Artery. A podcast on art, authorship and anthropology · Artery. A podcast on art, authorship and anthropology

Jonas Tinius with Iza Kavedžija

·57 min·3 clips

Trueley told the actor: "you're actually, you're speaking as if you really mean it."

The usual format gets nudged aside. Robert Simpkins frames the episode as a special exchange between Isa Kavetja and fellow anthropologist Jonas Tinius, whose new book looks at German theatre and migration through ethnography. Isa starts by asking Jonas about himself and his research interests, and the conversation lets him explain rather than rush to a neat thesis. Theatre comes through as a social field, but thankfully not in the bloodless way that phrase can sound. Jonas is interested in how people in a production relate to each other, to the characters they perform, and to the lives of the players themselves. One rehearsal setting carries much of the episode. He remembers a formerly industrial building that had housed a refugee shelter in the 80s. It was cold enough that people kept their jackets on. Around imagined chairs, cigarettes, and rehearsal-stage preparation, the group works out what an action on stage might say. Performance here is not simple identification. Jonas stresses the effort not to become a character, but to relate to that character with distance and intention. Even apathy has to be made. So does a ghost-like eeriness. It is not treated as a misty mood, but as something argued over, tested, and built through theatrical craft. The director and dramaturg make a useful distinction. One image is for the audience to see or hear. Another stays inside the actor's attitude and preparation. That distinction has ethical bite. If the internal image turns too quickly into appearance, the character and the actor's relation to it can get flattened. Costume becomes part of the thinking. Jonas recalls clothes discussed with a costume designer, then treated in water with dissolved rusty iron nails to give them a patina of decay and decadence. The detail matters because the episode keeps showing how meaning moves through bodies, surfaces, rooms, histories, and people making decisions together. Collaboration is not softened into easy agreement. Near the end, Isa and Jonas sit with the value of difference between art and anthropology, including different positionalities and competencies. The close has a quiet edge: serious collaboration may need disagreement, not a shared language that smooths everything over.

As heard by us

A careful theatre conversation about authorship, distance, and how performance is worked through in practice.

Artery listens best when it treats theatre less like a finished product and more like a working relationship. Isa Kavetja and Jonas Tinius talk through rehearsal-room details, authorship, and the shifting space between performers, characters, and directors without turning the…

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Why you'd press play

For when you want theatre thought through from rehearsal room to relationship.

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