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Watch Somber Tides by Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. Somber Tides is a cry from the species, startled into survival against the elements. One last breath before being trampled by the Earth or maybe conversely a battle to wage against winds and tides clutching on before extinction.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Somber Tides At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Saturday May 17th at 11am (as part of the Short Film Program) and also be available to watch online on the festival website till June 8th 2025. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country Canada Language No Dialogue Running Time 12 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film About The Retrospective Somber Tides is a cry from the species, startled into survival against the elements. One last breath before being trampled by the Earth or maybe conversely a battle to wage against winds and tides clutching on before extinction. About The Artist(s) Choreographer and filmmaker Chantal Caron's visual signature has always been inspired by the St. Lawrence River and the natural elements that make up its ecosystem. Her works are inspired by the living and embodied in contemporary dance. A member of the Order of Canada and recipient of CALQ's "Artist of the Year" award in 2023, her short films have been selected and awarded around the world since 2015 for their unique aesthetics. Get in touch with the artist(s) distribution@bandesonimage.org and follow them on social media Official Site : https://bandesonimage.org/distribution/catalogue-de-films?view=article&id=10 FILM FACEBOOK : https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61564890205177 PROD FB : https://www.facebook.com/fleuveespacedanse PROD INSTA : https://www.instagram.com/fleuve_espacedanse/ DISTRIB FB : https://www.facebook.com/BandeSonimage DISTRIB INSTA : https://www.instagram.com/bandesonimage/ 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

Instagram (A Performance) is 40-minute text about collective self-regard, written and directed by Aaron Landsman, performed by a different actor each showing. This Prelude showing will be performed by April Matthis. The piece is an extended riff on how caught up we are in each others’ image diaries, and in our own self-reflections; on how even the most cynical or circumspect of us get wrapped up in how we show our feeds to our followers. Performers receive an orientation shortly before they perform - the script includes both words to say and simple scores for movement and gesture. The piece is rendered as a litany of single photos, one per page. The joy in this piece is watching accomplished performers respond to and embody text in the moment, in the complicated way we often respond to our friends’ feeds. It is also an invitation for audience members to create for themselves the images they are hearing aloud - an imaginative act akin to reading - and to think about the moments in their lives that escape our lenses, that may be embodied and rendered more strongly as memory alone. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE Instagram: A Performance Aaron Landsman Theater, Performance Art English 35-40 MInutes 3:30PM EST Wednesday, October 11, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Instagram (A Performance) is 40-minute text about collective self-regard, written and directed by Aaron Landsman, performed by a different actor each showing. This Prelude showing will be performed by April Matthis. The piece is an extended riff on how caught up we are in each others’ image diaries, and in our own self-reflections; on how even the most cynical or circumspect of us get wrapped up in how we show our feeds to our followers. Performers receive an orientation shortly before they perform - the script includes both words to say and simple scores for movement and gesture. The piece is rendered as a litany of single photos, one per page. The joy in this piece is watching accomplished performers respond to and embody text in the moment, in the complicated way we often respond to our friends’ feeds. It is also an invitation for audience members to create for themselves the images they are hearing aloud - an imaginative act akin to reading - and to think about the moments in their lives that escape our lenses, that may be embodied and rendered more strongly as memory alone. Will be presented by Abrons Arts Center in June 2024 Content / Trigger Description: Aaron Landsman is a theater artist, researcher and teacher. His performance works have been presented by many venues in New York, including The Chocolate Factory, Abrons Arts Center, The Foundry Theatre, HERE and PS 122. His work has also been staged in Phoenix, Houston, Keene, San Francisco and other US cities, as well as in The Netherlands, Norway, Morocco, the UK and Serbia. He started the working group Perfect City, based at Abrons, which creates pathways through art for communities to envision more equitable cities, designed for the people who live here. His book The City We Make Together, co-authored with Mallory Catlett, came out with the University of Iowa Press in 2022. He has performed with Elevator Repair Service Theater, Tim Etchells, Tory Vazquez and Andrea Kleine, among other folks. He is a recent Creative Capital grantee, Guggenheim Fellow and ASU Gammage Residency Artist, and Perfect City's work is supported by The Artist Employment Program of Creatives Rebuild NY. He teaches part-time at Princeton. @thinaar (IG and Twitter); http://www.thinaar.com Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 19, Fall, 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Hecuba Provokes Catharsis and Compassion in the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus By Cindy Sibilsky Published: November 25, 2024 Download Article as PDF Hecuba, Not Hecuba , written and directed by Portuguese director, festival director, author, and performer Tiago Rodrigues and performed by actors from Comédie-Française (one of the oldest theatre companies still running, formed 1680), premiered at the Festival d’Avignon in France at the end of June but found its true home amid the ancient theatrical spirits of Greece at the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus at the Athens Epidaurus Festival late July 2024. [A shorter report on the Avignon performance and another in Pilsen can be found elsewhere in this issue.] I was fortunate to witness not a clash but a camaraderie, a magnificent mingling coexistence of cultures, languages, characters, emotions, and eras that blended together flawlessly to present a timeless tale of humanity in all its myriad forms, from the tragic to transcendent, from the grotesque to the glorious. The production, the performances, and the setting combined created a transformative experience that vividly reminds one of the necessity and vital power of theatre to heal and create collective awareness of shared human existence. Like all great odysseys, internal and external, my journey began with crossing an ocean from New York to Athens, followed by a quick metro ride to a two-hour bus excursion alongside the Sardonic Gulf. We traversed dense pine forests and drove by dirt road goat farms clinging to cliffs. The epic voyage was part of the soul-opening that prepares one for the profoundness of encountering the ancient Theatre of Epidaurus for the first time, a theatre with exquisite acoustics and aesthetics built in the 4th century BC by the architect Polykleitos the Younger that seats up to 14,000, still in use for contemporary audiences to experience dance, music and dramatic performances as the ancients did thousands of years before. Dionysus is best known as the Greek god of theatre, ecstatic dance and wine. His temple and theatre are in the heart of Athens at the Acropolis. However, in Epidaurus, the God of choice is the God of medicine, Asclepius, who the performances were meant to worship. While the connection to theatre and medicine may not seem obvious outright, ancient Greeks believed that seeing comedic and tragic plays was a form of healing, observing that those watching dramas performed onstage had positive effects mentally and physically. In fact, the word catharsis was coined by Aristotle in his Poetics and is derived from the Greek word “kathairein,” which means "to cleanse or purge.” This term aptly describes the release of emotional tension Aristotle noted that spectators experienced when viewing dramatic tragedy. Why are we drawn to witnessing pain and suffering on stages and screens? It connects us with universal humanity and fosters understanding. “We sometimes think that our grief is unique, without precedent, that no one in the history of humanity has suffered so much. But we only need to watch a play,” Rodrigues explained. Upon entering what feels like a truly sacred space, a centuries-old amphitheatre surrounded by woodlands growing dark in the dusk, the ancient spell is broken by 20th- century sounds. Otis Redding's voice, full of love and longing, soul and sorrow, cuts through the night sky. The somewhat odd opening music choice will come full circle in one of the play's most powerful moments. The set (scenography by Fernando Riberio) is simple: a few tables, some chairs, and a large object obscured by black cloth, looming like a mountainous Pandora’s box filled with secrets. But the real set is the setting, which dwarfs anything manmade or modern. The actors are clad in black flowing garments (by Jose Antonio Tenente)—European chic, with a nod to the Greek draping of yesteryear. Indeed, upon the opening lines (spoken in French with Greek and English surtitles on the sidelines), the ensemble introduces themselves as the chorus. They aim to set the tone and stage, explaining in unison their multiple roles and purpose. It’s a little cute and slightly undermines the depth and intensity of the performances to come, but a lighthearted introductory approach has a way of disarming an audience, just as the Otis Redding music did. The Comédie-Française ensemble is superb, and each of them volleys between roles of an actor rehearsing for a present-day performance of Euripides’ Hecuba in Paris, France, the character they are portraying in Euripides’ Hecuba , and several people entangled in a court case. Seamlessly, they shift from one role to another without fussiness or overt formality, a credit to the actors and the director. In the first scene, they are all gathered for a table reading of Euripides’ Hecuba. As is typical in these gatherings, the actors (playing actors) are in various self-centric states, detracting from the task at hand. Some are bored or frustrated, waiting for their lines; others are desperate to know their entrances and exits, arrogantly claiming more space than the others (particularly the actor who plays Polymestor, a brilliantly pompous and despicable role for Loïc Corbery). Then there’s the lead actress playing Hecuba, Nadia (played with exceptional dimension and sensitivity by Elsa Lepoivre). Nadia