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Is it possible for a room to be empty when your memories keep breaking through the walls? Alison Clancy’s drone-pop-psych-Americana piece So Brutal It Feels Like Home puts you in a liminal space where ghosts ricochet off every surface. This is about the same thing that makes wild dogs howl. Three dancers, Clancy’s live ethereal vocals and electric guitar, and multi-spectrum lighting and shadows transport us from ecstatic vistas to the bottom of the well. Landing somewhere between a rock show / dance concert / performance installation the work is haunting in its simple brutality, emotional intimacy and physical virtuosity. PRELUDE Festival 2023 DANCE So Brutal It Feels Like Home Alison Clancy Dance, Music English 30 min 8:00PM EST Friday, October 13, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Is it possible for a room to be empty when your memories keep breaking through the walls? Alison Clancy’s drone-pop-psych-Americana piece So Brutal It Feels Like Home puts you in a liminal space where ghosts ricochet off every surface. This is about the same thing that makes wild dogs howl. Three dancers, Clancy’s live ethereal vocals and electric guitar, and multi-spectrum lighting and shadows transport us from ecstatic vistas to the bottom of the well. Landing somewhere between a rock show / dance concert / performance installation the work is haunting in its simple brutality, emotional intimacy and physical virtuosity. This piece was created with support from Susannah Lee Griffee and the NY State Dance Force Choreogrpaher's Initiative Award Content / Trigger Description: Dreaming of beauty and collective catharsis, Alison Clancy designs projects bridging between worlds... Haunting solo music performances weave tapestries of electric guitar into expansive, brooding drone-psyche Americana. Incantatory vocals reveal delicate vulnerability and gritty volatility. Alison summons ghosts from machines. Performances often incorporate expressionistic choreography in collaboration with virtuosic dancers. Alison's choreographic work is informed by a deep relationship with classical ballet, but subverts technique in exploration of primordial sensuality. Illuminating the authority of each body's authentic story, the essence of performers are invited to burn and melt the form. Alison's approach is equal parts visceral and visual, often incorporating cinematic custom lighting and video installations. 2022 recipient of the New York State Dance Force Choreographer's Initiative Award. www.alisonclancy.com https://www.instagram.com/_alison_clancy_/ https://www.facebook.com/ClancyMedia Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

TINA SATTER / HALF STRADDLE presents PETRA at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 PETRA TINA SATTER / HALF STRADDLE 8-9 pm Friday, October 18, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall RSVP Early excerpts of a work-in-progress. With Emily Davis, Elizabeth DeMent, Emma Haeri, Lucy Taylor, Danusia Trevino, Nicole Villamil Directed by Tina Satter Thank you to Chloe Claudel, Claire Davison, Eleanor Hutchins, Marianna McClennan, Susannah Perkins, Clarice Reiner, Maya Rubio, Susie Sokol, and Oscar Peña and the Park Avenue Armory. 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). TINA SATTER/HALF STRADDLE is a performance company from New York City that has been making theater, music, and videos since 2008. Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

In conversation about past and upcoming projects PRELUDE Festival 2023 ARTIST TALK Raja Feather Kelly Discussion English 30 minutes 3:00PM EST Saturday, October 14, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All In conversation about past and upcoming projects Content / Trigger Description: RAJA FEATHER KELLY is a choreographer and director, and the Artistic Director of the feath3r theory (TF3T), a dance-theatre-media company. Kelly has created 18 evening-length premieres with the feath3r theory, most recently UGLY Part 3: BLUE at Chelsea Factory. The company’s latest work, The Absolute Future, premieres in 2024. His choreography can currently be seen in White Girl in Danger at the Second Stage Kiser Theater, written by Michael R. Jackson and directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz. He choreographed the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical A Strange Loop (Lyceum Theatre, premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizon), and is also a choreographer for Off-Broadway theatre with frequent collaborators like Jackson, Blain-Cruz, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and Sarah Benson. Recent works include Bunny Bunny (UC San Diego), We're Gonna Die (Second Stage Theater), SUFFS (The Public Theater), Lempicka (La Jolla Playhouse), and Scenes for an Ending for the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company. He has received numerous accolades, including a Princeton Arts Fellowship (2023-2025), three Princess Grace Awards, an Obie Award, an Outer Critics Circle honor for choreography for the Pulitzer Prize-winning and Tony Award-winning musical A Strange Loop, a Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist at New York Live Arts, a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, a Creative Capital award, a Breakout Award for choreography from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (SCDF), the Solange MacArthur Award for New Choreography, Dance Magazine's Harkness Promise Award, and the SDCF Joe A. Callaway Award finalist for outstanding choreography of Fairview (Soho Rep, Berkeley Rep, TFANA, and winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama). @rajafeatherkelly @thefeath3rtheory www.thefeath3rtheory.com Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Watch The Making of Pinocchio by Cade & MacAskill at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. A true tale of love and transition told through the story of Pinocchio. In this hybrid of theatre and film, shot and edited all in one take, you are invited to go behind the scenes of Cade & MacAskill’s creative process and their relationship, and question what it takes to tell your truth. Artists and lovers Rosana Cade and Ivor MacAskill have been creating The Making of Pinocchio since 2018, alongside and in response to Ivor’s gender transition. In this digital edition of the work, their tender and complex autobiographical experience meets the magical story of the lying puppet who wants to be a ‘real boy’. With an ingenious scenography designed by Tim Spooner, layered with sound by Yas Clarke, lights by Jo Palmer and cinematography from Kirstin McMahon, the show employs split-screen, forced perspective and intimate close ups to constantly shift between between fantasy and authenticity, humour and intimacy, on stage and on screen. The Making of Pinocchio joyfully embraces the importance of imagination in queer worldmaking and the idea of transness as a state of possibility that can trouble fixed perspectives and inspire change. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents The Making of Pinocchio At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Cade & MacAskill Performance Art This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks, as well as screened in-person on May 17th. About The Film Country Scotland Language English Running Time 90 minutes Year of Release 2021 A true tale of love and transition told through the story of Pinocchio. In this hybrid of theatre and film, shot and edited all in one take, you are invited to go behind the scenes of Cade & MacAskill’s creative process and their relationship, and question what it takes to tell your truth. Artists and lovers Rosana Cade and Ivor MacAskill have been creating The Making of Pinocchio since 2018, alongside and in response to Ivor’s gender transition. In this digital edition of the work, their tender and complex autobiographical experience meets the magical story of the lying puppet who wants to be a ‘real boy’. With an ingenious scenography designed by Tim Spooner, layered with sound by Yas Clarke, lights by Jo Palmer and cinematography from Kirstin McMahon, the show employs split-screen, forced perspective and intimate close ups to constantly shift between between fantasy and authenticity, humour and intimacy, on stage and on screen. The Making of Pinocchio joyfully embraces the importance of imagination in queer worldmaking and the idea of transness as a state of possibility that can trouble fixed perspectives and inspire change. Commissioned by Fierce Festival, Kampnagel, Tramway & Viernulvier with support from Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, Battersea Arts Centre, LIFT and Take Me Somewhere. Produced by Artsadmin. Funded by Creative Scotland, Arts Council England and Rudolf Augstein Stiftung with development support from The Work Room/Diane Torr Bursary, Scottish Sculpture Workshop, National Theatre of Scotland, Live Art Development Agency, Gessnerallee, Mousonturm, Forest Fringe, West Kowloon Cultural District & LGBT Health & Wellbeing Scotland. Created by Rosana Cade & Ivor MacAskill Performed by Rosana Cade, Ivor MacAskill, Jo Hellier & Moa Johansson, Tim Spooner & Ray Gammon Set, Prop & Costume Designer: Tim Spooner Sound Designer: Yas Clarke Sound/AV Technician and show operator: Riwa Saab Cameras: Jo Hellier & Moa Johansson Lighting Designer: Jo Palmer Relighter: Meghan Hodgson, Marty Langthorne Cinematographer: Kirstin McMahon & Jo Hellier Produced by Dr. Nora Laraki & Nene Camara for Artsadmin Creation produced by Mary Osborn for Artsadmin Production Manager: Sorcha Stott-Strzala Assistant Stage Manager: Ray Gammon Outside Eye: Nic Green Movement advisor: Eleanor Perry Captioning: Collective Text, Rosana Cade, Ivor MacAskill & Jamie Rea Caption Design: Yas Clarke & Daniel Hughes About The Artist(s) The duo holds the audience with a brand of mischievous humour that’s provocative and reassuring in equal measure.’ Exeunt Cade & MacAskill are Rosana Cade (they/them) and Ivor MacAskill (he/him): renowned queer artists and facilitators based in Glasgow, Scotland. Their work, together and individually, straddles the worlds of experimental contemporary theatre, live art, queer cabaret, film, children’s performance, site specific, and socially engaged practices. Their collaboration is born from a shared love of subversive humour, experimentation with persona and text, playful theatricality, and the joy they find in improvising together. They also share a passion for LGBTQIA+ rights and culture. They create strange, rich aesthetic worlds on stage, with unique sonic elements embedded into their work due to ongoing collaboration with sound artist and designer Yas Clarke. In 2017 they were commissioned by Fierce - Birmingham, The Marlborough - Brighton, and The Yard - London, to create Moot Moot which premiered early 2018. This was then selected as part of the British Council Showcase and the Made in Scotland Showcase at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2019, where it enjoyed a sell-out run at Summerhall, and they began to tour this show across Europe before the pandemic hit. Since 2018 they have been working on ‘The Making of Pinocchio’, which was supported though residencies at Gessnerallee in Zurich and Mousonturm in Frankfurt, as well as The Diane Torr Award bursary. They also regularly perform across club, music and performance contexts as their experimental concept band ‘Double Pussy Clit Fuck’. Footage from these gigs has inspired the creation of two new video works during the Covid Pandemic: ‘Taps Aff’, and ‘Presenting Our Selves’. The latter was commissioned by The Place - London for Splayed festival 2020, and selected as part of Scottish Queer International Film festival 2021. They are both experienced facilitators and trained volunteers with LGBT Youth (Glasgow). They are currently in the process of setting up a co-operative to open a new LGBTQIA+ second-hand shop / community space in Glasgow. Get in touch with the artist(s) nora@artsadmin.co.uk and follow them on social media Artists: @cademacaskill (Twitter and Instagram)Producer: @artsadm (Twitter and Instagram), @Artsadmin (Facebook)Fierce Festival @fiercefestivalKampnagel @kampnagel_hamburg (Instagram) @kampnagel (Twitter)Tramway @GlasgowTramwayVIERNULVIER @viernulvier.gent (Instagram) @VIERNULVIERGent (Twitter)Attenborough Centre of the Arts @AttenboroughCtrBattersea Arts Centre @Battersea_ArtsLIFT @LIFTFestival Website: https://www.cademacaskill.com/ https://www.artsadmin.co.uk/project/the-making-of-pinocchio/ Social media handles Twitter and Instagram: Commissioners and supporters: Take Me Somewhere @TMsomewhere Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

Encounter Tea, Arts & Culture's work Community Poetry and Tea in Manhattan, at this year's edition of the Prelude in the Parks festival by The Segal Centre, presented in collaboration with Eastside Outside Community Garden, Manhattan. Prelude in the Parks 2024 Festival Community Poetry and Tea Tea, Arts & Culture Interactive Ceremony, Poetry Saturday, June 8, 2024 @ 2pm Eastside Outside Community Garden, Manhattan Meet at 415 East 11th Street. Eastside Outside Community Garden, Manhattan 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 * This ceremony is 2pm - 4pm Through the Odes to Common Things, we will share tea and explore poetry from Pablo Neruda and Keorapetse Kgositsile, uncovering our deep bond with nature and the interconnectedness between ourselves. Tuning into nature’s myriad stories could offer us profound insights into navigating our collective journey on our shared planet. Tea, Arts & Culture Tea, Arts & Culture began as a gathering of friends and tea lovers to enjoy nature and tea in the park starting in 2019. Compelled to respond to the rapidly shifting world during the start of the pandemic, they are committed to using tea arts and culture to nurture community and belonging in the face of isolation and to cultivate mindfulness and inspiration in the face of our daily challenges by establishing themselves as a non-profit organization. They believe that they can support communities in need through fostering an appreciation of tea, arts, nature, oneself, and one another. Visit Artist Website Location Meet at 415 East 11th Street. Eastside Outside Community Garden, Manhattan East Side Outside Community Garden (EO) was established as a GreenThumb community garden in 2016. The name of the garden was determined by the students at ESCHS which is next to the garden Before EO became a GreenThumb community garden, from about 2010, the garden was mainly used by ESCHS with other organizations and volunteers, including Earth Matter NY which did composting projects with the high school students (with coordination of the biology/science teachers). The composting projects were not only a general teaching component for the whole class, but also some of the students used the project as part of their PBAT (Performance Based Assessment Tasks)—students at this high school uses the PBAT, at the conclusion of which they would do a powerpoint presentation in front of teacher and guest judges, instead of having to take the Regents Exams. From about 2014, a composting operation called Reclaimed Organics, a program of Common Ground Compost, began collecting and composting food waste at the garden. They use cargo bikes, instead of motor vehicles, to pick up food waste from various locations. Eventually, the garden became an official public drop-off site, through DSNY (Sanitation), for the community to bring their food scraps, 24-7, for composting. Before becoming the East Side Outside Community Garden, the garden was also known as LES Park (Lower East Side Park). Visit Partner Website

