worldrama

Holland Festival June 2009

2009-06-19T11:46:00.031-04:00

Amsterdam. A city full of dichotomies. Restrictive Dutch heritage and whores in glass boxes. Troupes of tripping backpackers and heart-heavy visitors in Anne Frank's attic. As such, the 62nd Annual Holland Festival captured its city perfectly by leveraging the theme "Serenity & Anxiety" to frame its 34 international productions from June 4-28, 2009.

Forced to Tour/tour de force?

The Dutch Theatre Critics Association (Kring van Nederlandse Theatercritici) and the Festival gathered members of the International Association of Theatre Critics from more than 20 nations to discuss the theatrical selections at this year's festival and to debate our theme of Forced to Tour/tour de force?. Through a series of formal presentations and informal chats, we explored the effects of globalization and immigration on the interpreters of self-expression--that is, how theater critics see "immigrant" or "migrant" theater at home and abroad.

One of the most compelling presentations was by the South African critic Brent Meersman ("From Ipi Tombi to iMumbo Jumbo: How to Act Black"). He touched upon early African "performance" with the example of Saartjie Baartman (aka Sarah Bartman), a Khoisan woman who was forced to entertain 19th century European audiences by gyrating her nude buttocks and showing what was, to them, her shocking human body.

America's Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks wrote the play "Venus" about Baartman in 1996. (Directed by Richard Foreman, it was presented by The Public Theater.) Meersman noted how since international tours of "The Lion King" have swept the globe, most plays from his home country are inevitably compared to that Disney production. Certainly a welcome shift from the early 19th century, but still demonstrating a marked lack of understanding African theater and performance beyond what Westerners interpret simply as spectacle.

Holland Festival: Theater & Music

The Antonioni Project

One of the most striking offerings at the festival was "The Antonioni Project" by Flemish director Ivo van Hove. Through live acting and live video, he imported the Italian films of Michelangelo Antonioni (“L’Avventura,” “La Notte” and “L’Eclisse”) to the Dutch stage at Stadsschouwburg. While Van Hove works primarily in Holland as the artistic director of Toneelgroep Amsterdam, he maintains a home here in New York where his works are frequently staged (usually at New York Theater Workshop). Last fall, his production of "Opening Night" as part of BAM's Next Wave Festival caught the attention of many Gotham critics.

In the beautiful Stadsschouwburg, Amsterdam's municipal theater, Van Hove's vision of love and compromise was refracted through Antonioni's twisted lens. A stellar cast of 17 strode across the massive stage, while camera crews followed their moves, which were projected above the stage. The juxtaposition between theater and film, built scenery and a green screen, underscored the performance's central theme of outer artifice and inner truth. The cast was strikingly talented, giving Hollywood's best a run for their money (Cate Blanchette, Sean Penn and their ilk). Karina Smulders was irresistibly adorable as the bouncy, blonde object of Sandro's (Fedja van Huet) affection, while Halina Reijn countered her as the shrewd brunette avoiding the advances of the bold stock broker Piero (Jacob Derwig).

The scope of the production and the level of acting was among the most staggering I've seen. Pity, the Dutch was not translated for this international festival, so I don't know whether the text added or detracted from the visual excellence of "The Antonioni Project".

[The Sound and the Fury (April Seventh 1928)
The Brooklyn-based company Elevator Repair Service brought their self-indulgent production to Holland. I reviewed the show at New York Theatre Workshop last May for Portugal's Revista Obscena. No need to put myself through that again on any continent.]

The indie folk-rock group Antony and The Johnsons was joined by Holland's Metropole Orchestra for a two-night engagement at the Koninklijk Theater Carré. His 2005 album I Am a Bird Now bewitched me, but I had never had the chance to see them perform live. Lead man Antony Hegarty is a British-born singer-songwriter who lives here in New York. (So I have to go to Amsterdam to see him. Go figure.)

