Irina Gachechiladze discusses her international projects and the importance of sharing the arts - DIPLOMAT

Irina, you are representing the field of culture, to whom diplomacy is not a stranger either, due to the fact that you come from a family of diplomats. What is the role of culture in diplomacy?

It happened so that diplomacy and international projects turned out to be a source of creative interest for me. Art belongs to everyone and should not be confined within specific geographical boundaries. It is necessary to share it, to hold international collaborations, and, what is most important for me, art should be relevant today.

I believe that if you use art correctly, it has the power to bring changes. This change may not be rapid but sometimes drop by drop some works of art can influence the hearts, minds, and thoughts of people.

As an example, when certain TV series from a particular country enter another country, the population of the latter watches, enjoys, and is engaged in the emotional state of the heroes of these TV series, and experiences a kind of sympathy towards these heroes. This is a sort of cultural expansion when a particular country dominates the cultural market of another country. People get disposed toward this particular country. Especially if these serials are historical when the audience develops feelings of false patriotism. “False”, because this is not their country, but the history of another country that made them obsessed with via the TV series. Literature has the same power. I will say the same about pop culture, and its influence on young people. In short, I believe that art can be a tool of politics.

Let’s start with childhood, what does it mean to be the daughter of a diplomat, how do you remember the period when you had to live in different countries?

Perhaps I should start with the fact that I was the first in my family to become interested in diplomacy when I enrolled in international relations. I was going to be a diplomat. At that time, my father was lecturing at the university and writing books. When I graduated from International Relations, my father was appointed as an Ambassador of Georgia for the first time, and I went abroad as an ambassador’s daughter. The first country was Israel. Then I entered the Moscow Academy of Performing Arts for a MA in opera and drama theater directing. My father served as ambassador in four different countries for about 20 years and I often visited my parents. Therefore, the life of a diplomat became part of my natural being.

Why did you choose the field of art, when you could have followed the path of diplomacy?

I consider myself an independent diplomat. I like it that way, I don’t depend on anyone and I have my own international projects. In addition to my projects, each of my plays staged abroad is a kind of diplomacy, because culturally I represent Georgia, and those I work with get to know Georgia as well.

Your name is associated with many successful projects, what are the three projects you are most proud of?

I love all my projects, but since we are talking about cultural diplomacy and I have three of them to choose from, then I should name Mozart’s opera “Don Giovanni”, which I staged in 2009 at the Spendiarian Opera and Ballet Theater in Yerevan, Armenia. My goal was to bring this production to Georgia with Armenian singers, to include Georgian and Azerbaijani singers as well, and to unite the peoples of the Caucasus under the wing of the opera. This ambitious and utopian plan could not be implemented. I wish to believe that the time will come when art can bring peace!

As a second project, I would name the Festival of Georgian Playwrights, which I held in New York City in 2017. We had 11 Georgian plays translated into English and staged by 11 American directors. I invited the theaters of New York and beyond New York, to make them interested in Georgian plays and to make them stage them on their premises. This festival had a result: the following year one of the New York-based theaters was interested in staging a Georgian play and Dato Turashvili’s play, which, by the way, was about the emigration of our first government from Georgia in 1921, had been staged. In addition, my festival included two Georgian concerts. There were copies of samples of Georgian writing displayed in the lobby of the theater. Georgian cuisine and Georgian wine tasting were included in our program as well.

I would name the third project “Opera in the Regions”, which I implemented in Georgia in 2019. It was the American composer Gian Carlo Menotti’s opera “The Telephone”, which I staged together with Georgian musicians in Vienna’s “Volkstheater” and then I brought it to the regions of Georgia. In addition to the fact that the project served to popularize opera, at the same time it was a Western art piece, namely American culture. And, as I said above, I’m a big believer in cultural expansion. I think that the wonderful people in the regions who attended this performance and enjoyed it will have a positive memory of our visit with the American opera production.

For the future, I have plans for a number of other international projects, including the Festival of American Playwrights in Georgia, which I have been working on for two years already, and I hope to implement this project soon.

At this stage, you are working on a play by Boris Akunin “Hamlet. A Version”, which you have already staged in New York. How is this “Hamlet” different and at what stage is the implementation of the project in Georgia?

Boris Akunin’s play “Hamlet. A Version” is a highly original reworking of Shakespeare’s classic. I staged the world premiere of this play in New York City and it was a great success with the audiences and the press as well. 12 positive reviews were written in the media, including positive coverage by The New York Times. At this point, I am staging it in Georgian with the participation of Georgian actors. The premiere will be held this year, on November 25. I believe there will be the same interest in this production in Georgia as it was in New York. The general sponsor of the project is Tbilisi City Hall, but we still have small financial problems and I am trying to attract additional sponsors. The reality is that artists also have to think about finances.

In conclusion, I can say that any work of art that goes on the international stage, whether it is a theatrical tour of a play, taking a movie to a film festival, or translating and publishing a book, all this is cultural diplomacy, and we artists do not even realize how much responsibility we have when sometimes we unwittingly become diplomats of our country.