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Watch Jesus and The Sea by Ricarda Alvarenga at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. The video fables a submerged phantasmagoria of Jesus in the sea waters of Guanabara Bay, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The action took place on one of the 365 days of the One Year Performance, in which, every afternoon, the artist dressed up as Jesus and produced images in different places, situations and contexts, recreating mythological and everyday imaginaries with one of the most iconographic figures in western culture.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Jesus and The Sea At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Ricarda Alvarenga Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Saturday May 17th at 11am (as part of the Short Film showcase) and also be available to watch online on the festival website till June 8th 2025. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country Brazil Language non-verbal Running Time 4 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film About The Retrospective The video fables a submerged phantasmagoria of Jesus in the sea waters of Guanabara Bay, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The action took place on one of the 365 days of the One Year Performance, in which, every afternoon, the artist dressed up as Jesus and produced images in different places, situations and contexts, recreating mythological and everyday imaginaries with one of the most iconographic figures in western culture. About The Artist(s) They are a professor in the Dance undergraduate program at UFU (Federal University of Uberlândia) in Uberlândia, Minas Gerais; a Ph.D. candidate in the Performing Arts Graduate Program at UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro); and hold a master's degree from the Dance Graduate Program at UFBA (Federal University of Bahia) in Salvador, Bahia. Their work mobilizes actions and compositions in performance, contemporary dance, photography, video, installations, and writing — inferring and interfering with life as a work of art. Get in touch with the artist(s) provisoriocorpo@gmail.com and follow them on social media @ricardalvarenga Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Robert Wilson Yearbook Volume 1 Visit Journal Homepage Robert Wilson’s Art of Senses and Emotions Maria Shevtsova By Published on September 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF Robert Wilson’s Art of Senses and Emotions Preamble The intention of this keynote address for the Segal Center Conference on Robert Wilson in New York and at Watermill on Long Island was to select from Wilson’s more recent theatre works, grouping them around specified elements of his aesthetic. My oral presentation on notes has here expanded into a written version that seeks to keep the speaking voice I had preferred for a well-judged and timely celebration, on his home soil, of Wilson’s achievements on a world scale. My choice of productions was clear from the outset, as were the questions to be raised, but my opening gambit eluded me. Wilson, unknowingly, provided the cue. We had warmly met up again in Romania in May 2024 at the Craiova International Shakespeare Festival, celebrating its thirtieth edition. This biennial festival had invited Wilson’s The Tempest, made and premiered in Bulgarian in 2021 at Sofia’s Ivan Vazov National Theatre. Performed twice at the National Theatre of Craiova (NTC), the festival’s prime venue, The Tempest was the fourth Wilson production to be seen at this festival. During the after-show social gathering with the Bulgarian actors, NTC actors (whom Wilson had directed in Craiova in 2014 for Eugène Ionesco’s The Rhinoceros ), staff, and friends, Wilson suddenly asked: “Maria, which scene did you like best?” Taken aback, I hesitated for a split second and said “the last.” Wilson, looking surprised, said: “I thought it would be the first.” To which, on a party occasion when everyone wanted to be photographed with Bob , I uttered a few hurried words before someone snapped my photo with Bob, too. Instantly I knew that my New York presentation had to begin with a veritable reply to his query and that answering it was the best way for me to pay homage to a fundamentally unclassifiable, ever-creative, and ever-growing unique artist. The Choreography of Sound Wilson’s The Tempest begins with a phenomenal sea storm constructed by the play of light, sound, and timing, which are not synchronized but in counterpoint, and in counterpoint again for juxtaposition against the dark visual imagery so as not to make this opening scene illustrative but expressive by association with the event. These are foremost traits of Wilson’s aesthetic in relation to which he offsets movement. Where there is light in Wilson there is color, so add “color” to “light,” “sound,” “timing,” “counterpoint,” “juxtaposition,” “ association,” “movement,” and “motion.” Other of his aesthetic elements will present themselves as we go. Movement in the tempest scene is stylized, as always in Wilson, and the eye discerns bodily images that suddenly appear in sharp, shaped flashes signifying lightning. These movements flash out and, suddenly, seem to be stilled for a split second. Juxtaposition like this of the moving body and the still body is also a Wilson trait, and here it implies (rather than “says”) the attempts the scene’s indistinct humans make, twisting in angular fashion to steady their bodies in the violence of a ship rolled and tossed by a ferocious tempest. Note my “still body,” whereas, in fact, there is little stillness in Wilson’s theatre since there are always tiny movements, sometimes so small – like the blink of an eye or the twitch of a finger – that they are barely perceptible. Shakespeare’s story component is embedded in the scene’s composition whose blasting sounds stimulate spectators to conjure up images of thunder and roaring ocean: thus they “see the sound” or “see with [their] ears,” as Wilson usually puts it (1), This crossover of the senses is one of his fundamental synesthetic principles. The scene suggests colossal cosmic upheaval and the devastation of the planet, and its immense sonic build-up explodes into the roar of a gigantic all-consuming wave rushing straight into the audience. Those of you who have experienced a mini-earthquake’s deep-throated growl, swelling up at top speed out of nowhere, would have recognized the terrifying, but also thrilling – because this is theatre – sonic revving up to the explosive wave, heard but invisible, of Wilson’s score. The scene ends abruptly with a swift blackout, followed, almost immediately, by low blue light announcing the next episode. Its overt theatricality, prodigiously powered sonically, is a metonym for Shakespeare’s words, a figurative replacement of them while, nevertheless, relaying their story: here is a tempest, a shipwreck, people stranded somewhere, which, as in Shakespeare, is said to be an island. Identification of the what, when, and where of this scene and of all subsequent scenes gives Wilson the structure of his production. Structure is habitually his starting point for arranging space (his term is architecture ) and for everything else that enters it, which is decided through testing and checking during the working process. Light is fundamental from the very beginning, counter to the standard practice, which is an anathema to Wilson, of bringing light in at the end, after everything else has been “done.” (2) For The Tempest , Shakespeare’s story is stripped back, offering what could be called the gist of its essential parts: Prospero seeks revenge; Miranda, his daughter, and Ferdinand fall in love; the foolish Stefano and Trinculo drink alcohol, as they plot a political coup – if braggart natter can be called “plotting” in anything but the vaudeville-type comic-ironic treatment that Wilson gives it; Ariel, demure, plays the role of Prospero’s fairy-angel helper (another ironic touch); Caliban appears, learns to get drunk, and is otherwise subordinated to Stefano and Trinculo’s antics. Caliban’s role in Wilson’s arrangement is really no more significant than that of the usurper Duke Antonio, Prospero’s treacherous brother and father to Ferdinand, or that of Alonso, King of Naples and Prospero’s former friend. Antonio and Alonso are shown in an incidental, rather than vital, run-by-magic banquet scene, attractive for its visual panache but without further consequence. Wilson’s is a “short” version of The Tempest – and of short duration, too, taking only ninety minutes – whose excisions in terms of storyline and, especially noticeably, of dialogue can be argued to be as valid as any of the plentiful “short” Shakespeare at the 2024 Craiova Festival, not to mention across the world. None, of course, is like Wilson’s theatre, which is truly one of a kind, sui generis . A few phrases on second viewing of the production seemed over-repetitive, but they were most likely reiterated because a given line or the one that followed it in Shakespeare’s text was too long for the beat, or meter, or rhythm considered more suitable, and therefore necessary, for performance purposes. In other words, the artistic exigency was a matter of the perceived right form rather than one of staying with the right text – the text, so called to the letter of literary concerns. Wilson’s approach here recalls the repetitions used in opera, when, at certain moments, a singer sings again the same phrase or sentence from the libretto to exactly the same music specifically for formal reasons, that is, the arc of the musical writing requires repetition for musically satisfactory completion – such as, for instance, the completion in returning to the tonic of musical composition. More than story, then, is at issue in this not immediately evident, indirect approach to narrative typical of Wilson’s theatre. The production elides to its close and to Prospero, alone with Miranda. Wilson condenses Prospero’s lines, but their subject is clearly his bygone suffering and inner turmoil, and this, his internal tempest, is transcended at the very moment when forgiveness, reconciliation, and renewal begin in an atmosphere of peace at play’s end. Prospero’s spiritual voyage is the core of the production and, from it, come new beginnings. His last scene with Miranda is gently moving, and this emergent emotion, together with Wilson’s elision of Antonio and his courtly entourage as extraneous to this particular denouement, opens the space for suggesting that Prospero’s last scene is a legacy offered not only to Miranda but also to all listening and watching in the theatre. “In my end is my beginning” wrote T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets of his own spiritual rebirth . (3) Wilson’s focus and closure on this very note is a clue to his insight into the spiritual dimension of Shakespeare’s play. You can see why it was not possible to speak to Robert Wilson about his first scene in The Tempest without speaking about the last: they are, essentially, two parts of the same scene because Wilson’s structural line is straight, going from tempest to reconciliation – to illumination, in fact – in a continuum of thought and action. Further, all factors considered, this emergent emotion emanates principally from the actor in the role of Prospero (Veselin Mezekliev): it stems from something in his manner coming from deep within him, and the sensation transmitted is sustained by the quality of his voice – a long-road-traveled voice that has been and seen and understood. The phenomenon of performer attention nurtured from within rather than settled on an external, extraverted, starting point allows what Wilson calls “filling the form,” that is, you, the actor, are filling the form from yourself, from whatever you are thinking, dreaming, feeling – in sum, experiencing there and then. Wilson sets the outer form to which he holds you, down to the angle of your little finger, but whatever it is that keeps you centered and permeates the form quietly, unostentatiously, gives it its interest for both actor and spectator. Wilson frequently maintains that, without this “inner” experiencing – let us also call it an inner energy – the form, however outwardly splendid it may be, is simply empty. (4) It is important for me to say, in anticipation of the last section of my talk, that the spiritual in Wilson’s work is rarely noticed, let alone written about, yet it is often there to a lesser or greater degree, depending on the work. It was present in his utterly innovative 1976 Einstein on the Beach (its premiere at the Avignon Festival, where I saw it), incarnated in the white beam of light, glowing against black, that took twenty minutes to rise from the floor and, incredibly slowly, slide into a vertical position at the center of the stage. Slowness, with nothing to detract attention away from it, measured time, while accentuating the sense of time as a palpable entity and, also slowly, the sense of time as eternal; and all of this happened to one long note, with minor modulations, held on an organ in the orchestra pit. That was spiritual, reaching beyond material being without signing itself conspicuously as “Spiritual!” Mary Said What She Said, premiered in 2019 in Paris two and a half years before The Tempest in Sofia, is a useful cross-reference, although not solely because it also took ninety minutes, which is long for a monologue, but because it relies and, this time, consistently relies, on an incisively fashioned soundscape, now, however, primarily generated by language; and, while Wilson never tires of stressing that all elements of his theatre works are equal, equal can be understood as “all playing their part,” which does not exclude the prominence of selected parts at some point in the multiplicity of a given composition. Language, here, is the eminent factor because it provides an exceptionally dense text, an unavoidable verbal mass with which its performer, Isabelle Huppert, has to deal, or fail. Mary Said What She Said is the second of Huppert’s Wilson-directed solos, following her 1993 French version of Orlando , its text extracted from Virginia Woolf’s novel by Darryl Pinckney and Wilson. (5) Pinckney, the author of Mary Said , draws on the letters of Mary Queen of Scots, cousin of Elizabeth I Queen of England, who imprisons her for eighteen years before executing her. The time is the eve of Mary’s execution. Huppert’s monologue requires pristine diction and enormous stamina so that nothing is lost from her gamut of enunciated letters, syllables, words, phrases, but also sentences that flow one after another without marked punctuation. In Orlando she often hurled or spat out words, often defiantly. (6) In Mary Said , she affirms, as if the substance of the text that she is saying need not be explained or defended. Timbre, tone, innuendo, register, pitch, pace, and tempo weave her vocal choreography while she paces up and down, back and forth, and frequently on a diagonal (Lucinda Childs’s signature angle for walking in Einstein on the Beach ). A sense of urgency filters here and there through Huppert’s volley of words, while an occasional hop, skip, or cantering motion breaks into her walking, accentuating the intermittent sound of her footsteps, audible only when her feet, hidden by her long dress, press on the heels of her shoes. Meanwhile, Ludovico Einaudi’s horizontal piano music runs counter to Huppert’s much thicker textured sonorities, while the latter in turn runs counter to Wilson’s palette of light. The palette is elegant, comprising soft pinks (some folding on the back wall into a sliver of white before sudden disappearance), soft blues, subtle shifts of nuanced shadings of peach-apricots and dimmed yellows, and eventually billowing white feathered clouds that envelop Huppert as the performance draws to a close. Space is non-figurative – common to Wilson’s oeuvre – thus enabling the sensorial impact of the light design as well as that of the unexpected and incongruous apparitions, at different moments, of a thinly framed white chair (almost faded out by a white-fog effect); a high-healed white shoe evoking Elizabethan courtly attire, which stands in profile on the floor; and a white envelope whose enclosed page Huppert burns, presumably of an incriminating letter, before Mary’s end. Huppert’s black, slightly shimmering, figure-length sleeved garment has a hint of Elizabethan costume around its neck and sleeves. (7) A high beehive wig completes Mary-Huppert’s silhouette. All of these constitutive elements come together, and although operating on the principle of contrast, they combine into a coherent and cogent artistic unit, grounded in its linguistic intensity. The cogency of this particular work is instrumental in evoking sensation and eliciting responsiveness of some kind from spectators, and the language wielded by Huppert, although meaningful, is keyed to Wilson’s non-representational means, none geared to apperception through the reasoning mind and all-affecting intuitive sensing and subconscious release. After all, the subconscious harbors feelings – tangibly in such instances as Huppert’s voice rising repetitively with just enough urgency to trigger spectators’ intuitive perception that she is approaching Mary’s demise. There is no trace of outburst when Huppert accelerates pace and pitch, but acceleration is noticeable enough to communicate the wisps of emotion that emanate from her sonorities at these very points in her soliloquy. Spectators are free to link them to earlier vocal points since they are all integral to her “filling the form,” aspects of which could be attributed to Mary’s “inner tempest” (initiated, not unlike that of Prospero, by political machinations) before her death. They are free, as well, to link the entire soundscape—including Einaudi’s musical notes—to the continually changing colors of light, for instance, since all of it together elicits some kind of emotion, not least the feeling of beauty or the wonder that Huppert could have managed it all. “Emotion,” for Wilson, is not about being “emotive,” nor is it “histrionics” or forced or fake “acting emotion,” any more than it is for Huppert. On occasion, Wilson seeks external signs capable of arousing a performer’s feelings behind their actions, as happened during the dress rehearsal of The Tempest (May 19, 2024). The scene involved Tom Waits’s recorded voice singing of love, through which Wilson urged the actor in the role of Ferdinand to look at his partner: “Eyes, eyes . . . Show your eyes. Look at her. . . . You love her.” At this juncture, the actor was so fixated on correcting the arm and hand movements prescribed by Wilson’s template that lifting his eyes for the audience to see them or to look at his partner, let alone allow stimuli to feed into what might pass for inner experience, seemed out of the question. Concern with outer form inhibited inner response. This brief episode shows that Wilson is by no means solely interested in impassive performers, or that he is immune to the sense of words. The dense presence of language in Mary Said What She Said is a reminder that language most certainly exists in Wilson’s collected works, and not only as playful enigma, as had transpired in his 1974 A Letter for Queen Victoria . The latter heralded his break from the highly imaginative and highly innovative group of “silent opera” preceding it (give or take Wilson’s play of words on opera from the Latin denoting “work”). Yet, while Wilson had avoided using language semantically for meaning and interpretation in his “silent” pieces, language in some of his later ones is expressly tasked to convey meaning. Such was the case of his own three solos – Hamlet, A Monologue (1995), Krapp’s Last Tape (2009), and Lecture on Nothing (2012). By comparison with Huppert’s solos, they are not as tightly packed linguistically, thus conveying meaning more immediately. They are also more straightforward, which makes them more quickly recognizable as dramatic texts rather than any other kind of text. Drama-acknowledged works like these (collaboration with Heiner Müller had doubtlessly ignited Wilson’s interest in drama) draw attention to the variety within Wilson’s theatre, but also of his oeuvre as such, which embraces the artefacts – paintings, drawings, sculptures, video portraits, glass, and other objects – that have won them international acclaim as visual art, while leaving their imprint on his theatrical art. Wilson is not beyond self-reference, within or across his artistic forms, as occurs in the unexpected fleeting presence of a video portrait of Aleksandr Rodchenko in Lecture on Nothing , high in the corner front-stage, who, in an inspired joke, winks at the audience! Humor is no stranger to the Wilson repertoire. The Music of Opera Einaudi’s music is integral to Huppert’s sonosphere, but, then, music is of utmost importance to Wilson’s theatre as a whole. (8) It can come in mixtures of musical genres in his manifestly spoken-word/drama creations, as happens in The Tempest , where a Tom Waits song co-exists with fragments of Schubert played by string instruments. His music theatre proper is, by comparison, different in that it is sparked off by music and is music-led; and, notwithstanding the hybrid characteristics that layer his music-led constructions, it is musically genre-specific, which lends itself to grouping into three categories. The first is what I call the “rock-folk” group, whose masterpieces are The Black Rider (1990, Hamburg), where Waits’s music predominates, Woyzeck (2000, Copenhagen), whose music and lyrics are by Waits and Kathleen Brennan, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (2009, Berlin), music by Rufus Wainwright, with Wainwright rising up on a small platform from the pit (only once in a “star” gesture), singing into his microphone. The second is “baroque opera,” notably Monteverdi’s The Return of Ulysses to his Homeland (2011) at La Scala (Milan) and The Coronation of Poppea (2014) at the Opéra de Paris Bastille, the second, modern house of the Paris Opera, while the older, nineteenth-century house is known as the Palais Garnier. The third music-theatre group is “grand opera” (the commonly used but awkward terminology), which, in Wilson’s case, primarily comprises operas from the Romantic repertoire of the nineteenth century, with Verdi foregrounded since the 2000s, giving seven Verdi operas to date. Even so, he staged a sparse but fire-flamed, overall ritualistic and quite mesmerising Ring cycle, all four of Wagner’s operas of this major opus taking two years to be premiered sequentially at the Zurich Opera (2000 to 2002) and be performed in relatively quick succession during 2002 in Paris at the Théâtre du Châtelet. Their Wagner predecessors were Lohengrin in 1998 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the glaringly only grand opera Wilson was to stage there at all, and Parsifal in 1991 in Hamburg. Weber’s Der Freischütz ( The Freeshooter ), connecting this opera with the rock-folk The Black Rider, came in 2009 in Baden-Baden. Just these few geographical details for Wilson-crafted operas show a pattern of European patronage and audience engagement that have sustained his operatic output right until the present. Still within