When the thick, red curtain rose to expose the figure of Antony, I was taken aback. Sitting there in the fourth row, no more than 20 feet from him, I found a chubby, pained angel figure with a mop of tangled black hair. During his first two songs with the massive orchestra behind him ("Everything Is New" and "For Today I Am A Boy"), he writhed and twitched, looking up into nothingness. As the performance continued, his anxiety diminished and the vocalist opened a bit to the 2,000-person audience. Musing on the agreement between performer and audience, he offered, “It’s really magical, isn't it? It's so mysterious. It beats me sitting in my room.”

The group's new song "Everglade" was inspired by John Everett Millais' famous painting of Ophelia and Antony's observations of his own mother's aging. Another new song, "Salt, Silver and Oxygen" actually brought a contended smile to the singer's face, as he intoned about a boy “dancing with his casket” and urged the listener to “elect the salt mother" because "she’s a selective Christ”. (If it makes him happy...)

One of his most endearing and down-to-earth moves was Hegarty's version of “Crazy in Love”, the 2003 pop hit by Beyoncé. Sung with all sincerity, the song transformed in Antony's mouth, with the idea of "looking so crazy in love" taking on a darker implication than when sung by the twinkle-eyed mega-star. In that moment, the audience could sit back and know--or at least hope--that Antony had found some serenity, however fleeting.

And Also...

Simultaneous to the Holland Festival's offerings was the Grand Opening of the Hermitage Amsterdam, with the opening exhibition "At the Russian Court" with more than 1,800 treasures from the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg (and all the fuel needed to spark the Russian revolution). Meanwhile, a European White Night, an overnight festival timed with the summer solstice, provided 31 hours of activity in the Hermitage. With the Amsterdam sun setting around 10:30pm each night, there was plenty of light to continue the party late into the morning.

At 10:00 pm, the popular pair of Dutch dancers Peter Bosveld and Euvgenia Parakhina taught visitors a brief Russian waltz in the museum's kerkzaal, while a Dutch quartet, 4tuoze Matroze, played Russian tunes on their violins, accordion, and piano at midnight. At 1:00 am the silent disco began. A dance party without traditional speaker system, the silent disco relies on dancers jamming out with wireless headphones and a DJ with an FM transmitter. (Those without the headphones hear no music.) We got some Gogol Bordello, Franz Ferdinand and a slew of Euro dance hits that I didn't know, but that made the room shake. The disco went until 6AM.

It would have been impossible to absorb all of the cultural discourse and varied performances in three days along the Amstel. But from African history on stage in the U.S. to Flemish interpretations of Italian films, the Holland Festival and IATC captured the many moods of Amsterdam for its global visitors.

Europe Theatre Prize: Thessaloniki, Greece 2008

2008-04-20T19:23:00.015-04:00

I'm just back from Thessaloniki, Greece, a land founded by King Cassander of Macedon back in 315 BC, which was descended upon just last week by theater folks from all over the world. From April 10-13, the small seaside city hosted the honorable likes of Patrice Chéreau, Rimini Protokoll, Krysztof Warlikowski and the Belarus Free Theatre in two theatres.

But many of you Yanks may be wondering (I had been before my Grecian sojourn): Who the hell are those people? Let me start by telling you what the Prize is.

Created in 1986 and presented in '87 as a European Commission pilot program, the Europe Theatre Prize is awarded to artists and theaters whose work is deemed to have contributed to mutual understanding among nations. The European Parliament and the European Council have placed this prize among institutions "presenting a European cultural interest." It has even been awarded to people we know on this side of the Atlantic, like Harold Pinter, Peter Brook, and Robert Wilson.

This year's prize winner was Patrice Chéreau, a French director of theater, opera and film. After accepting the award, he performed a reading of Pierre Guyotat's Coma, a monologue created especially for the Prize ceremony. This 90-minute piece about art, depression and repression was performed in Chéreau's native French with surtitles in Greek and English. With few moments of relief, the piece was a weighty, autobiographical look at Guyotat's own bout with depression in the late 1970s, when he was admitted to a psychiatric clinic. Thierry Thieu Niang directed the reading, which had Chereau on a chair facing stage left and a square of light around him.

The Prize festivities also include an award for New Theatrical Realities. That was given to the German ensemble Rimini Protokoll and choreographer Sasha Waltz and Polish director Krysztof Warlikowski. After a letter-writing campaign to the Prize organizers, the Belarus Free Theatre was given a Special Mention.

