Phantom Beard, performed by Monira Al Qadiri. Photo: T-Inge-Vermeiren.
Volume 14

Cultural Diversity in the Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels) 2019

The Kunstenfestivaldesarts 2019 has new directors, Sophie Alexandre, Daniel Blanga Gubbay, and Dries Douibi. The former director of the Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Christophe Slangmuylder, who determined the aesthetic importance of the festival for years, now directs the Vienner Festwochen, another important festival of theatrical innovation in Europe. However, the new direction does not represent a major change in the 2019 edition. The Kunstenfestivaldesarts remains a festival dedicated to innovation in the performing arts.

Perhaps the most notable difference was that in the 2019 edition, there is no dominant figure, no guest who occupied a central place in the conception of the festival. The festival included a large number of shows, of different nationalities, exploring the limits of theatre and allowing an international vision of theatrical innovation.

The 2019 edition presented a number of fascinating dance productions.  Cria is a dance production directed by Alice Ripoll with the group Suave, formed by young black dancers coming from Rio de Janeiro. This production has hip hop elements and a new style, the passinho. The passinho is mixed with elements of other traditional dances (such as the samba) or with elements of the breakdance, dancinha, and voguing. The elements of those dances are reinterpreted, and can only be guessed among other techniques within the flow of movements. The performance could easily be divided into different parts. The first part is built on very short, rapid solos or duos, and shows the amazing virtuosity of the dancers with an intense display of energy. The second part is more narrative. In a few short scenes from the second part, the performers talk while the dancers interpret reactions and introduce narrative elements, evoking sexuality, the life of young people in Brazil, violence, and repression of freedom. For example, at one point, an actress begins to make gestures of protest. Then all the other dancers surround her and narrow their circle until the dancer, caught in the middle of them, quietens down little by little despite her forceful movements. However, this beautiful production shows mainly the freedom evoked by the great energy of the performers’ movements.

Fúria, choreographed by Lia Rodrigues. Photo: Sammy Landweer.

Furia is the latest show by Lia Rodrigues, a Brazilian choreographer, whose company Lia Rodrigues Companhia de Danças is based in the favela of Maré in Rio de Janeiro. Furía is an extraordinary show with overflowing energy. The nine young dancers of Furía develop a series of images, taken from daily life, that is inspired by the life of the Blacks in Brazil (according to Lia Rodrigues). However, these images are elaborated and combined among themselves. They are mixed in such a way so that progressively transforming succession is constantly produced without a single moment of pause from the beginning. It is a constant flow of overflowing imagination that visualizes both daily images and obsessions. Without following any clear narrative plot, the images seem to happen in a random way by association. The performance shows incredible freedom of imagination. Only in a brief moment, the four women of the group make the same simultaneous movements, which can be characterized as traditional dance movements. At no other time can the dancers’ movements be defined by the traditional vocabulary of dance. The rhythm of the show creates continuity of images that are both dreamlike and metaphorical. The show tackles various themes such as sex, violence, domination between people and between genders. There are diverse figures of magic, kings, queens, slaves, or people reduced to extreme submission.

The show uses a frontal device with the dancers on stage and the audience in front of it. The displacements take place in groups until the last scene. The parade is one of the most recurrent figures: the dancers run through the space in three or more groups, one after the other. Often, at the back of the stage, they follow the movement from left to right, and go forward from the background, moving from right to left (or the opposite) in order to create a figure by their itinerary. For example, in the first scene, the group lies down between blankets and different colored clothing at the back of the stage as if asleep. They gradually rise and move to the right. One of them with a flag in her hand seems to guide the others slowly. Some are standing, and others asleep and motionless are dragged by their companions. Intertwining their bodies and pushing each other, another group of three dancers seems to reflect both combat and a sex scene. The nine dancers are very different. Their movements have individual sequences that characterize them. In the parades, one on top of the other, they build traditional figures. Dancers being covered with sheets and plastic, or naked, the movements of the parades alternate with moments of dance. The parades alternate like other phases in which the dancers are divided into three groups representing violence, which is both provocative and festive. The music that accompanies the whole show has only the same percussion rhythm that becomes more complex and intense.