A play with music that follows a group of immigrant women working at a Chinatown garment factory. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE Sweatshop Melody Nancy Ma Theater English 30 min 4:30PM EST Wednesday, October 11, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All A play with music that follows a group of immigrant women working at a Chinatown garment factory. Content / Trigger Description: Nancy Ma is a Chinese American actor, writer, and filmmaker based in New York City. She recently directed her first documentary short, 有一天你不在 One Day You Are Not Here, about intergenerational care through her relationship with her father. Her solo show about growing up in Chinatown, Home, has been performed at schools and festivals around the country. As an actor, Nancy has been seen in Memorial (Pan Asian Rep), The Joy Luck Club (Sierra Madre Playhouse), Three Little Girls Down a Well (The Public), Hacks (HBO), Barry (HBO). Nancy’s writing has been supported by The New Harmony Project, Asian American Arts Alliance, The Latino Theater Company, Fresh Ground Pepper, WhoHaHa. Nancy currently facilitates storytelling with The Moth and Young Storytellers. Her work and her life focus on finding the funny, intimate and redemptive in forgotten places. www.littlemoisttugboat.com Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Watch Making of The Money Opera by Amitesh Grover at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. The film documents the making of Amitesh Grover’s THE MONEY OPERA, an immersive theatre production staged in an abandoned building produced by the Serendipity Arts Foundation, India. The show — performed by actors and real-life experts — plays out stories that reflect on the historical workings of money and capital in relation to the fragile performance traditions and ecology in India. Audiences discover several characters in the building including a child goddess, a ghost, a billionaire, a thief, a poet, a banker, a cross-dresser and several others, who tell real and unreal stories about the extent to which they go to survive in the system. In this 3hr. show, the audience chooses what they watch in this multi-storeyed space with multiple performances and installations. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Making of The Money Opera At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Amitesh Grover Theater This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks, as well as screened in-person on May 20th. About The Film Country India Language English, Hindi Running Time 15 minutes Year of Release 2023 The film documents the making of Amitesh Grover’s THE MONEY OPERA, an immersive theatre production staged in an abandoned building produced by the Serendipity Arts Foundation, India. The show — performed by actors and real-life experts — plays out stories that reflect on the historical workings of money and capital in relation to the fragile performance traditions and ecology in India. Audiences discover several characters in the building including a child goddess, a ghost, a billionaire, a thief, a poet, a banker, a cross-dresser and several others, who tell real and unreal stories about the extent to which they go to survive in the system. In this 3hr. show, the audience chooses what they watch in this multi-storeyed space with multiple performances and installations. Produced by Serendipity Arts Foundation, India. Directed by Vaibhav Raj Shah About The Artist(s) Amitesh Grover (born 1980) is an award-winning theatre director and artist. His body of work includes more than 20 productions, which range from global performances connecting performers and spectators across continents to the most intimate pieces. His creations have been commissioned, co-produced, and presented internationally by renowned festivals and theatres. His work is driven by the desire to understand the workings of power in societies controlled by the logic of techno-capital and increasingly authoritarian political forces. He is based in New Delhi, India. Get in touch with the artist(s) amiteshgrover@gmail.com and follow them on social media https://amiteshgrover.com , https://www.facebook.com/amitesh.grover?mibextid=LQQJ4d, https://www.instagram.com/amitesh.grover?igsh=MWpmaDZubHprNDR2cw%3D%3D&utm_source=qr Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

WASEEM ALZER, AYA AZIZ + SARAH BITAR presents The Arab in Theatre: A Conversation at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 The Arab in Theatre: A Conversation WASEEM ALZER, AYA AZIZ + SARAH BITAR 5-5:50pm Wednesday, October 16, 2024 Elebash Recital Halll RSVP Join us as we engage in conversation about the Arab in theatre; the character and the artist. 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). Waseem Alzer is a Palestinian-American theater artist based in New York City. He firmly believes in the transformative power of theater to change the world. He is a teaching artist and performer with YAA SAMAR! DANCE THEATRE (Palestine), performed in Gathering (The Shed), and teaches Dabka to anyone who wants to join in the cultural Intifada. Waseem stands in solidarity with The Freedom Theatre in Jenin, Palestine, and is amplifying PCRF’s NYC Chapter call for volunteers (@PCRF_NYC). Aya Aziz is a multidisciplinary artist from NYC, most known for her musical Eh Dah? Questions for my Father (New York Theatre Workshop, 2019). She is currently recording her debut album with the support of the Bryan Gallace Fellowship and NY Fund for the Arts. You can find her single "Rapids" on all streaming platforms. Aya lives in Ridgewood with her (Queen of Queens) Tabbycat Tess. Sarah Bitar is an award winning film + stage actor, vocalist, writer, Arabic teacher and community builder, fluent in Arabic French and English. She is a valued member of the acting ensemble at the Mercury Store—an experimental directing lab, where she works on classical, physical and new works with notable directors. She writes and produces her own work out of the curiosity and necessity to play with different story forms and express authentic narratives from a Self shaped by the foreign and the familiar, the personal and collective. She has a great passion for Arabic and improvisational music which she persistently studies at home, where her partner Guy is her first and infinitely gracious audience who doesn’t seem to mind all the singing around the clock. Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

"The More Things Change" is play #4 in a 10-play series of climate change performances, created by Farm Arts Collective. Conceived and directed by organic farmer and theatre-maker, Tannis Kowalchuk, "The More Things Change"is a promenade performance that tells the story of a multi-generational farm family who is offered a large sum of money to sell their organic farmland to developers of a “bio-diversity” theme park called Eco-Land. The offer pitches the family into a dramatic crisis and a riveting family drama unfolds as they decide what to do in the face of climate change and their own personal dreams—to sell or not to sell? The devised performance features original music, a chorus, and puppetry. The work premiered at Willow Wisp Organic Farm in August 2023. Conceived & Directed by Tannis Kowalchuk Text by The Ensemble, Mark Dunau, Melissa Bell, Hudson Eynon-Williams Composer Doug Rogers Music and Choral Director Annie Hat Additional songs by Melissa Bell, Mark Dunau & Traditional music Company Manager Jess Beveridge Costumes by Chris Barkl Parade Puppets by Sue Currier & Ace Thomas Stage Manager Cami Pileggi Dramaturg Jess Barkl-Lopez Ensemble Actors Jess Beveridge as Sarah Wilder Beau Brazfield as Oliver Wilder Michael Chojnicki as Grandpa “GiGi” Walter Wilder Ginny Hack as Aunt Linda Annie Hat as The Ghost of Grandma Tannis Kowalchuk as Nora Kosciuk-Wilder Lexee McEntee as Candace Two Feathers Doug Rogers as The Narrator, Old Joseph John Roth as Theron Wilder Jonah Watwood as Jo Wilder Hudson Williams-Eynon as Justin Darling The Musicians & Chorus Pam Arnold, percussion & banjo Rebekah Creshkoff Tiffany Esteb Annie Hat Karen Hudson, guitar Kris Kurtz Doug Rogers, guitar & piano Phoenix Murns PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE (Cancelled) Dream on the Farm: The More Things Change Farm Arts Collective Theater, Music, Puppetry English 75 minutes 1:00PM EST Saturday, October 21, 2023 Prospect Park, Brooklyn, NY, USA Cancelled CANCELLED DUE TO RAIN Storm on Saturday Farm Arts Collective is spending a decade from 2020-2030 on DREAM ON THE FARM, a series of original devised plays about climate change. We were so excited to share play #4 in this decalogue of climate change plays at The Prelude Festival. Sadly and fittingly, due to the very intense rainy weather we are experiencing, we need to postpone the performance as Friday and Saturday rains will be prohibitive to rehearsal and presentation. We look forward to bringing the show to Prospect Park in the late Spring and working with Frank and the Prelude who will include The More Things Change in a new festival called DOWN TO EARTH. We wish to thank all the people who supported our GoFundMe campaign—we will definitely use this finacial support for our re-scheduled Prospect Park performance in late Spring 2024. Sincerely, Tannis Kowalchuk "The More Things Change" is play #4 in a 10-play series of climate change performances, created by Farm Arts Collective. Conceived and directed by organic farmer and theatre-maker, Tannis Kowalchuk, "The More Things Change"is a promenade performance that tells the story of a multi-generational farm family who is offered a large sum of money to sell their organic farmland to developers of a “bio-diversity” theme park called Eco-Land. The offer pitches the family into a dramatic crisis and a riveting family drama unfolds as they decide what to do in the face of climate change and their own personal dreams—to sell or not to sell? The devised performance features original music, a chorus, and puppetry. The work premiered at Willow Wisp Organic Farm in August 2023. Conceived & Directed by Tannis Kowalchuk Text by The Ensemble, Mark Dunau, Melissa Bell, Hudson Eynon-Williams Composer Doug Rogers Music and Choral Director Annie Hat Additional songs by Melissa Bell, Mark Dunau & Traditional music Company Manager Jess Beveridge Costumes by Chris Barkl Parade Puppets by Sue Currier & Ace Thomas Stage Manager Cami Pileggi Dramaturg Jess Barkl-Lopez Ensemble Actors Jess Beveridge as Sarah Wilder Beau Brazfield as Oliver Wilder Michael Chojnicki as Grandpa “GiGi” Walter Wilder Ginny Hack as Aunt Linda Annie Hat as The Ghost of Grandma Tannis Kowalchuk as Nora Kosciuk-Wilder Lexee McEntee as Candace Two Feathers Doug Rogers as The Narrator, Old Joseph John Roth as Theron Wilder Jonah Watwood as Jo Wilder Hudson Williams-Eynon as Justin Darling The Musicians & Chorus Pam Arnold, percussion & banjo Rebekah Creshkoff Tiffany Esteb Annie Hat Karen Hudson, guitar Kris Kurtz Doug Rogers, guitar & piano Phoenix Murns National Endowment for the Arts, Radio Drama Network, William E. Chatlos Foundation, Honesdale National Bank and Deep Roots individual donors. Content / Trigger Description: Farm Arts Collective is based on Willow Wisp Organic Farm in Damascus, PA, a 30-acre solar-powered vegetable and flower farm owned and operated by farmers Greg Swartz and Tannis Kowalchuk. Farm Arts Collective was founded in 2018 by theatre artist, Tannis Kowalchuk, to provide programming in four life-sustaining practices: farming, art, food, and ecology. Our mission is to serve and improve our rural community in creative ways that intersect art with farming and ecology. The collective offers a full season of unique public programs, events, and performances, and feeding people farm-fresh food is always a priority at events. Farm Arts Collective has developed and trained a LOCAL ensemble of over 25 actors, scientists, farmers, stilt-walkers, playwrights, and composers who create ORIGINAL innovative and spectacular performances. The company was featured in THE NEW YORK TIMES Arts Section. DREAM ON THE FARM is a ten-year performance project focusing on climate change. From 2020-2030 the company creates and presents one new play every August. The event attracts hundreds of people to the farm for a week of site-specific theatre performances about the environment, farming, and climate change that both educates and entertains. Every performance also includes a meal of farm fresh food shared by audience and artists. https://www.farmartscollective.org/ https://www.facebook.com/farmartscollective Instagram @FarmArtsCollective Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Despite being in a revitalized era of civil rights and land acknowledgements, one Lenape gets confronted with a stark reality that can only begin to be resolved with a group journey through four hundred years of history. At times surreal, at times absurd, and at times brutal, This Play Is Native Made is a quintessential untold story of America through the lens of one member of an indigenous nation that is one of the longest continuous democracies on Earth. Directed by Ash Marinaccio PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE This Play is Native Made Opalanietet Theater 6:30PM EST Friday, October 20, 2023 Torn Page, 435 W 22nd St, New York, NY 10011, USA Free Entry, Open To All Despite being in a revitalized era of civil rights and land acknowledgements, one Lenape gets confronted with a stark reality that can only begin to be resolved with a group journey through four hundred years of history. At times surreal, at times absurd, and at times brutal, This Play Is Native Made is a quintessential untold story of America through the lens of one member of an indigenous nation that is one of the longest continuous democracies on Earth. Directed by Ash Marinaccio Content / Trigger Description: Opalanietet is a member of the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape tribal nation of New Jersey. He is currently a PhD student at The Graduate Center at the City of University of New York (CUNY), and the Founder and Artistic Director of Eagle Project, www.eagleprojectarts.org . Upon graduating from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, Opalanietet has performed in workshops and productions at such renown New York theatrical institutions as the Public Theater, Nuyorican Poets Café, New York City Opera, and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. In November of 2020, Opalanietet made history by giving the first-ever Lenape Land Acknowledgement at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on NBC. Ash Marinaccio (Director) is a multidisciplinary documentarian working in theatre, photography, and film. She is dedicated to storytelling highlighting the socio-political issues defining our times and regularly works throughout the United States and internationally. For her work, Ash has received the Lucille Lortel Visionary Award from the League of Professional Theatre Women, a Drama League Residency, fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, NY Public Humanities, and National Endowment for the Humanities, been listed as one of Culture Trip’s “50 Women in Theatre You Should Know”, and is a two time TEDx Speaker. Currently, Ash is a Ph.D. Candidate in Theatre and Performance at the CUNY Graduate Center. Ash is the founding artistic director of the United Nations recognized NGO Girl Be Heard and founder of Docbloc, dedicated to bringing artists across documentary genres together for live performance collaborations. Website: ashmarinaccio.com/ Instagram: @ashmarinaccio Eagle Project Founded by Opalanietet (Ryan Victor Pierce) in 2012, Eagle Project is the only Lenape-led performing arts company in New York City. Its mission is to explore the American identity through the performing arts and our Native American heritage, deciphering what exactly it means to be American while using the Native American experience as the primary means for which to conduct its investigation. Since its inception, Eagle Project has produced six full productions, numerous readings and workshops, and has collaborated with the Public Theater, Nuyorican Poets Café, Rattlestick Theater, and Ashtar Theater in Palestine. For more information, visit www.eagleprojectarts.org . Photo by Ash Marinaccio www.eagleprojectarts.org Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Watch Radical Move by ANIELA GABRYEL at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. How much would you sacrifice to experience transcendence, to go beyond the body? Members of a legendary theatre group, in continuing the explorations of Jerzy Grotowski, give up everything for artistic research. Suspended between fascination and fear, they seek to transgress their own limits. The group resembles a miniature society with all its inherent faults, especially as it falls apart.