Alessija Lause (Photograph: Stefan Klüter)

Alessija Lause, film and theatre actress, won the Best Actress award at The Stage Awards for Acting Excellence at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2011 for her performance in Danny and the Deep Blue Sea. In the same year at the Los Angeles New Wave International Film Festival she won The Best Stunts award together with other members of the stunt ensemble for her performance in a short film St. Christophorus: Roadkill.

Polyglot

She is a polyglot. She speaks six languages, and she can easily switch from one language to another if necessary. Her first language is Croatian as well as German since her father is German and her mother is Croatian, who comes from City of Pula. As a child Alessija often travelled to Croatia. In an interview that I conducted with Alessija Lause in October 2013, she lovingly referred to Istria. She said: “I go to Croatia every year, once per year, and I enjoy every second there.”

She also spoke about her desire to work in Croatia.
Alessija Lause: “I would like to work in Croatia. I think about making one solo play in Croatia or with Croatian artists. I worked in the 2003 as a production assistant at Ulysses Theatre on the Brijuni islands. That year in Croatia I worked for one German production company that produced German Film Awards. At that time I was very young and I wanted to learn all about theatre and production, and not just acting. I was interested in everything and all that experience was very good and useful for my current work today. ”

It always starts from the scratch

Besides her acting and stuntwork, Alessija worked as an assistant theatre director. She produced Danny And Deep Blue Sea and she is one of the founders and a member of the acting ensemble Santinis. She organizied the International Alexander Technique workshop in Berlin and, now, she has just started to work with her acting colleague on her own TV series, which they have produced together, and for which Alessija has written the scenario.

Alessija Lause: “I could not do just one thing. Everytime you work on something new, you have to start from the beginning, and this is what I really like in the acting work. It creates new opportunities and you never go in one direction. You have to react thoughtfully, reflect the situation and have self-confidence, but at the same time it is important to be flexible and open to new opportunities. That is what creates the excitement because you can not expect a preconceived course of events. It is necessary to go out of your own shadow and be transparent. This kind of openness creates new opportunities. ”

Acting

Alessija’s first appearance as an actor was when she was six years old. She told me how people from TV companies spontaneously sought permission from her parents on the streets in Munich for her to participate in some television commercials what her parents refused for a long time.

Today Alessija says:
Alessija Lause: ” To make an acting career you must have the discipline, will, desire and the love to do it.”

She has played in many various films and TV dramas and series as SOKO Leipzig, Tatort, Löwenzahn -Schmetterlinge, Großstadtrevier – Fracht aus Abidjan, Polizeiruf 110 – Stillschweigen, Wie Männer über Frauen reden, Basement and ect..

She pointed out how she has learnt the most from Larry Moss, a respectable acting coach, whose workshops she attended in Los Angeles and in Berlin.

Jasna Lovrinčević: ” What do you find fascinating about him?”
Alessija Lause: “I like the most that you feel very alive working with Moss. The acting profession is often very self-centric and egoistic. Working with him that egoism disappears because, according to Moss, the actor should be focused on the content of the story, and how to tell that story in the best way in order to touch the audience. It is important to tell a story with a lot of adore and love for the story and the people. ”

Larry Moss suggested to Alessija Lause the performance Danny And The Deep Blue Sea. With that performance she achieved fantastic success. She won the best actress award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2011. With her performing and her acting she told the story in the best way, and in this way she achieved the most important goal for her. She touched the people in audience.

After the performance Danny And The Deep Blue Sea, many people from the audience were waiting outside the theatre for Alessija and her colleague, Nikolaus Szentmiklosia. The people were delighted with their performance.
Alessija Lause: “They were waiting for us. They were crying and embracing us. It was beautiful.”

Photograph: Colin Hattersley

Stuntwoman

Alessija spent nice time working as a stuntwoman. She was prepared for this kind of work practicing different sports and participating in different dance troupes. As a stuntwomen she started to work in 2003 in the same period of time when she was working with Argentine theatre De La Guarda. At that time she was encouraged by one of her acting colleagues to apply to one company which was looking for stunts for one of their show.

Later, during the shooting of a series in Berlin she worked together with one stuntmen who was resposible for stunt work in that series. He was surprised when he realised that Alessija could work as a stuntwoman, and then he invited her to train in his stunt team.

That was the beginning, and later she received many invitations for different movies. She was the stuntwoman in Inglourious Basterds, Wer ist Hanna, The Three Musketeers, The International etc.

Alessija Lause: “It was very nice to learn all of that. For example a fight, that is like a dance, it is kind of a choreography. I like that very much. In stunt work you really have to focus on the things you have to do. You need to trust your partner, you have to know what he is going to do and what you have to do. It was fun for me to do that. I used to work with great people. I loved to work with them, we really had lot of fun. It was the teamwork with more men and less women. This work is quite different from acting. An actress takes her time, but stuntwomen has to act at the exact time; they count: three, two, one, and you must go, there are no chance to wait. It is a collaborative work. You must be very focused on what you need to do. ”

Allesija has been doubled for the actress Diane Kruger in the film Unknown Identity.

