Ekaterina Levental: 'I come from the very bottom of society, didn't even have the right to be here, was even less than a junkie.'

Singer, harpist and theatre-maker Ekaterina Levental (Tashkent, 1977) came to the Netherlands as a refugee in 1993, where she built a successful career. Together with her partner Chris Koolmees, she created the triptych The Road, The Border and Queen of Spades, in which she sings of her own difficult road to happiness. With her pocket shows, she holds up a mirror to us: 'We are quick to judge another person, but the line between success and unhappiness is narrow.' In the coming months, she will tour the country again; on Saturday 25 January, she plays The Road In Schermerhorn.

Musical theatre for a wide audience

Our schedules are hard to coordinate. Of necessity, I speak to Ekaterina Levental in her car, via mobile phone. It is 11 a.m. She is on the road with partner, director and all-round multimedia man Chris Koolmees. He steers, she talks. Together with their own LEKS Company, they make compact musical theatre for a wide audience, at a wide variety of venues. Today they present The Border on two different stages: in the afternoon a private performance in a private room in Den Bosch, in the evening a performance for the visitors of Het Graalhuis in Utrecht.

The busy schedule is indicative of the eagerness with which Levental takes to the stage. An ordinary person wonders how she keeps it up, all those different productions and the frequent travelling. 'Simply by loving it immensely,' she answers enthusiastically. 'Being on stage is my great passion, I get SO much satisfaction from it: this is who I am!' It makes no difference to her whether she is in a big theatre, a renowned concert hall, a modest village hall or someone's living room. As long as she can get her message out, person to person. 'I want to communicate, pull people out of their comfort zone, move them with feelings they had not discovered in themselves before.'

To this end, she gratefully draws on her own life. The Border is the second part of a trilogy, which began in 2015 with The Road and concluded four years later with Queen of spades. She came to the Netherlands as a 16-year-old refugee from Uzbekistan in 1993, where, with admirable perseverance, she developed into a much sought-after opera singer and harpist. She sang with De Nationale Opera, LOD Gent and in the Holland Festival, among others. Together with Eva Tebbe, she forms the harp duo Bilitis, with which she has now released three successful CDs.

At some point, she realised she had more up her sleeve than just performing other people's work. 'That came through a confluence of circumstances,' recalls Levental. 'I got to know Chris during a production of the song cycle Pierrot lunaire by Arnold Schoenberg. It clicked immediately and we decided to create a performance together in the spirit of Jean Cocteau. It was an ambitious production with three harps and carnival-like conditions on a big stage. However, we didn't get that play sold and ended up playing it only four times.'

While that was disappointing, the search in itself was euphoric, says Levental: 'We knew we could make something together, what we had always wanted: Chris can direct, write and design, I can perform.' They totally changed course: 'We decided to make something close to society, topical and small, so that it could be performed in every conceivable manifestation. - With light, without light, in large halls, small halls, between sliding doors. That way, we bypass the problem of ever making an unsellable product again.'

From outcast to theatre maker

Socially relevant and topical is definitely her own life history. 'That one is authentic, something of me personally. We wanted to show the listener: this is me! I may sing opera, the highest imaginable European art form, but pay attention: this is where I come from. My identity as an opera singer coexists with my background as a refugee. I come from the very bottom of society, didn't even have the right to be here, was even less than a junkie.'

'Every person has so many more layers than you see at first glance. I can convey that insight as an opera singer. I felt the inner need to show this to the world. Suddenly I understood that opera becomes richer when you also show the ugliness of life, because only then the ultimate beauty emerges. It is a mirror for everyone.'

For a year, they worked on The Road, in which Levental tells her own life story. 'I wrote texts, which Chris adapted. He is a great dramaturge who knows exactly what works and what doesn't on stage. When the libretto was ready, we spent a month rehearsing in a studio in the Achterhoek to work out the performance scenically and in terms of lighting. That it would become such a success we could not have foreseen, that is a gift.'

