Stage Voices

MICHAEL COVENEY ON IMMERSIVE THEATRE

  

(Coveney’s article appeared in Prospect Magazine, 8/19/10; via Michael Billington’s article on Experimental Theatre in the Guardian, 1/10:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/jan/10/e-for-experiment-modern-drama. Jerzy Grotowski interview is in Polish: press cc on the bottom YouTube toolbar for English translation.)

Not long ago, the audience in a theatre was there to watch a play. Nowadays, the audience is the play, or at least the protagonist in a production that is animated by the paying customer.

Recently I visited an abandoned electricity board building in Bethnal Green, east London, signing away my possessions and jacket on the door. My loafers were gaffer-taped to my socks; I was placed in a wheelchair; pushed through swing doors; and berated about the bad form of an American football team. Two seconds later, I was in a locker room, delivering a pep talk while 15 hunks glowered at me through facepaint and helmet guards.

(Read more)

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/08/you-me-bum-bum-train-one-on-one-theatre/

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DIRECTOR JORINDE DRÖSE ON HANS FALLADA’S ‘EVERY MAN DIES ALONE' IN BERLIN

 

(Daniel Berg’s article appeared in Exberliner, 11/12.)

For over half a century, the work of German writer Hans Fallada languished in relative obscurity outside his native country after his untimely death in 1947. But his last and most famous work has recently been rediscovered by the international literary community, garnering critical recognition and acclaim worldwide.

Jeder stirbt für sich allein (Every Man Dies Alone) is an evocative portrayal of a working-class couple’s passive struggle against the brutal inhumanity of the Third Reich through the printing of political postcards. Under the direction of Hanau native Jorinde Dröse, the Maxim Gorki Theater is presenting the first contemporary stage

(Read more)

http://www.exberliner.com/articles/poscards-of-resistance

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BUILDING A PLOT

 

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WHO IS THE GREATEST LIVING PLAYWRIGHT? (ALEXIS SOLOSKI ASKS THEATER WRITERS TO NAME THEIR PICK)

(Soloski's article appeared in the Village Voices, 11/2.) 

“Be not afraid of greatness,” Shakespeare encouraged us. Easy for him to say! But when it comes to the theater, how do we determine greatness today? And which writers deserve that accolade? In search of answers, we polled a slew of the Voice’s favorite dramatists and asked them to name their greatest living contemporary. They were invited to choose American or foreign, renowned or obscure. Here are their responses:

(Read more)

http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-11-02/theater/who-is-the-greatest-living-playwright/

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THEATRE AND POLITICS

 

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MARTHA WILSON INTERVIEW

 

(Britta Wheeler’s article appeared in the October online issue of BOMB Magazine.)

I met Martha Wilson in 1996 in Santiago, Chile, when we were both invited by Alexander Del Re to attend Performare, a performance art symposium there. I interviewed her for my sociological research about the institutionalization of performance art. Since then, she has spoken to my classes and commissioned me to make a visual map of my research, Performance Art and Its Institutionalization: A Map. This work is traveling internationally under the auspices of History of Disappearance, a 30th anniversary exhibition drawn from Franklin Furnace’s archives.

Martha Wilson is the founding director of Franklin Furnace, a 35-year old organization that tries to make the world safe for avant-garde art. Its mission is to present, preserve, interpret, proselytize, and advocate on behalf of avant-garde art, especially forms that may be vulnerable due to institutional neglect, their ephemeral nature, or politically unpopular content. The Martha Wilson Sourcebook: 40 years of Reconsidering Performance, Feminism, Alternative Spaces contains images, documents, and influences that made her who she is today. This is the first of a series of sourcebooks that Independent Curators International has decided to publish. These are books by artists that help people see inside the artist’s brains. The next in this series will be by Hans Haacke.

We talked in early September over BLT’s and the newly published Martha Wilson Sourcebook on the eve of her opening at P.P.O.W. Gallery.

(Read more)

http://bombsite.com/issues/999/articles/6158

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THE BOLSHOI REOPENS AFTER SIX YEARS

 

(Susanna Beyer’s and Mattias Schepp’s article, translated by Christopher Sultan, appeared in Der Spiegel, 10/27.)

The Russian word awos is hard to translate into English. It means "perhaps" and "hopefully," but awos is also a broader term that conveys the notion that, in the chaos of existence, everything will eventually turn out for the best. These days, awos aptly describes the mood at Moscow's Bolshoi Theater.

The theater has one of the richest traditions of all Europe's stages. It is famous for opera and, most of all, for its ballet company. With its 200 dancers, the Bolshoi Ballet is the world's largest dance company. The theater was closed for six years. During that time, its dancers and singers performed in another building while the main building was being renovated at a cost of €570 million ($798 million).

The reopening ceremony for the theater will be held this Friday as part of a spectacle to be broadcast live in theaters worldwide, on television and online. But, at the moment, workers from Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan are still scraping bits of adhesive from the steps. It smells of paint, and in the stage-set storage area 20 meters (66 feet) underground, water still leaks through the ceiling whenever it rains. The principal dancers are practicing for the big gala event on a rehearsal stage.

(Read more)

http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,794174,00.html

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BARBRA STREISAND INTERVIEW IN THE TELEGRAPH

 

(Celia Walden’s article appeared 8/26.)

'They must have moved this,” frowns Barbra Streisand, sliding a tiny carved ivory box an inch to the right across the coffee table. “They have – they’ve moved it. It should be here.”

Batting a strand of hair out of her eyes, she stretches her wide, expressive mouth into a wonderfully familiar smile. “Things like that bother me. I wish they didn’t but they do. Take the new album cover: down to the last minute I’m there, trying to get the exact peach colour I want but it keeps coming out beige – and I’m not a beige person.”

Few would query that, and Streisand accepts that a desire to impose authority on the world around her has always been there. “Because I feel so impotent,” she shrugs. “Like I’m living in a world that’s going nuts.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/starsandstories/8722516/Barbra-Streisand-interview.html

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TONY KUSHNER TALKS TO MICHAEL BILLINGTON

(from the Guardian, 8/15)

The best dramatists, as Peter Hall once pointed out, are very like their plays. And that is eminently true of Tony Kushner. Meeting him for the first time, I find him to be witty, erudite and deeply political. Not surprising, perhaps, since Kushner is a man who expanded the horizons of drama in his epic fantasia Angels in America, foresaw the perils of Afghan intervention in Homebody/Kabul and explored the intersection of race and economics in Caroline, or Change. Kushner's trademark is his ability to reconcile the world of visible reality with that of spiralling imaginative possibility. And, more than any other living dramatist, he has demolished the myth that American drama is exclusively concerned with personal crises.

(Read more)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/aug/15/tony-kushner-honorary-degree-interview?INTCMP=SRCH

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INGMAR BERGMAN DIRECTING 'WINTER LIGHT'

 

 

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