is clearly distracted, constantly checking the time, eager to depart. The only thing on her mind is her son’s court case. Nadia’s son, Otis, named after the musician, is autistic. She attempts a pun that people suggested she prophesied his condition by naming him thus (say Otis with a French accent, and you get “au-tee-ss”)—a little humor attempt that falters, especially when trying to keep up with the translations. Otis is verbally limited to about fifty words, mainly something and not something. Fruit, not fruit; home, not home; mama, not mama; cuddle, not cuddle (hence Hecuba, Not Hecuba). It was a vehement “not cuddle” that alerted her maternal instincts that something was very wrong. She approached him from behind, arms open for an embrace, and Otis threw his arms into an “X” above his head and yelled, “Not cuddle!” Most of the time, Otis is under the state’s care in a facility. This gesture made Nadia certain he was being abused, and the remainder of the performance darts between scenes betwixt Euripides’ Hecuba characters that parallel or sometimes contrast with lawyers, prosecutors, defendants, witnesses and the accused abusers. Life imitates art and vice versa. In the court, human nature is revealed as it is on stage. Elissa Alloula plays the actress portraying Coryphaea (a mountain goddess) in Hecuba and Nérine in the courts. As Nérine, she confesses to witnessing the abuse. Her fears of speaking out because she is an immigrant and threatened with deportation are lessened by being a mother and caretaker. Conversely, Séphora Pondi, who also plays Nadia’s lawyer preparing her for the wrath of the cross-examination (“Why, as his mother, do you allow the state to take care of Otis?”) is another who looks after Otis but is devoid of proper training for caring for an autistic child. Hecuba, Not Hecuba. Photo © Alex Kat Gaël Kamilindi, who is barely more than an observer for the first half of the play, gets two strong moments to shine as the actor. Playing the small role of a servant in Euripides’ Hecuba, he confronts Nadia’s lamentations about the insurmountable stress of her son’s abuse and the trail by putting his own pain and role into perspective. “At least he is alive!” he challenges her, referring to the loss of his father, who was his “whole world.” Each character, no matter how small, has a life and relationships that are their “world.” This pivotal moment speaks to the universality of pain and Rodriguez’s observation on how we each suffer individually and feel we are in a silo with our anguish, while others are feeling tormented too. Kamilindi’s sympathetic actor is starkly contrasted by Dubois, Otis's lead abuser. Cold, hard and staring blankly ahead, he defiantly defends himself for “doing what needed to be done.” Denis Podalydès, who also plays the actor portraying Agamemnon (a controversial character, not as outright villainous as Polymestor, but the one who lays judgment on Hecuba, ultimately deciding she was right in her vengeance on Polymestor and his sons), also plays the Prosecutor, an amiable man who grows more so as the trial continues with subtleties like offering or denying refreshments to the witnesses and passionately defending Nadia and Otis. In one such moment, he questions the reason for force, and when Kamilindi, as Dubois, states he felt threatened, Podalydès, as Polymestor, flails his arms back and forth at his chest and shouts, “He was dancing!” This transitions into one of the most unexpectedly powerful moments of the play. Each cast member dons a helmet (like those worn by children to protect them from injury) and, to Otis Redding’s “Try A Little Tenderness,” flings their arms about with wild abandon and joy. At first, it seemed absurd, another attempt at humor flattered. But, almost immediately, another sensation rushed over me as the actors, fully committed, almost forgetting themselves, flung their limbs with such sweet sincerity and innocence that I felt the waterworks welling up in my eyes uncontrollably. Hecuba, Not Hecuba. Photo © Alex Kat I felt a combination of the absurdity, innocence, joy and the unspeakable violations to crush those feelings. It hit me then that catharsis wasn’t the only healing effect of witnessing tragedy. The greater emotion and, indeed, power that is stirred is compassion. I cannot personally relate to the plights of these characters; the tragic mother (Hecuba, who lost most of her nineteen children, or Nadia with her abused autistic son) is far removed from my experience. Yet, the depth of compassion such performances provoke is enough to feel the pain as your own. And with that, to feel less isolated in your struggles and less separate from others’ hurt. Perhaps this was Nadia’s turning point as well. The actress and mother was at first defensive when hearing Dubois’ excuses, then in a bold choice that could only happen at a theatre surrounded by pine trees engulfed by the velvety night, Lepoivre shifted from defensiveness to listening as she wandered off the stage into the woods, her pale skin and blond hair glowing against the darkness. She emerged from the forest with a new purpose, even some compassion for Dubois, the abuser, as a fellow victim of systemic abuse and with a newfound vengeance for the real perpetrator, the mastermind behind the government-run grossly lacking facilities, the Alternate Minister, arrogant, slick, vile and dangerous as Polymestor himself, played by the same actor in that role, Loïc Corbery. Nadia performs to the press to highlight the injustices. The Minister’s defenses fall flat as lies and sophistry. Their battle plays out much like Euripides’ Hecuba, with justice being served blindingly. A significant theme peppered throughout is of a canine kind. In some tellings of Hecuba, she was transformed into a dog by the gods after snarling at Odysseus as a slave. This seeming punishment allowed her to escape. Dogs play an integral part. Nadia speaks of an animation that Otis adores (parents of autistic children have noted that cartoons and anime are calming and enjoyable because the emotions are easier to identify) about a stray dog roaming alone, who upon various turns, shows up more beaten and injured, eventually losing a leg. This is later emphasized when the black drape covering the mountainous set piece reveals a grotesque statue of a wolfish hound whose leg falls off. Nadia uses this as a prop to represent Otis to the press. In the play’s final triumphant moments, Nadia tells the audience end of the cartoon, the lost stray finds a puppy, and they are no longer afraid or alone. Image Credits: Article References References About the author(s) A lifelong theatermaker and arts worker, Cindy Sibilsky (she/her) is the founder/CEO and producer of INJOY Entertainment LLC (established in 2011), a multimedia, multi-genre and multi-purpose arts & entertainment company focusing on meaningful cultural exchange worldwide. She is a Broadway, Off-Broadway & international independent producer, marketing/PR director, and writer/journalist. In 2019, she was guest editor, curator, and lead writer for American Theatre Magazine ’s special edition on Japanese Contemporary Theatre. Through inJOY Entertainment, Cindy represents a diverse and constantly growing roster of New York and global clients, companies and shows, including festivals, theatre, musicals, dance, concerts, cirque, cabaret, drag, curated art shows, public art, and immersive performances. 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 20, 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Willem Dafoe in conversation with Theater der Zeit By Thomas Irmer Published: July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF Image Courtesy: Willem Dafoe by Sasha Kargaltsev Willem Dafoe in conversation with Theater der Zeit What was your approach for this new challenge? And why did you accept this curatorial job in such difficult times? Oh, it seemed like an interesting challenge for me. It's not what I normally do. It gave me the opportunity to try and make a program that I thought would honor the things that I love about theater. Venice, the Biennale has a great organization in place. They have beautiful spaces. When you come here to look at spaces, it just blows your mind how beautiful the spaces are that deserve good theater pieces in them. So I get to have this structure behind me and I get to imagine a beautiful program. So that's a challenge, but it appealed to me. Did you travel to all the theater capitals of the world? Your program looks like that you had a concept from the beginning. When they told me about the appointment in July last year, the truth is I thought the only way I can do this, where I can really make a contribution, is do what I know. I'm not gonna go shopping. I'm not gonna go around and see what's cool or what's really current or anything. So, instead… I'm going to invite people that I've worked with, people that I've always admired, and people that some people would introduce me to. But basically, I had a pretty good idea of who I wanted to see in the program. It's a two-year appointment. I think next year, I'll do it a little differently because I have more time and I want the focus to be a little different. Well, the program clearly shows your signature, so to speak, and your artistic background with the Wooster Group and all these years in the New York avant-garde. And of course, with Richard Schechner, you go even farther back. It looks like a great heritage event. To be fair, there is some of that, but there's also other people, there's emerging artists and people whose work is new to me. And I also got to say that specifically the Wooster Group, it's not a nostalgia trip because they're still functioning. They're still making interesting stuff. And also, I was there for a very long time, but the stuff, the work that they're making now is a further refinement of what we were doing before. And it hasn't stopped developing. It hasn't stopped refining. So it's further down the line of, a company that I think, although it's quite small and quite humble, has really had a huge impact. I've seen some of their recent work, like what they did on Grotowski and more recently with Tadeusz Kantor. And so it looks to me like a combination of European and American avant-garde. And you seem to bring that together again for Venice. I mean, for what interests me is Liz (Elizabeth LeCompte) and Kate (Valk) and the company are working with a new relationship to technology. And usually when you're entering technology, things get a little cold. But the truth is, because a lot of it is very precise working with things outside of yourself, the presence of the actor is very strong because these are not people that are automatons. They are observing something very clearly and then embodying it at the same time. And that's the kind of super, super concentration and super presence that is so compelling about theater. When you say in your mission statement about the presence of actor, „theater is body, body is poetry“, is that a return to such purity like Grotowski