ANNA LĀCIS’S ACTIVITIES IN LATVIA IN THE 1920s: A GESTURE OF EXPRESSIONISM

Abstract

The theatre director Anna Lācis belongs to the generation of modernists who found the origins of their creative impulses in the bright and erudite flow of arts education at the beginning of the 20th century. The wheel of the turn of the centuries threw Anna Lācis into the expression of idealism of the revolution, ideology and art forms. The stage requirements for this expression organised the flexibility of the actor along geometrically constructive laconic lines. Anna Lācis was one of the creators of this kind of gesture for a short time in Latvia in the 1920s. Her activity in Latvia was focused on the ideas and practice of formation of the so-called Proletarian Theatre. Anna Lācis’s choice of working with amateurs was determined not only by her position of an adherent to proletarian ideology and her brave civic liberty, but probably also by the coincidence of circumstances. When Anna Lācis was in Latvia, she gladly communicated not only with the left-wing revolutionary intellectuals (the poet Linards Laicens, the writer Leons Paegle, and others), but also with the representatives of Riga theatrical environment of the time. Unfortunately we cannot speak about Anna Lācis’s creative contribution to the Latvian Professional theatre of the time; however, her stagings lend us a wonderful opportunity to see a part of the multi-faceted spectrum that the beginning of the 20th century offered to the stage form of the actor and appreciate the erudition that her education had provided.