The theme of human and sexual exploitation, slavery, is recurrent with the image of men sitting on naked women or the opposite. The objects of the show are simple. The signs of domination are created with a single element like the woman with a serious countenance whose crown is formed by a broom. Derisory and symbolic, she moves slowly. Sitting on a naked man, she advances on cats or the naked woman, who one moment wears a striking blue turban, which seems to confer her extraordinary power. But suddenly, this position unravels, and all the dancers engage in a frantic dance at the same time. Sometimes, one of the groups has a very marked rhythmic movement like the representation of stylized but violent combat between a black and a white man. At a given moment, they all together build up a tower, which slowly advances diagonally, immediately followed by a rhythmic movement of joint dance. In the last scene, while the bodies of the other naked dancers lie at the backstage, apparently exhausted, a black dancer tied to a long rope speaks to the audience. It is hard to know what he is saying, but the audience understands the vindictive tone: he unties himself and escapes among the audience. The show is also clearly vindictive and militant against violence. At the end of the production, the dancers show a poster with the sentence: “Who had Marielle killed” (in allusion to Marielle Franco: a Brazilian politician, a municipal councillor of the city of Rio de Janeiro, a defender of human rights, and a member of the Brazilian LGBT league, who was murdered in March 2018) Undoubtedly, a large number of cultural references escape the audience of the Kunstenfestivaldesarts, who nevertheless gives them a long-standing ovation.

Atla, choreographed by Louise Vanneste. Photo: Maria Baoli.

The dance show Atla by choreographer Louise Vanneste presents an empty space in which spectators can move, mixing among the dancers. The space, which evokes perhaps a space of the future, is empty, and both the walls and the floor are covered with a large white cloth, a black cloth covering the middle of the square structure. In an aesthetic close to non-dance, six dancers develop their dance, moving through different parts of the space and performing repetitive and symbolic actions.

Shadows of Tomorrow, a surprising dance show directed by choreographer Ingri Midgard Fiksdal, takes the audience unawares. Twenty-two young dancers are immobile when the audience enters the venue “Le Lac,” an empty attic under the high ceiling with the overhead rigging in sight. The dancers are dressed in brightly colored clothes, which cover them from head to toe, so that no face can be distinguished from any other. The shape of their asexual bodies disappears under their clothing. They are gathered in two compact and immobile groups at the beginning of the show. The dancers all make the same kind of movement at the same time. They separate very slowly until they occupy the whole stage. All of them perform the same movements, not exactly at the same time but in a collectively coordinated manner. The individuality of the dancers disappears.  The transition between the movements is gradual: it begins with a small gesture that is progressively amplified and transformed. Sometimes a movement is performed in several different ways by the same dancer as if they are performing a series of their own movements. Except for what can be inferred from the movements, the dance does not express any story. The illumination constantly changes, highlighting the collective movement and its different colors.

Among the dance shows, there is also the magnificent Somnia, based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Shakespeare (performed with students from the P.A.R.T.S. School of Dance, directed by Anne Theresa De Keersmaeker) in the park of Gaasbeek Castle to the south of Brussels. Forty-four dancers perform Shakespeare’s play among the trees of the park for three hours as an example of theatre steeped in nature in a festive and mocking way, reflecting the spirit of Shakespeare’s play in a particularly accurate way.

Symphonie Harmoniae Caelestium Revelationum, performed by Chaignaud, M-P. Brébant. Photo: RHoK anna van waeg.