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Radical Move At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by ANIELA GABRYEL Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Thursday May 16th at 7:25pm. 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 Poland Language English Running Time 88 minutes Year of Release 2023 About The Film About The Retrospective How much would you sacrifice to experience transcendence, to go beyond the body? Members of a legendary theatre group, in continuing the explorations of Jerzy Grotowski, give up everything for artistic research. Suspended between fascination and fear, they seek to transgress their own limits. The group resembles a miniature society with all its inherent faults, especially as it falls apart. About The Artist(s) Film director, writer, a graduate of Film Directing at Polish National Film School in Lodz and of Theatre studies at Jagiellonian University. Her short films have been screened and awarded at numerous festivals in Poland and around the world. Her full-length documentary debut When Will This Wind Stop was screened and recognized at many film festivals, including an award at IDFA in 2016. Currently Get in touch with the artist(s) aniela.astrid.gabryel@gmail.com and follow them on social media 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 New Black Fest will present four excerpts from new and provocative plays that interrogate issues around immigration and green card marriages, toxic patriarchy and climate change, truth and transparency as well as a new play inspired by the absentee black character Donald Muller from the play Doubt. The four excerpts will be followed by a conversation on the topic of resistance and survival through intimacy, community and knowledge-seeking. PRELUDE Festival 2023 READING + PANEL The New Black Fest Kemiyondo Coutinho, Dennis Allen II, Hayley Spivey, and Keith Josef Adkins Theater English 90 minutes (includes panel discussion) 3:00PM EST Thursday, October 12, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All The New Black Fest will present four excerpts from new and provocative plays that interrogate issues around immigration and green card marriages, toxic patriarchy and climate change, truth and transparency as well as a new play inspired by the absentee black character Donald Muller from the play Doubt . The four excerpts will be followed by a conversation on the topic of resistance and survival through intimacy, community and knowledge-seeking. The post-reading panel features Kelley Giord, Kemiyondo Coutinho, Hayley Spivey , Dennis Allen II, and Keith Josef Adkins and is moderated by Robyne Walker Murphy. Content / Trigger Description: Language, Discussions of race, gender, sexuality Kemiyondo Coutinho (Playwright) is a multi-hyphenated writer, director and actor hailing from Uganda but who self identifies as an African nomad. Her theatrical debut, "Jabulile!", offered a heartfelt portrayal of Swazi women and transcended borders, captivating audiences worldwide in Swaziland, South Africa, Uganda, Canada, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Portland. Kemiyondo's poignant play, "Kawuna...you’re it," shed light on the lives of HIV-positive women in Uganda, earning recognition with a reading in New York by Hybrid Theater Works. It was further celebrated at the National Arts Festival in South Africa and headlined the 2015 Gates Foundation World AIDS Day Celebration. Notably, Kemiyondo is a recipient of Forbes Africa's esteemed 30 under 30 award, and remains grounded in her commitment to storytelling that bridges hard-hitting themes with witty comedic commentary, all aimed at making audiences feel seen. She is also the inaugural recipient of John Singleton's Filmmaker's Fellowship, Kevin Hart's Laugh Out Loud Filmmaking Fellowship, and the proud recipient of the Shadow & Act Rising Star Award. Furthermore, she has earned a place among OKAYAfrica's 100 Women of Africa To Watch. Currently, Kemiyondo contributes her creative talents as a writer and Co-executive producer on Season 3 of Starz's acclaimed series, "P-VALLEY". Dennis A. Allen II (Playwright/Director) is a multi-hyphenate in the world of theatre. As a playwright, his play The Mud is Thicker in Mississippi won the 35th annual Off Off Broadway Samuel French Festival. He is the recipient of Atlantic Theater Company’s inaugural Launch Commission, Clubbed Thumb’s Early-Career Writer’s Group, and National Black Theatre’s “I Am Soul” Playwright Residency. Allen has directed and developed new plays by NSangou Njikam, Aziza Barnes, Tanya Everett, a.k. payne, Craig "Mums" Grant and many more. He also served as the National Playwriting Program Vice Chair for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival region 1. An adjunct professor at LaGuardia Community College, Montclair State University, The New School and is the Co-Program Director for the MFA Playwriting program at Brooklyn College. Dennis received his MFA from Brooklyn College's Playwriting program. Hayley Spivey (Playwright) is a Brooklyn based playwright, dramaturg and actor from Atlanta, Georgia. She received a B.F.A in Theatre Arts from Boston University. In Boston, Hayley worked as a Junior Dramaturg for Company One Theatre as well as freelancing at companies such as SpeakEasy Stage Company and Artists’ Theater of Boston. Currently, she is writing her own stories while working with other writers to foster excitement for their own development. Keith Josef Adkins (Playwright/Artistic Director) is a playwright, screenwriter and artistic director. His Great Migration play, The West End, had its world premiere at Cincinnati Playhouse and was a finalist for the 2022 Steinberg-ATCA New Play Award. Keith's other plays include The People Before the Park, Safe House, Pitbulls, the Last Saint on Sugar Hill, among others. He’s the recipient of the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, Samuel French's Award for Impact and Activism in the Theater Community as well as National Black Theater's Teer Spirit Award. He is the artistic director of The New Black Fest, a 13-year-old theater organization committed to fostering insurgent voices from the African Diaspora. The New Black Fest was in residence at the Lark Play Development Center for six years and has commissioned three social justice anthologies, including Facing Our Truth and Hands Up -- both published by Samuel French/Concord Theatrical. Keith and The New Black Fest was also commissioned by the Apollo Theater to develop work for their new Victoria Theater. Some of his TV writing credits include P-Valley, Outer Banks, The Good Fight. He's also developed TV projects with JJ Abrams, Don Cheadle/Steven Soderbergh. website > thenewblackfest.org - IG> @newblackfestival - Kemiyondo Coutinho IG > @kemi_yondo - Dennis Allen IG > @daallen2 - Hayley Spivey IG > @hay_lyly Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Watch Festival of the Body on the Road H! by Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. 2021-2022 Festival of the Body on the Road H! - Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Yokohama / Tokyo Road Dance Tour H stands for 'human', 'hope', 'homeless', and 'hurt'. Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! presented their works at eight venues, mostly public spaces, in Yokohama and Tokyo, hoping that the increasing number of people living in poverty and suffering due to the COVID-19 pandemic will regain their abundant physical and mental health, and hope. In addition to the new dance performance “The Day of Nihilism”, the programme included film screenings, talks, workshops and exhibitions. * Some music has been replaced in the distribution. -------- Newcomer “H” Sokerissa!, led by Aoki Yuuki, is a unique dance company featuring actual homeless people. The members are naturally far from graceful as their backs have become stiff from years of sleeping on the streets. Still, those who consider dance to be fast, strong and skillful as in dance classes will have their notions overturned by the overwhelming presence of the dancers. What was once a body abandoned on the streets shrines through an earnest physicality unlike anywhere else. This video is an edited version of a street performance tour in Tokyo and Yokohama. It is distinguished by uncontrollable elements like the night view of the port and the rain-drenched park. Talks offered along the way by Aoki and the performers will help viewers understand this unique group. Dancing is not just the providence of the young and beautiful. The mission of contemporary dance is to rediscover the possibilities that are abandoned as dance techniques become more sophisticated. One essence of this is recorded in this video. (Written by NORIKOSHI Takao) -------- The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Festival of the Body on the Road H! At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Dance, Documentary This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks. About The Film Country Japan Language Japanese (with English / Chinese / French / Spanish / Japanese subtitles) Running Time 68 minutes Year of Release 2023 2021-2022 Festival of the Body on the Road H! - Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Yokohama / Tokyo Road Dance Tour H stands for 'human', 'hope', 'homeless', and 'hurt'. Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! presented their works at eight venues, mostly public spaces, in Yokohama and Tokyo, hoping that the increasing number of people living in poverty and suffering due to the COVID-19 pandemic will regain their abundant physical and mental health, and hope. In addition to the new dance performance “The Day of Nihilism”, the programme included film screenings, talks, workshops and exhibitions. * Some music has been replaced in the distribution. -------- Newcomer “H” Sokerissa!, led by Aoki Yuuki, is a unique dance company featuring actual homeless people. The members are naturally far from graceful as their backs have become stiff from years of sleeping on the streets. Still, those who consider dance to be fast, strong and skillful as in dance classes will have their notions overturned by the overwhelming presence of the dancers. What was once a body abandoned on the streets shrines through an earnest physicality unlike anywhere else. This video is an edited version of a street performance tour in Tokyo and Yokohama. It is distinguished by uncontrollable elements like the night view of the port and the rain-drenched park. Talks offered along the way by Aoki and the performers will help viewers understand this unique group. Dancing is not just the providence of the young and beautiful. The mission of contemporary dance is to rediscover the possibilities that are abandoned as dance techniques become more sophisticated. One essence of this is recorded in this video. (Written by NORIKOSHI Takao) -------- ＜Performance Credits＞ Directed by AOKI Yuuki Performers：KOISO Matsuyoshi, HIRAKAWA Shuichiro, ITO Haruo, WATANABE Yoshiharu, NISHI Tokuchika, YAMASHITA Koji, HAMAOKA Teppei, AOKI Yuuki Collaborated with TERAO Saho, WATANABE Atsushi（I’m here project）, NISHIHARA Nao, TAGUCHI Randy Scenic Design by NISHIHARA Nao, AOKI Yuuki Sound Design by CODA Noriaki Lighting Design by OVER Cage（RYU） Stage Managers : KAWAGUCHI Makoto（Le Rayon Vert）, MITSU Hisashi Technical Cooperation: MITSU Hisashi, ROSHI (Sunagumi), MORI Noriyuki Photo by OKAMOTO Chihiro, OGIWARA Rakutaro Video Documentation and Editing : LAND FES Producer : KUREMIYA Yurika Organized by AOKIKAKU ＜Film Credits＞ Presented by: The Japan Foundation (JF) In cooperation with EPAD ＜Subtitling Credits＞ Multilingual subtitling： Supported by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, Goverment of Japan through the Japan Arts Council Chinese Translation (Simplified): Shu LIN Chinese Translation (Traditional): SWSG English Translation: YAMAGATA Mirei French Translation: Edouard Brena Spanish Translation: David TARANCO About The Artist(s) Newcomer H Sokerissa! is a dance group consisting of members with experience living on the streets. Dancer/choreographer Aoki Yuuki began recruiting participants in 2005 and held the group’s first performance in 2007. To date, more than 40 people who have previously lived on the streets have joined a total of nearly 150 performances. The group participated in 2016 in Celebra's "With One Voice", the official cultural program of the Rio Olympics. It won the Konica Minolta Social Design Award 2016 Grand Prix. A documentary film called Dancing Homeless that followed their activities won acclaim nationwide. Get in touch with the artist(s) aokikaku2021@gmail.com and follow them on social media https://sokerissa.net/ , https://www.facebook.com/SOKERISSA , https://www.instagram.com/sokerissayuukiaoki/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

JULIA JARCHO presents Throw Yourself Away: Writing and Masochism at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 Throw Yourself Away: Writing and Masochism JULIA JARCHO 3-3:50 pm Saturday, October 19, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall RSVP Celebrated poet and critic Michael Robbins (Walkman , Alien vs. Predator ) will join Jarcho to read and discuss her new book and how to be a pervert in writing. Throw Yourself Away proposes that we can best understand literature’s relationship to sex through a renewed focus on masochism. In a series of readings that engage American and European works of fiction, drama, and theory from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, Jarcho argues that these works conceive writing itself as masochistic, and masochism as sexuality enacted in writing—and that THEATER has played a central role in modern erotic fantasies of the literary. 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). Julia Jarcho is a writer, theater artist, and scholar. She puts on her plays with the NYC company Minor Theater. They include Marie It's Time , Pathetic, The Terrifying, Dreamless Land, Every Angel Is Brutal , and Grimly Handsome . Other books: Minor Theater: Three Plays (53rd State Press) and Writing and the Modern Stage: Theater beyond Drama (Cambridge University Press). She is the head of MFA playwriting at Brown. Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

PRELUDE Artist & Panellist Information Fill in your performance details for the Prelude 2023 festival organized by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center. 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 2023 October across New York City At the Segal Center: Oct 11-14, 16, 19 For more details and questions, contact: Ann Kreitman Co-Producer, PRELUDE '23 ann4prelude@gmail.com 847-471-1550 Tayler Everts Co-Producer, PRELUDE '23 tayler4prelude@gmail.com 480-313-2595 Your Name Your Email Address Your Title, Organization / Affliation Your Bio Your / Organization Links (Website, Social Media) Your Headshot (Please include credits in file name) Upload File Submit Thank you for submitting your information. We will be in touch soon!

