In conversation with Łukasz Twarkowski

“The show has found relevance now around the development of AI and deepfakes. The question of authenticity has become very urgent in our lives and we don’t really know how to deal with this.” 

- Łukasz Twarkowski

 Łukasz Twarkowski Credit Beatrice Borgers.

Director Łukasz Twarkowski combines theatre and many other artforms to create productions which extend reality through multimedia. A crucial element of Twarkowski’s creative work is investigating the ability and limitations of theatre as a medium and tool of communication. By permanent deconstruction of narratives, questioning the fixed habits of the audience and by meaningful usage of new media, Twarkowski creates a new, original language of stage performance based on multimedia and, more widely, digital technologies. In using these, Twarkowski analyses and observes increasingly complex relations between the Real, the Symbolic and the Imagined. He has won prestigious international awards over the past decade for Best Direction, Best Show, and Best Ensemble, most recently winning the Premi Ubu in Italy, Faust Theatreprise in Germany and Distinguished Artist Award by International Society of Performing Arts. His work is programmed at the most important festivals and stages around the world, and has been invited to be the associate artist of the Onassis Foundation (2023-24) and Piccolo Teatro de Milano (from 2025).

ROHTKO makes its UK premiere at the Barbican Theatre from 2 - 5 October 2025. barbican.org.uk

ROHTKO revisits one of the most infamous scandals in the art world: the sale of a forged Rothko painting for over $8 million in the early 2000s, one episode in a larger forgery operation that went undetected for years. What drew you to this story?

This was actually not the starting point of the show, we discovered it during our research phase. We had already been working on a performance that would deal with the concept of originality, and abstract expressionist paintings.

As we were making this show with Latvia’s Dailes Theatre, we were thinking about Mark Rothko. I wanted to find some part of the topic which connected to the place where we were working, and he is considered by Latvians to be the greatest Latvian painter.

Around this time I was working in China and I discovered Byung-Chul Han’s writings. One of his books, Shanzai, really saved my life and made me understand that we are living in two different paradigms and the Occidental and Oriental paradigms are untranslatable. There are some notions which we can discuss, even using the same words, but they mean completely different things to different cultures.  

So we were digging around these topics but not knowing how to put it all together. This is connected to our way of working - we start rehearsals without a script, using improvisations, lots of R&D with actors.

Miraculously, just before we were meant to start rehearsals, my agent called me and told me about the documentary they’d just released on Netflix Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art, which connected all the dots. I had real shivers watching it because there was Rothko, Chinese forgery, this idea of originality. And that’s how we started to incorporate it into our show.

ROHTKO directed by tukasz Twarkowski, text & dramaturgy by Anka Herbut, produced by Dailes Theatre. UK premiere at the Barbican Theatre, Thu 2 - Sun 5 Oct 2025. Photographer credit: Arturs Pavlovs

You’ve spoken about reading Byung-Chul Han’s Shanzhai while in China, and how it challenged Western ideas about originality and authorship. How did those ideas shape your vision for the production?

Absolutely, these were the starting point. The first inspiration for the show was Shanzhai and thinking about the different paradigms we are living in. Many of our company’s works deal with how to deconstruct certain constructs that we find obvious and we assume that they are fundamental world-wide. The three biggest constructs of our civilisation - religion, money & art - objectively do not exist, it is just social agreement. But we were and we’re still willing to kill ourselves over these things which do not exist.

This is similar with the concept of originality. It stems from the basic idea of things having a beginning and end. But in Oriental culture, there is no such concept, everything is in a process of eternal change. So if there is no beginning or end it means nothing can be ‘original’.

It’s so much connected to Rothko himself because he was using pigments which have since bleached completely. So now, a lot of his paintings do not have anything in common with the moment when they were created. In the case of abstract expressionist paintings where colour counts so much, we could ask ourselves “are we still observing the works which were painted by Mark Rothko”? Wouldn’t it be more original if we had a perfect copy of how it was in the moment of creation?

We were also inspired by the boom of NFTs at the time, and how do we position the question of originality and possible copies?  An NFT is undifferentiable from the original, but of course we find a way to monetise it. So even though it’s exactly the same file, there is an ‘original file’ because you have proof of payment in the blockchain.