Among the innovative, yet strange and extraordinary shows of this year’s festival is Symphonie Harmoniae Caelestium Revelationum presented in the chapel of the Brigittines. The innovation is both in the adaptation of the musical work and in the theatrical presentation. It is a magnificent concert and a contemporary staging of an early music piece. François Chaignaud and Marie-Pierre Brébant play, sing and perform the work of Benedictine mystic abbess Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179). Symphonia Harmoniae Caelestium Revelationum is a musical adaptation by Marie-Pierre Brébant. The work was written around 1150 when its author was already a figure recognized by the papacy, whose manuscripts have been preserved. Marie-Pierre Brébant plays the bandura, a Ukrainian instrument that is a mixture of harp and lute, while François Chaignaud sings the liturgical songs that make up the production. The instrumentation and the new interpretation seek the proximity to the original work as a contemporary theatrical staging at the same time. The originality and variety of this medieval work, the exploration of modality variations, the melodies, and the multiple musical references it contains are all surprising.

A platform with six steps or six levels on which the musicians climb and sit is composed of a central structure between the bare walls of the baroque Brigittines chapel, the scenery designed by Arthur Hoffner. The presentation is theatrical: the musicians have a naked torso, arms, and legs covered with tattoos that simulate letters and drawings of medieval manuscripts undoubtedly to evoke the origin of the work and at the same time the materiality of the music, its concrete character. The musicians have their hair combed up like a tower on their heads. Without a score, they play and sing by heart, which makes the music more immediate and gives more importance to the bodies and the movements of the musicians. The audience is seated on the floor or lies down on cushions to listen to these medieval varieties. In the first part of the work, as if the music were raised from the earth, both performers are sitting on the floor. She plays the bandura while he sings. Progressively, they sit on the upper levels of the structure throughout the work. The work does not have a conventional structure, but it seems to correspond to a cyclic development with repetitions and with an incredible variety in its reiterations. The musicians play and sing, chaining together some forty mystical and meditative songs from the seventy pieces that make up the Symphonie Harmoniae Caelestium Revelationum. For almost two and a half hours, the two interpreters frequently change positions so that they are seen by the entire audience. The concert of music is also an amazing production by the variety of the movements of the singer, François Chaignaud, which are articulated with the singing. He crosses several times the public space, passing close to the spectators who see and hear it from different points of view. He adopts a multiplicity of positions on the platform, reflecting the tension, the variety of the music, and its incredible richness.

Penelope Sleeps, a performance by Mette Edvardsen and Matteo Fargion. Photo: Werner Strouven.

The minimalist opera Penelope Sleeps by Mette Edvardsen and Matteo Fargion at the Kaaitheatre is radically different. The main character is Penelope, an evocation of the literary figure of the Odyssey, who waits for Ulysses. With music by Matteo Fargion, the opera shows how she spends her time, she mostly reflecting and sleeping as a way to wait and to maintain the position she has chosen in front of her potential suitors.

On stage, there are three performers: Mette Edvardsen, who narrates most of the stories, Matteo Fargion, the composer and musician on stage, and Angela Hicks, a young singer. The production is not a historical recreation, but a mixture of different texts and stories almost without dialogue. Some texts refer to the figure of Penelope, also evoking the colors employed in the tapestry she is weaving, but most of them evoke modern situations whose main topic is the passing of time, the past, and the loss it implies. At first, some of the texts seem completely unrelated to the Penelope story. For instance, the first story evokes a woman who visits her family and finds a spider in her room. Her father fakes catching it and throwing it out, and his lie is discovered by his wife and his daughter. This text allows a reflexion on the features of the spider and on fears and regression. Penelope’s attitude and actions thus underlie all the stories and are evoked in some moments.

In order to stage the wait, her director adopts a minimalist approach of means and music with simple structures and melodies. Many times it is a simple note that is maintained, and the variations are subtle. Sobriety is the main feature of the music. On stage, the three actors are at the beginning –as during most of the production– lying on the floor of the empty stage. Mostly in this position, they recite their text and sing. This position becomes a metaphor for Penelope’s situation and resistance. The lying and immobility imply a temporal suspension and repetition. All the speeches seem pronounced so as to provoke a sensation of strangeness and an experience of duration. The extension of time and the motionless also become a topic of many texts: “moments extending, going nowhere, endless spaces in between, to not move, not write, not know, wonder if it rained in the night, live between stone and air.” The performers sit at some moments, mainly when the musician at one point plays a musical instrument beside him, which is a sort of accordion. The three performers walk, pausing after each stride. But those movements underlie even more the main position of the actors during the production. Says the director, “I wanted to propose an internal journey. This is what we need. I thought, to better act on the outside, to first go inside and listen.”