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 Report from Basel By Marvin Carlson Published: November 25, 2024 Download Article as PDF Basel, Switzerland, is surely not widely thought of as a major European theatre center, but each time I have visited it I have been impressed by the variety and quality of the work presented there, which regularly includes productions, even premieres, by some of the best known European directors. This was certainly the case when I visited the first week in May of 2024, where I saw four productions remarkable in their range and artistic achievement. The municipal Theater Basel is Switzerland’s largest venue offering theatre, opera and ballet and follows the standard European practice of rotating repertory, so I was able to see all of these productions in this single massive structure, although in different internal spaces. The theatre’s cultural centrality is reinforced by a large and complex fountain in front of its monumental main entrance, the work of Basel’s favorite native artist, the ingenious and whimsical Jean Tinguley. In the 2020/21 season the administration of Theatre Basel underwent a major restructuring. Benedikt von Peter, who had been in change of all three branches of the theatre, became manager only of the opera, while the ballet continued under the direction of Richard Wherlock, formerly von Peter’s subordinate. Most radical was the change in the drama sector, where a team of four were announced as of equal authority by the theatre, although the same report noted that “the central artistic signature” of the group would be that of Antú Romero Nunes, formerly the in-house director at the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg, one of Germany’s leading houses. There in 2018 his production of The Odyssey was invited to Germany’s most prestigious festival, the Berlin Theatertreffen, and in his third season in Basel, Nunes was invited again, for his Midsummer Night’s Dream, clearly establishing him among the leading contemporary German directors. Although I had not seen either of these two productions, awareness of them made me very eager to see Nunes’ new production of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera my first evening in Basel. I was certainly not disappointed. It was one of the most original interpretations of this often revived piece I have seen, and surprisingly not because of its departures from Brecht but, on the contrary, by pushing Brechtian challenges to conventional theatre far beyond what most “Brechtian” stagings attempt. The tone of the production was set at the very beginning, when the audience was confronted with a totally empty dark space, not a touch of theatrical illusion visible. Into this space strolled a familiar, slightly stooped figure, wearing blue worker’s uniform with matching peaked hat and smoking a cigar. Even before he began to speak in a distinctive Augsburg accent, the audience applauded him as Bertolt Brecht, who acknowledged the identification and warned that the empty stage was an indication that the audience were going to have to put their imaginations to work and those unwilling to accept this “epic” approach might as well go home. In fact “Brecht” pulled out a rack with a few costumes on it to represent Peachum’s shop, and informed us of the invisible elements we must imagine. Indeed the only regularly appearing scenic element were a group of long neon lights, sometimes bright sometimes barely seen, which hovered above the actor to suggest ceilings or, upright, surrounded them to suggest various enclosures. Throughout the production written stage descriptions were regularly recited instead of being shown, and other stage directions indicating movements or reading of lines were similarly articulated. His general introduction over, “Brecht” announced: “Enter Peachum” and with a quick change of coat, became Peachum, one of a number of roles he would assume throughout the evening. This virtuosic actor, the remarkable Jörg Pohl, came with director Nunes from Hamburg and is now one of the four members of the directing board. If the production has a star, it is surely Pohl, but this term is really not applicable, since the company is a flexible ensemble all dressed in identical blue worker’s cap and jackets, occasionally covered with rough coats or removed to reveal body length white underwear. They switch roles freely, and anyone, male or female, may become Brecht, any other character, or an authorial voice. The plot outlines remain largely unchanged, but spoken material and songs are altered and moved about freely and side comments on the play or its presentation are frequent. In his opening speech, for example, as Peachum is explaining the tricks needed to get the public to part with its money, he compares his trade to that of the theatre, specifically reminding the audience of the expense of the seats they are occupying (Tickets in Theatre Basel run from $45 to $135, not shocking by Broadway standards but well above the average in Germany, where at a major theatre like the Deutsches Theater in Berlin seats run from $5 to $52). Although most of the words are Brecht’s, the cast feels free to experiment with readings—sometimes pausing, commenting on the line or the character, or repeating a scene to stress a particular point. From time to time a particular theatrical choice is explained, as when one actor suddenly remarks: “At this moment, before the main character is established, we add a retardant moment to increase the tension.” And often, quite unexpectedly, one of the cast will temporarily “become” Brecht, by producing the iconic jacket, cigar and slightly stooped posture, in order to make his own observations on the passing show. Music is provided by an eight piece live band led by trumpeter Anita Wälti, and although they beautifully captured the Kurt Weill tone, they, unlike the actors, were visually de-emphasized, mostly appearing at the back of the stage in semi-darkness and clouds of fog. Moreover the same sort of liberties were taken with the Weill score as with the Brecht text. The two most famous songs in the show—Mack’s Ballad and Jenny’s Pirate Song, were present, but far from their usual place and in much reduced versions, and similar changes were made in the music throughout. Again the effect was to keep the audience, especially those familiar with the opera, continually finding their comfortable expectations thwarted and challenged. Nowhere was this more evident than in the remarkable closing sequence. Mackie Messer, played by Basel actor Sven Schelker, sings his powerful final Ballad, in which he asks for general forgiveness. Anyone with reasonable knowledge of the play knows the shape of the following famous conclusion. Mackie ascends the scaffold and the waiting noose, but at the last possible moment Peachem stops the play to explain that although hanging Macheath would be the Christian thing to do, out of consideration for the audience’s feelings another ending will be substituted. Then comes the spectacular finale, the most famous deus ex machina in the modern theatre. A victorious messenger arrives on horseback to deliver a letter from the Queen pardoning Macheath and heaping honors upon him. Mackie and others exult in song, but Peachum and others in a closing chorus remind us that in real time, unlike in opera, happy endings are not common, and advise a more cautionary view of the world. In the Nunes production, the curtain abruptly and surprisingly closes immediately after Mackie’s forgiveness ballad, and the house lights go up. The astonished audience assumes that Nunes has taken the radical step of eliminating the calculatedly ridiculous happy ending and leaving Mack to his just fate. Hearty applause begins, but is immediately stopped by Peachum appearing from behind the curtains to announce that most of the company feel that the audience may feel cheated by being deprived of the famous traditional ending and so it will be offered for those who wish to remain. Indeed, the curtains part to reveal the usual almost empty stage except for the neon lights faintly gleaming above, and the blue clad actors lined up to present the closing sequence. When they come to the announcement of the victorious messenger, the neon lights blaze brightly and the orchestra sounds out in triumph, but no messenger appears, only a pathetic stuffed loose-limbed doll horse, about three feet long, triumphantly waved by a cast member at the end of the line. Once again, Peachum, at the other end, angrily interrupts, saying that this awkward nod to tradition was worse that nothing at all, and that if they were going to present the messenger scene at all it must be impressively done. Again the curtain closes and immediately reopens with lights and music blazing forth and a spectacular live white horse with richly festooned rider and cortege moving onstage to do the final scene. One more surprise awaited, however, when the curtain closed again on the play’s traditional ending, it opened for curtain calls, always elaborate in the German-speaking theatre. The entire cast had remove the blue worker’s aprons and caps they had worn for most of the evening, and appeared for the first time in a dazzling array of individualized costumes, copies in fact of the costumes of the first production of The Threepenny Opera in Berlin in 1928. After an evening of visual minimalism, this stunning tableau, in addition to its final reference to the operations of theatre itself, proved in fact as dazzling, and perhaps even more memorable, than the Queen’s messenger himself. Threepenny Opera. Photo © Inco Hoehn The following evening I returned to the theatre to see what turned out to be the most powerful production of my visit to Basel, a staging of Mozart’s Requiem by one of Europe’s most imaginative directors, Romeo Castelucci. The production opened to standing ovations in the festivals of Aix-en-Province in 2019 and Adelaide in 2020. Basel was scheduled to follow, but Covid intervened, and the much anticipated production did not reach Basel until 2024, though its silencing and resurrection added another powerful symbolic level to this already densely layered experience. Castellucci and his musical director, Raphäel Pichon, have created a radically innovating interpretation of one of the most family works in the Western musical canon. Perhaps taking his cue from the fact that Mozart left the work incomplete and it was finished by his student Süssmeyer, Pichon has woven together a collection of other related musical pieces, including Gregorian chants, other religious music by Mozart, and Masonic hymns. The resulting text is projected as supertitles in Latin, German and English. These translations often provide little explanation of the specific images on stage, however, which depart far more radically from the tonality of the original than do the arrangements of Pichon. In his production notes, Castellucci calls the work particularly suited for contemporary times, tormented by the idea of extinction both of us as individuals, of our species, and perhaps of our planet itself. This idea is most clearly and powerfully seen in one of the production’s most memorable features. Throughout the evening names are projected on the rear wall of the stage, changing every few seconds. For a considerable time these were unfamiliar Latin names, like Dunleosteos Belgicus or Panxiosteur ocullus, but at last a series of more familiar names appeared—Stegosaurus, Brontosaurus, Tyrannisaurus—and we realized we were seeing a chronicle of extinctions. Nor was this confined to plants and animals—as man appeared, his departed creations were added to the list, extinct languages, disappeared cities and monuments, lost writings and works of art. As the evening went on so the list inexorably drew closer to the present--Nagasaki, Chernobyl, Fukushima—and at last evoked a future in which even the present theatre and its audience must inevitably join the ever extending list. It formed a deeply moving and disturbing visual grounding for the production. Requiem Romeo Castellucci. Photo © Luciano Romano In front of this constantly changing roll, however, Castellucci developed a highly complex performance structure that in part reinforced and in part worked in counterpoint to the pain and suffering suggested by the music and projections. Running parallel to themes of mourning, anxiety and death, Castellucci also celebrated the continual counter-process of rebirth and renewal. His production begins with a sequence closely fitting the musical theme. In a black void, an elderly woman places a rose in a base, climbs into an isolated simple bed, and dies. Castellucchi however takes this end as a beginning, when, in the course of the evening, we will follow this woman backward, into middle age, youth, childhood and infancy, and as the litany of extinction rolls inexorably in the background, the stage is filled with the glories of her (and all human) life. The black background is torn away and replaced with a large white curtain. A stunning sequence follows, beginning with the chorus point brightly colored paints over the youthful incarnation of the woman who opened the show. She is then lifted by ropes up to serve as the central element in the white background, as the chorus surrounds her suspended figure with bright splashes of paint of all colors. The chorus itself remains onstage except for the opening and closing scenes, beginning in regular dress, then changing to a series of traditional folk costumes, and at the end, naked except for loosely wrapped shrouds. Through the major central part of the production they clearly represent the ongoing life force of the countryside, moving ,primarily in circle dances from many traditions, including an inevitable maypole. Trees and flowers burst up among them. Inevitably, however, the dances end. The trees and flowers disappear and the chorus obliterates the bright colors behind them by splashing black paint across them. A pile of soil pours onto the stage and as the lights fade to a low level, is spread out to cover the white stage floor by the actors, who have removed their festive clothes and now are either nude or loosely wrapped in shrouds. When at last they rest quietly in an indistinct pile of soil, bodies, and shrouds, the back of the stage slowly begins to rise and this mixture of material slowly slides forward to create a mound of refuse downstage. The old woman whose death opened the evening appears with her three younger avatars, gently place a young baby on the mound and leave. Offstage a boy treble sings Mozart’s In Paradisum, “May the angels lead you into paradise.” Silence follows, broken only by the baby’s contended gurgles as the curtain slowly lowers on this final image of hope and rebirth in the very face of death. For my third evening I returned to the Theater Basel, but to a different performance space there, the medium-sized Schauspielhaus (450 seats as opposed to 860 in the main house and 320 in the small experimental stage). The production was Maxim Gorki’s Summerfolk, a familiar work on the German stage, but rarely seen in the United States. The play has a very Chekhovian feel and is generally regarded to have been inspired by Chekhov. Chekhov in fact died in 1904, the same year Summerfolk appeared. Chekov’s final play, The Cherry Orchard, with a tonality and characters especially close to those Chekov used. Summerfolk has been often considered a kind of sequel to The Cherry Orchard, though the Chekhovian echoes must have come from earlier plays. While the Chekhov play focuses upon the departure (literally and symbolically) of the old social order represented by the Renevskaya family, that of Gorki takes place a few years later, when the materialistic and pragmatic generation represented in The Cherry Orchard by Lopahin have come to power. Each summer they gather at the summer house of one of their number, presumably to relax and enjoy this vacation from the pressures of the business world, but actually to pass the time in empty discussion, tedious quarreling and flirting, and lamenting the pointlessness and joylessness of their empty lives. In the background, the audience, knows, the impending revolution will sweep all this away. This production has a special relevance in the career of director Stephan Pucher. After launching his career with a series of pop and disco-oriented works, much influenced by the Gob Squad, he achieved his first major success with a radical reworking of a classic text, which has been his major type of work since. This first triumph was his reworking of The Cherry Orchard in 1999, created in Theater Basel. Since then he has premiered only two other productions in this theatre, Uncle Vanya in 2005 and Faust I in 2012. Summerfolk, just 25 years after his first major success with the closely related Cherry Orchard at this same theatre, thus seems a kind of homecoming. In addition to a particular fondness for Chekhov (Pucher’s first invitation to the prestigious Berlin Theatertreffn was with his 2001 The Seagull, created in Zurich), Pucher has from the beginning been one of the German directors especially interested in experimenting with the combining of live action with video and digital technology. The unconventional ending of Pucher’s 1999 Cherry Orchard clearly indicates this and eerily anticipates the technological world of his current Summerfolk. In Chekov’s original, the dying Firs sits alone within the locked confines of the abandoned Renevskaya home. In the Pucher staging, two large doors opened upstage to reveal an electronic wasteland. The verdant cherry orchard dissolved into a frozen ice-glue tundra inhabited by the ghostly images of the departed family, still carrying on their empty and directionless activity. The opening scene of Summerfolk might almost be seen as a parodic variation on this unsettling conclusion. We see a healthy middle-aged couple ( Annika Meier and Jan Bluthardt) relaxing in front of a beautiful mountain landscape—but immediately recognize it as a bit too beautiful, and indeed the landscape is a video projection with the glowing colors of a TV travel advertisement, and even the three-dimensional scenic elements surrounding the couple suggest advertising stage properties. The theatricalized summer wear they display has elements of both the early twentieth century and current fashion, since Puchner has moved the play from pre-revolutionary Russia to the modern world of international capitalism. Summerfolk. Photo © LuziaHunziker The basic situation remains unchanged, a group of nouveaux riches, disappointed by the lack of fulfillment in their current lifestyles, withdraw to a country retreat, where they find not relief but an even keener awareness of the emptiness and lack of direction in their lives. Pucher’s contemporary summerfolk assume that the emptiness they feel in their everyday live is caused by their growing reliance upon non-human technology—cell phones, video games, the internet, and ultimately AI. The retreat to which they withdraw promises to provide relief from these forces specifically bans cellphones and internet access, to provide the direct experience of nature. The difficulty of finding such a retreat is suggested by Pucher locating it in Davos, one of Switzerland’s most popular (and crowded) Alpine resort areas, and equally significantly, the regular meeting place of the World Economic Forum. The impossibility of escaping contemporary technology is a central theme of both text and staging. Almost every character has a hidden presumably banned cellphone hidden somewhere about the set, and the resort itself attempts to reinforce its ban on technological devices by technological means, including hidden cameras and even more