was demanding it? Look at this, here I have this picture from the Wooster Group‘s „Hairy Ape“ and that was very technological theater with you. From my point of view, I could apply „body as poetry“ to the „Hairy Ape“ because that may have seemed very technical but the inside of it as a performer that was very demanding physically and it did bring me to some sort of a super state because the demands were so physical. And I think that was conveyed. This particular production wasn't so much an interpretation of the O'Neill play as the O'Neill play created a world that we could live in that was kind of extraordinary. So there's still the theater actor with you and not so much the film actor that you have been in the last 20 years? They're the same thing. The process is a little different, but I always think it's a little bit like a musician. A musician is a musician and sometimes they go in studio and they record something and sometimes they play live. So the actor is still here, whether it's theater or whether it's film, it doesn't matter much. Of course, they're different mediums, of course, but this kind of old-fashioned notion of the measure of a performance - I don't subscribe to that at all because there can be fantastically artificial, very correct performances in film and there can be very naturalistic, correct performances in theater. So it's not about size or way of performing necessarily. What's your personal choice for that matter? I like to try to do it all. You know, every time I do something, I always have to figure it out. So it's each time, it's not quite first thought, best thought but it is always returning and cleansing yourself of preconceived notions and trying to find a new way. Just so you don't repeat yourself and so you don't start believing certain things that might hold you back. You know, people talk about craft and there is a craft. There are instincts. You develop instincts after performing for a long time but that doesn't mean you have to uphold them. So you should always try to destroy yourself a little bit. The program seems to be expanded by comparison with previous editions. Is it more than in the years before? I don't know because they didn't give me a number of performances, not really. I mean, they gave me some sort of guidelines. I don't know previous years well enough. I've attended the Biennale before but only for a workshop and a talk. So this is all quite new to me. There's also a German part that you invited with Thomas Ostermeier and Milo Rau (who's actually Swiss) but both I think are what we call the real actor‘s theater even though they are conceptual at the same time. Yes, they're both people that I've been in contact with. I've followed their work and with both actually I've talked about working with them. It hasn't happened yet, but we're still in conversation. So which means you could return to theater? Yes, absolutely. Via Venice. I'm always looking for a way to return to theater. And in fact, for the Biennale I'll do a small performance experiment. It's not a whole production but it'll be being on the stage again. What would that be? That's something I did with Richard Foreman before he died but we only did an audio recording. He put phrases on cards, like hundreds of cards. We shuffled them like playing cards. He took half of the deck, I took half of the deck and then we read them, alternating one to the other. Then we took them, reshuffled them and did it again. So these are phrases that don't necessarily have anything to do with each other but the actors in response to each other through rhythm, through inflection through trying to contact the other person sometimes try to make a connection and sometimes let it fall flat. It's an interesting exploration of language and how we communicate with each other. In Venice we'll do some in English and some in Italian. So that's like a chance-operation dialogue? There's a randomness to it because it's not rehearsed because you'll get different combinations all the time. So the living element, the present element, the part that's dramatic or engaging to me is something's being formed in front of you. That's not pre-designed. The rules are designed, but the effect or what happens isn't designed. So for that, it's really an experiment. It could be a disaster. Who will be your partner as this will need two people? An Italian actress called Simonetta Solder, who a friend suggested because she speaks English very well. And she helped with the translation of these very enigmatic phrases. bAnd she spent a fair amount of time in New York and we just basically hit it off. So Simonetta and I will be doing this back and forth. You say the program of your second year could be different. I'm still forming ideas, but if I told you that this year I wanted to program things that I knew, next year, I wanna find things I don't know. But one thing that will guide me is I think I'm still trying to figure it out and we're going to get in it very soon. I'm interested in how theater serves communities. But the struggle with that is sometimes some of those situations are socially very important but sometimes aesthetically they aren't as developed. So you gotta find that balance. And they're very contextual because they could not be presented easily that way in a Biennale. But that's what makes it interesting, I think because the context comes with them a little bit, if it's really a theater that is serving a community. Let's get back to what one could call the bottom line of this year's edition. It's what you call the inquiry into the essence of theater. And that seems to be acting and the actors. The theater uses everything but I think you need people for those events. I shouldn't make any rules, but for me it does start with the audience watching not only something that happens but people involved in that. So they see themselves. They see themselves in this world that's created in this event that's created. Without the people, they don't have a scale, they don't have a reference. If nobody's on stage, it is as if a tree fell in the forest. Your output in film is enormous at the moment. It's like seems like the peak of your career with nine movies this year alone. Well, I like to work. And if I find interesting things to do, I will do them. How do you make your choices for a number of films of very, very different genres. „Poor Things“ was clearly an art house film. But then you have „Beetlejuice“, „Nosferatu“… I like variety, obviously. And it's about people and situations, I think. Because it's seldom about character. And with each one of those people, I could give you the reason. The director is very important to me just because my relationship to directors has a lot to do with when they have a vision, they see something. I love being the guy that they sort of tell me what they want to see. And then I go in there and I try to embody it and even push it further or engage with it. This is the relationship I like. If the director doesn't have that kind of vision, there's gotta be something else. And usually it's not enough. The director is very important. I try to balance things so I don't get stuck into thinking performing's one way or my process gets fixed. I think you gotta trick yourself out of a certain kind of comfort. We all like comfort and we all like familiar things. But in the end, what really floats us, what really keeps us alive is a certain kind of variety and a certain kind of mystery and a certain kind of curiosity. So as people see you probably as an American actor, also representing at least American theater in a certain way, where do you see American theater at the moment? I don't know. Yes, I'm not that familiar with it, I've never been as familiar with American theater as I've been with European or even Asian or South American theater. With the Wooster Group, we used to travel quite a bit. And after that collaboration with Bob Wilson, particularly, we toured a fair amount. So what I was seeing at festivals, what I was seeing when I was in periods and places where there was a lot of theater activity, that's what I was seeing. And as you say, I like to work a lot. I'm shooting a lot. I'm not in the States that much anymore. Your program also seems to symbolize the exchange between European and American theater, which has become less and less significant in the last 20 years. So I see this also as a gesture that it could be different. I think that exchange was very useful in the past. For a while, creatively, maybe it was in one direction, economically, it was in another direction, and then maybe it shifted. But living through that period that you speak of, I really saw the interchange and it was quite dynamic. And it was a mutually beneficial exchange. Sometimes when I see European theater, I see the origins of it from someplace else, but it has more support and therefore it becomes institutionalized, also in its language. Because the one thing about American theater, it doesn't have a lot of support. So there's always a scrappiness and inventiveness to it, even if it lacks a certain kind of sophistication and a broad understanding of cultural history. Image Credits: Article References References About the author(s) Thomas Irmer is a scholar and critic regularly contributing to Theater der Zeit, Theater heute and Shakespeare (Norway). He has also worked for various international festivals, e.g. 2003-2006 as dramaturge for spielzeit europa / Berliner Festspiele. His recent books include “Andrzej Wirth. Flucht nach vorn. Erzählte Autobiographie und Materialien“(2013) and “Maria Steinfeldt. Das Bild des Theaters“(2015). His recent academic research covered the new phenomenon of internationalization of German theater with teaching a class on this subject at the University of Osnabrück 2014/15. He also made documentary films on theatre and theatre history, among them the prize-winning “The Staged Republic – Theatre in the G.D.R.” (2004). He lives in Berlin. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents The 2025 Festival International New Drama (FIND) at Berlin Schaubühne Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 20 Willem Dafoe in conversation with Theater der Zeit The Puzzle: A new musical in the Spoleto Festival, Italy presented by La MaMa Umbria Varna Summer International Theatre Festival Mary Said What She Said The 62nd Berliner Theatertreffen: Stories and Theatrical Spaces That Realize the Past, Present and Future. Interview with Walter Bart (Artistic Leader, Wunderbaum Collective & Director, Die Hundekot-Attacke) from the 2024 Berliner Theatertreffen Duende and Showbiz: A Theatrical Odyssey Through Spain’s Soul Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch His Head was a Sledgehammer by Richard Foreman in Retrospect at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. The term “iconoclast” gets thrown around all too much, but in the case of Richard Foreman (1937-2025) there is hardly a more appropriate synonym to describe him. An unparalleled writer and director who ranks among the premier theater artists of the twentieth century, Foreman was also a local legend whose electrifying work greatly shaped the artistic landscape of downtown New York. The founder and director of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater company, Foreman staged eighty-plus astounding plays in a career that spanned over forty-five years, and most of them were presented here in the neighborhood. Foreman’s brazen avant-garde aesthetic was deeply rooted in his early involvement with Jonas Mekas and the 1960s underground film movement. His very first play, Angelface, was performed in 1968 at Mekas’s Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, one of the organizations that preceded Anthology. This retrospective both memorializes Foreman, who passed away in January, and celebrates the publication of No Title, his posthumous new book just published by The Further Reading Library. Organized in roughly chronological order, the series includes Foreman’s own films and videos alongside an array of performance documentation, documentaries, and portraits. Foreman retired from the theater in 2013 to focus on filmmaking, and the series includes his final digital videos, many of which have never been publicly screened. In addition to this sweeping survey, we are presenting a sidebar program featuring a handful of Foreman’s most cherished films. Some are the movies that inspired him early on, and others are works that he talked about on a regular basis. [Unfortunately, we are unable to include Foreman’s 35mm feature film STRONG MEDICINE (1981) in the series as all the known prints are unavailable at the moment due to a future preservation project.] SCREENING SCHEDULE RICHARD FOREMAN, PGM 1: THE EARLY PLAYS May 21 at 7:00 PM RICHARD FOREMAN, PGM 2: SOPHIA: THE CLIFFS May 22 at 7:00 PM RICHARD FOREMAN, PGM 3: PAIN(T) AND VERTICAL MOBILITY May 23 at 7:00 PM RICHARD FOREMAN, PGM 4: TWO REDISCOVERIES May 24 at 6:00 PM RICHARD FOREMAN, PGM 5: SHORT FILM AND VIDEO WORKS OF THE 1970s May 24 at 8:30 PM RICHARD FOREMAN, PGM 6: SHORT FILMS AND VIDEOS OF THE 1980s May 25 at 6:00 PM RICHARD FOREMAN, PGM 7: ONCE EVERY DAY May 25 at 8:00 PM RICHARD FOREMAN, PGM 8: NOW YOU SEE IT NOW YOU DON’T May 26 at 6:45 PM RICHARD FOREMAN, PGM 9: MAD LOVE May 26 at 8:45 PM RICHARD FOREMAN, PGM 10: LATE DIGITAL WORKS May 27 at 6:30 PM RICHARD FOREMAN, PGM 11: ASTRONOME May 27 at 8:30 PM RICHARD FOREMAN, PGM 12: MY NAME IS RAINER THOMPSON AND I’VE LOST IT COMPLETELY May 28 at 6:30 PM RICHARD FOREMAN, PGM 13: MARIE LOSIER + SHAUN IRONS/LAUREN PETTY May 28 at 8:45 PM IMAGE CREDITS Event Image – Thomas Jay Ryan, Jan Leslie Harding, Henry Stram, in Richard Foreman’s “My Head was a Sledgehammer” Photo copyright by Paula Court / Courtesy of NYU and Richard Foreman Artist Image – Richard Foreman, 2009 By Dave Pape. . The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents His Head was a Sledgehammer At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Richard Foreman in Retrospect Screening Information The retrospective will be screened in-person at Anthology Film Archives (32 Second Avenue, NY 10003) from May 21st to May 28th 2025. RSVP Please note this is a ticketed event that takes place at Anthology Film Archives. Please use the button to reserve your tickets. Country United States Language English Running Time - minutes Year of Release - About The Film About The Retrospective The term “iconoclast” gets thrown around all too much, but in the case of Richard Foreman (1937-2025) there is hardly a more appropriate synonym to describe him. An unparalleled writer and director who ranks among the premier theater artists of the twentieth century, Foreman was also a local legend whose electrifying work greatly shaped the artistic landscape of downtown New York. The founder and director of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater company, Foreman staged eighty-plus astounding plays in a career that spanned over forty-five years, and most of them were presented here in the neighborhood. Foreman’s brazen avant-garde aesthetic was deeply rooted in his early involvement with Jonas Mekas and the 1960s underground film movement. His very first play, Angelface, was performed in 1968 at Mekas’s Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, one of the organizations that preceded Anthology. This retrospective both memorializes Foreman, who passed away in January, and celebrates the publication of No Title, his posthumous new book just published by The Further Reading Library. Organized in roughly chronological order, the series includes Foreman’s own films and videos alongside an array of performance documentation, documentaries, and portraits. Foreman retired from the theater in 2013 to focus on filmmaking, and the series includes his final digital videos, many of which have never been publicly screened. In addition to this sweeping survey, we are presenting a sidebar program featuring a handful of Foreman’s most cherished films. Some are the movies that inspired him early on, and others are works that he talked about on a regular basis. [Unfortunately, we are unable to include Foreman’s 35mm feature film STRONG MEDICINE (1981) in the series as all the known prints are unavailable at the moment due to a future preservation project.] SCREENING SCHEDULE RICHARD FOREMAN, PGM 1: THE EARLY PLAYS May 21 at 7:00 PM RICHARD FOREMAN, PGM 2: SOPHIA: THE CLIFFS May 22 at 7:00 PM RICHARD FOREMAN, PGM 3: PAIN(T) AND VERTICAL MOBILITY May 23 at 7:00 PM RICHARD FOREMAN, PGM 4: TWO REDISCOVERIES May 24 at 6:00 PM RICHARD FOREMAN, PGM 5: SHORT FILM AND VIDEO WORKS OF THE 1970s May 24 at 8:30 PM RICHARD FOREMAN, PGM 6: SHORT FILMS AND VIDEOS OF THE 1980s May 25 at 6:00 PM RICHARD FOREMAN, PGM 7: ONCE EVERY DAY May 25 at 8:00 PM RICHARD FOREMAN, PGM 8: NOW YOU SEE IT NOW YOU DON’T May 26 at 6:45 PM RICHARD FOREMAN, PGM 9: MAD LOVE May 26 at 8:45 PM RICHARD FOREMAN, PGM 10: LATE DIGITAL WORKS May 27 at 6:30 PM RICHARD FOREMAN, PGM 11: ASTRONOME May 27 at 8:30 PM RICHARD FOREMAN, PGM 12: MY NAME IS RAINER THOMPSON AND I’VE LOST IT COMPLETELY May 28 at 6:30 PM RICHARD FOREMAN, PGM 13: MARIE LOSIER + SHAUN IRONS/LAUREN PETTY May 28 at 8:45 PM IMAGE CREDITS Event Image – Thomas Jay Ryan, Jan Leslie Harding, Henry Stram, in Richard Foreman’s “My Head was a Sledgehammer” Photo copyright by Paula Court / Courtesy of NYU and Richard Foreman Artist Image – Richard Foreman, 2009 By Dave Pape. About The Artist(s) Richard Foreman (1937-2025) was a prominent American avant-garde playwright and the founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. He was known for his unique, highly stylized theater, characterized by complex language and visual tableaux, often employing disruptive, deconstructive elements. His work explored themes of the absurd and the surreal, with a focus on the relationship between language and image. Get in touch with the artist(s) - 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

Stanley Love Performance Group performs excerpts from Meow Love Werk, Hinny selected from choreographer Stanley Love’s vast body of work to honor his life at a memorial celebration in August 2023. “If you dance, you’re a dancer.” – Stanley Love PRELUDE Festival 2023 DANCE Excerpt from Meow Love Werk, Hinny from Love to Love You, Stanley Love: A Memorial Celebration Stanley Love Performance Group Dance English 40-45 minute performance 7:30PM EST Saturday, October 14, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Stanley Love Performance Group performs excerpts from Meow Love Werk, Hinny selected from choreographer Stanley Love’s vast body of work to honor his life at a memorial celebration in August 2023. “If you dance, you’re a dancer.” – Stanley Love The PRELUDE '23 presentation of the Stanley Love Performance Group has been made possible by the generous support of Claire Montgomery, James MacGregor and LOCATION ONE, Linda Wells and the Martha Graham Dance Company. Content / Trigger Description: Language warning for brief use of curse word (shit) Stanley Love Performance Group (SLPG) was created in 1992 with the inaugural performance at DTW’s Fresh Tracks with Adam and Steve and the company’s first full evening in 1993 with Hello Cruel World. SLPG now works, since Love’s death in 2019, in partnership with The Stanley Love Legacy which exists to safeguard, care for and share the artistic works of choreographer Stanley Love. Instagram: @lovestanleylove Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

The Segal Centre The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center (MESTC), The Graduate Center , CUNY , is a non-profit center for theatre, dance, and film affiliated with CUNY’s Ph.D. Program in Theatre . Originally founded in 1979 as the Center for Advanced Studies in Theatre Arts (CASTA), it was renamed in March of 1999 to recognize Martin E. Segal, one of New York City’s outstanding leaders of the arts. At the same time, the multi-purpose performing space in The Graduate Center’s new home in the former B. Altman department store was named the Martin E. Segal Theatre. The New York Times called Mr. Segal “New York’s leading cultural power broker.” An extraordinary figure in the arts and education in New York City, he has played a seminal role in many of the City’s most important cultural initiatives. The Center’s primary focus is to bridge the gap between the academic and professional performing arts communities by providing an open environment for the development of educational, community-driven, and professional projects in the performing arts. As a result, MESTC is home to theatre scholars, students, playwrights, actors, dancers, directors, dramaturgs, and performing arts managers, as well as both the local and international theatre communities. The Center presents staged readings to further the development of new and classic plays, lecture series, televised seminars featuring professional and academic luminaries, and arts in education programs, and maintains its long-standing visiting-scholars-from-abroad program. In addition, the Center publishes a series of highly regarded academic journals, as well as single volumes of importance, including plays in translation, all written and edited by renowned scholars. The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center is a longstanding collaborative partner with the Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation where Dr. Frank Hentschker serves as an advisor. This collaboration includes national and international artistic exchanges of archival work, talks, and research regarding the work of Robert Wilson. The Martin E. Segal Theatre is a 70-seat, fully equipped flexible space that provides an intimate venue where both artists and theatre professionals can actively participate with audiences to further the advancement, awareness, and appreciation of the theatrical experience. In addition, the Segal Center presents three annual festivals (PRELUDE, PEN World Voices: International Pay Festival, and The Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance) and publishes and maintains three open access online journals (Arab Stages, European Stages, and The Journal of American Drama and Theatre). The Segal Center also publishes many volumes of plays in translation and is the leading publisher of plays from the Arab world. The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center (MESTC) is a vital component of the Theatre Program’s academic culture and creating in close collaboration a research nexus, focusing on dramaturgy, new media, and global theatre. The Segal Center provides an intimate platform where both artists and theatre professionals can actively participate with audiences to advance awareness and appreciation MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER The CUNY Graduate Center Room 3110 New York, NY10016 ph: 212.817.1860 mestc@gc.cuny.edu

