Theatre Alive: Monday Musings with Aaron Orzech
See article in its original context here by Theatre Alive.
Once upon a time in Romania, Aaron Orzech and his girlfriend met a strange and powerful man named Victor Bergman. The next day, he married them in the village of Voroneț. By the third day, he was gone, but for days and weeks and months afterwards he haunted Aaron’s life.
From that encounter comes The Collected works of Victor Bergman. We caught up with Aaron, in the lead-up to the premiere season at fortyfivedownstairs…
Tell us a bit about The Collected works of Victor Bergman. How did the piece come about?
The Collected Works of Victor Bergman has its genesis in an encounter I had in 2009 while backpacking in Romania. My girlfriend and I met an older man, named Victor Bergman, with whom I became very close.
Within three days of our first meeting, he had convinced us to get married, presided over our wedding, and deserted us. This real-life story was the catalyst for our show.
As we worked on the show, co-director Romanie Harper and I began to find all sorts of strange parallels between my relationships with Victor Bergman, and Brian Lipson (my fellow performer in the show). These centered around notions of ritual, masculine mentorship, storytelling, and the passing on of wisdom from an older man to a younger one.
The work we have created is a cumulative fantasy. It’s drawn from the dreams, nightmares and real-life stories which the encounter with Victor Begrman has provoked in every member of The Family.
What do you hope audiences will take away from the show?
I hope that the stories, enigmas and internal conflicts which Victor transmitted to me will, in turn, be transmitted to the audience.
You’re a part of a new theatre company called The Family, can you give us some insight into how the group formed, and what kind of work we can expect in future?
Romanie Harper and I started The Family a very long time ago, but we didn’t have any good ideas for a show.
What we did have was a shared sense of inertia and limitation working exclusively in specific roles (acting for me, design for Rom). We both really wanted to branch out and develop a parallel practice to our existing individual work, and to make work over which we had full creative control. A kind of co-operative megalomania.
We have no idea what we will create in the future, but we will continue to make work which draws on the personal experiences of all the extended Family, and use them to discover new forms of theatrical expression.
A lot of people from the company collaborated on this piece. How do you find that process informs the work, especially seeing as this show begins from a real life situation of your own?
The more we delved into my encounter with Victor, the more we realised it had a universal or archetypal quality to it.
This encounter resonated with every member of the company, regardless of their specific role on the project. This has meant the content of our show, whether it be expressed through design, sound, text or performance, is essentially generated collaboratively.
Collaboration is also inherent in our working method, which we’re making up as we go, but is still a method! We create work using as many elements as possible as early as possible.
For example, our sound designer, James Paul, is always with us during the development process, and is constantly responding and creating the environment of the work as we rehearse.
More to the point, the individual is not to be trusted. Only the collective can create something cool.
Who inspires you, and why?
Personally, I am inspired by Bruce Springsteen. He is the best writer/director/performer/ dramaturge of the 20th/21st century.
As a group, The Family is inspired by everyone who takes the complications of their Australian-ness seriously.
The Collected Works of Victor Bergman runs from the 4th of December at fortyfivedownstairs.