All this idea of original and copy is extremely fascinating. There’s an example given in Shanzhai of the Ise Jingu shrine in Japan. It’s destroyed and rebuilt every 20 years and isn’t on the Unesco Heritage list because they decided it’s not ‘original’ anymore.

While I was working in China, I asked this question as a naive European many times “Is this an historic site, is it original?” and they answered “it is how it was”. We could not understand each other, because their monuments have all been rebuilt in the last 50 years and they can’t believe that we are keeping our monuments in such a bad state. What does original mean? Isn’t the Ise Jingu shrine closer to the original because it is still in the state of how it was first built? Isn’t it closer to the original than the Acropolis which is all in ruins?

Your work often merges the languages of theatre and cinema, particularly through live video. What draws you to collapsing the boundary between stage and screen, and what possibilities emerge when those two forms blur?

It’s true that ROHTKO is probably one of our most cinematographically rich performances.

One element which is extremely interesting for me in the use of video in theatre, is ‘time’. It was Andrei Tarkovsky who wrote about cinema as the first art to grasp and really record time. And live performance gives us incredible possibilities of playing with time, splitting the possible multiverses by replaying live action and pre-recording videos, and getting lost between the two because they can exist or co-exist in parallel. It creates a fascinating tension between time in the video and time being played out live onstage.

We also have the question of what is original and copy, and authenticity as well. Once we frame reality, we give a false promise of infinity within that world. In theatre, you see the artifice. You see where the stage ends and where backstage starts. When we use framing as part of our set, we direct attention to a certain thing within that frame and we hide or cover everything around that. So paradoxically, while you are watching the performance you see how it is done. With our onstage-screens, you see the video footage at the same time, which can seem more real than the live action on the stage.

Mixing these media creates a hybrid artform. Creating something beyond concert, visual arts, cinema and live performance. Each one of these multiplies the whole spectrum of possibilities for interaction or influence on the human organism.

ROHTKO directed by tukasz Twarkowski, text & dramaturgy by Anka Herbut, produced by Dailes Theatre. UK premiere at the Barbican Theatre, Thu 2 - Sun 5 Oct 2025. Photographer credit: Arturs Pavlovs

How did you approach sound as a narrative tool in ROHTKO?

There are so many ways of using sound in our performances. Like background ambience music and found audio footage which are used to to build up the illusion of the locations.

We tend to focus so much on visuals. But it is through sound that you can hear ‘false notes’ first, if something feels inauthentic. You can detect this quickly by hearing only the voice, because we are attuned to a certain harmony in the world which you feel very strongly through sound.

And in these complex performances we have many layers of sound, similar to cinema. The found footage, ambience, and then music which is emotionally driven added on the top. And then there are couple of moments of pretty strong electro-beats where the sound is working physically on us using bass and trance rhythms, which should drive you into more of a concert experience.

ROHTKO directed by tukasz Twarkowski, text & dramaturgy by Anka Herbut, produced by Dailes Theatre. UK premiere at the Barbican Theatre, Thu 2 - Sun 5 Oct 2025. Photographer credit: Arturs Pavlovs

ROHTKO was first performed in 2022 and is making its UK premiere at the Barbican this October. How has the production changed or developed since its debut, and do its questions about value, truth and authenticity feel more or less urgent now?

It’s interesting because the show has found relevance now around the development of AI and deepfakes. And the question of authenticity has become very urgent in our lives and we don’t really know how to deal with this. So there are a lot of angles you can view it from.

We’ve performed ROHTKO more than 80 times in different countries. It matures like wine over time, we are always in dialogue with the actors and the technical crew to keep it alive and it is a never ending process of finding new inspirations to feed our imaginations. Content wise it hasn’t change so much, but nowadays it reflects certain anxieties about realness that we are living in.

Arrivals & Departures by YARA + DAVINA. Image credit Paolina Varbichkova.

The [Quick] #FLODown:

Best life advice?
Don’t follow others’ advice

Last song you listened to?
Anxiety by Preoccupations

Last book you read?

Greek Lessons by Han Kang

Can’t live without…?
music + skydiving

What should the art world be more of and less of?

Less of business and more of tenderness