Since 2011 she hasn’t work any more as a stuntwoman.
Alessija Lause: “It is enough, I worked worked for many big movies, and now I need time for new things.”

When he draws a parallel between acting and his work as a producer he told: “The acting ist always essential.”

The first experience for Ivan Vrgoč as a producer it was his production of Rumors by Neila Simon performed by The Santinis, the acting group in which he participates.

He decided to be the producer of this performance after the Santinis had already chosen Rumors to be their first exit in front of the audience. The member of Santinis, the actress Leslie Malton, who used to work with famous directors, suggested to Vrgoč to produce this performance.
” O.K., why not to try”, said Vrgoč, he founded the production company and today he says: “Thank to God, it was successful.”

The performance was enormously successful. It was the most successful performance ever for the Theater am Kurfürstendamm in Berlin where it was performed. Every day, from 13th of January till 28th of February in the year 2013 during the performance time, there were eigth hundert people in the audience and theather was completly full. In the same period of time, Rumors was also the most attended performance in Germany.
“Just now I negotiate to go on tour with Rumors to Austria, Swiss and through Germany”, said Vrgoč.

It is demanding and requires an enormous personal involvement to produce a play and to act in it at the same time. But Ivan Vrgoč says that this kind of combination doesn’t represent a hard task for him.
Ivan Vrgoč: “This kind of combination is not difficult for me. There is a lot of work to do, but I don’t perceive it as work. As a producer I have to take account of the whole organisation, but since I am also acting in the play, I admire what I do. When I am preparing the play I don’t think about the amount of work. I have never said – Oh, what more I have to do – I adore to be in this process. I really enjoy it.”

Santinis

Santinis is an acting group founded by eigth famous German actors who twice together attended the workshop of the respected American acting coach Larry Moss in Berlin.
“We were all introduced to each other at the workshop of Larry Moss”, said Ivan Vrgoč. They derived inspiration from Moss’s approach to acting, directoring and to theater work. It delighted them to start a new project together which they called Santinis. Moss’s capability to motivate the actor was the main impetus for that.

“He knows how to motivate the actor so that he can completely be ready to take a role”, says Vrgoč and he continues: “The aim of Moss’s school is that the actors serve the purpose to support the main idea of the author. The actors only execute the author’s idea. Often the idea of the author is not in the first place but more directoring. The director puts his own ideas with the goal to make his art visible that once can be seen as his handscript. The role of a director is to respect the author’s work, he should go together with all actors on the journey and to discover what the writer wanted to say, and not to bring ideas which are not written in the script.”

The first performance of Santinis was a comedy, and about his plans in the future Ivan Vrgoč says: We are looking for another play and another theatre because we don’t like to play a comedy again in the same theatre.”

Theatre and film actor

Ivan Vrgoč has acted in a comedy in Frankfurt and in Munich. On the question if he likes comedy or if it hapened by chance to play multiple times in a comedy, he answered:

Ivan Vrgoč: “I like comedy, but it was by chance that I acted in a comedy in Frankfurt, and then the same performance went to Munich.”

Ivan Vrgoč attended the acting school in Cologne and Berlin. He has acting experience in theatre and in film. In the performance of „Was ihr wolt or Twelfth Night or What You Will” by Shakespeare he performed the two main roles.
Ivan Vrgoč: “It was very inspiring to play two big and main roles in the same performance.”

He told he doesn’t have any desire for a specific role.
Ivan Vrgoč: “As I am personaly changing, my desire for the roles are also changing. When I was in twenties I wanted to performe other roles than now. I like that kind of job, but I would’t like to prioritise one or another role.”

It was interesting from the position of an spectator to hear how the the actor perceives the audience from the stage.
Ivan Vrgoč: “I feel the audience and that feeling is very important. Nevermind how deep I am involved in my role or with the co-actors on stage, it is impossible to ignore the energy of five, six or eight hundert people in the audience. That is important. It is important to understand the audience; to feel if it is focused on the play, if it is enthralled by the performance. That doesn’t mean that I look where somebody sits, I am not interested in that, but I feel the audience. It is just a feeling, and not soemthing I am thinking about.

He was acting in many films, and two years ago, in the film Die vierte Macht, he acted together with the actor Rade Šerbedžija. He says that he has an enormous respect towards him as an actor and he would like to work with him again in the future.

Ivan Vrgoč was born in Frankfurt am Main, where he lived before he went to Berlin. His origin is Croatian. He goes with his family every year to Croatia, mostly to Split and the surrounding area where his parents were born.

Interview with Ivan Vrgoč held in April 2013