An exploration of mobility, disability, & bags. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE Watch Me Walk Anne Gridley Theater, Performance Art, Other English 30 minutes 6:00PM EST Thursday, October 12, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All An exploration of mobility, disability, & bags. Content / Trigger Description: Warning: I am a cripple with a gimp rising and my walk is not a character choice. 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. Instagram @gridlock2001 Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

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Two friends in the after hours entertain ghosts in the kitchen and the bedroom. One friend takes a long walk to the grocery store. One young woman waits for her. This is a short play about locating and accessing one’s will when the will has begun to drift away. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE ANALOG INTIMACY (Second Showing) Jess Barbagallo / Half Straddle Theater English 30 Minutes 7:30PM EST Tuesday, October 10, 2023 Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Ave, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Two friends in the after hours entertain ghosts in the kitchen and the bedroom. One friend takes a long walk to the grocery store. One young woman waits for her. This is a short play about locating and accessing one’s will when the will has begun to drift away. Content / Trigger Description: Jess Barbagallo is an American writer, director, and performer based in New York City. He has toured internationally and domestically with Big Dance Theater, the Builders Association, Theater of a Two-Headed Calf (and its Dyke Division) and Half Straddle. Barbagallo has originated roles in plays by Joshua Conkel, Casey Llewellyn, Normandy Sherwood, Trish Harnetiaux and many others. He appeared as Yann Fredericks in the original cast of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child at the Lyric Theatre on Broadway. His playwrighting credits include Grey-Eyed Dogs (Dixon Place), Saturn Nights (Incubator Arts Center), Good Year for Hunters (New Ohio Theatre), Karen Davis Does … (Brooklyn Arts Exchange), Joe Ranono’s Yuletide Log and Other Fruitcakes (Dixon Place), Sentence Fetish (Brick Theater), Melissa, So Far(Andy’s Playhouse) and My Old Man (and Other Stories) (Dixon Place). His writing has been published by Artforum, Howlround, Bomb Blog, New York Live Arts Blog: Context Notes, Brooklyn Rail and 53rd State Press. He is a 2009 Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab alum, a 2012 Queer Arts Mentorship mentee, and a 2013 MacDowell Colony Fellow. Barbagallo has taught theater and writing as a guest artist and adjunct lecturer at Duke University, New York University, University of Pennsylvania, Brooklyn College, the Vermont Young Playwright’s Festival and The O’Neill Center. Kristina "Tina" Satter is an American filmmaker, playwright, and director based in New York City. She is the founder and artistic director of the theater company Half Straddle, which formed in 2008 and received an Obie Award grant in 2013. Satter won a Guggenheim in 2020. Satter was described by Ben Brantley of the New York Times as "a genre-and-gender-bending, visually exacting stage artist who has developed an ardent following among downtown aesthetes with a taste for acidic eye candy and erotic enigmas." Her work often deals with subjects of gender, sexual identity, adolescence, and sports. She won a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (2016), and a Doris Doris Duke Artist Impact Award in 2014. In 2019, she received a Pew Fellowship. Satter has created 10 shows with Half Straddle, and the company's shows and videos have toured to over 20 countries in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and Asia. She made her Off Broadway debut as a conceiver and director in fall 2019 with Is This a Room at the Vineyard Theatre. A collection of three of her plays, Seagull (Thinking of You), with Away Uniform and Family was published in 2014. The text for her show Ghost Rings was published in 2017 by 53rd State Press along with a vinyl album of the show's songs. Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

As an ode to Carolee Schneemann's "Meat Joy," "Chicken Sister" explores fleshy sensation as a vessel for ghostly eruptions. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE Chicken Sister Anh Vo Dance English 30 minutes 2:00PM EST Saturday, October 14, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All As an ode to Carolee Schneemann's "Meat Joy," "Chicken Sister" explores fleshy sensation as a vessel for ghostly eruptions. This program/project was supported by a grant from the Jerome Foundation. Content / Trigger Description: Nudity Anh Vo is a Vietnamese dancer and writer based in Brooklyn. They create dances and texts about pornography and queer relations, about being and form, about identity and abstraction, about history and its colonial reality. Described by the New York Times as "risky, erotic, enigmatic and boldly humorous," their work animates the life of a Vietnamese desiring America, of a colonized being desiring its colonizer. Vo receives their degrees in Performance Studies from Brown University (BA) and New York University (MA). Vo is currently a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow. www.anhqvo.com Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

What is the role of academia in the new landscape of theater and performance after Black Live Matters, We See You W.A.T., The Time of Corona and the Climate Catastrophe in a radically changing political landscape? Should academia mirror, theorize, reflect and document — or influence, shape and actively participate in the change we want to see? PRELUDE Festival 2023 PANEL Academia and NYC Performance Tomi M Tsunoda, Daniel Irizarry, Solana Chehtman, Alexis Jemal, and Sylvaine Guyot 4:30PM EST Monday, October 16, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All What is the role of academia in the new landscape of theater and performance after Black Live Matters, We See You W.A.T., The Time of Corona and the Climate Catastrophe in a radically changing political landscape? Should academia mirror, theorize, reflect and document — or influence, shape and actively participate in the change we want to see? Featuring Tomi M Tsunoda , Daniel Irizarry , Solana Chehtman, Alexis Jemal, and Sylvaine Guyot. Content / Trigger Description: Tomi Tsunoda has spent most of her career as a director, deviser, designer, and producer of independent performance, developing sustainable systems for performing artists to self-produce work outside of institutional contexts. This included the creation of Breedingground Productions, which shepherded more than 200 projects over the course of ten years. She is one of 17 artists worldwide who are certified in all levels and disciplines to teach Soundpainting, the universal sign language for live composition created by jazz composer Walter Thompson. Her current projects combine both practical and critical work in dramaturgy, progressive arts pedagogy, fiber art, literary non-fiction, eco-philosophy, and facilitation, putting these fields into conversation as a way to address sustainable practice and systemic change. Tomi is currently serving as Chair of Undergraduate Drama at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, having previously served as Director for Playwrights Horizons Theater School, Head of the Theater Program at NYU Abu Dhabi, Education Director for the Powerhouse Training Program at Vassar College, and as faculty and guest artist at several additional schools and conservatories. Daniel Irizarry is a Puerto Rican born International Experimental Theatre director, actor/performer and educator based in NYC. His work embraces highly stylized visceral acting, pataphysics, a celebration of GERMS & consensual audience participation. He is the Artistic Director of One-Eighth Theater and full time Lecturer at MIT Music & Theatre Arts. In his most recent work, he directed and performed the final project for the historic closing of the New Ohio Theatre titled, ‘Ultra Left Violence’ written by Robert Lyons. Other notable credits directed and performed; The Maids by Jose Rivera (New York Times Critics pick); UBU by Adam Szymkowicz (Time Out NY Critics pick), world premiere of Busu by Mishima at Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theatre Festival, YOVO by Robert Lyons in NYC, Poland, Cuba, South Korea & My Onliness by Robert Lyons at New Ohio Theatre in NYC (One of the best performances Off-Broadway in 2022 by Theatermania and nominated for a 2023 HOLA award for best Outstanding performance by a lead actor. Over his career he has directed, performed and taught in Turkey, India, Germany, Japan, Lithuania, Italy, Romania, UK, Colombia, among others. Most notably at: Folkwang University in Germany, Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey and Seoul Institute of the Arts in South Korea. He holds an MFA in Acting from Columbia University, a BA in Drama at The Universidad de Puerto Rico where he has returned to teach at both. Solana Chehtman is a cultural producer and engagement curator born in Buenos Aires and based in New York City since 2012. She is currently the Director of Artist Programs at Joan Mitchell Foundation, where she supports artists with unrestricted funding and professional development through the Joan Mitchell Fellowship, as well as in their long term career stewardship via the Creating a Living Legacy (CALL) program. In the past decade, Solana has partnered with a wide range of cultural organizations across the performing and visual arts to create new opportunities for artists and avenues for public participation in the arts. Prior to joining the Foundation, she served as inaugural Director of Creative Practice and Social Impact at The Shed, and as Vice President of Public Engagement at Friends of the High Line. Solana received a BA in international studies at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, and holds an EdM in education policy from Teachers College, Columbia University. She was an adjunct Professor at the MA in Arts Administration at Baruch College, City University of New York between 2018 and 