Particular homage was given in this year’s Berlin theatre festival to the work of the leading director Dimiter Gotscheff, who died this spring. His final production, and among his most impressive, of Heiner Müller’s Zement, created for the Residenztheater in …
As the 2013 holiday season approached, theatres and opera houses in Berlin were crowded with people coming to see many new productions and some revivals of popular favorites. The Deutsche Oper offered a merry and highly unconventional production of The …
A Very Hot Summer in Munich’s Opera-Houses…
31 July 2013 was the hottest day ever in Munich! At Bayreuth—where some Perfect Wagnerites still wear tuxes—the argument against air-conditioning is that its installation would ruin the acoustics… But surely something can …
In November 2013 Wojciech Krukowski still walked among New York crowds at Times Square when the members of Akademia Ruchu (Academy of Movement) were performing their action as a part of the Performa 13 project. His presence was also strongly …
In Poznan for a week in early October of 2013, I saw four productions that together give a sampling of the offerings in this theatrically active city. On my first night I attended the Teatr Polski, which was presenting Piszczyk…
In France, as in the United States, there are politicians who rail against immigrants, but the French stage continues its long tradition of welcoming foreign-born playwrights and often forgetting that they were not French at the outset. Currently Cuban-French playwright …
Onzième is a production by the Théâtre du Radeau, directed by François Tanguy. The production was first presented in November 2011; it was presented in many cities in France during 2012, and in Chambery from the tenth to the thirteenth …
Brno, the second largest city in the Czech Republic, has been quite overshadowed culturally by Prague, but it nevertheless has a rich cultural life of its own and a thriving varied theatre scene, which I had the pleasure of exploring …
TG STAN performs up and down Flanders largely to audiences at the beautifully equipped and welcoming cultural centers to be found in every hamlet and mid-sized ones of it towns. The small casts, the aleatory approach to text, the jerry-rigged …
Before the performance begins, the actors playing major characters enjoy informal pre-party conversations and drinks standing at the front of the stage or sitting there in a sofa and armchairs. On a small table there are glasses, bottles, and plates …
Mozart’s Magic-Flute Afloat on Lake Constance
Who knew that Mozart’s Magic Flute was really about three giant giraffe-like hounds’ heads thrusting into the skies over the Bregenz Festival’s great lake-stage on the Bodensee? What the festival planners did know …
Theatre was hot the summer of 2013 in Ireland! Despite the recession and a historic summer heat wave that turned theatres into saunas and had even stolid Irishmen yearning for air conditioning, theatre was alive and well at arts festivals …
These theatre festivals, to their advantage, offered an abundance of interpretations, points of view, narrations, and contradictions. It seems both festivals were dedicated to “Solidarity,” which was the theme for the 6th edition of Temps’d Images in Cluj-Napoca, Romania …
During the last ten years, the Finnish theatre world has been in the middle of numerous structural and artistic changes. Some trends and characteristic features are fairly clear, but it is still difficult to predict where they will lead.
The …
