Asja LÄcis
Asja Anna Ernestowna Lācis, born Liepiņa (* October 19, 1891 in Līgatne, Latvia, † November 21, 1979 in Riga) was a Latvian actress, director and theater director.
Life
Asja Lācis was born in 1891 on the estate Ķempji in Latvia. The father was Decorators in Riga's wagon factory, while the mother kept a small shop. After attending high school in Riga studied Asja Lācis of 1912 to three semesters at the General Faculty of the Psycho Logical Euro Institute in St. Petersburg. It was very early impressed by the theater. In St. Petersburg, their model Emiljewitsch Vsevolod Meyerhold worked. Particularly impressed she was by the avant-garde work of Mayakovsky and director Nikolai Jewreinow. In 1914 she married Jülijs Lācis and began the following year with his studies at the Schanjawski University in Moscow. With her acting training, she began in 1916 in the studio of Theodor Komissarschewski. Upon her return to Oryol they founded a proletarian children's theater and took over the directing. They built an improvisation method by which it took the imagination of children. A little later she created performances in workers' theater in Riga.
In 1922 she went to Berlin, where she learned the theater scene know. She came in contact with Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, who met on their own initiative in 1924. Together with Benjamin, she wrote an essay about Naples and worked on his passage work. He made his essay on the proletarian children's theater program known to a wider circle. Asja Lacis 1925 played in Lady of the Camellias at the Deutsches Theater under the direction of her future husband, the director and theater theorist Bernhard Reich. In 1928 she was Head of Department in the film trade department of the Soviet Embassy in Berlin.
In the next few years, she supported Ernst Toller and Erwin Piscator on their trips to the Soviet Union. So they took over the assistant director of Piscator in the film version of Anna Seghers ' novel Revolt of the Fishermen of St. Barbara. It claimed, in the work of Brecht's well-known and now devoted himself to the film. In 1932 she enrolled at the Faculty Writers in Soviet Cinema institute in Moscow. The following year she took over the directing at the Latvian theater " Skatuve " ( Latvian: Stage).
Asja Lacis in 1938 was arrested by the NKVD and until 1948 interned in labor camps in Kazakhstan. She then returned to Latvia and went to the theater as a director of Valmiera. Mid-1950s, they resumed contact with Brecht and Piscator, and sat as a director on Latvian stages by Brecht. She joined in 1956 in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. After her retirement in 1958 she worked as a theater critic. Asja Lacis died in 1979 in Riga.
Works
- Revolutionary theater in Germany. Moscow 1935.
- The red carnation. Autobiography, 1981.