intrusive video projections about current information of presumed interest which are created by rather robotic announcers in a small isolated area to the side of the stage, and appear on the central screen. The operations of this system, and its frequently malfunctioning, are the continuing preoccupation of the arrogant but inept local engineer, very amusingly portrayed by Ueli Jaeggi, constantly complaining to the audience of the stupidity and pointlessness of his tasks. The other major character Pucher adds to his band of Swiss escapists is Rick Roaming (Julian Anatol Schneider), a half-demented American visitor to the resort who is already much more seriously affected by the current digital world than his Swiss companions. Neither he nor they are entirely sure whether he is an actual computer addict or his avatar which exists both in and out of the game. In any case, Rick is convinced that he is threatened with death by his digital foes, and frantically is attempting to construct a coil gun to defend himself. Eventually is appears that he (or his avatar) is indeed killed, but since the visual background of the stage shifts continually between the idyllic landscapes of Alpine vistas, in which the actors from time to time appear, official but garbled video announcements from the resort staff, apparent video interventions from the resort engineering center airing the grievances of the engineer, and digitalized segments of Rick’s ongoing Star War type battles with his mechanized adversaries, it becomes increasingly unclear to both audience and characters whether the world in which they are operating is real or digital. Perhaps not only Rick but all of them are in fact AI figures. Desperately they seek a way to discover which is the truth and decide that the question “What do you desire?” is reportedly one that computer intelligence cannot answer but living humans can. In fact none of the characters are able to provide a satisfactory response to this test, and so we are they are left to wonder whether they are all in fact empty forms of AI or whether they have essentially become such by their immersion in the new technological world. Clearly, as most reviewers were quick to admit, this concern is far from Gorki, despite the well-known socialist sympathies of translator and adaptor Dietmar Dath, but German directors like Pucher have long turned classic texts in radical new directions to make, as this production clearly does, surprising new insights into our most pressing cultural concerns. For my final evening in Basel I returned to the major house for a new production by one of my favorite modern directors, Herbert Fritsch, who has defied the traditional view of a lack of humor in the German dramatic tradition by establishing himself as the leading director of farce in Europe today. I first encountered Fritsch’s dazzling and over the top visual and physical theatre in 2011 when he was first invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen, with a stunning and hilarious version of Ibsen’s Doll House played in the grotesquely exaggerated style of a gothic horror film. Since then I have followed his work whenever possible, as he continued to put his own particular spin on classical authors like Dürrenmatt and Molière and, to my mind, even more successfully in his own works (like the well-known Murmel, Murmel, with an eighty minute text composed only of those words—the German for “murmer, murmer”). Although internationally his work in theatre is most frequently compared with the great French farce writers of the late twentieth century, so far Fritsch has only staged two of their works, both by Eugene Labiche, The Affair in the Rue de Lourcine in 2010 and the current Italian Straw Hat in Basel. Seeing Fritsch’s interpretation of this masterpiece of modern farce was one of the major reasons for my choosing Basel for this European excursion. Perhaps my expectations were too high, because although I certainly found the evening entertaining, and occasionally hilarious, I did not consider it as a whole among the director’s best works. All the elements of successful farce were there—the constant frenetic movement, including of course the continual slamming of doors, the elaborate physical routines based on the manipulation of physical objects like hats, glasses, flowers, and walking sticks, the repeated handstands, pratfalls, and inadvertent collisions and near collisions. Music is almost always an important part of a Fritsch production, and that promised to be the case here, with the play advertised as an Opera, co-produced by the Komische Oper of Berlin, and with lyrics and a score by a cultural icon with an even larger following than that of Fritsch, the rock-pop star Herbert Grönemeyer. The plot, however and even the songs, often tended to disappear in the activity, but that did not seem to me a great loss. Grönemeyer’s lyrics were rather banal (though not much less so than the originals) and as for the plot, it is largely an excuse for all the confusions and rushing about in search of the rather ridiculous object which gives the play its name (here changed from the French original [and traditional English and German translations] An Italian Straw Hat, to the admittedly somewhat more active and comic [at least in German] Pferd frisst Hut [Horse Eats Hat]). Pferd Frisst Hut. Photo © Thomas Aurin Fritsch’s company are virtuosic actors, acrobats and musicians, and although the latter skills were less used here than in some pieces, the stage provided essentially a machine for the display of their physical abilities and endurance. Designer Oscar Meteo Grunert has created essentially a colorful open box with side walls consisting mostly of doors (actually five on each side) and at the back center, a semi-circular bright yellow platform with five steps leading up to a revolving door. All the doors and the spaces between provide locations for every sort of physical activity, with actors constantly running into doors and walls, running up and sliding down stairs, and performing complicated routines around the revolving elements. The familiar saying that the manipulation of doors is the heart of French farce was never more imaginatively developed than here. The Basel chorus, which plays the confused wedding party running about in search of the elusive hat, moves well and sings nicely but they lack the virtuosic skills that Fritsch likes to encourage and which are stunningly displayed in the leading actors, especially the harassed protagonist Fadinard (Christopher Nell). In all, despite the ingenuity of Fritsch and his company, the three hour production , entertaining as it often is, is also rather exhausting. The Threepenny Opera. Photo © Ingo Hoehn Image Credits: Article References References About the author(s) Marvin Carlson is Sidney E. Cohn Distinguished Professor of Theatre, Comparative Literature, and Middle Eastern Studies at the Graduate Centre, CUNY. He earned a PhD in Drama and Theatre from Cornell University (1961), where he also taught for a number of years. Marvin has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens, Greece, the ATHE Career Achievement Award, the ASTR Distinguished Scholarship Award, the Bernard Hewitt prize, the George Jean Nathan Award, the Calloway Prize, the George Freedley Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the founding editor of the journal Western European Stages and the author of over two hundred scholarly articles and fifteen books that have been translated into fourteen languages. His most recent books are Ten Thousand Nights: Highlights from 50 Years of Theatre-Going (2017) and Hamlet's Shattered Mirror: Theatre and the Real (2016). 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.

A green city-wide pop-up-park festival of creative, innovative, and inspiring environmental art works in the boroughs of New York City. Free. Outdoors. Off-grid. No electricity. Rain or shine. Bridge Matter / The Reach Bridge Matter / The Reach Brooklyn is Not a Sacrifice Zone Brooklyn is Not a Sacrifice Zone Weather Weather Bridge Matter / The Reach Bridge Matter / The Reach 1/13 Prelude in the Parks performances for the planet SEE SCHEDULE FREE | OUTDOORS | OFF-GRID/NO ELECTRICITY | RAIN OR SHINE A green city-wide pop-up parks festival of creative, innovative, and inspiring environmental art-works by artists addressing environmental & climate change issues. Co-Curated by Frank Hentschker & Robin Schatell / Mov!ngCulture Projects; The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at The Graduate Center CUNY. June 7th @ 6pm, June 8th & 9th @ 3pm What's On: Performance I Dance I Music I Theatre I 13 Presentations Where It's Happening: Parks & Gardens City-Wide: Brooklyn, Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island – all 5 Boroughs Partners: Bronx River Community Garden; Eastside Outside Community Garden; Manhattan , Hunters Point Park Alliance/Queens ; ID Studio Theater/Bronx ; Social Practice CUNY; Newtown Creek Alliance/Brooklyn ; Roc-A-Natural Cultural Foundation/Staten Island ; Summer on the Hudson/Riverside Park Conservancy/Manhattan What's On Performance I Dance I Music I Theatre I 13 Presentations in 5 Boroughs Friday, June 7 - All performances @ 6pm Brooklyn Pliable Futures Strike Anywhere Performance Ensemble Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn Manhattan Devrai (Sacred Grove) Richard Move / MoveOpolis! Riverside Park, Manhattan Manhattan Bridge Matter / The Reach Kinesis Project dance theatre Inwood Hill Park, Gaelic Field, Manhattan Queens Guinean Environmental Stewardship Traditions Sidiki Conde and Tokounou Dance Company Hunter’s Point South Park, Queens Saturday, June 8 - All performances @ 3pm Bronx Land Connections: Reflections with Dennis Dennis RedMoon Darkeem Bronx River Community Garden.,The Bronx Manhattan The Heat Will Kill Everything Keith Josef Adkins Riverside Park South, Manhattan Bronx Dance in Connection ID Studio Theater and Daniel Fetecua Barretto Point Park, Viele Avenue, The Bronx Staten Island Mixed Use | Cyn | M.A. Dennis | Manners and Respect | | Thomas Fucaloro | Tappen Park, Staten Island Brooklyn WATER RISES Artichoke Dance Company Newtown Creek Nature Walk, Kingsland Ave, Brooklyn Manhattan Community Poetry and Tea Tea, Arts & Culture Eastside Outside Community Garden, Manhattan Sunday, June 9 - All performances @ 3pm Brooklyn Brooklyn is Not a Sacrifice Zone Al Límite Collective Newtown Creek Nature Walk, Greenpoint Avenue, Brooklyn Brooklyn Resilience Thinking Walkscape Rafael de Balanzo Joue and Daniel Pravit Fethke Endale Arch, Prospect Park, Brooklyn Brooklyn Weather Anh Vo Brower Park, Prospect Place, Brooklyn Locations City-Wide: Brooklyn, Bronx, Manhattan, Queen Staten Island – all 5 Boroughs Meet The Team Robin Schatell Co-Curator Robin Schatell is a creative producer who works with artists, arts group, cultural and community organizations and city agencies to shape, design, develop, and organize creative visions for activating their public spaces with arts and cultural programming. Co-Founder , Mov!ng Culture Projects, Director of Museum Mile Festival for 20 years, Founder and Artistic Director of Riverside Park’s Summer on the Hudson Festival, Executive Director of River To River Festival, Director of Programming for Madison Square Parks’ Mad Sq Art program, Curator of Public Programs for the Van Alen Institute, Managing Director of Performance Space 122, and Ralph Lemon Company, Founder of The Puffin Room, Manhattan Community Board 3 Member, Contributing Cultural Writer for TheLoDownNYC.com. Gaurav Singh Nijjer Web and Digital Producer Gaurav Singh Nijjer is a theatre-maker, creative technologist and designer whose artistic works explore technology and media in live performance. He is one half of the Indian performing arts collective Kaivalya Plays, and also works as a freelance artist and arts manager with collectives in India and abroad, currently as Digital and Web Producer at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Centre CUNY. He is a former German Chancellor Fellow and a Chevening scholar. He trained at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. Apart from theatre, Gaurav also works as a freelance marketing, design and creative consultant for diverse organizations. Frank Hentschker Co-Curator Frank Hentschker, who holds a Ph.D. in theatre from the now legendary Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen, Germany, came to the Graduate Center in 2001 as program director for the Graduate Center’s Martin E. Segal Theatre Center and was appointed to the central doctoral faculty in theatre in 2009. Currently executive director and director of programs at the Segal Center, Hentschker has transformed the center into the nation’s leading forum for public programming in international and U.S. theatre and theatre studies; each year, he curates and produces more than forty events—staged readings, lecture-demonstrations, symposia, works-in-progress, and conversations with theatre scholars, theatrical luminaries, and emerging voices in the international, American, and New York theatre scenes. Among the vital events and series he founded at the Segal Center are the World Theatre Performance series; the annual fall PRELUDE festival, which features more than twenty New York–based theatre companies and playwrights; and the PEN World Voices Playwrights Series. Hentschker also led CUNY’s nineteen performing arts centers in founding the CUNY–Performing Arts Consortium (C–PAC), producing the consortium’s first joint festival in 2009. Hentschker edited the MESTC publications Jan Fabre: I Am A Mistake, Seven Works for the Theatre (2009) and New Plays from Spain (2013), and he served as president of the board of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art from 2005 to 2009. Before coming to the Graduate Center, Hentschker founded and directed DISCURS, the largest European student theatre festival existing today; he acted as Hamlet in Heiner Müller’s Hamletmaschine, directed by the playwright; performed in the Robert Wilson play The Forest (music by David Byrne); and worked as an assistant for Robert Wilson for many years. Producer, General Operations Manager Teresa Soraka Next Generation Fellow Nurit Chinn For queries, feedback and any more information get in touch with us at segalcenter@gmail.com

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 Berlin’s “Ten Remarkable Productions” Take the Stage in the 61st Berliner Theatertreffen. By Steve Earnest Published: November 25, 2024 Download Article as PDF The 61st Theatertreffen was the first under the new artistic leadership of Nora Hertlein-Hull, who was appointed on Jan 1, 2024. Numerous changes had taken place in Berlin’s largest and most prestigious theatre festival between 2018 and 2022, including the 50% quota of female directors in 2020 and a complete conversion to mediated viewings during the COVID pandemic crisis. Under the leadership of Yvonne Budenholzer, the festival had achieved a greater sense of inclusion, not only in the nature and style of the productions, but also for those who created and presented the works as well as the characters realized in the works. The recently adjusted rules for selection allowed works that may not have been previously considered a chance to be one of the “Ten Remarkable Productions” chosen by the panel of jurors. The Theatertreffen once again used the Festspielhaus as the central location for the bulk of the performances, with the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, the Volksbühne am Rosa Luxembourg Platz and the Hans Otto Theatre in Potsdam as the other locations for performances. Numbers of performances were kept relatively low again this year as only a few of the invited productions played more than five performances. For example, Nathan the Wise played only two performances and Overweight, Unimportant, and Out of Shape only had three showings. Several productions were seen as many as six times and media coverage aided in the visibility of the Theatertreffen. Four of the invited works were made available on ZBF, again providing a great deal of access to a large population outside of Berlin. Extra Life was a production of DACM/Company Gisele Vienne and listed a total of twenty-one producing partners from numerous countries including Italy, France, Germany and the Netherlands. The only work to play in the Grosses Haus located on the Hans Otto Theatre “compound,” Extra Life centered around the lives of two siblings who recounted and relived critical moments of their lives, including episodes of sexual abuse by an undisclosed family member. Speaking mainly in non-sequitur and poetic reflection, they eventually emerged from their parked vehicle and began to advance into a dreamscape, created by abstract sound and lighting. At one point they were encountered by another figure – a barely visible and unidentified figure. As the work progressed the characters interaction with the third figure shifted into a slow motion, light enhanced movement sequence that defies verbal explanation. Vienne’s slow-motion choreography attempted to blend with numerous elements of light, stage fog, prisms and other elements designed to create new spaces on stage – spaces that (in her words) release the horror and pain experienced by the siblings. The intense slow-motion movement of the siblings was combined with a series of rotating laser style lights whose purpose was to redefine the interior space of the theatre. The lights created numerous internal partitions that became shared spaces between audience and the two performers in timed sequences. The effects used in this performance were extraordinary, but in many ways Extra Life was a highly unusual selection for this festival given the extremely minimal text and considerable focus on the creation of an internal space in which shattering life experiences can be manipulated and felt in theatrical space. An important layer to the production was the original musical design and soundscapes were provided by Caterina Barbieri and Adrien Michel. The resulting experience had the overall effect of a dreamscape defined by a mixture of movement, sound, lights and minimal text. Theater HORA actors and puppets join with actors from Schauspielhaus Zurich in Riesenhaft in Mittelerde Riesenhaft in Mittelerde , a devised retelling of The Lord of the Rings was presented by Theater HORA, Das Helmi Puppentheater and Schauspielhaus Zurich. Directed by a team of four – Nicolas Stemann, Stephan Stock, Florian Loycke and Cora Frost – the work was developed with a team of twenty-four actors and twelve onstage technicians (with about ten more offstage) as the work involved multiple cameras capturing the action and sending it to one of five projection screens. The entire space, the Second Stage of the Festspielhaus had been converted into a multi-stage performance site, featuring projection screens, three stages (one was movable), and numerous other pathways on which vehicles were used to move the action throughout the space. A small orchestra and chorus were included in the performance as were two functioning service areas for bar service and bathroom facilities. The duration of the performance was just under four hours. Co-director Stephan Stock was artistic director of HORA Zurich, Switzerland’s largest and most prominent inclusive theatre company. Twelve members of the inclusive theatre company were paired with twelve members of Schauspielhaus Zurich to form the company of Riesenhaft in Mittelerde . Though the mission of HORA had been slightly altered due to budget cuts, the nature of the student’s participation in HORA projects includes the study of many subjects that can be considered “pop-culture,” and because of the worldwide popularity of