Yo-escribo. Vos-dibujás, directed by Federico León. Photo: Bea-Borgers.

Among the interesting theatrical productions is Yo escribo. Presented at the Halles de Schaerbeck, Vos dibujas by the Argentinian director Federico León transforms a former market into an art venue. The production is divided into two parts. In the first part, reminiscent somewhat of the Catalan group La Fura del Baus, the audience is taken into a large space occupied by ten little different performances, displayed in half of the space of the Halle. The audience strolls from one place to another, watching those different scenes. All of them are based on games. On the right of the entrance, a man tries to reach glasses on the top of which are small balls with a toy gun. On the second one, an actor seems like a basketball player trying to make a basket. When he succeeds, he makes an acrobatic movement. On the third spot, a chess champion plays against three young men, but they eat pieces made of chocolate, and the champion nonetheless manages to pursue the game. In the middle of the space, two performers try to put the balls in a nest with strange machines that look like hand-driers in front of a table that looks like a ping-pong table. Further on the right, a man is making caricatures imitated by three other men. On the right, in front of a small swimming pool, a woman throws a plastic doll, trying to reach the rubber ring on the other side of the swimming pool. In front of the entrance, there is a booth, the “cabine du silence,” where a man invites members of the audience to come in and to read in silence for a few seconds. All the actions are illogical and in some way dreamlike.

All of them seem to perform something they enjoy doing, but highly depending on luck. Each member of the audience randomly chooses what they decide to watch. All the actions happen at the same time. But all the actions and games remain enigmatic: the audience does not know either why exactly they are doing those actions or why they are performing at the same time. While those actions are developed, a few performers give each member of the audience some sheets of paper containing pieces of a meditation handbook with reflexions about the sense of life, the path of elevation, how to concentrate, and so on. On those sheets of paper, some simple messages, which invite the audience to be patient to find the answer, are written in big letters. Those are the only sentences that the audience can read. Finally, the action is concentrated in the “cabin of silence”: most of the performers go into this cabin, where they perform simple actions. The main performer invites the audience to walk across the Cabin of Silence to the other part of the theatre to see what happens behind the scenery and to understand the real meaning of all those actions. This division of the space and this transition to the other side remind me of Le lapin Chasseur, an humorous production in the 1980s by a French director Jerôme Deschamps, in which the audience was invited first to see a restaurant from the kitchen point of view and then from the client space of the restaurant, or vice-versa.

In the other part of the venue, two seated performers, surrounded by all the performers, explain in a rather pedagogic way that there are many ways to catch the meaning of things, but that dreams are one of the most interesting ways to connect things. The production wants to stress the synchronicity of how things happen in life and how we only become aware of this simultaneity in some unexpected instants. They further want to stress that we tend to interpret those instants as an omen of a probable future. However, the consciousness of this simultaneity helps us to improve our attention to the variety of the world. The simultaneity of the actions forces us to pay attention to different actions. The production is interesting, but after the intriguing first part, the second seems rather static and disappointing, not reaching the expectations arisen from the beginning. In all, there are twenty performers, and most of them were hired a few days earlier for this performance.

Tu-Amarás, directed by Andreina Olivari and Pablo Manzi with a text by Pablo Manzi, performed by the Chilean company Bonobo. Photo: company Bonobo.