2021. Alexis Jemal, LCSW, LCADC, MA, JD, PhD, associate professor at Silberman School of Social Work-Hunter College, is a critical-radical so(ul)cial worker (practitioner, scholar, researcher, educator), social entrepreneur, and artivist who specializes in racial justice, radical healing, wellness, and liberation. Dr. Jemal grounds her research and scholarship in her Critical Transformative Potential Framework that develops critical consciousness and taps into radical imagination to convert consciousness into action that heals and transforms people, relationships, and environments to support everyone’s humanity to the fullest extent possible. This framework guides the development and implementation of multi-(from the molecular to the macro) level, holistic, socio-cultural, psychosocial, bio-behavioral health interventions that incorporate clinical practice, advocacy, and community and cultural organizing. She teaches courses at the master’s level in clinical practice, critical social work practice, and human behavior, and at the doctoral level in arts-based, participatory action, intervention research and public scholarship. Sylvaine Guyot is Professor of French Literature, Thought & Culture at NYU, New York, since 2021. At Harvard University, Guyot acted as the Chair for TDM Theater, Dance & Media next to her tenure at the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures. As a theatre director, she co-founded La Troupe (Harvard) and Le Théâtre de l’homme qui marche (Paris, France). She is currently developing a lecture-performance on understudied early modern female writing. Her research interests focus on seventeenth-century tragedy and spectacle culture, the history of the body and emotions, the politics of performing arts, and the formation of cultural institutions. Publications include Racine et le corps tragique (PUF, 2014) and Databases, Revenues, and Repertory: The French Stage Online, 1680-1793 (MIT Press, 2021). She is a coleader of the Comédie-Française Registers Project. She has also published articles on contemporary docu-plays that tell the stories of the under- and unrepresented. Photo credits: Tomi Tsunoda. Photo courtesy of the panelist. Daniel Irizarry. Photo courtesy of the panelist. Solana Chehtman. Photo courtesy of the panelist. Alexis Jemal. Photo courtesy of the panelist. Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Watch The Great Grand Greatness Awards by Jo Hedegaard at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. 3000 people are not gathered in the Asteroid Theatre on the night of the big award show. In fact, not a single soul could attend The Great Grand Greatness Awards. Not the host, not the presenters, not the winners, not the bands, not the products in the ‘commercials’. This presents a mounting challenge to host May Lifschitz, who finds the show descending into bizarreness and pure poetic chaos. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents The Great Grand Greatness Awards At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Jo Hedegaard Circus / Movement, Film, Mime, Multimedia, Music, Performance Art, Spoken Word This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks. About The Film Country Denmark Language English Running Time 57 minutes Year of Release 2023 3000 people are not gathered in the Asteroid Theatre on the night of the big award show. In fact, not a single soul could attend The Great Grand Greatness Awards. Not the host, not the presenters, not the winners, not the bands, not the products in the ‘commercials’. This presents a mounting challenge to host May Lifschitz, who finds the show descending into bizarreness and pure poetic chaos. Starring: May Lifschitz, Goyo Pomphile, Mirza Poturovic, Andrea Marcellier, Anne-Marie Curry, Kirsten Kamp Cadovius, Connie Hedegaard, Malik Grosos, Troels Thorsen, The Waiter, Makaia Salomon, Anette Støvelbæk, Søren Mühldorff, Jan Elle, Nana-Franciska Schöttländer, Jordan Jackson, Tomas Skovgaard, Jesper klinge Christen, Jacob Andersen, Jo Hedegaard. Written, directed and produced by: Jo Hedegaard Editor: Nicolaj Monberg Editor assistant: Jasmin Falk Jensen Sound design: Kristian Møller-Munar Photography: Peer Jon Ørsted, Lasse Gottlieb Karstensen, Ivan Cuevas, Daniel Leeb, Mark Grotkjær Lauritzen, Menno van Winden VFX: Kristian Møller-Munar, Ricardo León, Alexander Hjalmarsson, Esther-Sofie Hede CGI: Michael Vrede Colourgrader: Morten Pelch Graphics: Jo Hedegaard Post production: Jo Hedegaard Post production consultant: Mia Bang Stenberg Artworks: Jo Hedegaard, Hartmut Stockter Best boys: Martha Jes, Johan Sarauw, Kamma Hansen, Christian Hedegaard Music by: Kristian Møller-Munar, Casper Christiansen, August Campeotto, Andreas Svendsen, Bill Gross, Leonor Rib, Christine Raft, Daniel Nicholas Mølhave, Fredrik Hjulmand, Erik Danciu, Jo Hedegaard. Music mixing: Kristian Møller-Munar, Luiz Karlsen About The Artist(s) Jo Hedegaard (b. 1994) is a multi media visual artist working in film, sculpture, drawing, coagulated poetry and (public) performance. He has lived and worked in London, New York and Amsterdam, but is now based in Copenhagen, where he runs an art studio and makes visual work, experimental films and theatre. Get in touch with the artist(s) johedegaard@hotmail.com and follow them on social media www.johedegaard.com https://instagram.com/johedegaard_sunmanstudios 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

PRELUDE Public ity Information Fill in your performance details for the Prelude 2024 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 Performance Name Artist(s) / Group Name Your Email Address Performance Description Performance Image (Include credits in file name) Upload File Artist(s) / Group Bio (Please include all relevant bios from your team that you would like displayed on the website.) Artist(s) / Group Links (Website, Social Media etc.) Artist(s) / Group Image (Include credits in file name) Upload File Performance Type (Tick all that apply) * Required Theater Circus / Movement Dance Discussion Film Mime Multimedia Music Opera Performance Art Puppetry Spoken Word Other Performance Language Performance Duration Audience / Content Description or Warnings Grant / Foundational / Partner Acknowledgement Submit Thank you for submitting your information! We will be in touch soon with more details.

This event will take place in the Art History Screening Room in GC CUNY from Wednesday, October 11 to Saturday, October 14, everyday from 3pm to 8:30pm EST. Imagine that the American Theater is dead, or Downtown at any rate is dead, or both, or maybe no one can find the body but it's probably dead, anyway there was definitely a crime, or series of crimes; the place is a mess, and someone has watered down the whisky. You are a detective, or a prime witness, or a culprit, or all of the above, and you have been invited to contribute to one of those great evidence or murder boards/crazy walls they have on cop shows...sometimes in the stationhouse, sometimes in the serial killer lair... bring your questions, your theories, your schemes, your accusations, your confessions, your factoids, your manias; bring your hard won diagnosis, bring your intricately worked out solutions. We will supply: index cards, felt tips, crayons, red string. PRELUDE Festival 2023 INTERVIEWS Murder Room - Day 1 Anne Washburn, Many Others including, perhaps, yourself. Theater, Discussion, Multimedia, Other English 5 min - 55 min, your choice. 3:00PM to 8:30PM EST Wednesday, October 11, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Sign Up to Contribute This event will take place in the Art History Screening Room in GC CUNY from Wednesday, October 11 to Saturday, October 14, everyday from 3pm to 8:30pm EST. Imagine that the American Theater is dead, or Downtown at any rate is dead, or both, or maybe no one can find the body but it's probably dead, anyway there was definitely a crime, or series of crimes; the place is a mess, and someone has watered down the whisky. You are a detective, or a prime witness, or a culprit, or all of the above, and you have been invited to contribute to one of those great evidence or murder boards/crazy walls they have on cop shows...sometimes in the stationhouse, sometimes in the serial killer lair... bring your questions, your theories, your schemes, your accusations, your confessions, your factoids, your manias; bring your hard won diagnosis, bring your intricately worked out solutions. We will supply: index cards, felt tips, crayons, red string. This room has received material support from Playwrights Horizons, and New Georges, with numerous numerous contributors throughout the field. Content / Trigger Description: Anne Washburn is a playwright whose works include 10 out of 12, Antlia Pneumatica, Apparition, The Communist Dracula Pageant, A Devil At Noon, I Have Loved Strangers, The Internationalist, The Ladies, Little Bunny Foo Foo, Mr. Burns, Shipwreck, The Small, and transadaptations of Euripides' Orestes & Iphigenia in Aulis. Her work has premiered with 13P, Actors Theater of Louisville, the Almeida, American Repertory Theatre, Cherry Lane Theatre, Classic Stage Company, Clubbed Thumb, The Civilians, Dixon Place, Ensemble Studio Theater, The Folger, Playwrights Horizons, Soho Rep, Two River Theater Company, Vineyard Theater and Woolly Mammoth. Other contributors include: playwrights, box office personnel, artistic directors, literary managers, actors, designers, program directors, development directors, producers, interns, audience members, stage managers, directors. Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