the Lord of the Rings films, the Tolkien legend was included in the curriculum. Many of the student actors in this production considered themselves to be experts or superfans in the realm of Lord of the Rings trivia. Prior to the performance each student performer gave a brief (and often moving) testimony regarding the twelve-month journey with their particular role, the skills they learned along the way, how the role had influenced their lives and what they would take away from the performance as they moved forward in their lives and careers. Captured on video and broadcast over all five screens this opening moment set the tone for the journey that would take place in the production. Naturally, only a fraction of the events from the epic story could be realized in this four-hour time span, but the company presented a sequence of scenes to establish the forces of good fighting the forces of evil, battle scenes of both triumph and loss and the all-important scenes regarding possession of the ring itself. Many scenes were highly physical in nature (with consideration for the actors’ limitations) and utilized a “Monty Python-esque” brand of physical comedy. Many prerecorded sequences were also employed to enhance the established visual aesthetic. Life sized puppets, often manipulated by the HORA students, added to the visual spectacle of the work. Riesenhaft in Mittelerde was without doubt a model performance for the 21st Century. The mixture of the HORA student population and seasoned actors from Schauspielhaus Zurich presented in festival atmosphere, and combined with the use of puppets and multimedia elevated the event to a grand spectacle rarely seen in the world of live performance. The individual performances given by all involved achieved a powerful level of authenticity as the highly physical demands of each scene were supplemented by the life investment of the HORA students, who had practically adopted the world of the play as their primary existence. The framing of the work, however, allowed them to step back outside of the play at the end and interact with the audience while saying goodbye to the onstage world of Tolkien. Vaterlosen , based on Chekov’s novel Platanov was produced by München Kammerspiele with stage direction by Jette Steckel, scenic design by Florian Lösche and costumes by Pauline Hüners. The production was realized on the Grosse Bühne of the Festspielhaus complex. Lösche’s vast stage design for Vaterlosen was dominated by the use of hundreds of flexible metal rods inserted into the stage floor in order to create the appearance of something like an immense field of grain. Rear lighting and projections supplemented by basic stage furniture elements made up the minimalist design as space was further defined by light and sound. The play takes place at Anna Petrovna’s country estate where Platonov, a retired school master, manages to awaken the sexual fantasies of three women in one setting. Steckel’s somewhat epic approach included a unique element borrowed from the world of network television. Combined live and video sequences entitled “Dad Men Talking” featured prominent Volksbühne dramaturg Carl Hegemann along with Martin Weigel, a university professor, who engaged in summarizing what had taken place in the work up to that point. Like shows such as “Dead Man Talking” and the similar commentary found for Netflx series Breaking Bad , the commentary really existed on the margins of what was taking place in the story and had more of the “trashy tabloid” feel. As is so often the case with exemplary works of the German stage, primary emphasis was on the human form. Steckel’s human compositions involved a number of scenes that involved Platonov and one of the three women engaged in simulated sex, stood naked in the rain and numerous other erotic moments. However the most memorable physical scene occurred as Platanov, alone on stage, began to uproot the steel rods used as scenery and thrust them underneath his clothing, attaching them to his body – first two poles inserted behind him into the legs of his pants, followed by a third and forth pole inserted across his back through his arm sleeves and then several more poles strategically aligned to exaggerate his physical body, yet at the same time placed severe movement limitations on his ability to engage in simple movements. Because the poles were somewhat flexible (though not limp by any means) some movement and bending was possible. After inserting around ten poles into various areas of his costumed body, Platanov attempted to move around the stage and engage in simple activities, all rendered nearly impossible by the poles. At one point he was able to actually bend over and pick up a glass of beer which resulted in enthusiastic applause from the highly engaged audience. This silent, movement only scene occurred midway through the work and appeared to serve as a visual metaphor for Platonov’s life circumstances and the romantic choices that began to ensnare him. Marina Galic, Stefan Hunstein and Jens Harzer in Schauspielhaus Bochum’s Macbeth . The fourth invited production was Shakespeare’s Macbeth , produced by Schauspielhaus Bochum. Directed by the acclaimed Dutch director Johan Simons, also the company’s artistic director, Macbeth was staged with only three actors – Marina Galic, Jens Harzer and Stefan Hunstein, and utilized a mixture of Shakespeare’s text, some freely adapted textual sequences and some areas of post dramatic narrative that commented on the play’s action from a contemporary perspective. The three actors were relentless in their approaches to over thirty characters. Naturally, the witch scenes provided the central framework for the piece while most other scenes were easily framed with one to three actors and with some exciting twists. For example, Lady Macbeth’s “Unsex Me” monologue was performed in the midst of what appeared to be a threesome; Macbeth’s well known “Dagger” speech done with bloody comic flair. Simons is well known for dark comedic interpretations and his work has been well represented at the Theatertreffen. Previous productions included München Kammerspiele productions of both Müller’s Anatomie Titus Fall of Rome (2004) and Holloubeq’s Elementarteilchen (2005) as well as Kasmir and Karoline AND from Schauspiel Koln in 2010. Artistic director since 2018, Schauspielhaus Bochum was recognized as theater company of the year by THEATER HEUTE in 2022. Simons work is generally characterized by a great deal of physicality and the use of dark clowning and makeup techniques. Falk Richter’s powerful autobiographical work The Silence was the first of two 2024 TT selections produced by the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin. The Silence is essentially a one man show as the narrator – playwright Richter as portrayed by Dimitrij Schaad – recounts his family life with particular emphasis on moments of “silence,” things that were not said, stories that could not be retold and memories that were too painful to recount. The Silence included video segments as Richter conducted interviews with several family members, including his mother. Also directed by Richter, most of the stories revolved around Richter’s relationship with his father, a prisoner of war from WWII and the difficulty of life with a father suffering from severe PTSD. As a young homosexual attempting to emerge from a closeted lifestyle, Richter’s sexuality had also drawn the ire of his father and greatly strained their already painful relationship. Richter noted how the difficulties he faced with his father were also present in his daily social life – he recounted being stalked by a gang of boys who were intent to harm him since his outer appearance suggested homosexuality to them. He recounted a difficult situation as he begged for help from an older woman as the gang moved in on him. He noted how the older woman turned away from him, refusing to offer any assistance for apparently the same reasons. Richter states in the text that he had only been able to break his own personal silence after the death of his father. Upon his death, all of the family silences were ended – the physical violence toward Richter and his mother, the many women (six total) with whom the father had past or ongoing relationships, and finally, the complete revelation of his sexuality. Playing the role of Richter, Schaad spent most of the performance speaking directly to the audience and successful revealed both the pain and humor of Richter’s life as portrayed in THE SILENCE. Including personal video sequences with actual family members added an element of authenticity to the work that approached docudrama. THE SILENCE, like several other works in the festival, included a solid mixture of actual real-life events (interviews) with simulated or “quoted” happenings. Richter has remained a key figure in the repertoire of the Schaubühne for more than a decade. Schlomi Shaban and musicians for Bucket List at Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz. Described by its creators as a “musical hallucination, Bucket List was another unique selection for the 61st Theatertreffen. Composer/Lyricist Schlomi Shaban and Director Yael Ronen had worked together for several years at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin before the development of Bucket List at the Schaubühne. Both Ronen and Shaban were established artists in Israel before their work at the Gorki and Bucket List was their first collaboration on a traditional book musical. The work featured a cast of four as well as a small combo of three musicians. Like Richter’s The Silence , Bucket List also dealt with painful memories as Daniel Regetz/Robert recounts his life, his childhood, love, and relationships all within the scope of an institutional study that is taking place regarding his case. Plagued by recurring PTSD-like symptoms Robert’s painful story was realized as series of vignettes; musical styles varied from standard musical theatre fare, tango, jazz and pop. The characters remained costumed in black throughout the work and numerous references to current and past Middle East clashes were included. One scene saw the characters bending over and pretending to lift and cradle imaginary babies who were casualties of world violence. Several performances of Bucket List were unfortunately marred by anti-Israel protesters as was the case with the pair’s previous collaboration THE SITUATION at Gorki Theatre in 2021. The seventh production, Roland Schimmelpfennig’s monodrama Laios , is the second of the playwright’s five-part series Anthropolis . Directed by Karin Beier with Voxi Bärenklau providing video sequences, Laios consists of a fictitious monologue (supported by ancient sources) by the father of Oedipus, Laios utilizes a complex dramaturgy based in the single perspective of a narrator who steps in and out of the role of Laius while describing the events leading up to his death at the hands of his son Oedipus. As the solo actor and narrator, Lina Beckmann flows in and out of various characters ranging from politicians and warriors to hunters and other figures. Characteristic of Schimmelpfennig’s style, the work was post dramatic narrative; masks were used to help define many of the characters but, as was the case with the hunter character, were also used as accessories to describie the often gory and horrific details of everyday life in Thebes. Beckman’s greatest skill lay in her ability to just describe the (often horrific) stories in a conversational manner and reserved special moments in the work to shift into “acting” or playing other characters than herself. As one of Germany’s most respected contemporary directors, Beier, invited to her third Theatertreffen, realized the work on a mostly bare stage with only Beckman and series of masks and musical instruments. Rarely produced on the German stage is Ubergewicht, Unwichtig, Unform ( Overweight, Unimportant and Out of Shape ) by Austrian playwright Werner Schwab. Since his death in 1996 there have been few realized stagings of Schwab’s controversial works due to extremely graphic content and questions regarding their suitability for live production. Directed by Rieke Süßkow and produced by Staatstheater Nürnberg, Ubergewicht is set in a rural bar as five locals and the bar lady engage in a regular evening of lower-class bar conversation when they all suddenly become fixated on a “beautiful couple” who refuse to engage in their pedestrian banter. After a series of minor verbal exchanges the scene turns physical and the locals eventually carve the couple up and consume them in a cannibalistic frenzy. Süßkow’s visual concept involved a quasi-dollhouse setting with the locals on the bottom floor and the beautiful couple above. The seven local characters were all aligned in frontal, single row display with no real scenery and very limited properties. The locals were costumed as inflatable sex toys, complete with active genitalia, which were used both in comic and serious (sometimes degrading or tortuous) moments. The cartoon like characters that populated Schwab’s world opening discussed their sexual ability and genitalia size, flashed and insulted other characters, and spoke in crude, nihilistic terms about life itself. For example, a married couple, Piggy and Bunny discuss their potential offspring. Piggy notes: “We’ll give the impression that the two of us (Piggy and Bunny) had been through a meatgrinder, and our little Piggybunny had been modeled out of the mincemeat.” Similar commentary, generally much more graphic, was scattered throughout the work but the delivery and style of the work. Company of Overweight, Unimportant and Out of Shape by Staatstheater Nurnberg. The ninth and final production included is Die Hundekot Attacke , a company developed work presented by Theaterhaus Jena in cooperation with Walter Bart and the theatre collective Wunderbaum from Rotterdam In the Netherlands. The devised work was company developed and based on a theme that they had used previously – a company of actors brainstorming about what might be good subject matter for a new work. The subject that was finally chosen by the company dealt with an actual incident involving artistic director Marco Goecke, Intendant of Hannover State Ballet who retaliated against Weibke Hüster, a Berlin critic who had written a scathing newspaper review about his work as a choreographer. The incident, that culminated with Goecke smearing dog faeces across the critics face, had electrified the German and European press. The suspension of the Intendant only further ignited free speech and violence prevention advocates Bart noted that the actual incident was one that was so controversial that many people refused to talk about it – he noted that these types of situations are actually perfect to use in the context of a devised play. The text of Die Hundekot Attacke was realized as a combination of text messages as well as personal conversations among the company – both as a collective and between individual members – that focused on the Goecke/ Hüster, incident. In the eventually realized stage play, the characters used the situation as a springboard to discuss other issues, like freedom of the press, societal as fiscal responsibility of state funded institutions, physical violence by males against females and other issues that were revealed through the process of devising. The formalized staging developed by the company required that the actors sit in a row of chairs lined across the stage with only spare movement used to connect certain characters with one another or to create mini sub-groupings. Die Hundekot Attacke ended with the characters joining together to perform a dance performance modeled on the work of Goecke. At the conclusion of the 61st Theatertreffen numerous awards were given – Die Hundekot Attacke garnered awards for “Production of the Year” as well as the “Best Young Actor” award that was given to Linde Dercon. Like Bucket List , Nathan the Wise , selected from the Salzbug Festival (also producer) was affected by the Israel/Hamas clash in Gaza and performances were limited to two considering the world tensions surrounding the play’s subject matter as well as the logistical problems of transporting Ulriche Rasche’s massive work to Berlin. Unfortunately, Berlin is a often utilized site for political displays and protests due in part to its long history of such events as well as its profile as an important world location in Europe. Still the majority of Theatertreffen performances played to completely or nearly full houses, making the television performances all the more necessary for Berliners unable to get a ticket (as was the case with Laios , which completely sold out). Around 16.900 visitors attended the 40 events hosted by the 19-day festival, the first edition under the direction of Hertlein-Hull. 13.869 people watched 29 performances of the ten remarkable productions at Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz and Hans Otto Theater Potsdam. The overall capacity utilization was 99,95 percent. Approximately 3040 visitors attended the free events: discussions, award ceremonies and the events of the conference BURNING ISSUES at the Festspielhaus. Via the media libraries of 3sat, ZDF and Berliner Festspiele, the recordings of the three “Starke Stücke“ and the further digital offerings achieved over 39,000 views in the period from 2 to 20 May. Under Hull’s leadership a new format has been proposed and the new title would be Ten Treffen (meetings or encounters); a series of ten different transdisciplinary formats of encounters which take place during the entire period of the festival in a variety of formats and include both new events and already existing elements of the festival. This new format would be in force for the 2025 festival and, while it would not affect the selection process of the productions, would help shape the nature of the overall event moving forward. Image Credits: Article References References About the author(s) Steve Earnest is a Professor of Theatre at Coastal. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Nanjing, China during the 2019 – 2020 academic year where he taught and directed works in Shakespeare and Musical Theatre. A member of SAG-AFTRA and AEA, he has worked professionally as an actor with Performance Riverside, The Burt Reynolds Theatre, The Jupiter Theatre, Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theatre, The Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Birmingham Summerfest and the Riverside Theatre of Vero Beach, among others. Film credits include Bloody Homecoming , Suicide Note and Miami Vice . His professional directing credits include Big River , Singin’ in the Rain and Meet Me in St. Louis at the Palm Canyon Theatre in Palm Springs, Musicale at Whitehall 06 at the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach and Much Ado About Nothing with the Mountain Brook Shakespeare Festival. Numer ous publications include a book, The State Acting Academy of East Berlin , published in 1999 by Mellen Press, a book chapter in Performer Training, published by Harwood Press, and a number of articles and reviews in academic journals and periodicals including Theatre Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, Western European Stages, The Journal of Beckett Studies and Backstage West . He has taught Acting, Movement, Dance, and Theatre History/Literature at California State University, San Bernardino, the University of West Georgia , the University of Montevallo and Palm Beach Atlantic University. He holds a Ph.D. in Theatre from the University of Colorado, Boulder and an M.F.A. in Musical Theatre from the University of Miami, FL. 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.

