Today we’d like to introduce you to Armina LaManna
Hi Armina, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
When I was six years old, my mom took me to audition at Yerevan’s cultural center (Yerevan is the capital of Armenia, which at the time, was one of the Soviet Republics), which housed several theatrical programs. The audition process involved several artistic tests: we had to sing, dance, and go through rhythm exercises. The latter was easy for me, and while my dancing skills at the time bordered somewhere on uninspiring, it was my lack of singing abilities that prevented me from being admitted to the academy. The six-year old me didn’t take well to being told there was something I couldn’t do, so I begged to be taken back to the school so I can talk to the director. I spent the next seven years playing really great parts in the academy’s repertoire.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
For those of us born in the late 70s, life in the former Soviet Union differed greatly from the one lived by our parents. Even those who were ten years older than me had a much more restrictive lifestyle than my generation. This is of course more applicable to those actively serving in the Soviet Communist Party, but also very much so to artists. Between censorship of created arts and an inability to freely observe what our contemporaries in other countries were creating in the theatre, Soviet artists learned to be impressively clever, smart, self-sufficient, disciplined, and brave. The latter was a requirement. After all, many artists lost their lives to firing squads, inhumane conditions in gulags, beatings and torture in detention just for being poets, actors, directors, painters, etc. No one really knows how many artists were murdered between Stalin and Andropov. The avant-garde movement alone was decimated by Stalin. By the time Gorbachev came to power in 1985 when I was seven years old, things were different, but… As I like to say, you can take people out of Soviet Union, but you can’t take Soviet Union out of the people. A whole nation was already programmed a certain way after decades of dictatorial rule and exclusion from the rest of the world. So when asked if my life in the theatre has been a smooth road, I cannot answer without giving credit to the thousands of artists who carried the realities of life under communism and created the opportunities that I got to enjoy in the thirteen years before the collapse of USSR in 1991.
The obstacles I observed and faced in United States as an artist after finding myself in California in 1991, first in Shasta County and then in Los Angeles in 1993, differed entirely from the Soviet experience. The vast majority of people I met in the US had never been to the theatre, didn’t know where there was one in their city, nor (needless to say) did they know the names of local stage artists. People had never seen a play: theatre-going was not a thing. Not in child-hood, not in adolescence, not in adulthood. This is still true today.
The biggest shock of course was that most stage aritsts I met once we moved down to Los Angeles from Northern California, did not get paid working in the theatre. They had other jobs in completely unrelated industries and worked in the theatre around those jobs. Learning that the U.S. Government doesn’t subsidize the arts, thus places absolutely no value on arts, caused an earthquake in my brain. I went from one extreme to another: from one government brutally controlling (and fearing) artists to one that didn’t give a damn about them.
The greatest challenge in the US for me (and I believe every other theatre makers for whom working in the theatre is their vocation) is societal and governmental apathy towards the live arts (their contribution to humanity, and the impact consistent exposure to live storytelling has on childhood).
Our industry was a house of cards even before COVID. The business models used by big and small theaters alike could have never withstood a catastrophe. A fact all of us saw and keep seeing unfold in front of our eyes as decades-old institutions, abandoned by their communities and representatives, permanently closed their doors after being ripped apart at the seams by the pandemic.
What is the new path forward? No one knows. Imagine what remarkable ideas the erudite people of our industry could come up if our givernment created and funded a national commission to investigate, research, and find solutions for a new and sustainable infrastructure for the arts?! Imagine.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
Because plays and films can profoundly affect those who see them, directors, as storytellers, find themselves in a certain position of power – the power to influence. I do not take this responsibility lightly. Perhaps it is because I grew up in a Communist country where the stakes of artistic expression were so high. For this reason, I like drama that holds political and social value; works that jar the audience out of complacency, push the audience to question long-standing beliefs—stories that spark dialogue. I choose to work on complex pieces that stimulate the audience to look at the world in a new light.
As a playwright, I choose to tell the stories of people who are flawed, relevant in their objectives and experiences, and allow the audience to see itself in the journeys that my heroes take.
How do you define success?
In 2008, I saw a production of King Lear at the Satirikon Theatre in Moscow. Sixteen years later, I still think about it and the impact it had on me. I guess that’s how I define success. If an audience member still thinks about what they saw days, weeks, months, years later, then I consider that work a true accomplishment.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://www.arminalamanna.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/arminalamanna/?hl=en
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/arminalamannastage/
- Other: https://imaginetheatreca.org