The landlocked country of Belarus is the last of the European dictatorships, where free speech is still the stuff of a utopian science fiction. Michael Billington of The Guardian wrote of the group, "Everything about the Belarus Free Theatre is astonishing...they have suffered every form of intimidation and harassment. Their members have lost their jobs in Belarus's state theatres. The work at home is effectively banned...In 2007, fifty people were arrested when police special forces raided a performance at a house in a suburb of Minsk. Security forces, still working under the title of KGB, also regularly film members of the public arriving for one of the outlawed performances."

The “Free Theatre” Project began on March 30, 2005 by Natalia Koliada and Nikolai Khalezin and, they say, "will be ended when the situation in Belarus will be changed from dictatorial regime to democracy."

Jet-lagged and bleary-eyed, I saw the Free Theatre's show "Generation Jeans" my first night in Greece at the Center for Macedonian Studies. Performed by Zhalezin himself, this humorous and honest look at life under dictatorship kept me awake. Through English surtitles, the actor explains to us anglophones a bit about life in Belarus in the 1980s: "We used to buy plastic bags for 3 rubels and sell it for 5. That used to be called speculation. Now it's called business." More than plastic bags, the citizens would vie for vinyl records. There were three tiers: Soviet-licensed records, records made in countries of the Communist bloc, and, the most precious of all, albums pressed in the UK and America. More coveted than plastic bags or even a Rolling Stones album were blue jeans. Wearing those acid-washed denim trousers signified freedom and self-expression. The show played at The Public Theatre here in New York this January, as part of the Under the Radar Festival. I didn't see it then, but am glad I was able to glimpse this Soviet-tinged view there on the Mediterranean.

But why go to Greece and not see a Greek tragedy? Euripides' great, The Bacchae, was a fun, folkloric feast. Presented by the National Theater of Northern Greece under the direction of Tasos Ratzos, the strong Greek cast captured the pastoral frenzy of the fantastic tragedy. My first Greek play seen in Greek. That was quite an experience, and while we weren't in any outdoor amphitheater, the Vasiliko Theater was a lovely substitute.

The European Commission is already deep into the planning the Premio Europa 2009. So start planning your trip to the Thermaic Gulf now.

Photos by Nontas Stylianidis.

PlayFest!: Florida 2008

2008-02-15T10:03:00.012-05:00

Believe it or not, there is more to Orlando than Mickey. (Not much but there is some vibrancy outside of Cinderella's Castle.) What brought me to the land of the most famous of all cyrogenically-frozen opium addicts was PlayFest! the unimaginatively-named but sufficiently-interesting festival of new plays. Its full moniker is "PlayFest! The Harriett Lake Festival of New Plays," underwritten by the 84-year-old patroness herself: Harriet Lake.

From February 8-17, 2008 the Orlando Shakespeare Festival is hosting three workshops, 10 readings and one full production of new American theater. (For the difference between a reading and a workshop, click here.) John Pielmeier (Agnes of God) gave a keynote speech and offered a master playwriting class, even if the master himself has been under the radar for two decades or so. I attended as a member of the American Theatre Critics Association, an organization I joined in 2002.

One of the three readings I attended during my brief Floridian sojourn a few weeks ago was Missing Celia Rose by Ian August,a sort of southern mystery piece about a charismatic local (the eponymous Celia Rose) who goes missing in the heat of a Georgia summer in 1921. This was one of the most buzzed-about readings of the festival, with rumors of Mr. August being solicited by some Chicago companies for future production.

Trog and Clay took a Beckettian look into an imagined secret life of Thomas Edison and how the AC/DC battle might have played out in the late 1800s. The 27-year old playwright, Michael Vukadinovich, has already been noticed by The New York Times and The New Yorker for some earlier works. Since the PlayFest readings were not open to review, per se, I won't comment on Trog in particular, but keep an eye out for the ascendant Mr. V in the future.