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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 Report from Germany By Marvin Carlson Published: November 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF A week or so in Germany in May, Covid years excepted, has long been a high point of my annual theatre-going. Although Berlin has often been my focus, the decentralized nature of the German theatre makes available an even richer selection even if one’s visits are limited to theatres only an hour or two train ride from the capital. Thus I began my 2023 visit with a mini-Shakespeare indulgence, beginning with King Lear in Hamburg, followed by Hamlet in Dessau and Macbeth in Dresden. Such a selection is by no means unusual in Germany, where Shakespeare makes an important contribution to the repertoire of almost every professional theatre. One of the results of this is that in Germany, where the director is often the dominant artist, the variety of interpretation, especially of the more familiar works, is almost beyond imagination (or some might say, reasonable justification). Accordingly I booked these productions expecting to see very little resemblance in any of them to the Shakespeare I might see in London or New York, and this indeed proved to be the case. King Lear . Photo: Armin Smailovic. I began with the Lear at Hamburg’s Thalia Theatre, directed by Jan Bosse, who was in-house director there from 2000 to 2005 and has particularly close ties to Hamburg, though he directs regularly at most of the leading German-language theatres. Bosse is now in his mid-50s, the generation of Thomas Ostermeier and Michael Thalheimer. In the fairly predictable cycle of directorial reputations in Germany, leading directors like these, once considered revolutionary, are now generally considered respectable but very much a part of the establishment. In another decade or so, if they are still active, they will probably be considered hopelessly dated by at least the younger generation, as Peter Stein and Claus Peymann were in their time. In the meantime, Bosse is considered a major if somewhat conservative director although his work would appear quite radical in the Anglo-Saxon world. His production begins not in Lear’s palace but in a glittering disco ballroom, where instead of a throne, a shiny musicians’ platform is the focus. Above it a huge half globe with reflecting mirror surfaces provides a visual element that will be ingeniously used in various forms throughout the evening. Lear is the master of ceremonies, making a rather awkward entrance below the globe through a curtain of sequins to seize the microphone. Although he is dressed in full drag, with a brilliant glittering low-cut black gown with a sweeping train, and with deep black fingernails, there is nothing effeminate about him—an aging but still strongly virile figure. The actor is Wolfram Koch, a leading figure in contemporary Germany who recently played a magnificent Prospero directed also by Bosse at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, and the colorful, but gender fluid costumes are the work of Kathrin Plath. The scene is developed as a TV spectacle, with Lear calling up his daughters from their seats in the front row (where they smile and wave as the audience applauds) to present their clearly scripted testimonies on stage. Goneril and Reagan (Anna Blomeier and Tioni Ruhnke) are perfect properties for Lear’s production—elegant model types, with splendidly glittering ball gowns, perfectly coiffed silver hair and of course long black fingernails and striking but subtle makeup. Poor Cordelia (Pauline Renevier, who also plays Edgar) lacks their visual elegance as well as the expected verbal display. She has not even the consolation of a volunteer husband, since Bosse has removed from this production many of the lesser characters, leaving only the three sisters, Lear and the Fool, Kent, Gloucester, Edgar and Edmund (Johannes Hegemann, who also plays Oswald). After the glittering opening scenes, the elegant disco back curtain disappears, and the remainder of the production takes place in a cold black void, the central feature of which is the glittering half dome, which appears in an impressive variety of configurations. Still hanging in the air, it sometimes reveals its back side, essentially as assemblage of wooden supports, forming a kind of rough retreat where the villain Edmund can weave his plots, or the imprisoned King can be kept. Sometimes it sits dome-like on the floor as various characters climb up and down it to gain better positions. On the heath, tilted slightly upward, it becomes the sheltering hovel containing the outcast Edgar. In some scenes this central element is surrounded by a cloud of individual lights hanging from the flies. During the tempest scene, it is pelted by countless small white balls, which suggest a crushing hail, or much more ominously but more metaphorically appropriate, a rain of detached eyeballs. The imaginative and constantly changing design is by Stéphane Laimé. The reduced cast size leaves only leading actors, each of whom turns in a bravura performance. Perhaps especially notable is the flamboyant Edmund, a consummate villain in his flowing black hair, black petal sweater, shiny gold sports pants and cowboy boots. The ethereal Fool (Christiane von Poelnitz) in a yellow jumpsuit layered with gauzy wisps of fabric, hovers about Lear like a bedraggled and ineffective guardian angel, reduced to making ironic comments on a darkening situation. The production is dominated however, by the powerful visual images of Laimé and by the fading ruin of Koch’s Lear, a major addition to his already impressive creations of other monumental figures of the Western theatre. The next two evenings were devoted to other major Shakespearian tragedies, and although quite different from each other, both clearly demonstrated the general stylistic difference that exists between a “conventional” German director like Bosse and many members of the upcoming generation Bosse himself has jokingly referred to as the “pseudo-young savages.” This is not simply a matter of age. Both Phillip Preuss, director of the Dessau Hamlet , and Christian Friedal, director of the Dresden Macbeth , are only five years younger than Bosse, but both are clearly among the “young savages,” firmly on the other side of a distinct stylistic divide in contemporary German directing. This difference has many variations and has been described in many ways, but many German critics would use the term popularized by the theorists Hans-Thies Lehmann in his 1999 book, Postdramatic Theatre . Although the term has been much discussed and debated, the Preuss and Friedal productions would surely be characterized as postdramatic, in opposition to Bosse, despite his radical changes to the play. The central difference is that Bosse still essentially follows the plot and action of the original, respecting its overall narrative construction, while the others assemble and arrange images and motifs from the original or related sources and present these as a visual and oral collage which bears the name of its grounding text, but accepts no responsibility to the narrative contained in that text. The approach is clear from the moment when the audience enters the Dessau Theatre to see the Preuss Hamlet . We see two similar male figures (Niklas Herzberg and Felix Axel Preißler) in dark military garb with sparkling accents, seated downstage at a table. The audience assumption is surely that these are Marcellus and Bernardo, the watchmen whose dialogue has opened Shakespeare’s drama for centuries. In fact as they begin to speak, their lines are not the familiar opening of the play, but a series of unrelated exchanges of apparently free association, in which can be recognized fragments of the play, including parts of Hamlet’s soliloquies. Gradually we come to realize that these are not the guards but a divided Hamlet, out of joint with both his world and himself. In his (their) constant repetitions, false starts and recirclings, he (they) resemble less Shakespeare’s character than such postdramatic protagonists as the couples in Beckett or Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The cast, in addition to these, consists of Stephan Korves, a loud, grotesque, insecure Claudius, Boris Malré as a fawning and servile Polonius, Cara Maria Nagler, who slips back and forth disturbingly but convincingly between Gertrude and Ophelia, and two “utility” men—Sebastian Graf, who plays Horatio, Rosencrantz, an actor and a gravedigger, and his “double” Roman Welzien, who plays Laertes, Guildenstern, another actor and another gravedigger. Lines from the Ghost are spoken by the entire company, often over the heavy booted tread of the unseen spirit. The stage, designed by Ramallah Sara Aubrecht, is in some ways extremely simple, in others highly complex. At the opening the table at the end of which the two Hamlets sit, is a long narrow one, running upstage and disappearing in the folds of a large curtain. On the curtain appears a live video showing a closeup of Claudius, carousing at his wedding banquet, and surrounded by everyone but Hamlet (the video is designed by Konny Keller). This scene actually takes place at the upper end of the long narrow table running down from far upstage, which is the main element of the set, although at this point it cannot be scene in its entirety. The offstage video then follows Gertrude/Ophelia as she leaves the King, climbs onto the table and walks slowly down it to where the Hamlets are sitting. As she comes through the curtains they part and for the first time we see her physically present, as the entire stage, and table is revealed. The effect is increased by a large mirror far upstage behind Claudius. We also for the first time see several other figures, dressed as courtiers, seated along the sides of the table, but soon realize they are actually dummies, somewhat reminiscent of the dead figures in a Kantor production. Most of the action takes place on or (thanks to the tracking live video, beneath this table, which serves as most of the settings of the production. A section in the center can be opened to suggest a grave, which from time to time welcomes the bodies of various actors, who climb in, are covered with dirt, and then climb out again to resume their eternal and repetitive dance of life and death. The other major scenic element is a variety of full stage curtains, of widely varying styles and set at different depths, suggesting a constant play of somewhat arbitrary beginnings and endings. Upon each curtain plays a continuing live video image of the apparently never-ending wedding banquet. Now and then a fleeting image suggests a particular scene –the player king and queen embracing Ophelia lowered into her grave, but these are merely passing images, sometimes repeated, never contextualized, and always embedded in a sea of contentious language. Like all three of the Shakespearian productions I saw, this was accompanied by the almost continuous contributions of a small onstage band with keyboard, strings, and percussion (music by Cornelius Heidebrecht). The continual repetitions and opening and closings of curtains calculatedly gave little indication of an approaching conclusion. On the contrary every effort was made to suggest something of a never-ending dream—perhaps that suggested in Hamlet’s central soliloquy, fragments of which are constantly repeated. Before the production begins, as the audience assembles in the lobby, confused noises are heard from behind the closed doors into the theatre. When the auditorium doors open, the audience enters to find the two seated figures in place on the stage, and projected behind them the live video of the loud and unruly wedding party, which has been going on for some time, and which we heard from outside. Like many post-dramatic creations, the production ends where it began, suggesting that there is in fact no ending. The two Hamlets resume their positions and conversation downstage and the video of the celebration continues on the closed curtain behind them. Eventually, their conversation ceases but the video continues. Perhaps ten minutes passed before the audience decided the performance was over and there was scattered applause, but nothing changed on stage. After another rather long wait a few audience members left, then others. When the house was perhaps half empty I went to the door and waited as others left. It was now about twenty minutes since the last words or live action on the stage, though perhaps a hundred determined spectators remained to watch the unmoving Hamlets and the continuing video projection. Out in the lobby I recognized that the sounds I heard there from inside the theatre were much the same as I had heard before the theatre opened, and I realized that the effect was to suggest that the display within presumably never ended, like the waiting for Godot. One might wonder if so extreme a version of this well-known drama would be well received, and the answer is that although naturally the performance had its critics, this Hamlet was selected by a jury of leading German critics and theorists as one of the ten outstanding productions of the year, and invited to participate in the annual Theatertreffen held later this same month in Berlin. Macbeth . Photo: Sebastian Hoppé. My third Shakespeare, the Dresden Macbeth , was as unconventional as the Dessau Hamlet , but developed from a very different set of assumptions and circumstances. In 2011, Christan Friedel, an actor at the Dresden State Theatre, joined the four members of the pop rock band Arctic Circle 18 to form a new group, dedicated to working in theatre and film as well as on the concert stage. They significantly took their name from Shakespeare, the Woods of Birnam. The first major undertaking of the new group was in providing the onstage live musical accompaniment for a production of Hamlet in Dresden in 2012, directed by Roger Vontobel. Friedel played the title role, for which he created and performed several songs. The group’s second theatrical venture was a collection of dramatic and musical works inspired by various Shakespearian texts and presented in Dresden under the title Searching for William in 2016. As the group’s reputation grew through a series of album releases, tours throughout Germany and Austria, and as far as Elsinore and major concerts, a production of Macbeth itself became inevitable. Like major and minor theatre projects all over the world, however, it fell victim to Covid. Just a week before its scheduled opening in Dresden in 2020 the theatre was closed, and although a much reduced concert version, Searching for Macbeth , was presented later that year for a limited audience, the full production could not be mounted for another two years. At that time it ran for over three hours, as compared to the seventy minutes of Searching for Macbeth and the approximately two and a half hours of both the Bosse Lear and the Preuss Hamlet , both based on much longer texts. Hamlet. Photo: Claudie Heysel. Although more of the original in terms of lines and scenes could be perceived in this production than in the Dessau Hamlet , the Dresden Macbeth was essentially not so much a theatrical production as a no-holds-barred rock concert, with the emphasis not on the music, and even less on the text, but largely on the spectacular visual effects, stunning even for a m ajor German theatre. The witch’s realm was represented by a large open metallic box, filled with a writhing figure, that from time to time rose up out of the stage floor, the first time under the feet of Macbeth and Banquo. The menacing Birnam Woods formed an ever-present threat, both visually and aurally, appearing in countless and ever shifting forms—using video projections, beams of light, and massive moving screens, among other devices. Often hovering over the action was what seemed like a skeletal craft out of Star Wars , lined with machines that engulfed the stage with billowing clouds of smoke and powerful spotlights that could pick out particular actors, usually Macbeth, or in different combinations send down shafts of light that could suggest the walls of an insubstantial room. Certain images, like the bleeding hands, were developed into complex visual sequences, partly live and partly filmic. A striking example was the witches’ prophecy that Banquo would produce many royal descendants—a brief passage in the play—which was elaborated into a complex visual spectacle lasting several minutes and primarily created by film and video technology using the image of an adolescent boy in crown and royal robes splitting, multiplying, and creating increasingly complex visual patterns rather like a kaleidoscope or the