Wilson’s grand-opera diapason are two key Symbolist works, both strong and both staged for the Paris Opera – Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (1993, at the Bastille) and Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1997, at Garnier). These productions are still in the Paris Opera repertory, with another reprise of Madama Butterfly scheduled for the 2024–2025 season. And there are various modernist works, going from Bela Bartok’s Blue Beard’s Castle and Arnold Schoenberg’s Expectation in 1995 in Salzburg to Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts , premiered at the Houston Grand Opera in 1996 and performed shortly afterwards at the Edinburgh Festival in the fresh, light-hearted way conceived by its authors. Note too Richard Strauss’s The Woman Without a Shadow at the Paris Opera Garnier in 2003, which, in my view, had an undeservedly short life. Not to be forgotten in the modernist canon is Igor Stravinsky’s stand-alone 1927 Oedipus Rex, an “opera oratorio,” in Stravinsky’s own classification, for orchestra, narrator, soloists, and male chorus, which Wilson staged in 1996 on a huge staircase designed for the occasion at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. The work was introduced by a twenty-five minute Silent Prologue involving performance artists and dancers in the vein of Wilson’s “silent opera” and so too of his earlier experimentation with hybrid forms. Perhaps Wilson’s not altogether successful conjuncture of Oedipus Rex and his prologue (I was among the unconvinced) is best placed not with opera but alongside Debussy’s 1911 hybridized Le Martyr de Saint Sébastien, also a stand-alone piece. Debussy wrote its music for unconventional dancer Ida Rubinstein with text by Symbolist-influenced Gabriele d’Annunzio featuring a narrator. Jean Cocteau, who had collaborated with Stravinsky, also featured a narrator. Wilson staged Le Martyr de Saint Sébastien in 1988, showcasing Paris Opera Ballet’s superstar ballerina Sylvie Guillem in her then home, the Garnier. Opera, when “grand” – including, for the purposes of this presentation, the maverick modernist works that had contested the habits of the grand traditional opera houses ( Blue Beard’s Castle and so on) – significantly outweighs, in some twenty-six productions so far, the total number of Wilson’s baroque variety combined with his “popular,” more “home-spun” music-theatre. His prolific opera work points not only to his attachment to classical music, but also to the great importance of established opera to his artistic vision and the materialization of that vision. Given that these are matters of fact and not of opinion, it is more than disappointing that theatre scholarship has paid little to no attention to Wilson’s world of opera, within which are to be found some of his most outstanding works. Works of this caliber have enriched the field of opera of the past fifty years, while challenging and changing the field’s artistic vocabulary, outlook, and possibilities of being new in the present rather than entrenched in the practices of the past. Thus, when Wilson’s legacy is at issue, one need not look much further than his achievements in grand opera to gauge that legacy’s enduring force. My contextual remarks are a framework for ascertaining characteristics of Wilson’s direction and design shared by his operas. But they help to identify, as well, characteristics that are heightened in individual operas or are simply unique to a particular production. When looking from the perspectives of what is heightened and what singular, two recently acclaimed opera productions command attention: Puccini’s Turandot, staged in 2018 at the Teatro Real in Madrid, with this theatre’s orchestra and chorus, conductor Nicola Luisotti (returning to Madrid in 2023 before traveling to the Paris Opera Bastille in the same year, the performance discussed here); and Verdi’s La Traviata , first in Linz in 2015, but reaching glory only in the 2016–2017 version in Russia at the Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre with MusicAeterna, founded and conducted by Teodor Currentzis. This rendition was then performed at the Grand Théâtre de la Ville in Luxembourg in 2018, which is the one discussed here. Of foremost importance in these two productions is their uncluttered space, which, having distinguished Wilson’s very early career, has become a recognizable aesthetic principle across his body of work. What needs to be stressed, however, is that Wilson’s varied opera directing has completely ratified his principle of bare space. He may well have begun with an understanding of space from visual-art and dance perspectives, but opera progressively showed him that the musically complex organism that is opera required uncluttered space to be fully heard and be heard commensurately with its ambitions. Opera consists of orchestral music, singing soloist voices, choral voices, a libretto replete with names of characters and story and plot – these are its drama components – and architectural, painterly and other scenographic features as well as dance and related physically trained practices like the commedia dell’arte , which Puccini had borrowed for Turandot . All these multifarious elements notwithstanding, opera, if pan-artistic (or “interdisciplinary”) in its very essence is, above all else, a sonic universe, and Wilson accedes to this when he observes that he is usually “visually distracted” when he goes to the opera because it is “so busy on stage” that he has to close his eyes “in order to hear carefully. . . . I can [then] listen to the violin, to the harp, to the flutes, I can listen to the singer.” His “biggest challenge” as a director is to “give a space so that we can hear [the] music,” and, for his work, “which is highly visual, the visual must give a space for us to hear music so that, with my eyes open, I can hear better than when my eyes are closed.” In other words, hearing the music, which is imperative, cannot be impaired by busy décor (among other “busy” factors) or, for that matter, in the case of Wilson’s design, by what is visually arresting and even potentially overpowering. Turandot is a salient example of what is exceptionally visually powerful, even by Wilson’s standards, with its architecturally imposing but constantly moving big blocks and tall columns of colored light in a range of deep blues and some black; sometimes there is only black, barely lit. Vibrating masses of purple protrude and fill the space, also saturating the comical “Chinese” commedia trio whose costumes by Jacques Reynaud, as if cut from heavy paper in an angular fashion, hold the gaze. The rarity of purple in Wilson’s palette makes its loud presence all the more striking. Purple may well allude to Turandot’s regal power – indeed, imperial tyranny – to which Wilson unmistakably refers through her appearances, standing on a narrow black platform that moves and juts out from the wings, high up above the stage, and then retreats after her pronouncements to behead her unsuccessful suitors. She poses her three riddles to her last suitor, Caleb, from this same platform. Wilson perceives, in one of the most striking expressions ever of his imagination, just how daunting, how fearful the height and position in the air of his platform really are to eyes that see as they listen. The visual potency of this device is matched by Turandot’s stiff, stridently deep orange dress (which she wears throughout) of triangular shape and squared shoulders, accompanied by black squared headgear and long black gloves. Towards the end of the opera, the orange of her dress seems to radiate against washes of rich, warm brown on the back wall; at another moment, an outsize vibrating orange ball appears on it, referring, by association through color, to Turandot’s beginning to be transformed by the power to love. Turandot, without the capacity to love, is a forbidding sight, countered only by the softer contours of Liu’s, but especially of Caleb’s, simple but confident bearing and the garments both wear. Reynaud and Wilson here approach Puccini’s chinoiserie with discretion, dressing these characters from top to toe in monochromatic, one-patterned thick but stylish fabric which is the color of stone, tinted with very pale green (unless this slight tint is an optical illusion created by light). But discretion is evident most of all in their contained gestures and movements. More physically restrained still – Wilson’s understatement to another degree – are the duets between Turandot (Iréne Theorin) and Caleb (Gregory Kunde), particularly their closing series where Caleb is at last able to declare his love instead of continually proving it through his successful feats. The singers’ kinaesthetic minimalism is precisely what allows the cumulative release of the full power of their voice – for nothing can obstruct its intense focus; and the singers bring out vocally, even more than does the orchestral playing, the music’s enormous emotional range. Wilson understands only too well that music is both a source and generator of emotions and that it can be this form of energy – distilled, pure – when all the energy of singing is channeled through the singing and is condensed in it. Gestures and movements at this level of condensation can be nothing other than mere clutter, irrelevant to the supreme translucence of the singing voice as it sings from the movement within each singer. And once you can fully hear, untrammeled, what the voices are telling you – the voices rather than the words – Wilson’s sumptuous visual presentation falls into place, holding its own, but not overbearing – “equal,” Wilson would say – while you can hear all the music, vocal and instrumental together, at ease, with your “eyes open.” A comparable kind of translucence and musically elevated synthesis occurs in La Traviata , with the great difference that the music at the end of this opera soars into transcendence, instantaneously as Nadezhda Pavlova, in the title role, soars into transcendence. This extraordinary metamorphosis happens most of all through the emotional depth and finesse of the vocal and instrumental music from the very beginning of the production until its last note. This refined unison is due to the completely attuned togetherness of all the players, necessarily, including the singer-players, who are inseparable from, and totally sensitive and attentive to, the finely tempered ensemble that is MusicAeterna, nurtured by Currentzis. Wilson, meanwhile, pursued his designer-director course, sensitive, by some kind of alchemical intuition and affinity to the tenor of the musical work. His visual imagination, in response, is especially delicate: colors are largely pastels – creams and pinks tinged with gold for Violetta (Marguerite in Alexandre Dumas’s The Lady of the Camellias , the source of the opera’s libretto), as they are for her apartment and other spaces related to her. Objects are few, a good number of them floating in the air. Wilson’s more pronounced visual compositions are reserved for Violetta’s lover Alfredo (Dumas’s Armand), Alfredo’s father, and Violetta’s demi-monde friends. Accordingly, the opera’s ballroom scene of Act II (Wilson calls it a “party)” is replete with stunning bull-like heads and horns and cat’s-eye masks, pervasive red light, and red and black costumes evoking bullrings, matadors, and flamenco dancers. All are intrinsic to Verdi’s score but, nevertheless, give room for Wilson’s fantasy cabaret-camp-and-queer pianist to do his number with brio in the merriment that, before too long, becomes disaster. (10) The production’s closing scene is breathtaking. Wilson places Pavlova-Violetta in the shadow of death, her image in the illusion of a darkening skeleton (this through Wilson’s masterful lighting) in her large white bed, until she rises, training a long unfurling white sheet behind her, which is her nightgown and shroud in one. Attached to one of her fingers is the loop of a sheet that she trains along the air, like the sail of a ship, as she takes steps forward, her radiant face looking ahead as she sings her love of Alfredo. She biblically curves her index finger upwards to the Divine. And she is now smiling, smiling as she sings her love, not collapsing in a heap, as in melodramatic views of this opera, but standing tall, with dignity. The strings of the orchestra tremor and gently recede into silence, as does Pavlova’s voice, except that the silence seems to be an illusion of silence and the musical notes seem still to be heard. Never have I heard the quality of such a silence – a holy silence, the silence of miracles – in any Wilson work before. If pressed, I would have to say that this silence is the silence of spiritual experiencing – or, perhaps, more accurately, of spiritual being . The Spiritual Dimension La Traviata closes without closing, having suffused a distinctly palpable sense of togetherness on the stage and between the stage and spectators, binding them all as one. This particular kind of togetherness is in itself a kind of spiritual experience. It is, in the same instance, something like a celebration of life, akin to Pavlova’s celebration of love for and with Violetta. For Wilson, a spiritual experience is not a religious one because, as he sees it, the church (temple, mosque, synagogue) is the place for religion while the theatre can be spiritual without the religious dogmas (my paraphrase) that he believes are divisive. (11) The spiritual dimension of Wilson’s theatre appears in what may be called “secular” works, but it is more evident in music that is culturally accepted to be sacred music, (differently, of course, in the diverse cultures of the world), or thought to have sacred origins and uses, or which, by its spiritual qualities, is entitled to sanctified places. Such music gave rise to the following in Wilson’s oeuvre, in chronological order: Bach’s St John’s Passion (2007, Théâtre du Châtelet); Adam’s Passion (2015, using four pieces by Arvo Pärt, whose pivotal piece is a Russian Orthodox lament sung in Russian, which in 2009 Pärt had named Adam’s Lament ), presented in Tallinn’s Noblessner Foundry, newly renovated for performances; The Messiah ( Der Messias, 2020) , Mozart’s arrangement and sung in German of Handel’s English-language The Messiah, premiered right at the beginning of the Covid pandemic at the Mozartwoche in Salzburg); Bach 6 Solo (2021, Wilson in collaboration with violinist Jennifer Koh and Lucinda Childs choreographing for five dancers, of whom she was one). Bach 6 Solo was performed at the Chapelle Saint-Louis of the renowned seventeenth-century hospital Salpêtrière in Paris. The concert-dance was integral to France’s celebration of Wilson’s eightieth birthday in recognition of Wilson’s artistic services to France. (12) Two additional works on the outer edge of this time span rightly belong to the sphere of the sacred, broadly understood. The first is Gloria , a 2022 recorded sound installation in which Wilson speaks in tandem with Huppert and saxophonist Richard (Dickie) Landry playing his own music. Sound was transmitted through unobtrusively situated small microphones in that most venerated of holy sites in France, the Sainte-Chapelle, in the heart of Paris. Most unfortunately, the stream of tourists passing through (some stopping for a minute or two to figure out what was going on) brought in unsettling noise, while the sound installation, although respectfully quiet and intentionally transmitted as if from afar, was altogether too quiet to be heard adequately in such circumstances. The second work is an art installation, the 2024 STAR and STONE: a kind of love…some say , which is Wilson’s bold and frequently startling painting of Notre-Dame de Rouen in Normandy via digitally projected images from technology placed in the grounds of the Cathedral. Several of these images, although by no means newsreel reproductions, are surely allusions to the damages done to the Cathedral during the Second World War. Compelling in their destructive mode, particularly given the Cathedral’s beautiful facades in real life and the beautiful colorings that Wilson otherwise inscribes on them, these tougher images can justifiably be interpreted as his profoundly critical thoughts on the devastations of war. In the face of semiotics like these, it can hardly be assumed that Wilson’s consciousness of the world has been smothered by aesthetics because his is not social-issue art, nor, as a consequence, does he make “social theatre.” The latter, although a comprehensible label, is unsatisfactory for individuating theatre centered on social issues since all theatres, by virtue of being made in societies, are social. Adam’s Passion , created before Covid and the spate of horrendous wars fought in 2024, picks up Pärt’s underlying theme that Adam, the symbol of all humanity, had precipitated the tragedy of humanity, while transposing it into the key of hope. Myriad hues of blue permeate the work from start to finish, suggesting, in the context of Pärt’s thought, the celestial plane of salvation evoked by the painters of the Renaissance. These are the blues, too, of Wilson’s first four minutes of silence (Pärt’s choir sings straight afterwards) in which Adam, Wilson’s “Man,” is Everyman and stands for collective responsibility as well as collective atonement and pardon. The very abstraction of his name gives Man (Humanity) a plural identity, composed of single individuals. Atonement and pardon, two aspects beyond darkness, buoy up the production’s motif of hope and summon to the imagination the Man who was Christ. The silver, piercing light, which first appears on the backstage wall as a vertical line, opens out from the line’s central slight swell, growing bigger and brighter, like organic growth from a seed. This iridescent emanation returns periodically, also in order to light a hanamichi-style walkway extended from the edge of center stage into the audience. By the time the choir starts singing, the stage has been set for the journey of Man, played by a stocky and naked Michalis Theophanous, who, by a curious trompe l’oeil, does not, at first, look naked at all. This optical deception is probably due to the magnetic light, but also to the attention drawn of the viewing eye to the pearly silhouette of a tree, suspended in space above the stage, with its leafless branches hanging upside down. This can only be the Tree of Man, an evocation of faith and myth; a memory of antiquity and the holy. The Tree visually connects to a branch – possibly, symbolically, a branch lopped off the hanging tree (albeit with some leaves) – that rests on the floor at the point where the hanamichi reaches into the audience. Pärt’s religious musical meanings meld into Wilson’s projected humanist vision of human resilience and endeavor, while his pervading play of light conjures up the human spirit, as does, in tandem, the singing choir. Man walks steadily towards the branch as if walking into the future. The performance, at the same time, draws to an end, and nothing in it contradicts the idea that naked Man (who is, also “cleansed” Man), walks forward confidently, with hope. Wilson, being an artist of point and counterpoint, sets up rotund creatures in puffball shapes as comical counterparts of the central seriousness of his production. Yet this ploy, in my view, misses the mark, since the puffball scene looks like misplaced kitsch, nor is it particularly funny. Nor is it witty enough to counter and thus puncture high-minded sentiments, as comedy is said to have done for tragedy in Ancient Greece. Choreographer and dancer Lucinda Childs’s incomparable hieratic style is most certainly suitable for the composition, but for some reason – too withheld, or simply lackluster – it does not enhance a work that, by its very nature, poses the greatest of difficulties for rendition as theatre. The subject of Handel’s The Messiah concerns humankind, and Handel wrote it theatrically; but, then, he was also a writer of operas . Mozart, who was a prodigious composer, also wrote operas, and this meant that his version of The Messiah made it less problematic for staging than compositions lacking an inbuilt sense of theatre – the case of Pärt’s compositions, which are in the range of prayer and meditation. Mozart’s arrangement is lighter and bouncier than Handel’s original. It willingly displays its joyous tonalities and dance-like beats and rhythms, which Wilson caught quickly for his direction and design. Mozart’s and Wilson’s accord was cut short. No sooner was Der Messias premiered in Salzburg in January 2020, playing for three nights, then Covid drove it into “storage.” Wilson, in the meantime, was prevented by the outbreak from traveling back to the United States and found refuge in Berlin, where, in isolation, he continued the black and white drawings of The Messiah begun in Salzburg. Wilson, apart from generally working with and through drawings in the gestational phases of his productions, drew this particular set with the intention of exhibiting it in an art gallery in Paris to accompany planned performances of The Messiah in that city. My impression of these drawings so full of movement, much of it suggesting wind, was that they were of a different order from the joyousness of the stage movement. The two impulses appeared to be in opposition, the one steered towards shadowed turbulence, the other towards the radiant skies. It might well be that Wilson’s bi-vocality, couched in two different artistic forms, entered into dialogue with The Messiah, which recalled his earlier dialogue with Pärt in Adam’s Passion . Wilson could well have used Pärt’s name Adam’s Lament for the whole work. Instead, he chose Passion whose nuances of meaning differ significantly from those of Lament , the first coming from the Bible’s New Testament and the second from the Old. Passion inescapably references “Passion of Christ,” which is a singularly New Testament event, and Wilson probably felt that its nuances were closer to the positive, proactive dimensions that shaped his part of the collaboration. Five years later, the spirit of The Messiah is indubitably positive. The Messiah resurfaced three times in September 2020 at the venerable Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris, while Covid escalated. The theatre management took maximum precautions, and audiences complied, but, as Wilson notes, all the theatres of Paris were shut down after the third night. (Theatres in London, on the other hand, were closed down months sooner.) What, in retrospect, is striking is how uplifting in such fearful times The Messiah would have been to those who had heard and seen it (which argues for the importance of the arts to society). Just as striking is how true this production was to the certitude, breathed by Mozart into The Messiah, that humanity could and would overcome adversity; here the Christian basis and full significance of “Messiah” cannot be ignored. The Grand Théâtre of Geneva dared two performances in October 2020. The Messiah then retreated until its six performances at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona in March 2024. Wilson took up the abstractions of the dramatis personae of The Messiah. Mozart had identified them musically, that is, by voice and so by Soprano, Tenor, and so on. This pattern dramaturgically organizes all of the production’s participants, except its magnificent dancer Alexis Fousekis. Wilson’s main goal was to have the whole space full of joy, starting with the tenor, Richard Croft, who, light on his dancing feet, is graceful, gracious, and urbane as he cuts across his “roles,” including that of singing narrator. Like a thread of continuity, he weaves in and out of various tableaux. Tableaux is the most appropriate word in this context for Wilson’s sequences of slightly “stilled,” momentarily “held” images in the manner of Symbolist tableaux. Soprano, dressed in white with long white hair standing in a gondola, is “caught” in a gesture of rowing; Tenor is caught in an echoing, similar gesture: Alto stands with a jet of steam behind her; elsewhere fire burns in the sky; somewhere else a huge moon hangs (in my memory behind Tenor); and, somewhere else, the Tree of Man stands upright in the sky and not upside down, as in Adam’s Passion . Most of the solos and duos are offset by rows of iridescent thin lines on the stage floor; sometimes they are set into relief by the illuminated outlines of the rectangular shape of the stage; at others, a box framed in white-silver light is framed within another similarly framed box to create depth of image. The effect is entrancing, but does not etiolate the singing. There are also group tableaux. Sometimes the chorus walks in a line of darkened silhouettes behind this or that soloist. Mostly, however, choral singers divide the stage space into two (as in Turando t), with a wide passage between them, usually for entrances and exits. Occasionally, all horizontal space is filled, as happens when, a spaceman in the image of the first man on the moon emerges from clouds and massive effects of exploding snow. No sooner glimpsed, then the singing chorus in black flanks the moon man on either side. Even so, this splendor upon splendor is outshone by Dancer Fousekis whose impeccable virtuosic technique gives his jetés the power to leap high and free of the earth, an ethereal not terrestrial being with variations of the position of his arms. Airborne, Spirit incarnate, he leaps through the skies of Wilson’s blues; clouds thicken and darken; black planks, well spaced from each other and held up on “invisible” strings, look downward while he passes to land. At one point, Fourakis leaps and comes down to stand with his shoulders and arms pulled behind him, suggesting they might be touching or even be attached to the plank now settled nearer the floor. It dawned on me afterwards that the image, angled as it was, alluded to Christ carrying the Cross. The whole work is surreal, engrossing, exhilarating, and its instruments and singers perform music less like Handel’s church music (even if touched by theatre) and more like Mozart’s spiritual translucence, here symbolized and materialized in dance. Epilogue There can be no adequate “conclusion” to this presentation except to affirm that Wilson’s spiritual dimension is integral to his legacy. Further commentary waits silently for his future work. Endnotes “News,” Robert Wilson, accessed September 28, 2024, https://robertwilson.com . My Robert Wilson , 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2019) offers an extensive account both of Wilson’s working processes and the aesthetic of his works. T. S. Eliot, East Coker , in Four Quartets (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), 20. Confirmed for another context by Ann-Christin Rommen (Wilson’s assistant director on The Tempest ), in Ann-Christin Rommen and Maria Shevtsova, “Working with Robert Wilson,” New Theatre Quarterly 23, no. 1 (February 2007): 58–66. Jutte Lampe first performed Orlando in German in 1989 at the Schaubühne in Berlin. For a detailed study of Orlando accompanied by an interview with Huppert, see my “Isabelle Huppert Becomes Orlando,” Theatre Forum , no. 6 (Winter/Spring 1995): 69–75. I here coin the notion of “vocal choreography.” The costumier is Jacques Reynaud who also designed the exceptional costumes with Elizabethan echoes of The Winter’s Tale (2005) and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (2009); both premiered at the Berliner Ensemble. See my “Robert Wilson’s Sonosphere,” in Meredith Monk, Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson: Landscapes of Consciousness , ed. Ann Shanahan, vol. 6 of Great North American Stage Directors (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 175–208. Robert Wilson and Maria Shevtsova, “Covid Conversations 5: Robert Wilson,” New Theatre Quarterly 38, no. 1 (February 2022): 4. Amply illustrated with photographs. See, for this terminology, Susan Sontag’s renowned essay “Notes on Camp,” Partisan Review 31, no. 4 (1964): 515–530. For a considerably fuller account of this Perm production of La Traviata , see “Robert Wilson’s Sonosphere,” 193–97. Robert Wilson and Maria Shevtsova, “Covid Conversations 5,” 7 and 14. Ibid., 14 and 24–5. About The Author(s) Robert Wilson Yearbook The Robert Wilson Yearbook, published annually by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, offers a dedicated platform for scholarly and creative engagement with the life, artistry, and enduring legacy of Robert Wilson (1941–2025), one of the most original visionaries in contemporary theatre and performance. The Yearbook seeks to explore and expand upon Wilson’s groundbreaking approaches to staging, lighting, movement, and visual composition. Each issue will feature a diverse range of content—including original essays, critical commentary, archival materials, artist reflections, and photography—examining facets of Wilson’s multifaceted practice across genres, eras, and geographies. The Robert Wilson Yearbook is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - This Issue Listening to Deafman Glance Robert Wilson’s Art of Senses and Emotions Robert Wilson's Production of Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken Thinking in Structures: Working as a Dramaturg with Robert Wilson Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Inga Galintyé and Chloé Bellemère Kayla Farrish (a Nina von Maltzahn Fellow) Fana Fraser PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE In Process Open Studios at The Watermill Center Multimedia 6:00PM EST Friday, October 13, 2023 39 Water Mill Towd Road, Water Mill, NY 11976, USA Free Entry, Open To All In Process Inga Galintyé and Chloé Bellemère Kayla Farrish (a Nina von Maltzahn Fellow) Fana Fraser Content / Trigger Description: The Watermill Center is a laboratory for the arts and humanities providing a global community the time, space and freedom to create and inspire. Founded in 1992 by avant-garde visionary Robert Wilson, The Watermill Center is an interdisciplinary laboratory for the arts and humanities situated on ten acres of Shinnecock ancestral territory on Long Island’s East End. With an emphasis on creativity and collaboration, The Center offers year-round artist residencies and education programs, providing a global community with the time, space, and freedom to create and inspire. The Watermill Center’s rural campus combines multifunctional studios with ten acres of manicured grounds and gardens, housing a carefully curated art collection, expansive research library, and archives illustrating the life and work of Artistic Director, Robert Wilson. The Center’s facilities enable Artists-in-Residence to integrate resources from the humanities and research from the sciences into contemporary artistic practice. Through year-round public programs, The Watermill Center demystifies the artistic process by facilitating unique insight into the creative process of a rotating roster of national and international artists. https://www.watermillcenter.org/ Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Watch Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths by Catappum! Collective at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. The Catappum Collective retraces the steps of Benjamim de Oliveira, revisiting the places where he lived, performed, and left his legacy. The journey began in Pará de Minas and Belo Horizonte—his hometown and starting point—where the group interviewed local artists, accessed historical documents, and delved into the memory of our Black clown’s presence. In São Paulo, the collective visited the Museum of Circus Memory and explored key moments in Benjamim’s path to success. As the first clown to record a music album in Brazil, he made history in the capital through performances filled with chulas and lundus, playing a pioneering role in the evolution of Brazilian entertainment. The journey continued to Rio de Janeiro, a historic site of Black resistance and home to the region known as Little Africa. It was there that Benjamim found support and cultural vitality during the formative years of his artistic rise.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Catappum! Collective Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Saturday May 17th at 11am (as part of the short films selection) and also be available to watch online on the festival website till June 8th 2025. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country Brazil Language Brazilian Portuguese Running Time 36:17 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film About The Retrospective The Catappum Collective retraces the steps of Benjamim de Oliveira, revisiting the places where he lived, performed, and left his legacy. The journey began in Pará de Minas and Belo Horizonte—his hometown and starting point—where the group interviewed local artists, accessed historical documents, and delved into the memory of our Black clown’s presence. In São Paulo, the collective visited the Museum of Circus Memory and explored key moments in Benjamim’s path to success. As the first clown to record a music album in Brazil, he made history in the capital through performances filled with chulas and lundus, playing a pioneering role in the evolution of Brazilian entertainment. The journey continued to Rio de Janeiro, a historic site of Black resistance and home to the region known as Little Africa. It was there that Benjamim found support and cultural vitality during the formative years of his artistic rise. About The Artist(s) Group, Collective, or Production Resume The Catappum Collective began its research in 2015. In 2019, they premiered their first show, also titled Catappum. Between 2019 and 2023, they performed in more than 50 neighborhoods across all five regions of São Paulo and its countryside, reaching nearly 10,000 people from various social classes and age groups. From 2020 to 2022, the group took part in several in-person and online festivals, including the 2nd Festejo Raízes do Riso, the 2nd Saruê International Circus Festival, two editions of the Brincando no Parque Festival, the 3rd Dona Ruth Black Theater Festival of São Paulo, the 6th São Paulo International Circus Festival, and the Preta Leste Festival in Itaquera. In 2022, they were awarded funding through the 6th Circus Promotion Program, during which they held 12 performances of Catappum for over 3,000 people. They also offered workshops on Black comic traditions, engaging both artists and audiences in discussions about laughter, comedic expression, and racism through conversation circles. Also in 2022, the collective published an article titled “Black Popular Cultures in the Media” in Folha de São Paulo. That same year, they taught in the Humor course at SP Escola de Teatro, the institution where the collective’s founders were previously trained. Additionally, they participated in Brazil’s 1st Black Circus Research Symposium, contributing to the panel on Black Clowning, Circus, and Education. In 2023, they performed at SESC Registro – SP with a double feature: the Catappum show and the storytelling piece Pulú, the Little Black Boy Who Jumped Far, which was also written by the collective. That same year, they inaugurated the noon programming slot at Grande Lona do Mundo do Circo in Parque da Juventude (formerly Carandiru), presenting Catappum. Still in 2023, they were selected in the 42nd edition of the Theater Promotion Program for the City of São Paulo, which enabled them to create the group’s second show, Na Lona de Benjamim, a tribute to Benjamin de Oliveira, the great Black clown and circus artist of the early 20th century. In 2024, the Catappum Collective received the Picadeiro Trophy from the State Government in the category of Best Clown Show for their work Catappum. Get in touch with the artist(s) contatocatappum@gmail.com and follow them on social media https://www.instagram.com/cata.ppum/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

S T A R R BUSBY presents Working Up A Surrender: A Communal Offering, Part I at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 Working Up A Surrender: A Communal Offering, Part I S T A R R BUSBY 6-8 pm Thursday, October 17, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall Lobby RSVP Working Up A Surrender: A Communal Offering is an experience in support of community building and collective liberation that explores the question 'How can we center connection and care in a rapidly changing world?’ A Communal Offering, Part I will take place in Elebash Recital Hall Lobby, where visitors will each individually be invited to experience a private sound meditation. Visitors are welcome to arrive at Elebash Lobby at any time from 6-8 pm. Please also join us for Working Up A Surrender: A Communal Offering, Part II on Saturday, October 19, 5-5:50 pm in the Segal Theater. Working Up A Surrender: Collective Healing Experiments was first produced at JACK with the support of a NYSCA Grant LOBSTER Nora loves Patti Smith. Nora is Patti Smith. Nora is stoned out of her mind in the Chelsea Hotel. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is her mind. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is an out-of-use portable classroom in the Pacific Northwest, and that classroom is a breeding ground for lobsters. LOBSTER by Kallan Dana directed by Hanna Yurfest produced by Emma Richmond with: Anna Aubry, Chris Erdman, Annie Fang, Coco McNeil, Haley Wong Needy Lover presents an excerpt of LOBSTER , a play about teenagers putting on a production of Patti Smith and Sam Shepard's Cowboy Mouth . THE ARTISTS Needy Lover makes performances that are funny, propulsive, weird, and gut-wrenching (ideally all at the same time). We create theatre out of seemingly diametrically opposed forces: our work is both entertaining and unusual, funny and tragic. Needylover.com Kallan Dana is a writer and performer originally from Portland, Oregon. She has developed and presented work with Clubbed Thumb, The Hearth, The Tank, Bramble Theater Company, Dixon Place, Northwestern University, and Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. She is a New Georges affiliated artist and co-founder of the artist collaboration group TAG at The Tank. She received her MFA from Northwestern University. Upcoming: RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR with The Hearth/Connelly Theater Upstairs (dir. Sarah Blush), Dec 2024. LOBSTER with The Tank (dir. Hanna Yurfest), April/May 2025. Needylover.com and troveirl.com Hanna Yurfest is a director and producer from Richmond, MA. She co-founded and leads The Tank’s artist group TAG and creates work with her company, Needy Lover. Emma Richmond is a producer and director of performances and events. She has worked with/at HERE, The Tank, The Brick, and Audible, amongst others. She was The Tank’s 2022-23 Producing Fellow, and is a member of the artist group TAG. Her day job is Programs Manager at Clubbed Thumb, and she also makes work with her collective Trove, which she co-founded. www.emma-richmond.com Rooting for You The Barbarians It's the Season Six premiere of 'Sava Swerve's: The Model Detector' and Cameron is on it!!! June, Willa, and (by proximity) Sunny are hosting weekly viewing parties every week until Cameron gets cut, which, fingers crossed, is going to be the freakin' finale! A theatrical playground of a play that serves an entire season of 'so-bad-it's-good' reality TV embedded in the social lives of a friend group working through queerness, adolescence, judgment, and self-actualization. Presenting an excerpt from Rooting for You! with loose staging, experimenting with performance style, timing, and physicality. THE ARTISTS Ashil Lee (he/they) NYC-based actor, playwright, director, and sex educator. Korean-American, trans nonbinary, child of immigrants, bestie to iconic pup Huxley. Described as "a human rollercoaster" and "Pick a lane, buddy!" by that one AI Roast Bot. 2023 Lucille Lortel nominee (Outstanding Ensemble: The Nosebleed ) and Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group Alum. NYU: Tisch. BFA in Acting, Minor in Youth Mental Health. Masters Candidate in Mental Health and Wellness (NYU Steinhardt: 20eventually), with intentions of incorporating mental health consciousness into the theatre industry. www.ashillee.com Phoebe Brooks is a gender non-conforming theater artist interested in establishing a Theatre of Joy for artists and audiences alike. A lifelong New Yorker, Phoebe makes art that spills out beyond theater-going conventions and forges unlikely communities. They love messing around with comedy, heightened text, and gender performance to uncover hidden histories. She's also kind of obsessed with interactivity; particularly about figuring out how to make audience participation less scary for audiences. Phoebe has a BA in Theatre from Northwestern University and an MFA in Theatre Directing from Columbia University's School of the Arts. The Barbarians is a word-drunk satirical play exploring political rhetoric and the power of words on the world. With cartoonish wit and rambunctious edge, it asks: what if the President tried to declare war, but the words didn't work? Written by Jerry Lieblich and directed by Paul Lazar, it will premiere in February 2025 at LaMama. The Barbarians is produced in association with Immediate Medium, and with support from the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation. THE ARTISTS Jerry Lieblich (they/them) plays in the borderlands of theater, poetry, and music. Their work experiments with language as a way to explore unexpected textures of consciousness and attention. Plays include Mahinerator (The Tank), The Barbarians (La Mama - upcoming), D Deb Debbie Deborah (Critic’s Pick: NY Times), Ghost Stories (Critic’s Pick: TimeOut NY), and Everything for Dawn (Experiments in Opera). Their poetry has appeared in Foglifter, Second Factory, TAB, Grist, SOLAR, Pomona Valley Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Works and Days. Their poetry collection otherwise, without was a finalist for The National Poetry Series. Jerry has held residencies at MacDowell, MassMoCA, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Arts, and UCROSS, and Yiddishkayt. MFA: Brooklyn College. www.thirdear.nyc Paul Lazar is a founding member, along with Annie-B Parson, of Big Dance Theater. He has co-directed and acted in works for Big Dance since 1991, including commissions from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Old Vic (London), The Walker Art Center, Classic Stage Co., New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, and Japan Society. Paul directed Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die which was reprised in London featuring David Byrne. Other directing credits include Bodycast with Francis McDormand (BAM), Christina Masciotti’s Social Security (Bushwick Starr), and Major Bang (for The Foundry Theatre) at Saint Ann’s Warehouse. Awards include two Bessies (2010, 2002), the Jacob’s Pillow Creativity Award (2007), and the Prelude Festival’s Frankie Award (2014), as well an Obie Award for Big Dance in 2000. Steve Mellor has appeared on Broadway (Big River ), Off-Broadway (Nixon's Nixon ) and regionally at Arena Stage, Long Wharf Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Portland Stage and Yale Rep. A longtime collaborator with Mac Wellman, Steve has appeared in Wellman's Harm’s Way, Energumen, Dracula, Cellophane, Terminal Hip (OBIE Award), Sincerity Forever, A Murder of Crows, The Hyacinth Macaw, 7 Blowjobs (Bessie Award), Strange Feet, Bad Penny, Fnu Lnu, Bitter Bierce (OBIE Award), and Muazzez . He also directed Mr. Wellman's 1965 UU. In New York City, he has appeared at the Public Theater, La Mama, Soho Rep, Primary Stages, PS 122, MCC Theater, The Chocolate Factory, and The Flea. His film and television credits include Sleepless in Seattle, Mickey Blue Eyes, Celebrity, NYPD Blue, Law and Order, NY Undercover, and Mozart in the Jungle. Chloe Claudel is an actor and director based in NYC and London. She co-founded the experimental company The Goat Exchange, with which she has developed over a dozen new works of theater and film, including Salome, or the Cult of the Clitoris: a Historical Phallusy in last year's Prelude Festival. She's thrilled to be working with Paul and Jerry on The Barbarians . Anne Gridley is a two time Obie award-winning actor, dramaturg, and artist. As a founding member of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, she has co-created and performed in critically acclaimed works including Life & Times, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, No Dice, Romeo & Juliet, and Burt Turrido . In addition to her work with Nature Theater, Gridley has performed with Jerôme Bel, Caborca, 7 Daughters of Eve, and Big Dance, served as a Dramaturg for the Wooster Group’s production Who’s Your Dada ?, and taught devised theater at Bard College. Her drawings have been shown at H.A.U. Berlin, and Mass Live Arts. B.A. Bard College; M.F.A. Columbia University. Naren Weiss is an actor/writer who has worked onstage (The Public Theater, Second Stage, Kennedy Center, Geffen Playhouse, international), in TV (ABC, NBC, CBS, Comedy Central), and has written plays that have been performed across the globe (India, Singapore, South Africa, U.S.). Upcoming: The Sketchy Eastern European Show at The Players Theatre (Mar. '24). S T A R R busby (they/she/he/we - all pronouns said with respect) is a Black experimental artist who sings, acts, composes, educates, and is committed to the liberation of all people. A recent recipient of a NYSCA grant, S T A R R leads a music project under their name which will release a debut project in 2024 - Working Up A Surrender . She is also the lead singer of dance&b band People's Champs (www.peopleschampsnyc.com ) which released their latest project, Show Up, in the Fall of 2023. S T A R R has also supported and collaborated with artists such as The Gorillaz, Esperanza Spalding, Son Lux, X Ambassadors, Kimbra, Alice Smith, and Quelle Chris. Selected credits: If You Unfolded Us (Sable Elyse Smith, MoMA); Rest Within the Wake (James Allister Sprang, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Featured Soloist); (pray) (Ars Nova and National Black Theatre, A Singer, Composer, and Music Director)*Lucille Lortel Award Winner; The Beautiful Lady (La Mama, Boris); On Sugarland (NYTW, co-composer); Octet (Signature Theatre, Paula) *Drama Desk Award Winner; Mikrokosmos, Sterischer Herbst (Graz), Nottingham Contemporary; The Girl with the Incredible Feeling , Spoleto Festival dei Due Mondi. All music available via Bandcamp and all streaming services. Love, gratitude and ashé to my blessed honorable ancestors, especially MME. linktr.ee/S_T_A_R_R Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

Encounter Richard Move / MoveOpolis!'s work Devrai (Sacred Grove) in Manhattan, at this year's edition of the Prelude in the Parks festival by The Segal Centre, presented in collaboration with Summer on the Hudson and Riverside Park Conservancy. Prelude in the Parks 2024 Festival Devrai (Sacred Grove) Richard Move / MoveOpolis! Dance Friday, June 7, 2024 @ 6pm and 6:30pm Riverside Park, Manhattan Meet at Riverside Drive and 79th Street. Performance on 80th St Lawn Summer on the Hudson and Riverside Park Conservancy Presented by Mov!ng Culture Projects and The Segal Center in collaboration with Presented by Mov!ng Culture Projects and The Segal Center View Location Details RSVP To Event "Devrai (Sacred Grove)” calls attention to our local ecosystems and landscapes. The Indian word “Devrai” is a compound of Dev meaning 'God' and 'Rai' meaning forest. A prehistoric tradition of nature conservation, sacred groves have long been revered as sacrosanct and imbued with the belief that no creature may be harmed within its boundaries. This performance of Devrai (Sacred Grove) is a section of Richard Move’s Herstory of the Universe series commissioned by the Trust for Governors Island as part of Herstory of the Universe@Governors Island, named “Best Dance of 2021” by The New York Times. Devrai (Sacred Grove) will be performed by Aristotle Luna (Complexions Contemporary Ballet, Richard Move / MoveOpolis!) at 6:00pm and again at 6:30pm. Featured Image Credits: Akua Noni Parker in "Devrai (Sacred Grove)" by Ben DeFlorio. Richard Move / MoveOpolis! Richard Move, Ph.D., M.F.A. is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, TED Global Oxford Fellow, New York Public Library Dance Research Fellow, Artistic Director of MoveOpolis! and Assistant Arts Professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Department of Dance. Move's choreographic commissions include productions for Mikhail Baryshnikov and the White Oak Dance Project, two works for the Martha Graham Dance Company, a solo for New York City Ballet Principal, Heléne Alexopoulos, and a trio for PARADIGM - Carmen De Lavallade, Gus Solomons, Jr. and Dudley Williams. Visit Artist Website Location Meet at Riverside Drive and 79th Street. Performance on 80th St Lawn Summer on the Hudson and Riverside Park Conservancy Summer on the Hudson is NYC Parks' annual outdoor arts and culture festival that takes place in Riverside Park from 59th Street to 153rd Street. With a mix of music concerts, dance performances, movies under the stars, DJ dance parties, kids shows, special events, wellness activities, and more there is something for everyone! All programs and events are free to the public and registration is not required unless specifically stated in event information. The mission of the Riverside Park Conservancy is to restore, maintain, and improve Riverside Park in partnership with the City of New York for the enjoyment and benefit of all New Yorkers. We support the preservation of the park’s historic landscape, structures, and monuments, engage the community in active stewardship of the park, and provide a wide range of public programs. Visit Partner Website

Watch The Jacket by Mathijs Poppe at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. What begins as an intimate portrait of Jamal Hindawi — a Palestinian artist doing political theater in Beirut’s Shatila Refugee camp — transforms into a captivating journey. We discover a Lebanon rarely seen — one where hope persists despite hardship and where community transcends crisis. His story weaves together the profound connection to his Palestinian homeland with an intimate exploration of a country and its people learning to navigate an uncertain present.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents The Jacket At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Mathijs Poppe Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Friday May 16th at 3:55pm. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country Netherlands Language Arabic Running Time 71 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film About The Retrospective What begins as an intimate portrait of Jamal Hindawi — a Palestinian artist doing political theater in Beirut’s Shatila Refugee camp — transforms into a captivating journey. We discover a Lebanon rarely seen — one where hope persists despite hardship and where community transcends crisis. His story weaves together the profound connection to his Palestinian homeland with an intimate exploration of a country and its people learning to navigate an uncertain present. About The Artist(s) Mathijs Poppe, born in 1990 in Ghent (Belgium), graduated in 2017 with great distinction from School of Arts Ghent (KASK) with OURS IS A COUNTRY OF WORDS. For this medium length documentary, he worked together with a couple of families in Shatila, a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, to tell a story that balances on the thin line between fiction and documentary. The film was selected for Visions du Réel, screened at numerous international film festivals around the world and got awarded with a Wildcard by the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF). Since then, Mathijs has developed several film and video projects as a director, cameraman and editor. At the moment Mathijs is working on his first feature film, THE JACKET, in which he will continue and deepen his collaboration with the Palestinian community in Lebanon. Get in touch with the artist(s) rebecca@plutofilm.de and follow them on social media https://www.plutofilm.de/films/the-jacket/0092 Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

This installation will be open on Friday Oct 13th (6pm-9pm), Saturday Oct 14th (12pm-6pm) and Sunday Oct 15th (12pm-6pm). “Qualia” is a sensory voyage where the line is blurred between the physical and the digital world, between the real and the imaginary. The gaze is a visual poem, gravitational Qualia: anxiety shaped into Surrealism, a nightmare turned fantasy, spontaneous solidarity, feelings of solitude, suspension, an embrace, the beginning of a smile, a hand holding sand, falling and rising again. Conceived as an immersive projection mapping design using cinematographic language and interactive dramaturgy, “Qualia” explores concepts of mental states, symbolism, and hope, creating a story that unfolds across a series of immersive scenarios drawing from the body, faces, urban patterns, nature and remains of activity. Underneath these mirrored imageries lie many stories about limits, freedom, and self-perception. An ordinary tableau becomes a dreamscape; the brain is an airport, a train rail. The mind is a magician, and the body is the self, giving the audience an alternative experience where they are no longer passive spectators and actively enter the very heart of the piece where ‘universal time’ continues to exist in parallel with an inner perception of time — a back door — intimately associated with our sense of personal identity and unshakable condition that the future is still open to our chosen actions. The brain is an alchemist where memories are the bedrock of consciousness. The piece uses choreographic language, fragmentation, bioart, color, motion, music, drama, humor, light and darkness to confound expectations, dream-like scenes, and symbolic images, flattening space through animation and abstraction, or heightening the illusion of three dimensions. The immersive experience - environmental video sculpture - is designed as a large wall with white canvases spread across, seemingly in random positions, creating video spaces. Using the concept of ideasthesia, a bridge that metaphorically links rational abstractions, we open a dialogue between the different film streams - within the canvases and throughout the wall - with an original music score and sound design, extending the installation in time and space. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE QUALIA – You Matter to Me Immersive Cinematic Art Installation Directed by Laia Cabrera & Isabelle Duverger Music and Sound Design by Nana Simopoulos With the participation of Catherine Correa Multimedia Non-Verbal October 13-15 at Jersey City Theater Center 6:00PM EST Friday, October 13, 2023 Jersey City Theater Center, Barrow Street, Jersey City, NJ, USA Free Entry, Open To All This installation will be open on Friday Oct 13th (6pm-9pm), Saturday Oct 14th (12pm-6pm) and Sunday Oct 15th (12pm-6pm). “Qualia” is a sensory voyage where the line is blurred between the physical and the digital world, between the real and the imaginary. The gaze is a visual poem, gravitational Qualia: anxiety shaped into Surrealism, a nightmare turned fantasy, spontaneous solidarity, feelings of solitude, suspension, an embrace, the beginning of a smile, a hand holding sand, falling and rising again. Conceived as an immersive projection mapping design using cinematographic language and interactive dramaturgy, “Qualia” explores concepts of mental states, symbolism, and hope, creating a story that unfolds across a series of immersive scenarios drawing from the body, faces, urban patterns, nature and remains of activity. Underneath these mirrored imageries lie many stories about limits, freedom, and self-perception. An ordinary tableau becomes a dreamscape; the brain is an airport, a train rail. The mind is a magician, and the body is the self, giving the audience an alternative experience where they are no longer passive spectators and actively enter the very heart of the piece where ‘universal time’ continues to exist in parallel with an inner perception of time — a back door — intimately associated with our sense of personal identity and unshakable condition that the future is still open to our chosen actions. The brain is an alchemist where memories are the bedrock of consciousness. The piece uses choreographic language, fragmentation, bioart, color, motion, music, drama, humor, light and darkness to confound expectations, dream-like scenes, and symbolic images, flattening space through animation and abstraction, or heightening the illusion of three dimensions. The immersive experience - environmental video sculpture - is designed as a large wall with white canvases spread across, seemingly in random positions, creating video spaces. Using the concept of ideasthesia, a bridge that metaphorically links rational abstractions, we open a dialogue between the different film streams - within the canvases and throughout the wall - with an original music score and sound design, extending the installation in time and space. Content / Trigger Description: The piece uses choreographic language, fragmentation, bioart, color, motion, music, drama, humor, light and darkness to confound expectations, dream-like scenes, and symbolic images, flattening space through animation and abstraction, or heightening the illusion of three dimensions. JCTC presents QUALIA – You Matter to Me Produced by Laia Cabrera & Co. Laia Cabrera (Filmmaker and video artist) Laia Cabrera a multimedia artist working in immersive content experiences and visual storytelling. Her work includes traditional and experimental filmmaking, site-specific projection mapping, visual poetry, virtual reality and immersive interactive art installations. Identity and consciousness have been a long research in her work exploring concepts of mental states, symbolism and hope, creating stories that unfold across a series of immersive interactive scenarios. Her first interdisciplinary exhibition aimed to revitalize and strengthen the intercommunication of different artistic languages. Since then, her projects are searching new ways of using the space and the visual imaginary as a tool for narrative storytelling and audience connection. Interactivity and experienceability are intrinsically part of her new work, always challenging the conventional form and designed to be native to multiple platforms and exhibitions. Sculpting time through a looking-glass and creating a sensorial experience, her quest is to establish a language that makes this relationship possible and to invent stories to be told, stories that represent a profound exploration of the human experience in contemporary artwork. laiacabrera.com laiacabreraco.com Isabelle Duverger (Visual artist) Isabelle Duverger is a French Kabyle award-winning visual artist based in Jersey City for the past fifteen years. Her work as a painter and immersive interactive installation artist has been presented throughout the US, Asia and Europe. It includes public art with projection mapping on buildings, immersive interactive video and sound installations, projection art for theater and dance, video-art and animation. She is the recipient of the 2023 Artist Fellowship Grant awards by JCAC Trust Fund, 2021 Motion Award Nominee and 2022 Hybrid Vision Panasonic Digital Art Competition Nominee. Her work has been presented in Spring/Break Art Show, St John the Divine Cathedral, Time Square Plaza in New York, Nuit Blanche Washington DC, Fabra i Coats Contemporary Art Center, Barcelona, Spain and Tempietto Di Bramante, Roma, Italy, Hong Kong City Hall among others. isabelleduverger.com Nana Simopoulos (Musician and Sound Designer) Nana has been on the forefront of world fusion music with several recordings of original music, soundtracks, music for dance and theater. CDs include Daughters Of The Sun, After The Moon, Still Waters, Wings and Air, Skins and Live at the B&W Montreux Music Festival, Vol. II. She has performed with the New York City Opera and RAI Symphony Orchestra in Torino, Italy, and with her group at the Warsaw Electronic Festival, Symphony Space, Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center and St John the Divine NYC. Her musical quartet appeared in Lykavitos and Veakeo at the 1st Cultural Capital of Europe festival in Athens in 1985. She has created dance commissions for Dance Theatre of Harlem, the Joffrey Ballet, American Dance Festival, Ballet Hispanico, and North Carolina Dance Theater. She has conducted original works at the Joyce theatre in NYC, on Broadway and her score “Vessel” was performed by Westfield Symphony Orchestra. Her film scores are for Domain of the Senses; Touch and she has made music for theatrical productions of Antigone Through Time, Conversations With the Goddesses, by Soho Repertory Theatre. Musicals include An Absolute Mystery, Matrix Maison, Studs Turkel’s American Dreams, Lost and Found. She has written music for multimedia production Turbulence’s Tilt and is currently collaborating with Laia Cabrera and Co in creating music for live interactive immersive video art. nana.net Catherine Correa (Performer and interdisciplinary artist) Catherine Correa is an interdisciplinary artist and dance dramaturg hailing from Colombia and currently based in Brooklyn. Ms. Correa's illustrious journey includes active involvement in international programs dedicated to performance development, creative movement, and theater production. Her invaluable expertise has significantly contributed to the growth of theaters, performers, and workshops on a global scale, spanning South America, the United States, and Europe. catherinecorrea.com Website: www.laiacabreraco.com Immersive Art: www.laiacabreraco.com/immersive-art Portfolio: www.laiacabreraco.com/portfolio Instagram: www.instagram.com/laiacabreraco Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 20, 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage The Puzzle: A new musical in the Spoleto Festival, Italy presented by La MaMa Umbria By Alex Lefevre Published: July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF The Puzzle is a new original musical with music and lyrics by Alex Lefevre, Assistant Professor of Theatre at Coastal Carolina University and libretto by Marybeth Berry, Associate Professor of Theatre at the University of South Carolina: Lancaster and received its European premiere in the Spoleto Festival in Spoleto, Italy as a part of the La MaMa Spoleto Open curated by La MaMa Umbria International in June 2025. The musical debuted in a developmental reading at Coastal Carolina University as a part of their new works series in May 2024. This production in Spoleto, Italy marked the first fully staged production of the musical. The Puzzle takes place in Berlin, Maryland and tells the story of Jenna Adams, her mother Nanette, her six-year-old son Jake, and his two aunts Erica and Susan. In the opening number, “One Day”, the characters go through their daily routines until Jake’s father and Jenna’s husband, Scott, is killed in a car crash. Jake, overwhelmed by grief, is unresponsive until Jenna creates a song to accompany an old puzzle of Scott’s which serves as a breakthrough for the young boy. Nanette, the town busybody, sets up Jenna on a blind date with Taylor, a florist new to town. All goes well until Nanette suddenly bursts into their date and proclaims that her dog Mitzi has been injured by one of Jake’s puzzle pieces striking her in the eye. As a result, Nanette throws the puzzle in the trash, sending Jenna and Taylor on a date in the dumpster to successfully retrieve it. At the town’s fall festival, Jake begins to play the puzzle song by ear at the keyboard which Jenna attributes to the musical ability of her late husband and seeing it as a sign to move on. Through the course of the song “I Can Teach You”, Jenna and Susan convince Erica to teach piano lessons to Jake and over a decade passes highlighting major events including Taylor’s proposal to Jenna, the death of Mitzi, and Jake’s acceptance into NYU. At the end of Act I, it is revealed that Susan will be taking Jake to New York City and moving there herself as a part of a separation from Erica. Act II begins with a married Taylor and Jenna now working together at the flower shop and Jenna sharing a secret passion: writing children’s books. Jake, a sophomore music major at NYU, is unsure that he wants to continue studying music as he feels he is living in the shadow of his deceased father. Susan travels with Jake to Maryland for spring break and is served divorce papers by Erica. At an explosive family dinner, chaos ensues when the impending divorce is revealed to the family along with Jake’s plan to take a gap year in Africa. Erica and Jenna storm out with Susan and Jake following behind. Susan takes responsibility for leaving and the couple vow to find a way forward, while Jake apologizes to Jenna who gives her unconditional love to her son. In the final scene, five years have passed, and Jake is now married with a child on the way. Erica and Susan are living in New York together, Jenna is a successful writer, Taylor has hired a new store manager, and Nanette has tragically passed away. Susan speaks at the opening of her latest art exhibit based on her family, gathered in support, entitled “The Puzzle”. Marybeth Berry and I began writing The Puzzle in January of 2021. COVID-19 had crippled the theatre industry, and the world, and writing this show became our creative escape. We would meet weekly on Zoom to work and create weekly writing goals. We would start by discussing the characters and what we would ideally like to happen during a scene. The next meeting, we would read through the newly written scene, and I would choose moments that I felt would “sing” and began work on crafting a song. As our show is entitled The Puzzle , we attempted to shine the light equally on our different characters so that it was a true ensemble piece with each one of the characters representing a piece of our figurative puzzle. In the words of librettist Marybeth Berry, “It had been years of laboring to create the characters, the relationship dynamics and ultimately the story. Similar to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, The Puzzle focuses on life, loss, grief, love pain, triumph and survival. We can all see ourselves in this piece and we can all relate to a character, relationship, or simple moment because, in the words of the show, ‘it’s often in the mundane that we find the momentous.’” Songs and scenes were constantly being tweaked but by the start of 2024, we had a strong working draft of the libretto and score. Coastal Carolina University selects a new musical every May to be developed as a reading in their New Works Series and The Puzzle was honored to be the selection for 2024. Adam Pelty, Associate Professor of Theatre, helmed the reading as the director and Micah Young was the Music Director. Through the course of one week of rehearsals, new songs and scenes were implemented and seeds of ideas for the Spoleto production were planted. In the original CCU reading, the character of Scott had already passed as we started our prologue. Pelty suggested that there would be great power if the audience could experience the death first-hand. After being accepted into the Spoleto Festival, a new opening number was written with the car crash and funeral embedded in the opening number. While the original lyrics of the opening number “One Day” were kept for the start with each of the characters describing their everyday routines, it now ends after the funeral with the characters singing lines like “One Day is just like the others until one day it’s not” and “One day I will wash his coffee mug, right now I can’t put it away”. For the production in Spoleto, three new songs were implemented as well as significant cuts to the book to streamline our storytelling. While The Puzzle runs two hours and 30 minutes including a fifteen-minute intermission, with our Friday night Spoleto performance starting at 9:30pm, ensuring that we were maintaining our running time was essential. Reflecting on the process of putting up this production, Shelby Sessler who played Erica says “Watching pieces get moved, added, and cut from the reading to the production itself was fascinating to watch. We were experimenting with how each scene read even up to our opening to find the right tone to tell the story. It felt like a whirlwind of creativity.” There was no better place to experience this whirlwind than La MaMa Umbria. Full Cast of The Puzzle La MaMa Umbria is described on their website as a “non-profit cultural center and artist residence founded in 1990 by legendary theatre pioneer, Ellen Stewart.” Even with seeing all the photos available online, nothing can prepare one for the sheer beauty of this remarkable theatre space. Lisa Neal Baker who played the role Nanette shares “Every time we would return from an outing or a day of work, it felt like we were walking back into a serene fairytale- flowers blooming, birds chirping, butterflies everywhere with majestic mountains as your backdrop. With only eight days to come together to put this incredibly touching story together, having the calm, quiet serenity of La MaMa made it that much easier to focus, create and develop our characters and how their individual stories touched each other.” Actor Zach Hathaway, who played Jake, had previously performed at La MaMa Umbria in another production with Marybeth Berry. He states “Returning to La MaMa Umbria for the second time has been an incredibly special and fulfilling experience. There’s something truly magical about being in a space so deeply committed to nurturing