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Join us for a captivating Sound Journey with antique Himalayan Singing Bowls at the Prelude 2023 festival. For a transcendent hour, allow the resonances of these age-old instruments to transport you beyond the confines of time. As each note reverberates, it melds quantum vibrations with ageless wisdom, steering your mind into a serene observational state, untouched by barriers. The intricate harmonies, underpinned by the principles of psychoacoustics, aid in releasing tension, submerging you into the labyrinth of the subconscious mind and the expansive realm of creativity. This meticulously crafted sound odyssey guarantees profound relaxation and treasured moments of clarity and unity, irrespective of your meditation experience. Dive in, resonate, and find yourself anew in this symphony of rejuvenating vibrations. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE Sound Ceremony Guy Yair Beider Music, Other English 90 minutes 2:00PM EST Wednesday, October 11, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Join us for a captivating Sound Journey with antique Himalayan Singing Bowls at the Prelude 2023 festival. For a transcendent hour, allow the resonances of these age-old instruments to transport you beyond the confines of time. As each note reverberates, it melds quantum vibrations with ageless wisdom, steering your mind into a serene observational state, untouched by barriers. The intricate harmonies, underpinned by the principles of psychoacoustics, aid in releasing tension, submerging you into the labyrinth of the subconscious mind and the expansive realm of creativity. This meticulously crafted sound odyssey guarantees profound relaxation and treasured moments of clarity and unity, irrespective of your meditation experience. Dive in, resonate, and find yourself anew in this symphony of rejuvenating vibrations. Content / Trigger Description: Guy Yair Beider is an accomplished sound meditation facilitator, sound wellness arts educator, and Himalayan singing bowls expert. With a passion for promoting healthy sonic nourishment and facilitating mindful and safe sonic journeys, Guy has extensive knowledge of working with sound, drawing on research in psychology, musicology, and psychoacoustics. In the pursuit of sonic aesthetics, Guy meticulously hand-picked every single instrument to unveil its beauty to his audience. This quest for perfection has spanned nearly a decade and has taken Guy as far as India, Nepal, and Tibet, where he tested thousands of singing bowls, attentively listening to and learning from the ancient wisdom imbued in these antique masterpieces. Since 2010, Guy has facilitated hundreds of meditations in a range of settings, including yoga studios, martial art schools, rehabilitation centers, nursing homes, churches, synagogues, schools, businesses, private circles, medicinal plant ceremonies, and various organizations for people with special needs, PTSD, and AA groups. In 2015, Guy founded the internationally recognized Bells of Bliss project. In 2020, Guy introduced a unique method for educating sound therapy practitioners and meditation teachers, which was launched through the online Sound Medicine Academy. https://www.guybeider.com/ Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Encounter Kinesis Project dance theatre's work Bridge Matter / The Reach in Manhattan, at this year's edition of the Prelude in the Parks festival by The Segal Centre, presented in collaboration with . Prelude in the Parks 2024 Festival Bridge Matter / The Reach Kinesis Project dance theatre Dance Friday, June 7, 2024 @ 6pm Inwood Hill Park, Gaelic Field, Manhattan Use the 218th street and Indian Road entrance of the park. We'll guide you from there. 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 Kinesis Project brings new life into Inwood Hill Park with this excerpt of Bridge Matter/The Reach, created specifically for the park and Kinesis Project's uptown community, audiences will be led along pathways, waterways and bridge views with gorgeous dancing and the live music of Grammy Award winning musician, Johnny Butler. Bridge Matter / The Reach is a second collaboration with the research of geoscientist Dr. Missy Eppes and her colleagues, studying how our shifting climate is affecting even the bedrock of our earth. Featured Image Credits: Sabrina Canas Kinesis Project dance theatre Kinesis Project dance theatre is a non-profit organization that creates site specific dance performances and facilitates educational programs. The company produces large-scale, space-changing and unexpectedly intimate dances. Kinesis Project is at the forefront of the international discussion of placemaking, art engagement with diverse communities and the cultural imperative of art in public spaces. Kinesis Project dances are inspired by Riker’s questions about the world around us. Those questions are excavated and answered through a generative, collaborative process with the dancers and designers of Kinesis Project. As the work moves into a site, Riker focuses on the expanse, scope and depth of the environment. Dances then further evolve based on the site, resulting in unique and custom performances in each space that the company enters. Aimed at democratizing contemporary dance for audiences at all ages and demographics, Kinesis Project injects movement and stillness into unusual and inspiring places, pushing the boundaries of how people see and interact with that space. As an educational and outreach organization, Kinesis Project teaches dance and creative thinking in schools, leads non-dancers in community movement making activities, and brings dance into public spaces. As a producing organization, Kinesis Project dance theatre founded Women in Motion, a platform to support female choreographers in New York City. Visit Artist Website Location Use the 218th street and Indian Road entrance of the park. We'll guide you from there. Visit Partner Website

Watch This is Ballroom by Juru and Vitã at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. In Rio de Janeiro City and its outskirts, LGBTQ+ youth of color recreates Ballroom culture on their own terms. A portrait of the dramas, the voguing performances, and the art of shade, 50 years after its inception in New York. Rio is burning!. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents This is Ballroom At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Juru and Vitã Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Thursday May 15th, at 4pm. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country Brazil Language Portuguese, English Running Time 92 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film About The Retrospective In Rio de Janeiro City and its outskirts, LGBTQ+ youth of color recreates Ballroom culture on their own terms. A portrait of the dramas, the voguing performances, and the art of shade, 50 years after its inception in New York. Rio is burning! About The Artist(s) Vitã is a filmmaker and screenwriter. Director of the short film "The day I remembered the trip to Bicuda" (2015), producer of the feature documentary "It's Not the First Time We Fight For Our Love" (2022). Curator of Brazilian Comedy FF and of showcases on Hong Sangsoo films in four cities in Brazil. Master's degree in Audiovisual at UFF (Brazil). In the ballroom scene, they participate as an independent photographer and are a member of the Legendary House of Lauren Intl. Juru is a researcher, dramaturgist and performing arts critic. Casting coach for the feature film "Com O Terceiro Olho na Terra da Profanação", by Catu Rizo (2017) and the short film "Sunset", by Bruno Roger (2014). Dramaturgist in the performance "Repertory n. 1", by Davi Pontes and Wallace Ferreira. Master in Contemporary Arts Studies at UFF and PhD student in Arts at UERJ. Get in touch with the artist(s) festival@utopiadocs.net and follow them on social media https://www.utopiadocs.net/ renato@utopiadocs.net 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

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 2024 Report from London and Berlin By Dan Poston Published: November 25, 2024 Download Article as PDF Covid pushed many people out of the theatre, but in Germany, at least, it was not just Covid. For several years before, regular theatregoers had begun to complain of a stagnation in the theatre. The once-innovative “post-dramatic” directorial styles that had drawn international crowds to German theatres and festivals in the late 20th and early 21st centuries had grown standard, rote. Visitors and young people who had only seen realist, dramatic theatre before could still experience the revelation of intelligent, well- theorized, post-everything theatrical aesthetics in their first attendance at a theatre in Berlin. But after a while, the experience devolved into just another yelling actor in a dark, minimalist room interrupted occasionally by heavy intermittent electronic music instead of scene changes. Yet more cycles of Brecht Kabuki or a Castorf stage flooded with orange balls pouring out of cupboards did not seem to cut through the deadening sense of nothing-new. In Germany as in many parts of the world, theatregoers had quietly retreated even before the pandemic into their living rooms and bedrooms, where innovation took the form of a new abundance and diversity of streaming films and series available on demand. General historians will likely focus on how the pandemic created a newly mediatized society, but for many of us, the ready, mass obedience to strict public- health guidelines during the pandemic was also a result of so many of us having lost our connection to in-person institutions and events: we were already increasingly sitting at home, anyway, waiting for something, well, dramatic. Although I had continued to attend theatrical productions on a limited basis, as available, during the pandemic period, I experienced the desire for a renewal of theatregoing on a post-pandemic trip to London in Fall 2023. In short, I was surprised to feel again like a bored tourist, longing to have some contact to Shakespeare, to live Culture. It was professionally necessary, anyway, since I was writing and teaching about the Bard, so I booked a ticket at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe in Southwark. I had been reading early modern travelers’ accounts of going to theatre, and this proved a helpful way to frame my walk across the Thames, embracing rather than snobbishly shirking from an authentic, new tourist impulse. Why, after all, should the dramatic tourist theatre be any less interesting than the intellectual theatre of Berlin, the conceit of theory to one side? The audience in the lobby was an appealing, sociable group of highly educated tourists, vibrant evening celebrants, and people working in theatre or culture, a familiar scene. The ushers led us into the closed round Jacobean winter theatre—modelled after Blackfriars —with an admirable mixture of routine professional friendliness and vigilance. They stood watch at each entrance of the auditorium throughout the entire show, adding an energy to the spectacle. I could not decide if their vigilance had to do with pride and excitement about working in such a London institution during peak-rent neoliberalism, or if it had been impressed upon them how easily even this modern wooden theatre might accidentally burn up with everyone inside if the wax candle lighting went somehow awry. I decided it was probably both, though I am sure the Globe complex has a formidable sprinkler and fire-prevention system in place. I noted the relief of feeling safe from yelling actors here, a fact which I associated with some small distance from the War in Eastern Europe, and I gave myself what felt like almost scandalous permission to look forward to hearing what some traditionally trained Shakespearean actors would do with a classic text. My only hesitation, which had nearly prevented me from buying tickets, was that the text to be performed was not Shakespearean at all but rather Ibsen’s Ghosts . O n second and third thought, however, this bit of anachronistic meditation on theatrical ghosts seemed peculiarly, teasingly smart, a way of making something new in a well-established, historicist tourist venue. The production, in this sense, turned out to be entirely satisfying, a validation of director Joe Hill-Gibbins’ production concept and the Globe’s artistic direction under Michelle Terry, who has begun to widen the productions staged there beyond texts from