dancers in the climax of a Busby Berkley musical. Hamlet. Photo: Claudie Heysel. With all this spectacle the acting contributions of individual performers (there were over fifty of them) made a distinctly lesser impact. Indeed in terms of acting, critics regularly referred to this as a one-man show, not only because Friedel directed, created the music and acted and sang the title role, but also because spots and mikes often picked him out as the only distinct character amid a background of dark and constantly shifting configurations of characters. Like all the rest, however, he remained rather upstaged by the physical production, and his Macbeth was generally considered adequate, though rather conventional and even old-fashioned, considering the competition from the production as a whole. Aside from Friedel, the real stars of the show were the designer, Alexander Wolf, the lighting designer Johannes Zinc, and the video designers Clemens Walter and Jonas Dahl. By and large, the critics considered the production as a success in terms of its technical spectacle and far less impressive as an interpretation of Shakespeare’s play. For audiences, however, the production was a major event, and the show is playing to continuously sold-out houses and standing ovations. Although all the productions I attended in Germany had good audiences, only in Dresden did I have real difficulty in obtaining a seat. Antigone . Photo: David Baltzer. The remainder of my trip was spent in Berlin, where my choices became much more varied. I began with one more major world classic, Antigone , at the Gorki Theatre, which once again demonstrated the liberties taken with such texts in many contemporary productions. The setting, designed by Zahava Rodrigo, was composed of dark billowing cloud-like forms, suggesting perhaps Antigone’s fatal cave or perhaps, given the feminist orientation of the work, a sheltering womb. In it, four Antigone figures (Lea Draeger, Eva Löbau, Julia Riedler, and Ҁiǧdem Teke) and an accompanying musician on an electronic keyboard (Fritzi Ernst) presented what might be described as a highly emotional group therapy session lasting about an hour and 45 minutes. Director Leonie Böhm is well known for her radical revisions of the classics, particularly for her 2019 feminist version of Schiller’s The Robbers , performed, like this Antigone, by four women. Of the Sophocles text, little is left but fragments of the famous choric ode on the wonder of man. The text and actions have been instead developed from the ensemble’s improvisations on the themes of shame, exposure, personal loyalties, physicality and death. Some of the material is clearly improvised, especially when one or another actor directly addresses members of the audience. It is not an easy production to watch, especially the first ten minutes, when not a word is spoken, but the four actresses collect their saliva, play with it rather like chewing gum and mix and smear it on the faces and in the mouths of their partners. In a theatre just recovering from Covid, this sequence provided the audience with a serious initial challenge, and not a few departed. After saliva came shit, the central image of shame, and clearly the most often repeated word in the text. A large pool of the appropriate color and texture provided material throughout the evening for the actresses to smear themselves and each other, and each of them, some nude, at least once immersed herself completely and emerged dripping to continue the performance. Certainly, the audience could sympathize with the often stated feelings of shame and embarrassment expressed by the actresses, but it seemed to me that these feelings were on the whole shared by the audience, and not in a positive way. The Broken Jug . Photo: Arno Declair. My last three evenings were scarcely more conventional, but on the whole more enjoyable. All were at the Deutsches Theater, which on the whole remains the most distinguished of the many major theatres in the capital. On my first night there I saw a German classic, rarely done abroad, Kleist’s The Broken Jug , generally considered among the few major German comedies. The plot concerns a provincial Dutch judge, Adam, who gains access to the bedroom of a local young woman, Eve, falsely claiming that for the proper favors he can rescue Eve’s fiance Ruprecht from military service. Surprised in the bedroom by the fiance, Adam escapes through the window, smashing an heirloom jug prized by Eve’s mother. The play consists of an investigation brought by the mother to reveal the intruder’s identity, a trial in which Adam serves as judge. His increasingly desperate attempts to avoid exposure are finally thwarted by a visiting external official who insists on seeing justice done. Interestingly, this was the only production of the seven I saw that related to its grounding text in a conventional way. Kleist’s sprawling text was cut, and in a few cases slightly updated, but generally faithfully followed, with careful attention to psychological and linguistic nuance. Still, it was definitely a contemporary interpretation. Perhaps most notably, the visiting magistrate who ensures the moral order is no longer a man, but a shrewd, thoughtful, authoritative, and clearly pregnant young woman (Lorena Handschin). Director Anne Lenk has presented a series of popular classic revivals at the Deutsches, and is known for her general faithfulness to the text, with moderate, usually feminist updating. The Broken Jug shows this clearly, with justice at last established by a female judge, despite the best efforts of a corrupt patriarchy (led of course by Adam) to cast all blame on the female victim. The sleazy Adam, his face still revealingly scarred by his encounter with the jug, is beautifully played by Urich Mattius, one of Germany’s most revered actors, and although he dominates the stage, he is ably supported by leading members of the theatre’s famed ensemble, including Lisa Hrdina as the abused Eve, Tamer Tahan as the wronged fiancé, Franziska Machens as Eve’s ranting mother, more concerned with her jug then her daughter, and Jeremy Mockridge as Adam’s faithful but rather dull clerk. Aside from its excellent acting, the production is a visual feast. Scene designer Judith Oswald has created a narrow stage, containing only a row of 14 chairs, facing the audience and close to the footlights. The actors move ingeniously among these chairs such a way as to constantly suggest the shifting relationships among them (Eve and Ruprecht for example, are placed at opposite ends of the row for much of the early action, and gradually coming together as they are reconciled). Immediately behind these chairs is a magnificent still painting filling the entire stage space—a 17 th- century Dutch still life showing a lavishly furnished table, with goblet and play, oysters and ham, peaches, pomegranates and grapes, and even a huge parrot. No such opulence would be found in the home of a Dutch village judge like Adam, but costume designer Sibylle Wallum has created a set of somewhat anachronistic but richly imaginative costumes in the pink, orange coral range which combine beautifully with the opulent background. The following evening I returned to the Deutsches Theatre, to its smaller venue, the Kammerspiele, or more precisely to the stage of the Kammerspiele where seventy or eight chairs had been set up in rows on the revolving turntable in the middle of the stage. Here the audience was turned to different positions where various backstage areas (and occasionally the auditorium itself and the walkways above the stage over our heads) became temporary performance spaces. The production was of special interest to me, Ibsen’s very rarely performed early work, The Pretenders , one of the few Ibsen plays I had never seen. The young director Sarah Kunze argues that Ibsen’s historical drama has been unjustly neglected, but this so-called “limited edition” does not really offer enough of the original to make a strong case. Ibsen’s play owes much to Shakespeare, with a huge sprawling plot and dozens of characters. Everything in this adaptation is vastly reduced—the length, the complex plot, and most striking of all, the characters, reduced to only three actors, who primarily appear as the three central characters—rather like reducing Henry IV to the Prince, Hotspur, and Falstaff. Granted, these characters anchor the action: the two rivals for the crown, the attractive and gifted Haakon (Lorena Handschin), and the dark and manipulative Skule (Natalia Seelig) and the Machiavellian Bishop Nikolas who feeds off of their rivalry (Elias Arens). This distinctly melodramatic edge was even more clearly evident in Arens’ Bishop Nikolas, whose flamboyant delivery, especially in his death scene and his return as a minister from hell, were high points of the production, as they are of the original play. I was pleased to see this theatrical rarity in any form, but the staging, cutting, and presentation in fact left so little of the original that I doubt it many audience members will accept the director’s assertion that she has rediscovered a forgotten gem. Leonce and Lena . Photo: Arno Declair. My final production, back on the mainstage of the Deutsches Theatre, was a new interpretation by Ulrich Rasche of George Büchner’s Leonce and Lena , a popular revival piece in Germany, but almost unknown in the Anglo-Saxon world. Since his groundbreaking innovative production of Schiller’s The Robbers in 2018 Rasche has been hailed as one of the most powerful and original of young German directors, with his highly technological, powerfully lit, and perpetually and obsessively acted reworkings of classic texts. Büchner’s grotesque fantasy/comedy seems far removed from Rasche’s usual dark material, but he brings it unquestionably into his distinctive dramatic world through a striking directorial choice. Very little of the actual text of Leonce and Lena remains in Rasche’s production. It is replaced by extensive passages from other Büchner writings, including his letters, his revolutionary play Danton’s Death, and most significantly a good deal of an eight page call for political revolution, the 1834 Hessicher Landbote , for which the author was charged with treason and forced to seek asylum in France. The stage, designed by Rasche, is typical of his work, a vast essentially dark and empty space, here largely occupied by a massive, constantly revolving turntable, and a striking abstract element, here a huge, steadily shifting monumental lattice screen composed of color-changing fluorescent tubes (lighting by Cornelia Gloth). A chorus of ten actors, all clad in black with only their faces and hands dimly visible in a wash of blue light. Occasionally a chorus member will briefly emerge from the group to deliver a line, but the main body of the chorus remains steadily trudging onward, upon the constantly turning treadmill, slowly chanting the litany of oppressions and injustice making up the notorious pamphlet. Four musicians, placed in the front boxes with synthesizers, provide an appropriately crushing and continuous techno beat to accompany the unrelenting treading and chanting of the company. The effect is undoubtedly a powerful one, but at two and a half hours with no intermission, I found myself as much stunned as energized. This is an impression I often get from Rasche’s work, despite the unquestionable power of his visual imagination. In summary, I found the German theatre as always far more daring, more innovative, and more open to works (especially often neglected historical ones) than the Anglo-Saxon stage, which expands most of its creative energy on musical theatre and otherwise is satisfied as best with formulaic revivals of a handful of mostly English language plays. The German interest in pushing the boundaries certainly does not always work for me, but equally offers new insights into traditional works and into the potential of theatre to relate in new ways to the world around it to make this theatrical culture, so different from my own, continually fascinating. Image Credits: Article References References About the author(s) Marvin Carlson is Sidney E. Cohn Distinguished Professor of Theatre, Comparative Literature, and Middle Eastern Studies at the Graduate Centre, CUNY. He earned a PhD in Drama and Theatre from Cornell University (1961), where he also taught for a number of years. Marvin has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens, Greece, the ATHE Career Achievement Award, the ASTR Distinguished Scholarship Award, the Bernard Hewitt prize, the George Jean Nathan Award, the Calloway Prize, the George Freedley Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the founding editor of the journal Western European Stages and the author of over two hundred scholarly articles and fifteen books that have been translated into fourteen languages. His most recent books are Ten Thousand Nights: Highlights from 50 Years of Theatre-Going (2017) and Hamlet's Shattered Mirror: Theatre and the Real (2016). 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.

Watch The Books of Jacob by Krzysztof Garbaczewski at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. La MaMa and CultureHub in association with the Polish Cultural Institute New York present The Books of Jacob by Dream Adoption Society, a digital laboratory led by Krzysztof Garbaczewski. The Books of Jacob is inspired by Olga Tokarczuk's Nobel prize-winning novel of the same name which explores the historical events surrounding Jacob Frank, a man who claimed to be the reincarnation of Sabbatai Zevi. In front of a live audience, Garbaczewski creates a hybrid theatre and virtual reality experience that delves into the ideas and relevance of Jacob's transformative religious movement in 18th Century Europe. The Books of Jacob is produced within CultureHub and La MaMa’s Experiments in Digital Storytelling program, which incubates story-driven artworks that push the boundaries of artistic forms. Experiments in Digital Storytelling is made possible by generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts and Radio Drama Network. Additional support for Krzysztof Garbaczewski’s fellowship in Experiments in Digital Storytelling is provided by TMU and Polish Cultural Institute New York. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents The Books of Jacob At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Krzysztof Garbaczewski Theater, Film, Multimedia, Performance Art This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks. About The Film Country United States Language English Running Time 54 minutes Year of Release 2023 La MaMa and CultureHub in association with the Polish Cultural Institute New York present The Books of Jacob by Dream Adoption Society, a digital laboratory led by Krzysztof Garbaczewski. The Books of Jacob is inspired by Olga Tokarczuk's Nobel prize-winning novel of the same name which explores the historical events surrounding Jacob Frank, a man who claimed to be the reincarnation of Sabbatai Zevi. In front of a live audience, Garbaczewski creates a hybrid theatre and virtual reality experience that delves into the ideas and relevance of Jacob's transformative religious movement in 18th Century Europe. The Books of Jacob is produced within CultureHub and La MaMa’s Experiments in Digital Storytelling program, which incubates story-driven artworks that push the boundaries of artistic forms. Experiments in Digital Storytelling is made possible by generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts and Radio Drama Network. Additional support for Krzysztof Garbaczewski’s fellowship in Experiments in Digital Storytelling is provided by TMU and Polish Cultural Institute New York. CREATIVE TEAM Performers – Danusia Trevino, Anna Podolak, Ola Rudnicka Adaptation – Rébecca Pierrot Costume Design – Monika Palikot, Sławomir Blaszewski Music: Jan Duszyński Avatars – Anastasiia Vorobiova Set Design – Bettina Katja Lange, Krzysztof Garbaczewski Set Coordinator – Piotr Gawelko Director, VR Design – Krzysztof Garbaczewski CULTUREHUB DeAndra Anthony – Technical Director Mattie Barber-Bockelman – Producing Director Sangmin Chae – Creative Technologist Billy Clark – Artistic Director Evan Anderson – Lighting Consultant Live Park NY – Audio About The Artist(s) Krzysztof Garbaczewski (born February 24, 1983 in Bialystok, Poland) is a Polish theatre director, stage designer and digital artist. He creates interdisciplinary performances, theatrical installations combining performance, visual arts and virtual reality. Get in touch with the artist(s) krzysztof.garbaczewski@gmail.com and follow them on social media https://www.culturehub.org/the-books-of-jacob dreamadoptionsociety.com Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou