Dear Grandmother, How Are You?: The Influence of Anna Lācis on the Development of Political Theatre in Latvia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dear Grandmother, How Are You?The Influence of Anna Lācis on the Development of Political Theatre in Latvia* Krista Burāne Click for larger view View full resolution From the right: Anna Lācis, Māra Ķimele, and Bernhard Reich in Murjāņi, 1960s, LSSR. Photo from the personal archive of Māra Ķimele. Since the 1970s, Māra Ķimele, granddaughter of Anna Lācis, has been one of the most powerful and influential Latvian theatre directors. Many of Māra Ķimele's productions have become pivotal points in the development of Latvian theatre. Her complex personality and exquisitely interesting family, closely connected to the political and cultural history of Latvia throughout the twentieth century, were reasons why I decided to make the feature-length documentary Māra in 2013. Of course, the project was not possible without the presence of Anna Lācis, and not only because [End Page 69] granddaughter and grandmother are united in their choice of career. I was interested in the destiny of two great female artists in the context of power and politics. The collection of the Latvian Literature and Music Museum holds the large, and still unused, epistolary archive of Anna Lācis. A small fraction of it consists of 51 letters that Māra Ķimele wrote to her grandmother between 1953 and 1978. They cover Māra's childhood impressions, college years, and work in the theatre. Only Māra's letters can be found in the archive, and they found their way there after her grandmother's death in 1979. Anna Lācis's replies to these letters have not been preserved. It is curious that Māra Ķimele herself had forgotten about the existence of these letters; using them in the film came as a surprise to her. Even though each of the letters starts with "Dear Grandmother!" and the style and topics of the letters seemingly point to the close connection between granddaughter and grandmother, the author of the letters denies such a closeness. The explanation is to be found in the memoirs of Anna Lācis's daughter, Dagmāra Ķimele: Asja. Režisores Annas Lācis dēkainā dzīve (Asja: The Stormy Life of Director Anna Lācis) (Ķimele and Strautmane). From her daughter's perspective, politics, revolution, and theatre were always more important to Anna Lācis than her family, her daughter and granddaughter. The fate of one photograph serves as an archetypal visual statement of this attitude and of Anna Lācis's willingness to take history-making into her own hands. It is a studio photograph in which Anna Lācis appears with her daughter Dagmāra when the latter was about five years old. Later on, in the 1960s or 1970s, she ordered a graceless photomontage to replace the daughter with Bertolt Brecht in this picture. Although Anna Lācis had really worked alongside Brecht, had been his assistant and, according to her own statements, had played a name-part in Brecht's premiere of The Life of Edward II of England in Munich, and had maintained a close relationship with him until his demise, there are no photographs of just the two of them. However, there are many photographs in which Bertolt Brecht is alongside her and Bernhard Reich in other ways, in the names of posters and books. Anyone who has worked with the photographs in Lācis's archival materials knows how much she liked being photographed with Brecht. The anecdote of the fake photograph is yet another testimonial on behalf of her loyalty to the ideas of political theatre, which manifested in Brecht's work. In this article, I will quote several letters of Māra Ķimele to Anna Lācis that I included in the film and attempt to reveal the signs of the era embedded in them, proof of Anna Lācis's and Māra Ķimele's professional quests, and to relate them to the tradition of political theatre in contemporary Latvia. It can be said without a doubt that Asja was one of the brightest and most expressive pioneers of political theatre in Latvia in the 1920s, and contemporary Latvian artists can metaphorically...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".