The excellent staging of Tu amarás by the Chilean company Bonobo, directed by Andreina Olivari and Pablo Manzi with a text by Pablo Manzi, is one of few plays staged with a traditional structure, based on the conflict between characters and the development of a relatively simple action. The excellent performance of the actors is developed in a unique scenography: four tables arranged in a square figure in a room where the group meets. The different stages of symbolic characters’ actions are marked by red lights on the tables. After an introductory comic scene, which shows two men from an uncertain past century (perhaps the 17th)  competing comically for the affection and trust of an Indian, the four-day story begins. It presents a team of doctors who have to present communication. One of them, Carlos, is new to the group, has done all the work, and yet causes laughter because of his physical appearance (he looks  —according to the others— like a rabbit), but above all due to great distrust about his past: he killed another man. The action begins two days before the collective lecture that they have to carry out in a congress. The five doctors work with the Amenitas, a people of another race. There are great prejudices against them, and the doctors and the congress they are attending try to combat them. The text and the staging show the characters’ contradictions, their racist prejudices, and the complexity of their relationships with the Amenitas. Throughout the discussions, the five characters (represented by Gabriel Cañas, Carlos Donoso, Paulina Giglia, Guilherme Sepúlveda, and Franco Toledo), reveal bloody anecdotes of their past and show their true feelings, while gradually reconstructing the exact circumstances of the crime. The woman, Veronica, ends up throwing Carlos out of the group who refuses to leave. The group ends in a collective physical confrontation while the rest of the attendees wait outside to enter the room and attend the lecture. But until the end, the discussion about the validity of these prejudices —found or not— continues in the woman’s revelations. The text and the show are based on a frequent mechanism in Chilean theatre: the search for truth and authenticity through the revelation of a hidden past, which emerges in the exchange between the characters (with a certain kinship to the mechanism of psychoanalysis), revealing a part of the identity of the characters they try to hide in line with the prejudices of an entire society (concerning racism, sexual freedom, and homosexuality).

The show The Song Father Used to Sing (Three days in May), directed by Thai director Wichaya Artamat, who also wrote the script with Jaturachai Srichanwangen and Parnrut Kritchanchai, seems to want to reflect a society overcome in time without mutations. The slow-paced staging features two brothers (alternatively represented by Jaturachai Srichanwangen, Parnrut Kritchanchai, and Saifah Tanthana) sitting in the living room of their Bangkok home. They meet three times in different years at their dead father’s home. The scenography depicts a room with a part that seems open to an inner courtyard and a kitchen, indicated by a transparent curtain behind which the actors can be seen. They change the situations, although the way in which the actors perform varies little. The actions are banal but they evoke three days of terrible oppressions in Thailand’s history: May 17, 1993 (“Black May”) when the protest against the military government ended in downtown Bangkok with a dozen deaths and thousands of arrests; May 19, 2010 when the oppression resulted in twenty-five victims, thousands wounded and an endless number of arrests; and May 22, 2014, the day of the coup being carried out by the military currently in power in Thailand. However, on the stage, the actors, alien to historical events, carry out the actions of daily life. In the first scene, it is 4 o’clock in the morning and they do nothing: the man plays with his mobile phone, the woman talks to him. In their conversations, they speak about the father who has died, and in whose house they are. In the following two scenes, they carry out actions in real-time. The conversation, the wait for an answer, also seems to coincide with the time of real daily actions. In the last part of the play, the actors prepare a meal in honor of the dead man they invite to their table, placing his photo on a chair and serving him as one more. They eat all the food while they reveal that they are going to sell the house.

Among the most striking representations is an enigmatic and precise staging of De Living by the young German director Ersan Mondtag, in which two almost identical characters (represented by twins) live in two identical and symmetrical spaces and perform gestures and movements. Those gestures and movements are tedious and similar in many respects, reflecting their daily lives. One of them ends up committing suicide.

There were also poetic productions such as Hurler sous la lune (To howl under the moon). In this performance, Mathias Varenne (who is also the author and the director) presents a poetic story, deeply influenced by Allen Ginsberg’s book of poetry (Howl) and other American poets from the Beat Generation. Like a futurist and poetic fairy tale, his narration develops a fantastic story illuminated by a video creation and light design by Damien Petitot and a sound creation by Myriam Pruvot, who is also on stage. Like many other productions of the Kunstenfestivaldesarts, it aims to present new stories and new forms of narrations for our transforming world.