This modesty is also characteristic of Levental, as it is almost impossible not to be carried away by her intense delivery, glowing vocals and ditto harp playing. All alone, she stands in The Road on stage. But from sentence one, she draws you irrevocably into the performance and keeps you glued to your seat for over an hour. At times, it makes you want to crawl deep down from vicarious shame and dismay. Her life was by no means a bed of roses. And that is a solid euphemism. But no matter how harrowing and degrading the situations she describes, her tone never becomes bitter or resentful, there is even room for humour.

Voice from afar

She sits in front of an immense world map, on which a place name is pinned: 'Tashkent'. A Russian song sounds from the speakers, which Levental takes over on her harp: 'I hear a voice from afar, telling me to leave, far away from everything here that I love....' She tells how she grew up in the capital of Uzbekistan, 'the most beautiful, best and biggest country there is on earth....'. Grandma, however, came from Ukraine. 'She lived in Chernovtsi, the only place where Jews were allowed to settle permanently.' Bam, the first bash we have in.

She prods the relevant nameplate on the map - thousands of kilometres west - and takes a suitcase in hand. Grandma fled to Tashkent in 1939 because of the famine. Proudly, Levental looks into the audience: 'She was a real heroine.' Grandma is self-sacrificing and generous. When Tashkent too is overrun by refugees and bread runs out, she always manages to find food. She shares this with her family as well as the migrants, whom she also shelters in her humble hut. 'My grandmother really was a heroine!' reiterates Levental.

In the performance, she blissfully recounts her childhood in the small flat where she shares a room with grandma. Her three younger brothers sleep with parents in the adjacent room. Mother is a piano teacher, father is a flautist in the ballet and opera orchestra. She often joins them and sits next to the harpist in the orchestra pit during performances. That is where her love for harp and opera is born. 'On the one hand, I had chosen that spot myself because I found the harp such a magical instrument, but on the other hand it was also practical: only there the audience could not see me.'

A remarkable statement in The Road is that opera shows her 'what real life is like, not like mine'. Surely opera is a fantasy world par excellence? 'Not for me,' Levental laughs, 'I saw it as ideal. For me, the harp formed the physical connection with the ugly life of everyday life. In our flat everything was broken, even the TV didn't work, the corridor was full of junk.'

Dying for love

At night, she looks out of the window and, like Cinderella, hopes to be rescued from her poor circumstances by a prince on a white horse. She yearns for true love, which you 'only know once in a lifetime' and which she will follow 'to the death'. In The Road she gives a scorching rendition of the aria with which Aida follows her beloved Radames into his tomb. Why this fascination with death? Those are often the most beautiful moments in opera. For me, it was a symbol of beauty: the ultimate you can achieve in life. Utterly romantic and not very feminist, now I look at it somewhat differently.'

Her dream world was cruelly disrupted by rising anti-Semitism, which makes father decide to flee the country with his family. Levental: 'Gorbachev came to power. He meant well, but economically he was a disaster. There were shortages of all basic necessities; bread and milk were only available on the black market. This led to a us/side thinking in which the Uzbeks started seeing us as unwanted outsiders.'

Her parents become silent, but then comes the redeeming letter: they are allowed to travel out to Israel. It turns into a disillusionment. In the first country where they seek safe haven, they are snubbed as inferior jerks. Then they go to Moscow. There they are robbed of their last bit of money. Sweden then? More humiliations follow. As a last straw, father chooses the Netherlands. 'He was an avid amateur historian and had become convinced that tolerant people lived there.'

'We are refugees'

After a difficult train ride, they finally arrive in Amsterdam. Ekaterina is the only one who speaks a little English. 'We are refugees,' she stammers shyly to an officer in a police station in the Red Light District. He kneels in front of her and asks: 'Are you hungry?' - At last they have found their new homeland.

'Now my happiness begins,' Levental sings in The Road. The reality was less rosy. 'My grandmother we had to leave behind during our flight in Budapest, my father died shortly after we got our residence permit.' This is precisely why it is so important for people to hear her message, stresses Levental, who has just reached her destination: 'We must learn to listen to each other before we judge.'