The last of the readings I caught was for Miss Julie: Freedom Summer. Full disclosure: I did not read Miss Julie in college. I know, it's a terrible admission, but while I was working through the Pirandellian canon, I missed Mr. Strindberg's classic. Mea culpa. But my collegiate laziness certainly helped me relish this adaptation by Stephen Sachs. Other playwrights were disgruntled, and rightfully so, that the cast who performed this reading had, in fact, spent five months in full production prior to PlayFest. It was odd to see a production then reduced to a reading, but I found the Americanized and racial interpretation of this classic story of class division excellent.

Keep an eye out for these and other playwrights who make it to PlayFest! 2009. It might be worth a trip to the land that Disney forgot after all.

[Photo above: Amanda Stephen and Trenell Mooring in Missing Celia Rose. Photo by Rob Jones/Orlando Shakespeare Theater.]

I've Got Seoul: Korea 2006

2006-11-03T17:52:00.000-05:00

I have not recovered from my jet lag from my trip to Seoul, Korea. I went to deliver a paper on New American Theatre & Criticism for the World Congress of the International Association of Theatre Critics. While there, I met delegates from nearly 30 nations and got a chance to see a bit of Seoul. I missed out on the all-night karaoke, but I did see some palaces, secret gardens and sipped some mind-blowing tea. Best of all, I attended a shamanic ritual where I saw a pig speared by a pitchfork. (It was dead to begin with, but it was still revolting...and cool.) If that's not theatre, I don't know what is.

O'Neill Playwrights Conference: Connecticut 2006

2006-07-23T23:56:00.000-04:00

I just finished up my two week stint as a critic fellow at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center. Renowned for discovering, championing and honing the works of August Wilson, Wendy Wasserstein, Lee Blessing, John Guare and many other playwrights, the Center is a bucolic haven for theater artists. I came to the grounds to study theater criticism with Michael Feingold of The Village Voice, Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune, former L.A. Times chief critic Dan Sullivan and the imitable Julius Novick, a brilliant deity among drama critics.

Tonight I witnessed Charles S. Dutton and S. Epatha Merkerson perform selected pieces from the plays of the late August Wilson. Dutton performed with such power, charge, intensity...I have rarely seen an actor this goddamn good. Two of my colleagues called it "life-altering." I can't disagree.

Stratford Festival: Stratford, Canada 2006

2006-06-18T02:25:00.000-04:00

I see at least 100 plays a year--probably many more. "The Duchess of Malfi" was one of the most visually-arresting pieces I've ever witnessed. Director Peter Hinton and designer Carolyn M. Smith's interpretation of John Webster's grotesque tale of madness and passion nearly blew the lid off of the Tom Patterson Theatre. The bizarre little venue is a tight, rectangular space, which actually serves as the winter home of the Stratford Badminton Club. Lucy Peacock as the Duchess was riveting.

"London Assurance" was a colorful, wonderful feast for the senses. How can you argue with Brian Bedford? The brilliant man behind the makeup played the French comedy to perfection.

Shaw Festival: Niagara-on-the-Lake, Canada 2006

2006-06-15T00:36:00.000-04:00

I can't recall the last time I saw a play that I wanted to go back to the next night. Tadeusz Bradecki's production of "The Crucible," starring the inimitable Benedict Campbell as John Proctor, is riveting. I was quite literally on the edge of my seat. I think I hit the head of the man in front of me at one point.

Numero Festival: Lisbon, Portugal 2005

2006-03-13T18:17:00.000-05:00

The Sixth International Lisboa Multimedia, Film and Music Festival took place in Portugal in November 2005. The theme was "Neurological Games," encompassing the varied multimedia productions, dealing with sound, cinema, visual arts and other types of live performance for the 21st century. I caught two performances, one was the bizarre and esoteric "So Happy Together" by Vitor Rua and Vera Mantero.

New York International Fringe Festival: NYC 2005

2006-03-13T18:06:00.000-05:00

As published in OffOffOnline on August 13, 2005:

Some critics do everything in their power to craft a review from which no one can pull a quote for marketing purposes. Others, though they may not admit it, yearn to see their name emblazoned under an exclamatory phrase on a city bus or in a theater company's season brochure.

I have been neither of these thus far in my reviewing career, but be forewarned. The following review of Soir�e DADA: Neue Weltaffen contains scores of yankable words and phrases. To boot: Run, don't walk, to see Soir�e DADA at P.S. 122 before these beautiful lunatics escape from New York.