artists and celebrating the craft of performance. Ever since my first time here three years ago, I’ve longed to return to that creative atmosphere, where collaboration and artistic exploration are at the heart of everything.” The staff of La MaMa Umbria ensured that our experience would be a positive one. They welcomed us with open arms, provided phenomenal meals with ingredients often plucked out of their on-site garden, and even splashed our bus with buckets of water as we pulled out of their driveway as a symbol of safe travel and hopefully an eventual return. Kenley Juback, who played Susan, echoes this sentiment: “Not only is the scenery irrevocably beautiful but so are the people. The love, friendship and artistry that finds you here from the La Mama Umbria staff is rare.” In fact, our performances of The Puzzle were filled with staff from La MaMa Umbria who came to support our work and promote new musical theatre. Known primarily for producing experimental theatre, La MaMa Umbria embraced our show in an astounding way. Director Jason Trucco, who was also in residence at La MaMa Umbria with us stated “I think the most experimental thing that can be done at an experimental theatre today is a Broadway musical.” Performing in a festival brings its own set of unique challenges, especially when it comes to the technical aspects of performance. In order to create the different locations, present in The Puzzle , we decided to turn to projections to set the scenes in addition to basic set pieces. According to Hans Boeschen, our stage manager and technical director, “The idea of projections arose from the challenge of visualizing the final scene which reveals an art gallery. The idea of this gallery installment is so unique that a projection was really our only option to capture the symbolism and heart of the moment. Using various A.I. tools, I worked to create backgrounds that not only helped identify the setting, but, hopefully, reflected the aspects of the characters and underlying themes of the book.” The use of A.I to create backgrounds was not a simple process as rarely did the computer outputs match what we as a team had in mind artistically. However, there were some happy accidents that occurred in the creation of the projections. Boeschen explains “Unintended interpretations from the computer could lead to some interesting deeper symbology. For example, Susan’s character struggles to connect with her art early in the production. I had asked A.I. to include blank canvases lying against the wall. Instead, it gave me an image where all the canvases were turned away and all we saw were their backs, almost as though Susan couldn’t bear to look at them.” The final projection of Susan’s art gallery display proved be the most difficult. No matter how precise the description we provided the computer, it could not produce anything with the necessary heart to culminate our piece. In the end, it was the original paintings of our cast member Shelby Sessler who played Erica, that we were able to scan into the computer to create the final images of Susan’s art instillation. Even with a simplified set, transitions between scenes still proved to be a challenge. We initially had our actors dragging tables and chairs from backstage before and after every number. Not only did this prove to be laborious, but also time consuming. Director Jared McNeill, also in residence at La MaMa Umbria, came to one of our early runs and provided the suggestion that we leave the set pieces on the side of the stage and allow our audience to see the actors putting together the set as they would put together the pieces of a puzzle. This brilliant suggestion not only helped us to facilitate our transitions in a more efficient way, but it also aided in our storytelling. Our actors began to see the transitions not just as necessary stage business but as extensions of their characters. Actor Alex Cowsert who played Taylor says “It was important for me to continue the story forward when assisting with scene transitions by remaining in the correct time period for the show. For example, if I was helping with a transition in the second act, I wanted to keep my older Taylor’s glasses on so it wouldn’t seem I was ‘out of character’.” Being at La MaMa Umbria allowed us as a creative team to get input from international directors like Jason Trucco and Jared McNeill. Their creative questions and ideas sparked many conversations about the next iteration of this musical for which we as authors are incredibly grateful. Kenley Juback performs “Something To Fix” The final piece of the puzzle of any theatrical work is always the audience, which in the case of this production, was Italian. While there is a song with a chorus in Italian, “Bambola Mia”, The Puzzle is a musical that is performed in English. Adriana Garbagnati, part of the La Mama Umbria family and an enormous supporter of our show, suggested that we write a synopsis of the show and provide copies to the audience much as one would receive at an opera. Blaize Berry, son to librettist Marybeth Berry and technical assistant for the production, wrote a thorough synopsis of the show that I then translated into Italian. Though most of our audience had a basic facility with English, the synopsis proved to be useful as we noted many of our audience members following along as the show progressed. Even with the added challenge of the show being performed in English, our audiences were still able to be moved by the show as was evidenced by the sniffles and tears present during our run. Librettist Marybeth Berry states “The themes in this show resonate with all walks of life and all cultures. The language barrier taught us that our show has more to offer than just entertainment. It touches others deeply and profoundly. Audience members recognized their own loved ones and own life experiences in our creation. It was a gift that transcends all typical barriers because of its simplicity.” Katie Gatch and Alex Cowsert perform “Dumpster Diving” The Puzzle has had an incredible journey from our living rooms in South Carolina on Zoom to the stage of La MaMa Umbria as a part of the Spoleto Festival in Italy. Actor Katie Gatch who played Jenna, said that working on a production of a new musical “felt like a door popping into existence in front of me, the threshold uncrossed, and I get to be the one to see what’s on the other side.” With the support of La MaMa Umbria, we certainly were able to see what’s on the other side, and it was thrilling. Writing and producing a new musical is a complicated process, but one that is ultimately highly rewarding. After this run, The Puzzle , or Il Puzzle as it was called in Italy, has only just begun to have its pieces assembled. Image Credits: Article References References About the author(s) Alex Lefevre (composer/lyricist The Puzzle) is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, SC. He has played on Broadway in the orchestras of Aladdin, Anastasia, Beetlejuice, Cats, Newsies , and White Christmas , along with work Off-Broadway including The Fantasticks and Avenue Q and on national tour with Anastasia, Hairspray, and Irving Berlin’s I Love a Piano . An avid proponent of new musicals, Lefevre has music directed productions in both the New York Musical Theatre Festival and New York Fringe Festival as well as at 54 Below, The York Theatre Company, Primary Stages, and Ars Nova. As a composer, his work has been featured in the NEO Concert at the York Theatre Company celebrating New, Emerging, and Outstanding musical theatre writers as well as in the San Diego Fringe Festival, the Scranton Fringe Festival, the New Works Series at Coastal Carolina University and La MaMa Umbria. For the past three years, Lefevre has served as an opera coach for Varna International both in the United States and Italy, working on Mozart’s Don Giovanni , Puccini’s Suor Angelica , and Weill’s Street Scene . European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents The 2025 Festival International New Drama (FIND) at Berlin Schaubühne Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 20 Willem Dafoe in conversation with Theater der Zeit The Puzzle: A new musical in the Spoleto Festival, Italy presented by La MaMa Umbria Varna Summer International Theatre Festival Mary Said What She Said The 62nd Berliner Theatertreffen: Stories and Theatrical Spaces That Realize the Past, Present and Future. Interview with Walter Bart (Artistic Leader, Wunderbaum Collective & Director, Die Hundekot-Attacke) from the 2024 Berliner Theatertreffen Duende and Showbiz: A Theatrical Odyssey Through Spain’s Soul Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

The fellowships provide theatre and performance scholars the opportunity to conduct research in New York City for a period of 3 to 6 months. Fellows are given individual work spaces in the Segal Center offices at the Graduate Center CUNY Visiting Scholars Program 2025 GLOBAL VISITING SCHOLARS PROGRAM Marvin Carlson Fellowships Call for Applications The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at the Graduate Center CUNY is currently accepting applications for its 2025 Global Visiting Scholars Program. Ten scholars of theatre and performance who are currently working outside of the United States will be awarded our new Marvin Carlson Fellowships. This diverse group of fellows will represent communities from a range of geographical areas, including but not limited to Africa; East, South, and South-East Asia; Oceania; Eastern and Central Europe; the Americas; the Caribbean, and the Middle East. Overview The fellowships provide theatre and performance scholars the opportunity to conduct research in New York City for a period of 3 to 6 months. Fellows are given individual work spaces in the Segal Center offices at the Graduate Center CUNY, access to libraries and archives across New York City, and opportunities to share their work in a community setting through monthly salons with other fellows, faculty, and students from the Graduate Center's PhD program in Theatre and Performance. The fellowships do not include financial support from the Segal Center. Fellows are expected to secure their own resources to remain in New York City for the length of their fellowship. Visas, if needed, are processed through the Graduate Center CUNY in accordance with US State Department requirements. These requirements include proof of financial security in the form of bank statements, proof of health insurance as well as documentation of current residency.* Scholars will not be able to teach or enroll in courses at any university while in residence. Application We are accepting applications on a rolling basis. For consideration please submit the following materials via email for review. • One sentence description of project • Name and address of host institution • A 500- to 1000-word project proposal • An academic CV • A writing sample in English Please submit applications and queries to to: segalglobalscholars@gmail.com Email application materials in a single PDF. Incomplete applications will not be considered. Response time: 2-3 months. *Important: For those requiring a visa, the estimated amount of monthly financial resources each fellow is expected to have is $2,000 per month for a single person, $2,500 for a family. In addition, scholars must have $100,000 in medical insurance for each illness or accident, not to exceed a $500 deductible for each illness or accident; $50,000 for evacuation on medical emergency; and $25,000 for repatriation of remains in the event of death. For more information on the visa requirements of the CUNY Visiting Research Scholars Program, see: https://www.gc.cuny.edu/provosts-office/visiting-research-scholars .

Watch PACI by JULIETTE ROUDET at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. Choreographer and film director, Juliette Roudet returns to the Island Corsica after a long absence. She wants to question her estranged uncles about events in the past but when that doesn't work, she tries to find the truth through dance. . The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents PACI At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by JULIETTE ROUDET Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Saturday May 17th at 11am (as part of the Short Film Program) and also be available to watch online on the festival website till June 8th 2025. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country France Language French Running Time 33 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film About The Retrospective Choreographer and film director, Juliette Roudet returns to the Island Corsica after a long absence. She wants to question her estranged uncles about events in the past but when that doesn't work, she tries to find the truth through dance. About The Artist(s) Juliette Roudet is a versatile artist. Trained at the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine in Angers, she was quick to seek out other avenues of interpretation and creation. She was admitted to the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique de Paris (CNSAD), and has since performed under the direction of David Bobée, Jean Bellorini, Pierre Rigal, Laurent Laffargue, Caroline Marcadé... Since 2016, she has been teaching at the CNSAD and working with numerous artists and directors as a choreographer. In cinema and television, she has appeared in films by Alain Tasma, Manuel Flèche, Gérard Mordillat, Jérôme Cornuau and Ionut Teianu. In 2024, with “Paci”, she signed her first documentary film. Get in touch with the artist(s) dmorel@tsproductions.net and follow them on social media ✨https://www.instagram.com/julietteroudet/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

The Theatre Project is home to more than 25,000 images from around the world and covering over 3,000 years of theatre history. You will find each image in the collection has a descriptive title, along with information about its period and country. Images can be browsed by collection as well with groupings including categories such as scenography, actors, etc. Theatre Image Collection Welcome to the CUNY Graduate Center Theatre Project. The Theatre Project is home to more than 25,000 images from around the world and covering over 3,000 years of theatre history. You will find each image in the collection has a descriptive title, along with information about its period and country. Images can be browsed by collection as well with groupings including categories such as scenography, actors, etc. For more than 30 years it has been maintained by Distinguished Professor Marvin Carlson and his students as an important resource for those looking for the visual materials that are a crucial part of theatrical research. Starting in December of 2012, the CUNY Graduate Center Theatre Project moved to the open source software Omeka to increase accessibility and searchability of the many images and to make uploading and cataloging of the images easier. This transition also brought the image database under the auspices of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center's digital initiatives. The source is available for many images and a citation for each image is also provided on the item view page. Please note the collection is password protected and those interested need to get in touch to receive the login details. For queries related to database access, content and image collection, please write to Prof. Marvin Carlson at mcarlson@gc.cuny.edu or Frank Hentscher at fhentschker@gc.cuny.edu Visit Collection

PRELUDE Festival 2023 PANEL Devised Theater After COVID With Allen Kuharski and others English 60 minutes 3:00PM EST Monday, October 16, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open to All American Devised Theater After COVID: Teaching, Archiving and the Practice The past, present, and future of devised physical ensemble theater in the US was the topic of an historic NEH Institute in Philadelphia in June. A diverse group of over 50 professors, artist/teachers, grad students, editors, and archivists from around the country as well as several foreign countries gathered for 12 days to discuss the issues of archiving, criticism, and especially the theoretical and historical teaching of this 60-year-old practice in American and world theater. This exchange was prompted by the recent proliferation of the teaching of the practice of devising in colleges, universities, and drama schools (often without a theoretical, critical, historical framing) and the larger challenges to such innovative live performance following the pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and the growing impact of climate change. The Institute was initiated by Quinn Bauriedel of Pig Iron Theatre Company's School for Devised Performance, and co-hosted by Allen Kuharski of Swarthmore College. The panel at CUNY will consist of participants in the Institute and will be a report and critical reflection on the larger issues that emerged from the Institute. With Allen Kuharski, Rye Gentleman (NYU), Tracy Hazas (CUNY-Queens College), Rebecca Adelsheim, Tom Sellar (YSD) and/or others. TBC. Content / Trigger Description: Allen J. Kuharski is Senior Research Scholar in the Department of Theater at Swarthmore College and teaches in Pig Iron Theater Company’s MFA Program in Devised Performance. Kuharski is a widely published critic and scholar on contemporary directing history, theory, and practice and on modern Polish theater and drama. He is co-editor of the 16-volume Witold Gombrowicz: Collected Writings published by Wydawnictwo Literackie in Kraków. He has served as an editor for journals such Theatre Journal, Slavic & East European Performance, Western European Stages, and Periphery: Journal of Polish Affairs. His articles and reviews have been published in Polish, French, Spanish, Norwegian, German, and Bulgarian translations. His own translations from Polish and French have been widely performed in the United States and abroad. As a dramaturg and translator, he has shared two OBIE Awards and a Fringe First Award, and the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage has awarded him the country’s Order of Merit. Kuharski was a Fulbright Scholar in Theater to the Polish Academy of Arts & Sciences in Warsaw in 2017-18. With Quinn Bauriedel of Pig Iron, he was Co-Director of the 2023 NEH Institute in Philadelphia titled “Preserving and Transmitting American Ensemble-Based Devised Theatre.” Tom Sellar, a writer, curator, and dramaturg, is Editor of Theater magazine and Professor in the Practice of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at Yale University. His writing and criticism have appeared in national publications including Artforum, BOMB, the New York Times, the Guardian, 4Columns, and American Theatre. From 2001-2016 he was a frequent contributor to the Village Voice, where he covered theater and performance art nationally, serving as an Obie award judge and for two terms as chief theater critic. He has also contributed to numerous book anthologies including The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy; Joined Forces: Audience Participation in Theater; Curating Live Arts: Global Perspectives, Envisioning Theory and Practice in Performance; and the history BAM: The Next Wave Festival. He has curated programs for American Realness, Queer Zagreb, the Institute for Arts and Civic Dialogue (with Anna Deavere Smith), Prague Quadrennial, Philadelphia Fringe Arts, and other organizations. With Antje Oegel, Tom co-curated Prelude 2015 (What Could We Build, or Is the Future Already Behind Us?) and Prelude 2016 (Welcome Failure). Rebecca Adelsheim is a doctoral candidate in Dramaturgy & Dramatic Criticism at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale where they study queer theater and performance, and lecturer at Tufts University. As a new play dramaturg and producer, Rebecca has worked for companies including Audible Theater, Steppenwolf Theater Company, Baltimore Center Stage, the Goodman Theater, Philadelphia Theater, and Barrington Stage, among others. Recent credits include co-adapator for Affinity based on the novel by Sarah Waters with director Alex Keegan and dramaturg and researcher forsoldiergirls by Em Weinstein. Their writing has been published in Theater magazine, where they also serve as the associate editor. They have received research grants from the Beinecke Library and theFund for Gay and Lesbian Studies (FLAGS) at Yale University and is the recipient of the John W. Gassner Memorial prize and the G. Charles Niemeyer Scholarship. Rebecca is originally from Pittsburgh, PA and received their B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and their M.F.A. from the Yale School of Drama. Rye Gentleman is the Librarian for Performing Arts in the Division of Libraries. He holds a PhD from University of Minnesota's Theatre Arts & Dance Department and an MLIS from San Jose State University. Gentleman conducts research at the intersection of performance studies, transgender studies, and new media studies. His dissertation-based book project explores the ways transgender embodiment is conceptualized in and shaped by digital media and shows how actual and imagined transgender bodies are enmeshed in digital systems that exert a normative pressure, while also offering the capacity to materialize more expansive actualizations of gendered embodiment. He is also currently working as contributor and co-editor on an anthology focused on transfeminist theatre and performance. His writing has been published in TDR: The Drama Review, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Text and Performance Quarterly, and Fifty Key Figures in Queer US Theatre (Routledge). TRACY HAZAS is an actor and movement director. She has performed at NYC theaters including New York City Center, Dixon Place, Abrons Art Center, and Theater for the New City; most recently, she was seen in Preparedness, co-produced by the Bushwick Starr and HERE Arts Center. Hazas is an affiliated artist with Counter-Balance Theater. She is the voice of the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C., and the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, and has appeared in commercials for Xbox, Tide and others. She made her feature debut in White Rabbit at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. Currently she’s designing movement for The Wolves at Queens College; and developing an original work, Los Kentubanos, which reconstructs moments from her family’s history in Cuba, utilizing archival documents and her father’s digital collection of roughly 30,000 family photos dating from the early 1900s. Hazas teaches performance, movement, collaboration and voice at Queens College (CUNY). Previous academic positions include Lecturer of Acting and Movement at Stanford University, and work at Emerson College Los Angeles, Montclair State University and others. Photo credits: Allen J. Kuharski. Credit by Ted Kostans. Tom Sellar. Photo credit by the artist. Rebecca Adelsheim. Photo credit by the artist. Rye Gentleman. Photo credit by the artist. TRACY HAZAS. Photo credit by the artist. Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 19, Fall, 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage International Theatre Festival in Pilsen 2024 or The Human Beings and Their Place in Society By Klára Madunická Published: November 25, 2024 Download Article as PDF For thirty-two years the city of Pilsen has hosted the largest international festival in the Czech Republic. In the course of three decades, from an originally smaller cultural event, show-casing theatrical works of the countries of the so-called Visegrad Four, it has developed into a festival that presents the best of theatre from all over the world - from Britain and France, through Germany, the Netherlands, Italy to America, Iceland and Israel. The year 2024 was no exception, with ensembles from all over Europe gathering in Pilsen. From 11th to 19th September, on the new and old stages of the J. K. Tyl Theatre, Alfa Theatre and Moving Station a total of thirty-one productions were presented. And although the 32nd edition of the festival had no specific overarching title, the dramaturgy’s prevalent focus on socially critical themes was evident. The main leitmotif of all the productions included in the main program was the human being's confrontation with their past - be it in personal, national, or generational terms. The Human Being as a Social Construct Human beings as social creatures and their destiny are largely co-shaped by the society in which they live – by its history, its present and the future it heads toward. And certain archetypes can be perceived on the basis of ingrained patterns of behavior that recur in society across the centuries. This was the theme raised by the opening performance of the festival - Hecuba, not Hecuba of the Paris Comédie-Française (discussed in more detail in essays on Avignon and Epidauros in this issue). The author and director of the production is the Portuguese actor, director, playwright and producer Tiag o Rodrigues - a world-renowned theatre-maker. His work blurs the boundaries between theatre and reality, questioning the viewer's perception of social and historical phenomena, finding intersections between them and presenting them as a new reality to the audience. Hecuba, not Hecuba. Photo © Christophe Raynaud de Lage Hecuba, not Hecuba is a tragedy born between the lines of another tragedy. The author wrote it directly "on the body" of the actors. The story is about a small theatre company that has just begun rehearsing Euripides' ancient drama about Hecuba, who, as the wife of a Trojan ruler, has lost everything after the fall of Troy - her husband, her property, her power and her children - and is desperate for justice. The fictional tragedy is mixed with the painful fate of the play's protagonist Nadia. She has an autistic son who has been the victim of abuse and mistreatment in a nursing home. As a mother she rebels and, in parallel with rehearsals at the theatre, pursues a lawsuit against the institution on her son's behalf. Through the gradual culmination of the plot, a synthesis transpires, a painful encounter between the world of the fictional and the real. Nadia represents the archetype of the mother who defends her children, their honour, life and rights. She invokes justice in the same way as the ancient Hecuba and achieves catharsis only when her enemies suffer. The unequal, exhausting struggle, however, must necessarily take its toll on the warrior. Tiago Rodrigues is famous for his ability to look at difficult subjects from a detached perspective and with a sensitive humor that underlines the seriousness of the topic. The affectionate humor that accompanies the uneasy fates of the individual characters from the beginning to the end of the production is interspersed with emotionally tense, dramatic scenes in dynamic pacing and abrupt interludes. Such a directorial approach places high demands especially on the acting, which dominates this production. The simple, somber set, designed by Fernando Ribeiro, is dominated only by a large, antic sculpture of a dog, which forms one of the essential elements linking the text of Euripides' play and Rodrigues' play. Basic furnishings such as a table and chairs provide only minimal support for the actors, who do not leave the stage space for a moment. Despite the complicated plot, however, the viewer is not lost - the creators punctuate the intersections between present and past, reality and fiction by multiple means. The first, most striking of these is via light: warm hues for reality and cold white light for the upcoming play. The second, perhaps even more important element, is the manner of acting. The latter teeters on a spectrum from natural civility to absolute movement and vocal stylization. The Comédie-Française had, thus, provided a unique experience for the festival visitors. This success was confirmed by their guest appearance at the Slovak National Theatre in Bratislava a few days later, where two performances of Hecuba, not Hecuba in a sold-out hall were an unprecedented success with both professional and lay audiences. The Comédie-Française production remains for me one of the highlights of this year's Pilsen festival. Dealing with the Past The theme of coming to terms with the past at different levels of human existence was subsequently developed in several other productions. The German-French co-production of the internationally acclaimed French director Julien Gosselin, Extinction , certainly deserves the title of "the most challenging performance" of all this year's productions. Extinction . Photo © Christophe Raynaud de Lage In three closed, yet interconnected parts, this five-hour long saga focuses on the search for one's own self, one's own voice in today's world, as well as on family or partnership relationships, interpersonal communication, the dreams and worldviews of an individual or an entire society and, ultimately, the direction of the world in the 21st century. The director starts the whole performance in a rather irritating way: with a forty-minute techno party, during which the audience freely comes on stage, drinks beer and has fun. Through a screen on which just-shot details of the onstage action are projected live, the audience learns about the fate of Elsa, a teacher who has abandoned her home. She does not share the views and way of life of her parents and siblings, and lives in Vienna, where she enjoys herself with her friend, the actress Aurelie. She has a film project in the making, which the audience witnesses in the second part of the production. The third part is a telling, hour-long monologue by Elsa, who has just learned that her parents have died. Gosselin looks at the exuberant artistic and intellectual life in Vienna, yet not from the perspective of a historian of the middle of the 20th century, but rather than that from the perspective of a contemporary, giving the audience on stage and in the auditorium a glimpse of its "merry apocalypse," From the party, we go straight into a house as if cut out of the Viennese underbelly of early 20th century Vienna. The engagement party, which transpires there and which degenerates into a sexual orgy, incest, rape, prostitution and anti-Semitic talk, and ends in a murderous massacre, is watched via live cinema from a house built on the stage. It is only at the end of that second, almost three-hour-long, section that Gosselin learns that this is a film set in the 1930s. The entire production is an adaptation of Thomas Bernhard's novel Extinction , which is interwoven with texts by Hugo von Hofmannstahl and plays or novels by Arthur Schnitzler. Despite the diametrically different stage treatment and semantic language of the individual parts, at the end of the production the viewer receives a coherent point formulated in an hour-long monologue by Rosa Lembeck in a close-up on the screen above the stage, paraphrasing Thomas Bernhard's text about the transience of time, the stereotypical patterns of social and human existence, or the need to find one's own way through life. The production stands between theatre, film, site-specific theatre and performance, with each of the three parts employing diametrically opposite means of artistic expression. Gosselin lets the viewer experience a five-hour journey towards the final punch-line, which ultimately turns the entire responsibility for the issues raised and the socio-critical dimension of the work onto the viewer himself. The direction that the 'merry apocalypse' is to take in the 21st century is up to each and every one of us. The Hungarian ensemble Őrkény Színház from Budapest, which performed Ibsen's drama Solness at the festival, also reported on the personal coping not only with the past, but especially with the future (See also the essay Where Comes the Sun in this issue.) The dramaturgically abbreviated text about an architect who is afraid of being replaced by younger and more talented colleagues gradually revealed the personal and family tragedies that, in a tangle of events and long years of silence, have remained embedded in the conscience of a man and which, through the influence of an innocent event, have surfaced. Solness . Photo © Judit Horvath Director Ildikó Gáspár's production took place in an arena-like space in which the boundaries between auditorium and stage were blurred. The actors entered the centre of the arena from the auditorium itself and exited it again among the audience. The chamber character of the production further underlined the heavy, psychoanalytic atmosphere of Ibsen's play, which in the Hungarian ensemble's conception took on the features of a movement and music production. Yet, it was the very text of Norway's most important playwright that became the biggest stumbling block. The narrative nature of this drama largely predetermined both the form of the production and its outcome. This Solness , thus, ranked among the weaker entries in the festival program, especially with its over-dimensioned conclusion, which seemed, in the context of the rest of this rather classic drama production, like a film about Count Dracula. National History as a Topic The Czech Republic and Slovakia seem to have a constant need to revisit their national past, its ups and downs. The Goose on a String Theatre presented a dramatization of Juan Goytisolo's novel The Marx Family Saga, directed by Jan Mikulášek. The plot intertwines the historical perspective of the 19th century with the present day, with the family portrait of the Marx family being the main subject of the confrontation of the two periods. The Marx Family Saga. Photo © Narodni divadlo Brno Mikulášek opens the production with a farce surrounding the installation of a statue of Marx, which subsequently comes to life and tries to approach or defend the meaning of its own existence. The production has a collage-like character in which the viewer meets not only Marx and Engels, but also their wives, getting to know both the light and dark sides of their personalities, worldview and politics. The past is juxtaposed with the socialist world of the second half of the 20th century and then with the present, where the phenomenon of the cult of Marx's personality is beginning to emerge under the influence of a resurgent capitalism. Mikulášek's stage composition stands on the borderline between psychological drama, comedy, metaphorical stage stylization and reportorial inquiry. On stage we see not only actors and actresses, but also footage from a street reportage on the topics like "Who was Marx? Does he deserve a statue in the city? Is communism an acceptable form of ordering society in the 21st century?" The production, thus, brought to the festival a format featuring both artistical and documentary means of expression that ultimately looks at history with both critical detachment and sarcastic humor. The Alfa Theatre in Pilsen also presented a production for which it had turned to the past: Čáslavská - Tokyo – 1964. In it they theatrically processed the memorable event when Věra Čáslavská won the Olympic gold medal in Tokyo in 1964. In the resulting fictional story based on real events, the creators present the Czechoslovak gymnast as the embodiment of the best national qualities: Čáslavská is honest, good-hearted, modest and fair. The production, which is primarily intended for children’s audience, not only brought humour, but director Jakub Vašíček also managed to achieve a truly realistic atmosphere of the Olympic Games in the 1960s through the colours, costumes, props and music. Its premiere was in Tokyo in 2024 and was created by a Czech-Japanese team of actors and creators. The authenticity with which the Alfa Theatre treated this important moment in the sporting and cultural history of Czechoslovakia captivated both young and old audiences alike. The theme of national history was also presented by the ensemble of the Slovak National Theatre with a dramatization of Pavel Vilikovský's short story Dog on the Road . This production touched me the most, but not in a generally positive sense. As a Slovak, I was sensitive to the political and social themes that are revealed in the short story. The four protagonists basically spend the whole time explaining to the audience that they are "just" Slovaks and therefore will never culturally reach the level of Germany, Austria or Scandinavia. From this starting point, the episodic etudes subsequently present various tragicomic, grotesque or downright irritating situations that reflect the history of the Slovak nation after 1989. The references to political figures, specific journalists and writers, however, took on a monstrously topical dimension after the performance, when the protagonists read the manifesto of the Open Culture movement, which is currently read by all state-established and independent theatres in Slovakia after all performances. The parallel with Vilikovsky's short story, written after the fall of the communist regime, acquired special strength at a time when the Minister of Culture is making mass personnel changes in the management of key cultural institutions in Slovakia without giving any reason and without appointing an adequate replacement. So the production Dog on the Road became a gesture of protest. It is an example of how a mediocre production in a new social and political context can become an important landmark of international significance. Dog on the Road. Photo © Slovak National Theatre The Pilsen Festival in 2024 brought forward a number of thought-provoking themes. Both the organization and the artistic level have traditionally been of a higeh standard. For me this edition of the Festival has been the best possible start of the 2024/25 theatre season, which will hopefully be full of similarly stimulating and inspiring artistic experiences. The creation of the review supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council. Image Credits: Article References References About the author(s) Klára Madunická, AICT, Slovakia. Klára Madunická graduated in theatre studies at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava, Slovakia. She successfully completed her PhD in Aesthetics and as a researcher at the Slovak Academy of Sciences she has been working on theatre theory, history and criticism for a long time. She has been a member of AICT since 2024, serves on several committees and editorial boards, is editor of the peer-reviewed professional journal Theatrica and is the author of several national and international studies. In 2025 she will publish two monographs on musical theatre in Slovakia. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Between Dark Aesthetics and Repetition: Reflections on the Theatre of the Bulgarian Director Veselka Kuncheva and Her Two Newest Productions Hecuba Provokes Catharsis and Compassion in the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus (W)here comes the sun? Avignon 78, 2024. Imagining Possible Worlds and Celebrating Multiple Languages and Cultures Report from Basel International Theatre Festival in Pilsen 2024 or The Human Beings and Their Place in Society SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL … SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL …SHAKESPEARE AS YOU LIKE IT. IN CRAIOVA, ROMANIA, FOR 30 YEARS NOW Fine art in confined spaces 2024 Report from London and Berlin Berlin’s “Ten Remarkable Productions” Take the Stage in the 61st Berliner Theatertreffen. A Problematic Classic: Lorca’s Bernarda Alba, at Home and Abroad Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch Acting by Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. Sophie Fiennes' richly detailed and immersive film offers privileged access to the vital experience of making theatre with pioneering practitioners Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod of the ground breaking international theatre company Cheek By Jowl. In a derelict Gothic mansion on the outskirts of London, we join eight actors - four Macbeths and four Lady Macbeths - for 11 days with Cheek By Jowl. Working in pairs, they investigate key scenes and soliloquies from Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy. But this film is not about the play. It’s about being offered a different position from which to view acting and theatre - of seeing text newly animated in ways more subtle, surprising, revelatory and various than even the most dedicated theatregoers might have considered possible. Within the labyrinthine remains of the building, we watch with increasing fascination as actors and spaces combine to give Shakespeare’s words seemingly infinite new lives.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Acting At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Friday May 16th at 1:20pm. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country United Kingdom Language English Running Time 144 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film About The Retrospective Sophie Fiennes' richly detailed and immersive film offers privileged access to the vital experience of making theatre with pioneering practitioners Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod of the ground breaking international theatre company Cheek By Jowl. In a derelict Gothic mansion on the outskirts of London, we join eight actors - four Macbeths and four Lady Macbeths - for 11 days with Cheek By Jowl. Working in pairs, they investigate key scenes and soliloquies from Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy. But this film is not about the play. It’s about being offered a different position from which to view acting and theatre - of seeing text newly animated in ways more subtle, surprising, revelatory and various than even the most dedicated theatregoers might have considered possible. Within the labyrinthine remains of the building, we watch with increasing fascination as actors and spaces combine to give Shakespeare’s words seemingly infinite new lives. About The Artist(s) Cheek by Jowl is the international theatre company of Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod. Its landmark productions, performed in more than 50 countries in the 44 years since the company was founded, have influenced the creation of theatre and the experience of audiences the world over. Actors including Adrian Lester, Tom Hiddleston, Ralph Fiennes, Tom Hollander, Olivia Williams, David Morrissey, Gwendoline Christie and Matthew Macfadyen all developed their talent working with Cheek by Jowl in their early careers. Get in touch with the artist(s) martin@lonestarproductions.co.uk ; shanihinton@me.com and follow them on social media https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/, https://www.instagram.com/wearecheekbyjowl/, http://www.lonestarproductions.co.uk/, https://www.instagram.com/sophiefiennesofficial/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

Encounter Sidiki Conde and Tokounou Dance Company's work Guinean Environmental Stewardship Traditions in Queens, at this year's edition of the Prelude in the Parks festival by The Segal Centre, presented in collaboration with Hunters Point Park Alliance, Queens. Prelude in the Parks 2024 Festival Guinean Environmental Stewardship Traditions Sidiki Conde and Tokounou Dance Company Music Friday, June 7, 2024 @ 6pm Hunter’s Point South Park, Queens Meet at the Overhang - Enter the park at 56th Ave and Center Blvd. Hunters Point Park Alliance, Queens Presented by Mov!ng Culture Projects and The Segal Center in collaboration with Presented by Mov!ng Culture Projects and The Segal Center View Location Details RSVP To Event NEA Heritage Fellow Sidiki Conde and his Tokounou Ensemble present Guinean environmental stewardship traditions to address the global climate crisis through song. Conde, best known for his remarkable drumming and dancing despite the loss of his legs to polio as a child, is a spiritual authority called a “Sundousou” for his ancestral village, Mancellia in Guinea, West Africa. He is one of this tradition’s last keepers of stories who, to this day, is called upon by village community members to perform baby naming, funeral, and marriage ceremonies. As his mother speaks the language of birds, Conde’s particular spirit familiar (a kind of “spirit animal”) is the “dugah,” or the vulture, whose funeral songs celebrate the passing of great leaders. Sidiki Conde and Tokounou Dance Company Sidiki Conde is a dancer, drummer and singer from Guinea, West Africa. Sidiki lost the use of his legs at the age of 14 but this did not stop him from his dream of becoming a dancer. Sidiki has performed with the premier dance and music ensembles in Africa. He came to America in 1998 and formed Tokounou, whose music and dances chronicle Sidiki's unique journey as an artist and celebrate the traditional arts of Guinea. Dance and music in Africa are community events where everyone participates and no one is excluded. Tokounou offer performances as well as mixed ability workshops in which participants will learn to sing and play African rhythms on djembe drums and other instruments, as well as traditional dances. Visit Artist Website Location Meet at the Overhang - Enter the park at 56th Ave and Center Blvd. Hunters Point Park Alliance, Queens The Hunters Point Parks Conservancy’s mission is to enhance and advocate for the green spaces and waterfront of Long Island City, Queens, and to ensure the parks remain an indispensable asset to the community. Visit Partner Website

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 18, Fall, 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Confessions, storytelling and worlds in which the impossible becomes possible. The 77th Avignon Festival, July 5-25, 2023 By Philippa Wehle Published: November 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF From the daily chorusing of the ever-present cicadas to the familiar fanfare of Maurice Jarre’s trumpets, which have announced the opening of new shows in Avignon since early festival times, and the black swifts piercing the sky with their loud screams as they fly over the majestic 14th-century walls - - Avignon, the yearly festival I’ve attended since 1968 with a few missed years, is once more on my mind. Avignon, the name always brings forth indelible memories of navigating my way over cobblestones and through jubilant crowds to the many outdoor cloisters and other spaces serving as theatres during the festival. My yearly foray into this remarkable festival was no exception this year. No matter what shows may have disappointed or which ones delighted, Avignon for me is a yearly must despite my advanced age and frailties. I had to be there for the 77 th Avignon festival. I had to discover what the festival’s new director Tiago Rodrigues had in store for us. Seated among some two thousand spectators in the open-air Honor Court of the Popes’ Palace, I was ready and eager to receive Welfare , a new work by Julie Deliquet, director of the Gérard Philippe theatre in St. Denis. She is only the second woman to be invited to present a show in the Honor Court in the seventy-seven-year history of the festival, and I was looking forward to discovering her work even though some were saying that the Honor Court’s forbidding dimensions call for majestic stagings and that Deliquet’s choice of an ordinary school gymnasium was questionable. Welfare . Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage. Deliquet’s Welfare , an adaptation of American filmmaker Frederick Wiseman’s 1973 documentary, does indeed take place in a replica of a school gymnasium someplace in New York City in the 1970s. Stagehands are slowly taking down sports equipment and moving other athletic paraphernalia out of the way in preparation for the day’s welfare center, temporarily located in a make-shift venue. They bring out a table for the social workers who are about to begin dealing with the day’s cases while empty bleachers offer seating for the clients. A young man with a guitar provides musical commentary. A policeman strolls by. It is December. Throughout Welfare ’s two and one-half hours a cast of fifteen actors reenact the hardships of the homeless and the poor, single mothers, drug attics and others in desperate need, as well as the beleaguered director of the Welfare Center and his staff as they try to navigate their way through the overwhelming dysfunction of the system. Some clients need immediate attention. Others wait on the bleachers or wander about aimlessly. These are not anonymous people. They have names: Valerie Johnson, Roz Baker, and Larry Rivera. Their complaints are valid and their frustration is tangible as are those of the team trying to help them. Reactions range from angry outbursts to forlorn acceptance. When Valerie Johnson is told “There is no Valerie Johnson in our records. You will have to wait until January 1 st ,” we cannot help but commiserate with her, especially when her anger becomes so loud that she is carried off over the policeman’s shoulder. We also cannot help but laugh at the absurdity of the heavily pregnant woman who is told that she has to get written medical proof of her pregnancy in order to receive her stipend. Of course, we are touched by the gentleman who tells us that his dog is all he has, and we sympathize with the center’s director who is overwhelmed. Still, there is something missing. Deliquet’s theatre is a theatre of testimony. Welfare documents the situation of welfare recipients and those who help them, but the play seemed not to elevate beyond reporting. We are simply witnesses to these case histories dating from the 1970s and the losing battle that clients and staff endure. In an interview, Julie Deliquet shared that she hoped that her show would be received with anger and that her theatre would invite us to rethink the way we create society. Yet, drawing our attention to the flaws of the welfare system as it existed in the United States in the 1970s is puzzling when the system was overhauled twenty years ago and despite its many flaws, it is no longer the portrait that we encounter on Deliquet’s stage. In contrast to the many lives encountered in Welfare, The Confessions , by British author Alexander Zeldin, tells the tale of just one woman, Alice, a child of the working class in Australia, born in 1943. Based on hours of interviews Zeldin conducted with his mother, The Confessions is a portrait of an “ordinary” life with its many stories told in a series of hyper-realistic moments by nine actors playing all of the roles: mother, father, husband, friends, lover. The Confessions . Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage. The play begins in the family kitchen in Australia where we meet Alice fighting with her parents who want her to go to university while she wants to break free of her confined life as a child of a conservative, narrow-minded milieu. Multiple scenes follow Alice’s determination to reinvent herself. London in the 1980s, marriage and divorce, jobs as an art history professor and social assistant, even a sexual assault. We follow her into her living room with friends, and back in a kitchen with other friends. Other scenes are set in other kitchens and other living rooms, with other sofas, chairs, sinks and refrigerators. The play’s hyper-realistic dialogue and sets and the many personal moments captured over a lifetime, leave us wishing for something beyond the stark realism of this “ordinary life.” All of it , a trilogy composed of three monologues written for actress Kate Flynn, by Alistair McDowall, co-directed by Vicky Featherstone and Sam Pritchard, and presented in Avignon by the Royal Court Theatre from London, also tells stories of women dealing with “ordinary lives,” but these three female characters escape their everyday lives through sharing their inner worlds with us. All of it . Photo: Manuel Harlan. The first monologue takes place in War time, 1940. Speaking in blank verse, a woman is sitting in her rather shabby dining room in a home she shares with her father. She is trapped at home during an air raid. To protect her against the bombs outside, she has a Morrison shelter, a large wire cage on the dining room floor, into which she crawls and stays until the air raid is over, more confined than before and still talking all the while. In the second monologue, a woman speaks to us in a pre-recorded voice that echoes throughout the theatre. She has become obsessed with a stain on her wall. As she stares at the molding, she starts to see double. Talking to herself in a psychotic rant, she becomes increasingly drawn into to the moldy green wall as it turns into rubble. The third monologue portrays a woman from birth to death. It is composed of half sentences and repeated words, from baby’s babbling to discovering language, school, her first kiss, university, motherhood, and death. She delivers her lines on a microphone, varying rhythms from fast to slow and back, repeating words, noises, and finally the mutterings of old age. Her stunning performance of “a whole life in one breath” was extraordinary. Director and Visual Artist Philippe Quesne’s new creation Le Jardin des Délices (The Garden of Delights) , loosely based on Jerome Bosch’s sixteenth century triptych of fantastical allegories, received its premiere in the Carrière Boulbon, an awe-inspiring quarry 15 kilometers outside of Avignon. The quarry had not been used as a theatre for the past seven years and one could feel a sense of expectancy and excitement in the audience. What magic would Philippe and his Vivarium Studio players conjure up for us? Le Jardin des Délices . Photo: Phiippe Dauphin. Soon, a white tourist bus appears to our left. It is being pushed into the quarry by a group of passengers, two women and six men, stranded in the middle of imposing limestone cliffs. They slowly look around and take in the landscape, barely saying a word to each other. They don’t seem concerned that they are lost and that their bus is broken down, but they do have a plan. The bus driver brings out a shovel and pickaxe and they begin digging in the quarry’s chalky soil in preparation for the arrival of a large stone egg. Le Jardin des Délices . Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage. It is time to gather for the first in a series of rituals and performances that compose Le Jardin des délices . Circling around the egg, they pay tribute to this mysterious presence with music provided by a guitar, a tambourine and a recorder and even a piano played by the bus driver inside the bus. When the performance ends, they take their leave with a kiss and a bow to the egg, along with a handful of earth. What secret does the egg hold? The promise of a new life, or a way out of their predicament, perhaps, but they choose not to open it. Other rituals, other performances follow as the travelers explore possible ways to fill their time in this “garden’ where nothing green grows. While folding chairs are placed around in a wide circle, long time Vivarium artist Gaetan Vourc’h, tour guide and master of ceremonies, invites the group to feel free to express themselves in any way they choose. One reads a poem, another balances a chair in his mouth, and others strike poses reminiscent, perhaps, of figures in Bosch’s Triptych, they go about inventing micro-performances and creating “works of art.” Perhaps a stage for individual performances might provide more entertainment. They remove the sides of the bus to reveal an open stage on which one of the travelers, a man in bright red long johns, sings opera in full throat, but here again, this performance does not seem to satisfy them. Magic perhaps might offer some answers. “Do you believe in miracles?” Gaeton asks as he provides a demonstration. “Abra Cadabra” and his bald head is covered with a thick head of hair. This is fun but clearly, they must organize themselves. Perhaps this is the garden of earthly delights but as Gaeton asks, “What is your long-term strategy?” They must come up with a plan. Wearing Medieval costumes and wigs, they make their way to the quarry walls with Gaeton among them dressed as a skeleton. The play’s title lights up against the walls in giant letters with skeletons flying overhead, seeming to beckon to them. The egg is cracked open now but instead of entering it, they try to climb up the quarry walls with ladders that are much too short. Caught in the middle of an impressive lightning and thunderstorm, they seem lost until a shimmering triangle of light appears overhead. Perhaps this offers a better world than the disappointing garden of earthly delights. They seem to disappear into the smoke and loud noises and dogs barking, moving toward a better world, perhaps. They are survivors. Tiago Rodrigues’ Dans la mesure de l’impossible , ( As Far As The Impossible ), a play that Rodrigues created in 2022 at the Comédie de Genève, was a welcome choice to replace Polish director Krystan Lupa’s The Emigrants when it had to be canceled to the regrets of many. Dans la mesure de l’impossible . Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage . Based on interviews with thirty some collaborators of the International Committee of the Red Cross and Doctors without Borders who shared their harrowing experiences and first-hand accounts to create this powerful piece, performed at the Avignon Opera House, with just four performers and a percussionist. The show presents a number of questions. How to manage a refugee camp? How to deal with life and death decisions? How to survive when it is clear that one cannot change the world alone? In this world where the impossible is an everyday companion, Tiago Rodrigues offers us a theatre of words which puts us in touch with a reality that is deeply moving. The set is composed of large white sheets floating above the stage at different heights, suggestive of a tent where humanitarian workers retreat to recover from their encounters with disaster and death on a daily basis. These will be pulled up to varying heights and configurations throughout the show. Four actors, two women and two men—the humanitarian workers--deliver their lines in a mix of English, French and Portuguese. They are joined by a musician/ percussionist whose masterful drumming provides running commentary throughout the two-hour show. Thanks to them, we become familiar with the everyday lives of workers in humanitarian aid, those who witness horrors every day, and who are forced to make split-second decisions, as they provide relief from disaster and other emergencies. The geographical areas that they travel to throughout the world are referred to as The Impossible. Back home with family and friends is The Possible. “We work.” they tell us. “It’s a real job, helping to save others.” But they also admit that their work is no more than “a band aid placed on human suffering.” Of course, they are aware that the world cannot be saved and that they must go deeper into the frontier of the impossible. The stories they tell are the real-life stories that the interviewed humanitarian workers had told Tiago and his team, transposed into a form of documented theatre composed of testimonies. The horrors reported are almost too much to bear. Still, these brave humanitarians survive despite all of their scars, comforted by a beautiful rendition of a Portuguese “fado” sung a capella by one of the women. The final moments of the show, a virtuoso drum concert, sends the ear-splitting sounds of war throughout the theatre, as a reminder of the world of the Impossible. Black Lights , by noted choreographer Mathilde Monnier, portrays equally harrowing stories but of a different nature and they exclusively concern women—women who speak in a different voice, a voice between text and dance. Black Lights . Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage . Inspired by a TV series, H24, on Arte, based on twenty-four hours in a woman’s life in the form of written texts by well-known women, with a focus on different kinds of violence, Mathilde Monnier chose eight of these texts as the source for her choreography performed at the open-air Carmes cloisters theatre. It was a delight to visit this new dance piece by Mathilde Monnier who had created so many wonderful pieces at the festival, beginning in 1996. Performed by eight dancer/actors of different ages and different nationalities on a stage covered with the gnarled roots of olive trees, we are confronted with the mental and physical impact of different degrees of violence. One tells us how she felt when she had to smile at her old professor when she knew what was really on his mind; another was knocked down and doused with gasoline, another regrets her docile compliancy when receiving a compliment. From uncomfortable moments and regrets to horrifying attacks, the performers of Black Light show us the experience of domination, oppression, violence and defense, legs raised high as if kicking their aggressor, fingers extended in front of a face as if to ward off an unwanted attacker and twisted bodies. Among the many Avignon shows that introduced us to varied and crucial responses to the realities of today’s world, Rebecca Chaillon and her team of Afro-descendant sisters, showed us the reality of their world as black women treated as objects of white fantasy, racism and violence in Carte Noire nommée désir , a remarkable performance piece in which they present their situation head on with urgency, humor and brio. Carte Noire nommée désir . Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage . At the Gymnase du Lycée Aubanel, a large indoor theatre in the heart of Avignon, eight black women stand on a white stage in front of us. Themes of black and white play are introduced from the beginning of the performance and even before. There are two separate audiences on either side of the stage. Only women of color were invited to sit on comfortable sofas and enjoy refreshments facing the “white” audience seated on uncomfortable seats across from them. Rebecca Chaillon, her naked body covered with white cream, is scrubbing the floor with Clorox as if her life depended on it. Her friend is sitting at a potter’s wheel, making white clay coffee cups. They exchange a few words. Time drags on as we take in this painful picture of a “devoted” servant on her knees for close to forty-five minutes. In the following scene, Rebecca begins to braid long pieces of white cloth into her black hair. Soon she is joined by her friends who perform a lengthy ritual of hair braiding as if in a beauty parlor for black women. They create a masterpiece of long heavy black and white braids that Rebecca will wear throughout the performance. Seated in the middle of a circle of her sisters, Rebecca seems to enjoy their shared admiration. Later, as Rebecca smokes and thumbs through magazines, she begins to read a number of racist want ads out loud on the order of “White Man, French, looking for his black pearl” to the delight of the audience who enjoys these outrageous ads. The audience is also delighted when invited to play “Questions pour un Champion,” a popular TV game show, with Rebecca and her company feeding them questions. They seem to know all of the answers and enjoy shouting out their response. Carte Noire “plays” with the audience in other ways too. Some are provocative and even dangerous. Performers racing into the audience to “steal” women’s handbags, creates moments of chaos and anger. Others are tongue-in-cheek amusing. A beautiful black performer lying on a table covered in foaming milk, while a group of her black friends raise their coffee cups to her, draws our laughter. One especially powerful and “shocking” tableau features a nanny surrounded by her employer and others. They do not seem to think it odd that her body is pierced front and back with a long spike, as if she has been impaled. On the contrary, they seem to be enjoying themselves, placing little plastic white babies on the pike, one after the other, as the Mother, a lovely lady In Scarlet O’Hara white dress, happily looks on. Thank goodness for other moments of wild twerk dancing and amazing aerial stunts. Carte noire, nommée désir was brave and thrilling and wonderful. A great moment in the 77 th Festival. The official Avignon 77 was a great success, 225,000 audience members and theatres were 94 % full. Tiago Rodrigues’ rich programming gave full weight to the socio-political questions of our time and many new artists were invited for the first time. There was a large presence of English-language shows In keeping with Tiago’s decision to focus on the English language this year. As thrilled as I was with this year’s festival, I admit to being disappointed that American talent was so underrepresented. Only two American companies were invited to the festival, Elevator Repair Service’s Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge , based on their debate in 1965 and Tajal Harell’s choreographed performance The Romeo . The other English language contributions were mostly British, a response to Brexit, it seems. In whatever language, however, Avignon remains the “festival of my dreams.” Image Credits: Article References References About the author(s) Philippa Wehle is a professor emerita of French, drama studies, and literature at Purchase College. She writes widely on contemporary theatre and performance and has translated numerous contemporary French language plays by Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Philippe Minyana, José Pliya, and others. Her current activities include translating contemporary New York theatre productions into French for supertitles. Professor Wehle is a Chevalier in the French Order of Arts and Letters. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Report from London (December 2022) Confessions, storytelling and worlds in which the impossible becomes possible. The 77th Avignon Festival, July 5-25, 2023 “Regietheater:” two cases The Grec Festival 2023 The Festival of the Youth Theatre of Piatra Neamt, Romania: A Festival for “Youth without Age” (notes on the occasion of the 34th edition) Report from Germany Poetry on Stage: Games, Words, Crickets..., Directed by Silviu Purcărete Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

I make performances for different media: film, video, the written word, the street, the stage, museums, closets, in and out of a movie screen. Today I feel overwhelmed by all the movies that are out there. "We're supposed to spend more time with each other not watching screens. Why should I make more screen-things?" More about Fritz Donnelly: http://www.tothehills.com. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE FRITZ: Play Time Fritz Donnelly English 5:30PM EST Tuesday, October 17, 2023 137 West 42nd Street, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Play Time! A Participatory Performance by Fritz Donnelly 5:30pm at Anita’s Way 137 W 42nd Street Followed by Q and A with Frank Hentschker, Sophi Kravitz, Anita Durst, and @Funwithfritz Content / Trigger Description: About Fritz: I make performances for different media: film, video, the written word, the street, the stage, museums, closets, in and out of a movie screen. Today I feel overwhelmed by all the movies that are out there. "We're supposed to spend more time with each other not watching screens. Why should I make more screen-things?" More about Fritz Donnelly: http://www.tothehills.com . About Anita’s Way: This permanent public plaza accommodates artists and audiences in the center of New York City. The passageway between the Condè Nast building on 4 Times Square and Bank of America located at One Bryant Park was named after founder and principal of chashama, Anita Durst. Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

MORGAN BASSICHIS, FREEDOME BRADLEY-BALLENTINE, ENVER CHAKARTASH, WILL DAVIS, CALEB HAMMONS, JILL RAFSON, TINA SATTER + TYLER THOMAS presents The School of New York: New Leaders and the Artists They Serve in Dialogue at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 The School of New York: New Leaders and the Artists They Serve in Dialogue MORGAN BASSICHIS, FREEDOME BRADLEY-BALLENTINE, ENVER CHAKARTASH, WILL DAVIS, CALEB HAMMONS, JILL RAFSON, TINA SATTER + TYLER THOMAS 5pm-6:30 pm Friday, October 18, 2024 The Segal Theatre RSVP All over New York, long-lived performance venues are in transition, and we're welcoming the biggest "class" of new artistic directors and associate artistic directors in memory. These leaders take their positions in a fraught moment for the field — they are also taking power with fresh ideas. Join us for a structured, two-part panel discussion, in which we'll hear first from a group of four "freshman" New York artistic leaders, who will share their ideas and solutions for the quandaries currently facing our field; then we'll hear from a respondent group of veteran artists, experts in New York performance, who will reflect on these innovations, explore their ramifications, and possibly offer their own. Can we talk about the theatrical "crisis" in a new, solution-oriented way? Can we marry idealism and pragmatism? Can institutions and the artists they serve arrive at solutions together? Helen Shaw from the New Yorker moderates a talk with Morgan Bassichis, Freedome Bradley-Ballentine, Enver Chakartash, Will Davis, Caleb Hammons, Jill Rafson, Tina Satter, and Tyler Thomas. This event will be livestreamed via Howlround Theatre Commons . LOBSTER Nora loves Patti Smith. Nora is Patti Smith. Nora is stoned out of her mind in the Chelsea Hotel. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is her mind. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is an out-of-use portable classroom in the Pacific Northwest, and that classroom is a breeding ground for lobsters. LOBSTER by Kallan Dana directed by Hanna Yurfest produced by Emma Richmond with: Anna Aubry, Chris Erdman, Annie Fang, Coco McNeil, Haley Wong Needy Lover presents an excerpt of LOBSTER , a play about teenagers putting on a production of Patti Smith and Sam Shepard's Cowboy Mouth . THE ARTISTS Needy Lover makes performances that are funny, propulsive, weird, and gut-wrenching (ideally all at the same time). We create theatre out of seemingly diametrically opposed forces: our work is both entertaining and unusual, funny and tragic. Needylover.com Kallan Dana is a writer and performer originally from Portland, Oregon. She has developed and presented work with Clubbed Thumb, The Hearth, The Tank, Bramble Theater Company, Dixon Place, Northwestern University, and Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. She is a New Georges affiliated artist and co-founder of the artist collaboration group TAG at The Tank. She received her MFA from Northwestern University. Upcoming: RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR with The Hearth/Connelly Theater Upstairs (dir. Sarah Blush), Dec 2024. LOBSTER with The Tank (dir. Hanna Yurfest), April/May 2025. Needylover.com and troveirl.com Hanna Yurfest is a director and producer from Richmond, MA. She co-founded and leads The Tank’s artist group TAG and creates work with her company, Needy Lover. Emma Richmond is a producer and director of performances and events. She has worked with/at HERE, The Tank, The Brick, and Audible, amongst others. She was The Tank’s 2022-23 Producing Fellow, and is a member of the artist group TAG. Her day job is Programs Manager at Clubbed Thumb, and she also makes work with her collective Trove, which she co-founded. www.emma-richmond.com Rooting for You The Barbarians It's the Season Six premiere of 'Sava Swerve's: The Model Detector' and Cameron is on it!!! June, Willa, and (by proximity) Sunny are hosting weekly viewing parties every week until Cameron gets cut, which, fingers crossed, is going to be the freakin' finale! A theatrical playground of a play that serves an entire season of 'so-bad-it's-good' reality TV embedded in the social lives of a friend group working through queerness, adolescence, judgment, and self-actualization. Presenting an excerpt from Rooting for You! with loose staging, experimenting with performance style, timing, and physicality. THE ARTISTS Ashil Lee (he/they) NYC-based actor, playwright, director, and sex educator. Korean-American, trans nonbinary, child of immigrants, bestie to iconic pup Huxley. Described as "a human rollercoaster" and "Pick a lane, buddy!" by that one AI Roast Bot. 2023 Lucille Lortel nominee (Outstanding Ensemble: The Nosebleed ) and Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group Alum. NYU: Tisch. BFA in Acting, Minor in Youth Mental Health. Masters Candidate in Mental Health and Wellness (NYU Steinhardt: 20eventually), with intentions of incorporating mental health consciousness into the theatre industry. www.ashillee.com Phoebe Brooks is a gender non-conforming theater artist interested in establishing a Theatre of Joy for artists and audiences alike. A lifelong New Yorker, Phoebe makes art that spills out beyond theater-going conventions and forges unlikely communities. They love messing around with comedy, heightened text, and gender performance to uncover hidden histories. She's also kind of obsessed with interactivity; particularly about figuring out how to make audience participation less scary for audiences. Phoebe has a BA in Theatre from Northwestern University and an MFA in Theatre Directing from Columbia University's School of the Arts. The Barbarians is a word-drunk satirical play exploring political rhetoric and the power of words on the world. With cartoonish wit and rambunctious edge, it asks: what if the President tried to declare war, but the words didn't work? Written by Jerry Lieblich and directed by Paul Lazar, it will premiere in February 2025 at LaMama. The Barbarians is produced in association with Immediate Medium, and with support from the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation. THE ARTISTS Jerry Lieblich (they/them) plays in the borderlands of theater, poetry, and music. Their work experiments with language as a way to explore unexpected textures of consciousness and attention. Plays include Mahinerator (The Tank), The Barbarians (La Mama - upcoming), D Deb Debbie Deborah (Critic’s Pick: NY Times), Ghost Stories (Critic’s Pick: TimeOut NY), and Everything for Dawn (Experiments in Opera). Their poetry has appeared in Foglifter, Second Factory, TAB, Grist, SOLAR, Pomona Valley Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Works and Days. Their poetry collection otherwise, without was a finalist for The National Poetry Series. Jerry has held residencies at MacDowell, MassMoCA, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Arts, and UCROSS, and Yiddishkayt. MFA: Brooklyn College. www.thirdear.nyc Paul Lazar is a founding member, along with Annie-B Parson, of Big Dance Theater. He has co-directed and acted in works for Big Dance since 1991, including commissions from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Old Vic (London), The Walker Art Center, Classic Stage Co., New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, and Japan Society. Paul directed Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die which was reprised in London featuring David Byrne. Other directing credits include Bodycast with Francis McDormand (BAM), Christina Masciotti’s Social Security (Bushwick Starr), and Major Bang (for The Foundry Theatre) at Saint Ann’s Warehouse. Awards include two Bessies (2010, 2002), the Jacob’s Pillow Creativity Award (2007), and the Prelude Festival’s Frankie Award (2014), as well an Obie Award for Big Dance in 2000. Steve Mellor has appeared on Broadway (Big River ), Off-Broadway (Nixon's Nixon ) and regionally at Arena Stage, Long Wharf Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Portland Stage and Yale Rep. A longtime collaborator with Mac Wellman, Steve has appeared in Wellman's Harm’s Way, Energumen, Dracula, Cellophane, Terminal Hip (OBIE Award), Sincerity Forever, A Murder of Crows, The Hyacinth Macaw, 7 Blowjobs (Bessie Award), Strange Feet, Bad Penny, Fnu Lnu, Bitter Bierce (OBIE Award), and Muazzez . He also directed Mr. Wellman's 1965 UU. In New York City, he has appeared at the Public Theater, La Mama, Soho Rep, Primary Stages, PS 122, MCC Theater, The Chocolate Factory, and The Flea. His film and television credits include Sleepless in Seattle, Mickey Blue Eyes, Celebrity, NYPD Blue, Law and Order, NY Undercover, and Mozart in the Jungle. Chloe Claudel is an actor and director based in NYC and London. She co-founded the experimental company The Goat Exchange, with which she has developed over a dozen new works of theater and film, including Salome, or the Cult of the Clitoris: a Historical Phallusy in last year's Prelude Festival. She's thrilled to be working with Paul and Jerry on The Barbarians . Anne Gridley is a two time Obie award-winning actor, dramaturg, and artist. As a founding member of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, she has co-created and performed in critically acclaimed works including Life & Times, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, No Dice, Romeo & Juliet, and Burt Turrido . In addition to her work with Nature Theater, Gridley has performed with Jerôme Bel, Caborca, 7 Daughters of Eve, and Big Dance, served as a Dramaturg for the Wooster Group’s production Who’s Your Dada ?, and taught devised theater at Bard College. Her drawings have been shown at H.A.U. Berlin, and Mass Live Arts. B.A. Bard College; M.F.A. Columbia University. Naren Weiss is an actor/writer who has worked onstage (The Public Theater, Second Stage, Kennedy Center, Geffen Playhouse, international), in TV (ABC, NBC, CBS, Comedy Central), and has written plays that have been performed across the globe (India, Singapore, South Africa, U.S.). Upcoming: The Sketchy Eastern European Show at The Players Theatre (Mar. '24). Will Davis is a director and choreographer. His work has been seen off-broadway at Signature Theater, City Center, Roundabout Theatre, MTC, MCC, Playwrights Horizons, Clubbed Thumb, and Soho Rep. Regionally, his work has been seen at La Jolla Playhouse, Baltimore Center Stage, Shakespeare Theater Company, Long Wharf Theatre and ATC in Chicago where Davis previously served as Artistic Director. He received a Helen Hayes award for best direction for his work on Colossal at the Olney Theatre Center. He was nominated for a Lucille Lortel award for his direction of Men on Boats at Playwrights Horizons. Davis is the Artistic Director of Rattlestick Theater. Caleb Hammons (they/he) is a Tony and Obie Award-winning creative producer and curator of live performance. They are entering their second year as one of the three directors of Soho Rep, NYC’s premiere experimental Off-Broadway theater. Prior to returning to Soho Rep, Caleb spent ten years as Director of Artistic Planning and Producing at the Fisher Center at Bard, was the Producer at Soho Rep for two seasons, and was the Producing Director of Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company for four years. He is the co-organizer of the CATCH performance series, wore many hats for 13P, curated the Prelude Festival, and has generally floated around the downtown performance scene in various capacities. Jill Rafson took on the role of Producing Artistic Director at Classic Stage Company in June 2022. Previously, she worked with Roundabout Theatre Company since 2005, most recently serving as Associate Artistic Director as well as Artistic Producer for Roundabout Underground, an acclaimed program supporting productions from early-career playwrights. She has developed dozens of new plays and musicals for Roundabout, with highlights including Stephen Karam’s Tony-winning The Humans ; Steven Levenson’s If I Forget ; Joshua Harmon’s hit Bad Jews ; Adam Gwon’s musicals Ordinary Days and Scotland, PA ; Ming Peiffer’s Drama Desk-nominated Usual Girls ; and Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer Prize-winning English . Jill has been a dramaturg for several commercial musical projects and at institutions including the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, The Flea, The Playwrights’ Center, Fault Line Theater, and more. Jill received her BA from Johns Hopkins University and a Graduate Certificate in Fundraising Management from Boston University. Tina Satter is a writer and director for theater and film. Her debut feature REALITY was adapted from her play Is This A Room which opened at The Kitchen in 2019 and premiered on Broadway in fall 2021. With her theater company Half Straddle, Tina has written and directed 10 critically acclaimed plays including House of Dance , Ghost Rings , and SEAGULL (Thinking of you) and a number of shorter performances and video works. She has been a guest director at The Schaubühne and is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Doris Duke Artist Award among other honors. Helen Shaw is the theatre critic for the New Yorker. Before joining the magazine in 2022, she was the theatre critic for New York magazine (and its online site, Vulture) and wrote at 4Columns, Time Out New York, the Village Voice, and others. Tyler Thomas is a New York-based theater director and Susan Stroman Directing Award recipient. Most recently, she directed new work at the Vineyard Theatre, Pasadena Playhouse, Williamstown Theatre Festival, and Geva Theatre. Tyler is a former 2050 Fellow with New York Theater Workshop, member of the Lincoln Center Directors’ Lab, and has been a Visiting Artist at the Athens Conservatoire (Greece), UCLA, UC Santa Cruz, and NYU Tisch. She is currently the Associate Artistic Director of the national arts and health initiative, Arts for EveryBody, inspired by the Federal Theatre Project. Tisch: BFA in Drama, MA in Arts Politics. Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

The annual PRELUDE festival is dedicated to artists at the forefront of contemporary New York City theatre, dance, interdisciplinary and mediatized performance PRELUDE Festival Since 2003, The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center has presented the PRELUDE Festival. The annual PRELUDE festival is dedicated to artists at the forefront of contemporary New York City theatre, dance, interdisciplinary and mediatized performance. PRELUDE offers an array of short performances, readings, and screenings — a completely free survey of the current New York moment and the work being prepared for the next season and beyond—as well as new commissions and panel discussions with artists, scholars, and performers. PRELUDE is a place to discover what voices are shaping the future of theatre and performance in NYC, to observe, engage, commune, and critique. Prelude 2024 Between the scenes View Festival Lineup Prelude 2020 Sites of revolution! View Festival Archive Prelude 2016 welcome failure! View Festival Archive Prelude 2013 forward View Festival Archive Prelude 2023 20th anniversary edition! View Festival Archive Prelude 2019 Riotous excursions! View Festival Archive Prelude 2015 . View Festival Archive Prelude 2012 . View Festival Archive Prelude 2021 Start making sense! View Festival Archive Prelude 2017 theater/maker View Festival Archive Prelude 2014 . View Festival Archive The PR ELUDE Archive Read 10 Y EARS PRELUDE Edited by Frank Hentschker and designed by Yu Chien Liu

LÉOH HAILU-GHERMAY presents Legally Bald at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 Legally Bald LÉOH HAILU-GHERMAY 5:30-6:20 pm Thursday, October 17, 2024 The Segal Theatre RSVP This offering is a one-person staged reading exploring internalized biases. We’ll jump through time and space with a young artist/activist (and their child self and drag king alter ego) on a very important day for all three of them. Legally Bald is very much a WORK IN PROGRESS! Feedback/questions are so very encouraged. Written by Léoh Hailu-Ghermay Directed by Jake Regensburg LOBSTER Nora loves Patti Smith. Nora is Patti Smith. Nora is stoned out of her mind in the Chelsea Hotel. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is her mind. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is an out-of-use portable classroom in the Pacific Northwest, and that classroom is a breeding ground for lobsters. LOBSTER by Kallan Dana directed by Hanna Yurfest produced by Emma Richmond with: Anna Aubry, Chris Erdman, Annie Fang, Coco McNeil, Haley Wong Needy Lover presents an excerpt of LOBSTER , a play about teenagers putting on a production of Patti Smith and Sam Shepard's Cowboy Mouth . THE ARTISTS Needy Lover makes performances that are funny, propulsive, weird, and gut-wrenching (ideally all at the same time). We create theatre out of seemingly diametrically opposed forces: our work is both entertaining and unusual, funny and tragic. Needylover.com Kallan Dana is a writer and performer originally from Portland, Oregon. She has developed and presented work with Clubbed Thumb, The Hearth, The Tank, Bramble Theater Company, Dixon Place, Northwestern University, and Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. She is a New Georges affiliated artist and co-founder of the artist collaboration group TAG at The Tank. She received her MFA from Northwestern University. Upcoming: RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR with The Hearth/Connelly Theater Upstairs (dir. Sarah Blush), Dec 2024. LOBSTER with The Tank (dir. Hanna Yurfest), April/May 2025. Needylover.com and troveirl.com Hanna Yurfest is a director and producer from Richmond, MA. She co-founded and leads The Tank’s artist group TAG and creates work with her company, Needy Lover. Emma Richmond is a producer and director of performances and events. She has worked with/at HERE, The Tank, The Brick, and Audible, amongst others. She was The Tank’s 2022-23 Producing Fellow, and is a member of the artist group TAG. Her day job is Programs Manager at Clubbed Thumb, and she also makes work with her collective Trove, which she co-founded. www.emma-richmond.com Rooting for You The Barbarians It's the Season Six premiere of 'Sava Swerve's: The Model Detector' and Cameron is on it!!! June, Willa, and (by proximity) Sunny are hosting weekly viewing parties every week until Cameron gets cut, which, fingers crossed, is going to be the freakin' finale! A theatrical playground of a play that serves an entire season of 'so-bad-it's-good' reality TV embedded in the social lives of a friend group working through queerness, adolescence, judgment, and self-actualization. Presenting an excerpt from Rooting for You! with loose staging, experimenting with performance style, timing, and physicality. THE ARTISTS Ashil Lee (he/they) NYC-based actor, playwright, director, and sex educator. Korean-American, trans nonbinary, child of immigrants, bestie to iconic pup Huxley. Described as "a human rollercoaster" and "Pick a lane, buddy!" by that one AI Roast Bot. 2023 Lucille Lortel nominee (Outstanding Ensemble: The Nosebleed ) and Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group Alum. NYU: Tisch. BFA in Acting, Minor in Youth Mental Health. Masters Candidate in Mental Health and Wellness (NYU Steinhardt: 20eventually), with intentions of incorporating mental health consciousness into the theatre industry. www.ashillee.com Phoebe Brooks is a gender non-conforming theater artist interested in establishing a Theatre of Joy for artists and audiences alike. A lifelong New Yorker, Phoebe makes art that spills out beyond theater-going conventions and forges unlikely communities. They love messing around with comedy, heightened text, and gender performance to uncover hidden histories. She's also kind of obsessed with interactivity; particularly about figuring out how to make audience participation less scary for audiences. Phoebe has a BA in Theatre from Northwestern University and an MFA in Theatre Directing from Columbia University's School of the Arts. The Barbarians is a word-drunk satirical play exploring political rhetoric and the power of words on the world. With cartoonish wit and rambunctious edge, it asks: what if the President tried to declare war, but the words didn't work? Written by Jerry Lieblich and directed by Paul Lazar, it will premiere in February 2025 at LaMama. The Barbarians is produced in association with Immediate Medium, and with support from the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation. THE ARTISTS Jerry Lieblich (they/them) plays in the borderlands of theater, poetry, and music. Their work experiments with language as a way to explore unexpected textures of consciousness and attention. Plays include Mahinerator (The Tank), The Barbarians (La Mama - upcoming), D Deb Debbie Deborah (Critic’s Pick: NY Times), Ghost Stories (Critic’s Pick: TimeOut NY), and Everything for Dawn (Experiments in Opera). Their poetry has appeared in Foglifter, Second Factory, TAB, Grist, SOLAR, Pomona Valley Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Works and Days. Their poetry collection otherwise, without was a finalist for The National Poetry Series. Jerry has held residencies at MacDowell, MassMoCA, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Arts, and UCROSS, and Yiddishkayt. MFA: Brooklyn College. www.thirdear.nyc Paul Lazar is a founding member, along with Annie-B Parson, of Big Dance Theater. He has co-directed and acted in works for Big Dance since 1991, including commissions from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Old Vic (London), The Walker Art Center, Classic Stage Co., New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, and Japan Society. Paul directed Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die which was reprised in London featuring David Byrne. Other directing credits include Bodycast with Francis McDormand (BAM), Christina Masciotti’s Social Security (Bushwick Starr), and Major Bang (for The Foundry Theatre) at Saint Ann’s Warehouse. Awards include two Bessies (2010, 2002), the Jacob’s Pillow Creativity Award (2007), and the Prelude Festival’s Frankie Award (2014), as well an Obie Award for Big Dance in 2000. Steve Mellor has appeared on Broadway (Big River ), Off-Broadway (Nixon's Nixon ) and regionally at Arena Stage, Long Wharf Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Portland Stage and Yale Rep. A longtime collaborator with Mac Wellman, Steve has appeared in Wellman's Harm’s Way, Energumen, Dracula, Cellophane, Terminal Hip (OBIE Award), Sincerity Forever, A Murder of Crows, The Hyacinth Macaw, 7 Blowjobs (Bessie Award), Strange Feet, Bad Penny, Fnu Lnu, Bitter Bierce (OBIE Award), and Muazzez . He also directed Mr. Wellman's 1965 UU. In New York City, he has appeared at the Public Theater, La Mama, Soho Rep, Primary Stages, PS 122, MCC Theater, The Chocolate Factory, and The Flea. His film and television credits include Sleepless in Seattle, Mickey Blue Eyes, Celebrity, NYPD Blue, Law and Order, NY Undercover, and Mozart in the Jungle. Chloe Claudel is an actor and director based in NYC and London. She co-founded the experimental company The Goat Exchange, with which she has developed over a dozen new works of theater and film, including Salome, or the Cult of the Clitoris: a Historical Phallusy in last year's Prelude Festival. She's thrilled to be working with Paul and Jerry on The Barbarians . Anne Gridley is a two time Obie award-winning actor, dramaturg, and artist. As a founding member of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, she has co-created and performed in critically acclaimed works including Life & Times, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, No Dice, Romeo & Juliet, and Burt Turrido . In addition to her work with Nature Theater, Gridley has performed with Jerôme Bel, Caborca, 7 Daughters of Eve, and Big Dance, served as a Dramaturg for the Wooster Group’s production Who’s Your Dada ?, and taught devised theater at Bard College. Her drawings have been shown at H.A.U. Berlin, and Mass Live Arts. B.A. Bard College; M.F.A. Columbia University. Naren Weiss is an actor/writer who has worked onstage (The Public Theater, Second Stage, Kennedy Center, Geffen Playhouse, international), in TV (ABC, NBC, CBS, Comedy Central), and has written plays that have been performed across the globe (India, Singapore, South Africa, U.S.). Upcoming: The Sketchy Eastern European Show at The Players Theatre (Mar. '24). Léoh Hailu-Ghermay is a first generation Tigrayan-American, Black queer artist, activist, and law student living on occupied Munsee-Lenape and Canarsie Land (Brooklyn, NY). Select theater/performance art credits: Phyllida in Galatea (Flea Theater), Euridike in Antigonick (Playwrights Horizons), Bonzai/Husband in The Good Person of Setzuan (Atlantic Stage 2), Soloist in The Rave Revue (Prospect Theater Co.), Newmama in Letters in the Dirt (The Brick), Kunty Kracker Kyle in Chaotic Good (The Tank), and Mrs. Jennings in Episode (Metropolitan Playhouse). They’re thrilled to be showing their Work in Progress at Prelude! Jake Regensburg is an NYC based actor/musician/director. Acting credits include: Playhouse on Park: THE SHARK IS BROKEN , Argyle Theatre: BUDDY: THE BUDDY HOLLY STORY , IRT: BIRD PLAY , Soho Playhouse: ANNIE BROWN , ArtHouse: THE RIP , Atlantic Stage 2: SUMMERTIME . Jake also works as a dramaturg and has served as a script-reader for Rattlestick Theater, Egg and Spoon, and The New Group. BFA: NYU. Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on