Phantom Beard, performed by Monira Al Qadiri. Photo: T-Inge-Vermeiren.

There was also a multimedia show. Phantom Beard is a strange performance by Monira Al Qadiri, a Koweti artist, educated in Japan and currently living between Berlin and Beirut. In a playful way, she presents the relationship between the two traditions that have marked her personal evolution—Japan and her move to the Arabian Peninsula— in terms of the past and, in particular, the members of her family, understood in a broad sense of tribe, who have disappeared. The performer (who is also the director) engages in a conversation with film images that appear behind her on stage. She presents two different traditions: the images representing Japanese spirits are blue flames that multiply on stage and establish a friendly relationship with Monira Al Qadiri. In Japanese tradition, ancestors are mostly welcoming and establish continuity with the past. On the screen, blue flames represent the well-intentioned spirits of the past, which mark continuity of life: they are valuable, and the person cares for them like precious goods whose loss would bring misfortune. On the other hand, in the second moment, appear a surprising group of men a little taller than the actress. Dressed in traditional costumes, they ask her what she has been doing, reproach her, and make fun of her. They are negative spirits who laugh at her. They are not appeased spirits but resentful mockers. The image is astonishing, and the viewer sees an actress talking to some filmed figures, which change places in an instant. In a second moment, the head of one of them slides along oblique lines while reproaching her for acting as if she knew everything she has and for owing to her ancestors. The difference in tones creates contrast in this enigmatic spectacle. In reality, like a large number of the Kunstefestivaldesarts show, it is a new story, trying to understand the new circumstances and the new realities we live in. It presents a new way of interpreting the relationship with the past and in particular with dead people as if trying to reinterpret their tradition by comparing different cultures.

Rehab Training, a performance by Geumhyung Jeong. Photo: Mingu Jeong.

Among the most striking performances is the amazing and emotional Rehab Training by Korean artist Geumhyung Jeong, in which the artist handles a mannequin used by physiotherapists to learn their work, but in which the performance ends up making increasingly complicated movements. In the imagination of the viewer, the doll acquires a human dimension. Uncanny Valley by Rimini Protokoll and Thomas Melle is equally surprising. The show presented a humanoid robot in the form of the writer Thomas Melle, which appeared on a screen next to it. Throughout the show, the robot was not in any human physical presence on stage to deal with the problem of the use of robots in the future.

Like previous editions, the festival shows a strong political involvement in particular with the problem of immigrants, a problem in Belgium nowadays, which already occupied a central place in the 2018 edition. Among these shows, it is worth mentioning the show directed by Thomas Bellinck, Simple as ABC#3: The Wild Hunt. This show is a documentary theatre based on the recordings of the voices of immigrants or people directly involved in migrations to testify the horror of the situations that led them to escape from their countries, as well as the traumas of their journeys to Europe from 2011. The exhibition Liquid Violence of the Forestic oceanographic project, directed by Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani at the University of London, analyzes the emigration very precisely that has taken place across the Mediterranean since 2011 and details of the bloody attitude of European governments to discourage illegal immigration by sea. In the short film The Body´s Legacies Pt.2: The Postcolonial Body, Kader Attia exposes the repression of black and Maghrebi men in France, associated with racial myths. In two personal shows, performed by themselves, Sachii Gholamalizad tells her personal experience and problems of defining her personality as a daughter of Iranian immigrants, who has been educated in Belgium in Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season. In I…Cognitive Maps, Ely Daou, a Syrian artist, tells about his childhood during the war in Syria in an intimate way, reconstructing the events through the plans of the different apartments in which he was forced to live, as well as the events that forced him to immigrate to Europe.

In a clear critical dimension, the dancer and director Faustin Linkeluya staged Eric Vuillard’s novel Congo, which narrates the sharing of Africa by the European powers at the Berlin conference in 1884 and the subsequent bloody colonization of Congo promoted by King Leopold II.