An extraordinary piece of avant-garde theater is occupying the second-floor space of P.S. 122 through this Saturday. The quartet from Chicago's WNEP Theater (that's What No One Else Will Produce Theater) has crafted a daring piece of art�and a hysterically funny one at that�to the disturbance and delight of its audiences. This is the third in a nine-year run of various DADA soir�es, but Soir�e DADA: Neue Weltaffen is the one that made it to the New York International Fringe Festival, and that's lucky for us.

Four actors, greased up in white faces and dark formalwear, are charged with shaking up the audience with their schizophrenic and searing wit, in-your-face acting, and surprising relevance. This ensemble has steeped its sensibilities in the post-World War I movement of Dadaism�a backlash against the absurdity of the war. The company has mastered what Dada founders Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Richard Hulsenbeck, and others began in 1916. "Dada" literally means "hobbyhorse" in French, but figuratively lacks any meaning whatsoever. (One of the most recognizable expressions of Dada in the United States is Marcel Duchamp's iconic urinal titled "Fountain.")

WNEP Executive Director Don Hill and Artistic Associate Steve Lund helmed this whirlwind production, which features Emily Dugan, Jen Ellison, Bob Wilson, and Steve Zimmers. A naked plastic doll with moving eyes is introduced early on as an honorary cast member. When DADA Dabo (Ellison) first presents her from a suitcase, DADA Dondi (Wilson) grabs the blond toy, stares at it intensely, and says in an aroused tone, "She's got a lazy eye." Creepily hilarious.

Each Dada takes turns telling an absurd monologue or climbing onto a chair to chat with, harangue, needle, or caress an audience member�appropriate for a show whose moniker loosely means "new world monkeys." They scream audibly, they scream silently. At times their words are delicate and beautiful, and at other times they are utter nonsense.

In German (Swiss?) accents, they spit out machine-gun proclamations: "Dada is anti-action! Dada is anti-complacency! Dada comes to you at night and infects your nightmares with the scent of rotten halibut and causes your medulla oblongata to vomit the poison into your everyday monotony." The pacing is tight, and the precision with which they perform is startling.

The piece's frenetic energy may sound nerve-fraying, but the company knows when to alienate the audience and when to simply hit 'em with a good joke�as if Bertolt Brecht were directing The Daily Show. That is evident in lines like "Dada sees your full potential and rejects you anyway." With its humor, WNEP presents Dada Lite, eliciting less rage and more laughter than the original Dadaists, who incorporated few jokes.

These Dadas attack contemporary ills, from prosaic complaints like gas-guzzling SUVs to grander-scale frustrations like the standardization of Western culture. As the 60 minutes zoom by, the Dadas begin endearing themselves to the audience. They're strange and frightening and boy can they scream, but through their formidable intelligence it seems that they've figured it all out.

A hefty amount of audience interaction is interjected with bizarre monologues. Bob Wilson as DADA Dondi turns in an astonishing performance. He has amped the weird factor up and performs with dedication and commitment. Both women are remarkable as well. DADA Dabo (Ellison) delivers a powerful speech that simply multiplies the numbers of "you." "There is one of you. There are two of you. There are three of you," etc. The monologue continues into the billions, and as the number increases, the fever pitch of the delivery follows. Indeed, there is only one of her.

Ellison and Wilson are the strongest in the foursome, and Emily Dugan turns in a solidly strange performance as DADA Gift. Her black wig (stolen from Uma Thurman's Pulp Fiction wardrobe?) frames her white face and her Cleopatra eye makeup. DADA Wainscotting is outfitted in a bowler, vest, tie, jacket, and goggles.

The action is underscored by a thumping soundtrack of songs in various languages, and, while the lighting is simple, it is effective in its splashes of red, green, or blue when appropriate. Or inappropriate. Or DADApropriate.

Göteborg Dance & Theatre Festival: Sweden, 2004

2006-03-13T18:03:00.000-05:00

I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I had e-mailed a woman in Scandinavia a few times and the next thing I knew, I was on a plane to Göteborg, Sweden.

