Hamlet (and Others) as the Strong, Silent Type
By PATRICK HEALY
Published: January 21, 2011
WASHINGTON — For their first attempt at wordless Shakespeare — that’s right, wordless Shakespeare — the husband-and-wife leaders of the Synetic Theater company chose to apply their physical-theater aesthetic to “Hamlet,” counting on audiences’ familiarity with the plot.
Graeme B. Shaw
Irina Tsikurishvili, center, as Margarita in the Synetic Theater production of “The Master and Margarita.”
Evelyn Hockstein for The New York Times
Irina and Paata Tsikurishvili observing a warm-up at Synetic Theater's rehearsal space.
In place of three-plus hours of verse, Synetic presented 90 minutes of highly stylized dance, movement, acrobatics, pantomime, music and story. “To be or not to be” was never uttered, but Hamlet stormed across the stage, gesturing to convey desperation. He and Ophelia never touched; their tortured attraction was reflected, instead, by the two actors’ bringing “their fingertips to within a hair’s breadth of each other,” as TheWashington Post noted in its rave review in 2002.
Just a year-old troupe at the time, Synetic ended up drawing wide critical praise and winning local theater awards as best resident play for “Hamlet” and best director and best choreographer for the husband-and-wife team, Paata and Irina Tsikurishvili, who also played Hamlet and Ophelia. Since then Synetic has won many more local awards — mostly for wordless Shakespeare stagings like “Macbeth” and “Romeo and Juliet” — as well as a devoted following in this city and nationally among admirers of physical theater.
Émigrés from the former Soviet republic of Georgia whose style draws on the popular tradition of pantomime there, the Tsikurishvilis (pronounced T-SEE-koorish-VEAL-ee) have also been embraced by establishment theaters here.
“No one does what they do — not in Washington or, really, anywhere that I know of,” saidMichael M. Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, who has advised the couple on building a theatrical troupe and provided performance space for some Synetic productions.
What he likes about Synetic’s artistry, Mr. Kaiser said, is that “it starts from a theatrical base — what plot and characters do we want to portray? — and then creating the most imaginative physical movements in service to that story.”
During a long interview over tea here, the Tsikurishvilis described yearning for a wider audience to discover their large-scale works of physical theater. “I think if any place other than Washington would appreciate what we do, it would be New York,” Mr. Tsikurishvili said. “But we wanted to spend the last 10 years developing into a premier physical theater company, and that took all our energy.”
With a budget of $1.7 million this year, Synetic produces four to five mainstage plays and three shows for children and families each year. Most performances this season are at the Lansburgh Theater in downtown Washington or at the company’s theater in Arlington, Va., where an encore presentation of Synetic’s text-free “Midsummer Night’s Dream” is to begin on Tuesday.
Last fall Synetic was among 10 theater companies nationwide to receive the first set of $10,000 grants to support their work from the American Theater Wing, a nonprofit group that is a presenter of the Tony Awards. Before 2010 that grant money went to New York companies, but Howard Sherman, the Wing’s executive director, said it wanted to honor innovative companies with rising profiles in their cities and towns and with distinctive artistic vision that stood out nationally.
“Synetic impressed us for their singular, idiosyncratic, exuberant physical style, which clearly wasn’t like others on the Washington scene, and for the obvious embrace in which they were held by their growing audiences,” Mr. Sherman said.
Ms. Tsikurishvili, a sinewy dancer in her late 30s with the expressive face of a silent-movie star, said she knew that Synetic was onto something special with physical theater during her first performance of Ophelia’s suicide, as she ran across the stage gathering flowers and then “folding and unfolding and dissolving my body as Ophelia drowned.”
“You get this feeling inside you, and then the feeling is pushing your body, as if movement and speech are coming out of your body rather than out of your mouth,” Ms. Tsikurishvili said. “After we were done, and the curtain came down, there was a silence that was going on for a century. And then people started clapping.”
Both raised in the capital city of Tblisi, the Tsikurishvilis met in the late 1980s at the Georgian State Pantomime Theater, where they had worked in separate productions. Mr. Tsikurishvili had trained in pantomime and acting and had broken free of his parents’ expectations that he become a scientist or scholar. Irina, meanwhile, gravitated to dance after an early interest in ballet faded because she could not perform on pointe (despite her father’s sitting on her knees to strengthen them).
One day in a hallway of the theater, Ms. Tsikurishvili recalled, she slid through a pack of actors and dancers — Mr. Tsikurishvili and his friends — and ended up teasing him with a possible invitation to a swimming outing the next day. (She finally offered, and he went.) It was not love at first sight, Irina said; she did not fall for him until she saw him onstage.
“He was playing a chicken, in this Georgian family-oriented play about a fox, and I finally understood how an actor can use his face and body to full effect, how a character’s story could be told without words,” she said. They married four months after their first meeting.
Mr. Tsikurishvili, now 44, was known in Tblisi theater circles then as an outspoken critic of the government and the deprivations of daily life; in time he stopped getting much work. He ended up defecting during a performance tour in Germany and worked there for several years while Ms. Tsikurishvili raised their young son, Vato, in Georgia. (They now have a daughter, Anna, as well). Eventually they both came to Washington, where Ms. Tsikurishvili’s parents settled after her father was offered a job teaching and coaching gymnastics.
At first Mr. Tsikurishvili performed as a mime for patrons at Russian restaurants in the region, while Ms. Tsikurishvili taught gymnastics in Baltimore. They began acting with the Stanislavsky Theater Studio in Washington, but broke away after a few years to start Synetic — a name that Mr. Tsikurishvili coined by fusing syllables of two words, synthesis and kinetic, that he thought captured their aesthetic.
While some Synetic productions include full texts and speaking, like a recent adaptation of Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita,” the production next week of “Midsummer” particularly captures their signature style: un-self-consciousness, bravado and an undeniable sexiness, including a highly erotic wrestling match between Ms. Tsikurishvili’s fairy queen Titania and her sparring partner, King Oberon. (In March Synetic will take on “King Lear.”)
With the company now in its 10th year, the Tsikurishvilis are eager to take Synetic on the road, especially to New York, where they have performed only once — last year atColumbia University during a benefit for its Georgian Studies program.
“Our great wish since we were children was to perform in New York City and on Broadway,” Mr. Tsikurishvili said. As much as he looks forward to performing more beyond Washington someday, Mr. Tsikurishvili said that the physical theater of Synetic also brings him back, in his imagination, to Georgia and to the couple’s early days together.
“You miss home sometimes, we both do, but physical theater involves living in an imaginary world, the world of a children’s mind like my own in the ’70s,” he said. “I had no toys. I amused myself with what I could make my body do. When we perform, still, I think of where we’re from as well as where I hope we go.”
Yan Sun, professor, City University of New York
Karen Karbo, novelist and memoirist
C. Cindy Fan, associate dean of social sciences, U.C.L.A.
Hara Estroff Marano, author, "A Nation of Wimps"
Jennifer Cheng, blogger, Every Six Minutes
David Anderegg, professor of psychology
Elizabeth Hartley-Brewer, child development specialist
Meredith F. Small, professor of anthropology