As it does every year, but perhaps more broadly in 2019, the Kunstenfestivaldesarts promoted a series of courses and workshops by affiliated artists during the festival. They were who have represented their shows this year or in previous editions on a wide variety of topics, but the festival all tended towards artistic renewal. Jozef Wouters proposed a workshop The Unbuilt School of Architecture to build a public space, specifically a nightclub, and reflect on its implications. The choreographer Alice Ripoll and the company Suave offered a dance workshop Passihno Dance on this Brazilian dance. Caroline Maçot and François Chaignaud demonstrated the possibility of discovering the music of the work of Hildegard of Bingen participating in the Medieval Singing Class course. Choreographer Lia Rodigues and her company created a dance workshop, Núcleo Dance Class, open to everyone. Rachel Moore and Isaiah Lopaz proposed a course, The Politics of Sexuality, to reflect on the politics of sexuality from a colonial perspective and its consequences in relation to the black people in particular. The French artists Anne Lise Le Gac and Arthur Chambry proposed a workshop on the work done to carry out their performance Ductus Midi. The choreographer Eleonor Bauer offered Nobody´s Dance, a workshop of exchange of methods and artistic practices open to performers, artists, and dancers. The educator and curator Sepake Angiama proposed a School of Darkness, a workshop on a reflection on the future as a tool for imagining greater political autonomy.

The Kunstenfestivaldesarts also proposed, as in previous editions, the projection of the film works of various artists. Basir Mahmood, a Pakistani artist, presented his fascinating videos in the exhibition I Watch You Do in the basement galleries of Cinema Galeries during the whole festival. Saodat Ismaïilova presented two surprising films Zukha and Stains of Oxus about the traditional situation of Turkestan and the perpetuation of traditions but also about the mutations to which they are submitted.


Manuel García Martinez is Senior Lecturer in French Literature at the University of Santiago de Compostela. He wrote his Ph.D. in Drama Studies at University Paris 8. His research interests are time and rhythm in theatrical productions/performances and in dramatic texts, the French contemporary theatre, and the Canadian theatre.


European Stages, vol. 14, no. 1 (Fall 2019)

Editorial Board:

Marvin Carlson, Senior Editor, Founder
Krystyna Illakowicz, Co-Editor
Dominika Laster, Co-Editor
Kalina Stefanova, Co-Editor

Editorial Staff:

Stephen Cedars, Assistant Managing Editor
Dohyun Gracia Shin, Assistant Managing Editor

Advisory Board:

Joshua Abrams
Christopher Balme
Maria Delgado
Allen Kuharsky
Bryce Lease
Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
Magda Romańska
Laurence Senelick
Daniele Vianello
Phyllis Zatlin

Table of Contents:

  1. The 73rd Avignon Festival, July 4-23, 2019 : Odysseys, past, present and future by Philippa Wehle.
  2. Ibsen in London  by Marvin Carlson.
  3. Report from London (November – December, 2018) by Dan Venning.
  4. It’s All in the Wrist: How Nina Conti Faces Off with Reality by Katy Houska.
  5. Staging Trauma: A Review of Bryony Kimmings’s I’m a Phoenix, Bitch by Rachel Anderson-Rabern.
  6. Difficult Pasts and Revivals: Madrid Theatre Summer 2019 by Maria M. Delgado.
  7. Cultural Diversity in the Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels) 2019 by Manuel García Martínez.
  8. Tampere Theatre Festival: Progressing Society by Pirkko Koski.
  9. Nasza Klasa in Georgia by Mikheil Nishnianidze.
  10. Young and Critical Voices of Turkey I: “Theatre helps us to hear each other.” A Conversation with Irem Aydın by Eylem Ejder.

 

www.EuropeanStages.org
europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

 

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center:

Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications
©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York NY 10016

European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center ©2019

europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center:

Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications
©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York NY 10016

European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center ©2019

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