The impetus for my sojourn was the International Association of Theatre Critics’ Young Critics Seminar, arranged in conjunction with the Göteborg Dance and theater Festival. So, I left Newark airport, which operates next to a gargantuan IKEA store, for Stockholm, the IKEA world headquarters. How different could it be? For starters, unlike the rough-edged cities and fashions Americans live in, everything about Sweden was streamlined: from sleek the airplane flatware to the tidy film “Anja efter Viktor.” (Even if it is a Danish movie—you get the idea). I love to travel and have had the good fortune to do so with motley groups in the U.S., Mexico and Scotland, among others. But this experience in Göteborg (a.k.a. Gothenburg) made the deepest impact on my career as a critic, theatre artist and American journalist.

My 11 colleagues came to this remarkable Nordic city from South Korea, Portugal, Romania, France, Canada, Moldavia, Russia, Denmark and, of course, Sweden. Each morning in the stylized café of our humble Hotel Flora, complete with black wallpaper patterned with giant daisy photos, we would grab some breakfast of salami, sliced red peppers, pate, thick yogurt and a cup of coffee or tea before walking up the main avenue to Artisten, Gothenburg’s art school. We held our morning seminars, usually lasting 2-3 hours, in English, although I was the only native English speaker in the group. For the first few days, the seminar’s director, Margareta Sörenson, and the two monitors, Wibeke Waern from Copenhagen and Lis Hellström Svenningson from Gothenburg corralled our confused dozen, of whom only three understood Swedish. As each day passed, our befuddlement dissolved into sizzling intellectual conversation, European history lessons, awkward, on-the-spot translations and heartfelt companionship. We discussed the pandemic of shrinking real estate for theatre reviews in papers, as well as the lure and danger of freelance life. But we were there for the theater, right?

Living in New York, I left in the midst of the International Fringe Festival, whose roster only included a paltry six companies from outside of the United States. (Worse still, the festival hosted more that 200 companies in all.) The much smaller Göteborg Dance and Theatre Festival offered only 18 companies from which to choose, but only two were Swedish-based. My mind was virtually shattered the first night out during “Foi” by the Belgian company Les Ballets C de la B; I was filled with pride for the solo performer, Nana Janelidze, and her Georgian story of war-torn Eastern Europe; and I was shocked by Lina Saneh’s “Biokraphia” from Lebanon.

As the only American, it was quite a precarious time to represent the nation in the international community, and the trip certainly re-awakened me to the insularity of America and the need for a east- (and south- and west- and north-) looking vantage away from our own borders. Not only in the political arena do we need to fling wide our arms, but in our own art: in traditional theatre form and interpretation. Most of the performances at the Goteborg festival were not text- or reality-based. The heavy London/New York premium on 19th century, Western models of theatre seemed passé at best. The art form has long outgrown slice-of-life naturalism, yet our American universities teach Meisner like he’s Moses on the Mount and our award systems hold up “Proof” and “Take Me Out” as theatrically paradigm. Ah, but that’s the old “chicken-or-the-egg.” Which came first? The gesture or the word? In any event, this Scandinavian theatre festival reminded me that I much prefer the Artaudian to the Ibsenian view of what is stageworthy.

As we all—from lumbering nations to nimble individuals—try to discover meanings or lack thereof, theatre offers a solitary and unique form of artistic expression.

Just in case you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.

Cos Festival: Reus, Spain 2005

2006-03-13T17:55:00.000-05:00

Reus is a surprising Spanish town. Though partly overshadowed by booming Barcelona a mere 70 miles to the north, the hometown of architect Antoni Gaudí is no sleepy Mediterranean village. I arrived there in late October for Cos, the Eighth Annual International Theatre Festival of Mime and Gesture (or however that best translates from Catalan). Artistic director of Lluís Graells assembled 20 companies and performers from various regions in Spain as well as France, Israel, Belgium, Peru, Poland, Cameroon, England and Italy.

For a city of only 100,000, Reus boasts glorious venues. Theatre Bartrina was built in 1905 and seats an intimate 550. The larger, grander Theatre Fortuny is named in honor of the Reus-born painter Mariano José María Bernardo Fortuny y Carbó. Smaller spaces are plentiful in the cozy Catalonian town.

The proud and unique city of Reus awakened with a lively festival attitude for the week. In addition to the performances, courses were offered in puppetry and improvisation, restaurants were abuzz with late-night theatergoers, and the various plazas glowed with excitement as people dashed from venue to venue.

I was able to see 11 productions in my five brief days in Reus. They ran the gamut from amateurish fare best suited to children (or frat boys) to visually-arresting works for the most sophisticated theatergoer.

The piece that still shines in my mind weeks after my return to New York is “Duel” by the Clipa Theater of Israel. A melancholy clash between a pair of ill-fated lovers is underscored by the “Peer Gynt Suite” by Greig and “The Swan” by Saint-Saens. Idit Herman and Dmitry Tyulpanov appear on the ostentatious Fortuny stage like porcelain dolls. That short piece is performed before “Rite of Spring,” the main choreographic event. In that, Herman and Tyulpanov are joined by six other dancer-actors to enact a large-scale frenzy in beige. In primal, brutal tones, the company dances to Stravinsky’s infamous piece as if they were in the opening scene of the film Planet of the Apes.

Over at the Teatre de l’Orfeó Reusenc was the delightful work of Peruvian mime Hugo Suárez in the piece “Hugo and Ines” (named after his Bosnian partner Ines Pasic). He amazed a full house of children and adults by using his body parts—hands, fingers, knees, navel—to create figures and faces. Suárez brings vignettes of sadness, joy and frivolity to life in the most simple manner. Fingers become angry teeth; knees transform into bald heads. The poignancy of a love lost is as present in the work as the silliness of using a navel as a mouth.

Breaking from the majority of sullen work performed at Cos was the humorous “M.A.M.—Modern Art Modern,” presented by Ciatre Copi Rait of Catalonia. Unabashedly lampooning the New York modern art movement and its main characters, the three-person cast of Lourdes Domènech, Gerard Domènech and David Ferrer brought levity into the packed Theatre Bravium. In the piece, New York innovator and multidisciplinary artist “John Phillip Etty” presents an array of his groundbreaking works, from theatre to painting to dance, with hilarious irreverence. The more seriously Etty takes himself, the harder the audience laughs. All the while, his conservative interpreter and presenter (Ms. Domènech) plays the perfect straight man.

Other Cos performances worth mentioning are the excellent “L’Abric” by Taller Itt and “Nouvelles Folies” by Cie Fiat Lux, both from France; the bawdy commedia dell’arte show “Tacata i fuga” performed outdoors with the enchanting 16^th century Priory Church of Saint Peter as the backdrop; and the ambitious puppet piece “La sonrisa de Federico García Lorca” by Bambalina Titelles of Valencia.

The Ninth Annual International Theatre Festival of Mime and Gesture will take place in fall 2006. For a quiet alternative—or supplement—to the giant festivals in Edinburgh or Avignon, look to this tiny Spanish gem.

Edinburgh Festival Fringe: Scotland, 1998

2006-03-13T17:41:00.000-05:00

I probably saw 40 shows in my three weeks in Scotland in August 1998. Eight years later, one of the shows that still sticks with me is "Honestly" by the British company, Hoipolloi.

I was there performing at the Hill Street Theatre. We had 21 midnight performances and we sold out nearly every night. Walking to the theatre from our rented flats along Princes Street was a daily dream. Our theatre group spent hours busking along the Royal Mile to sell the show. From Arthur's Seat to the Edinburgh Palace to a hit show, that month in Scotland was one of the best times of my life.

European Theatre Prize: Torino, Italy 2006

2006-03-13T17:27:00.000-05:00

I have just returned from Turin, where I spent a few days roaming the streets of one of Italy's less-touted towns. I was there as part of the American Theatre Critics Associations's World Congress where we were to wintess Harold Pinter receive the X Prix Europe pour le Theatre.

Among the productions I saw, the first was Luca Ronconi's behemoth "Troilus and Cressida." A five-hour interpretation of Shakespeare's rant on the Trojan War. (Photo left by Marcello Norberth.)