the early modern period. The stage candelabra lighting ritual, performed by the actors, immediately established the conversation between the Shakespearean stage’s essential anti-realism and Ibsen’s conventional drama of servants and bourgeois rulers behaving as if they really are captured in the four walls of an established house. Seeing the faces of other audience members in-the-round doubled for the gaze of the Shakespearean theatre on its later cousin, 19th-century picture-box realism. This effect was emphasized by the production’s backdrop: a large, square mirror, reminiscent equally of a cheap bordello as of the hard regime of tightened neoclassical control in Versailles’ 17th-century mirror room. The stage was otherwise bare, though covered by a large, long-shag burgundy rug on which the artist-son, Osvald (compellingly played by Stuart Thompson), lay and seemed to dream much of the action of the evening, as if himself gazing back on or hallucinating theatre history from a plastic technicolor simulacrum of the 1970s. Rosanna Vize’s highly effective set and costume designs gave strong visual support to the production’s well-crafted and subtle play with multiple historical ages of avant-garde production and fraught relations with realism. Osvald’s costume—a faux-fur sweater jacket over a plain white undershirt and light boxer shorts—featured a faded, elaborate floral pattern that evoked Renaissance court doublets and beast masquerading, at the same time as gesturing towards a slipperiness between much more antique figurations of the satyr and contemporary, neo-bohemian, art-world fashion. This still minimalist aesthetic of allowing-the-ghosts-in, this conversation with the gaze of various historical theatres and the avant-garde, was captured by one of the opening gestures of the play when Osvald, before lying down for his reverie, lit a real cigarette on stage. The smell of that cigarette lingering throughout the intermission-less Ibsen drama participated in an already well-entrenched 21st-century performance tradition of smoking actors critically reminding us of the suspiciously sanitary odor of our own mega-liberated time. It also quickly established the play’s driving allegory of an artist understanding his “rebellion” as a sociologically forced exile, about which he previously—as the supposed hero of a happy family non-drama—had been kept effectively and relatively brutally in the dark. The acting was accomplished with intelligence and spirited handiwork. The mother, Helene, played by Hattie Morahan (known for her award-winning turn as Nora in a 2012 production of A Doll’s House ), dominated the dark bare stage. Her nervous tight stage business became increasingly legible, in the exposed allegory of the play, as a 19th- century effort to keep artists and their next-generation representations away from the corruption of society’s actual making, while at the same time seducing them just enough into a torpidly incestual drama to prevent what would otherwise be their disastrous free relation to the state and the servant classes. European Realism became for the duration of the play a moment within the Shakespearean theatre’s long, shuffling repertoire. The English Renaissance theatre was opened again as a laboratory for contemplating the extended human transhistorical in both directions, past and future. With exquisite scenic minimalism and the speed of a sharply cut and knit-together text (clocking in at 100 minutes), Hill-Gibbins’ Ghosts staged the artist’s paradoxical epiphany about his own exile from the actual primal scene of Realism: the intentionally guarded, representational inaccessibility of the driving truths and negotiations of society’s actual practical, historical construction and business deals. Realism became in the Shakespearean gaze a ma nufactured narcissistic ghost-machine, the previously glimpsed netherworld of entrances from a backstage now blocked—not by a façade with necessary doors but more essentially by a supposedly endlessly revelatory mirror, a very basic but entirely effective installation mimicking Louis XIV’s mechanism of virtual social surveillance while displaying how easily and cheaply such a mechanism could be constructed, at will, via mass, industrial production. By foregoing bourgeois furniture and historicism in favor of lightly suggestive long-historical minimalism and the surreal, visual centering of the fantasizing artist, the production opened the bare allegorical dimensions of the play and its meditation on what the artist and ultimately art can be, if anything other than ghosts among ghosts. Productions at the Sam Wanamaker are dominated by the tourist desire to visit Shakespeare’s original site of creation. This production seized this reality and dealt with it not as an impediment to original creation but as a critical tool for showing the artist’s relation to theatre vis-à-vis one of the most famous, classic plays meditating on just this theme. In Ibsens’ Ghosts , the will of the young painter, returned as the prodigal son from art school in Paris, to create a new mirror for his time, society, and family is fatally and ironically mixed up with his art education being a doomed escape, arranged by his mother’s financial management, from the disease and corruption that he is otherwise due to inherit from his father. This meditation on artistic abyss and generational juncture at the center of Ibsen’s realist dramatic career functions like a theatre-historical Verfremdungseffekt. Paradoxically, it brings the audience nearer to contact with the floor and room of modern artistic creation and exposes that site’s (childlike) separation from society—the artist’s ambivalent inheritance of society’s own will to erase its hidden bad deals—even as the artist thus captured attempts to critically represent society. Ibsens’s Ghosts at the Sam Wanamaker, in short, fulfilled the tourist wish to approach the Shakespearean ghost by demonstrating the realism of a transhistorical, always returning artistic dilemma only contingently attached to a period’s furniture or wallpaper. If the double-binds of bourgeois false consciousness was Ibsen’s pet theme, Hill-Gibbins’ production used the Shakespearean gaze to more fully unearth the less historically bound, allegorical dimension of the drama. Sitting as it were in the presence of one of the larger, shaping ghosts of Shakespeare’s theatre, Queen Elizabeth I, audience members read Ibsen’s play about uncanny revenants differently. Helene haunts Helen, and vice versa, beauty in her maternal capacity becoming the controlling, tragic demi-goddess on which the play ruminates. Regine (the household maid who lights the lights and is destined to be the artist’s muse before it is revealed she is his half-sister) doubles for the state in the fantasy that beauty will make the state its servant, rather than both being the servants of other, baser powers-that-be. The artist as the pure liberated heir of beauty is doomed by his actual mixed heritage, the same construction that blocks his potentially monstrous love affair with the state. Fated to be an impotent mental invalid, a quasi-universal, de-historicized ghost-heir about whom the realist world will tell some seemingly objective history, the Shakespeare-like, authorial artist-ghost of this production attempted to break the double-bind of realism by thrusting the representation of his own compositional dreaming on stage. With the Shakespearean theatre came the loosened historical gazes of other theatres, including those most ancient and our own most contemporary, the recurring self-reflective moment of an artist attempting to create a theatre both freed and captured autotrophically again by its ghostly colleagues. When Helene, unable to repress the ghosts she has attempted to keep at bay along with the corruption of the family’s past and present, declares in Act 2 that “there are ghosts everywhere,” the actress seemed to show her seeing us, too, seeing ourselves as images in the mirror. The audience was appropriately riveted, as energized as our kind sentinels at the doorways, who then ushered us out with the assurance of professionals knowingly relieved again that the theatre did not entirely burn down, despite its one slight violation of code, that anti-Zeitgeist cigarette. Laios. Photo © Mark Brenner When I walked after the play north across the Millenium Bridge over the Thames that night, I decided to continue this new engagement with the theatre as a returning tourist. In May, I was able to secure several tickets for productions at the annual Theatertreffen in Berlin, where most of the jury-invited shows continue to sell out within the first hours of tickets becoming available. These used to be named the ten “best” productions of the year in German-speaking countries, but now they are simply called ten “remarkable” productions since few of us working in culture and the arts today want to be burdened with assigning hierarchies to works (see the essay on the Berlin Theatertreffen elsewhere in this iss ue.) One of the most buzzy productions of this year’sfestival was Falk Richter’s autofictional, family history play The Silence , which had been selling out at the Schaubühne since its November premier, but I was unable to get a ticket for that show using the ordinary purchase system. As it was, my first show at the festival was Yael Ronen and Shlomi Shaban’s Bucket List , which was staged away from the festival theatre (the Berliner Festspiele) at the Schaubühne, where it had been playing since it opened in December. The playwright and director Yael Ronen has been a fixture of Berlin theatre since 2009, when her Israeli-Palestinian-German ensemble comedy Third Generation, about the conflicts in the Middle East, debuted at the Schaubühne. For more than a decade, her dark, humane, and funny comedies have been a steady part of the repertoire at the Maxim Gorki Theatre; three of her plays were invited to previous Theatertreffen editions, including her 2021 “almost-a-musical” Slippery Slope , which was also co-created with Schaban. Shortly before arriving at the full theatre, I realized that the Theatertreffen premiere of Bucket List had been scheduled to take place on Yom HaShoah, the annual day of remembranc e for the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust and for Jewish heroism and resistance to Nazism. The date, May 9, was also exactly six months after the play’s premiere, and in the space of that half-year, the cultural atmosphere in Berlin, as in many cities around the world, had changed significantly. The December premiere had been met with anti-Israel protests and heightened security at the Schaubühne. In the days following the October 7 terrorist attack of Hamas against Israeli civilians, the Gorki had cancelled performances of Ronen’s The Situation (Theatertreffen 2016), a piece that centered around a Berlin-Neukölln language class and Syrian, Jewish-Israeli, Palestinian-Israeli, and Palestinian dialogue. The Gorki’s statement at the time took a nuanced but decided stance supporting Israel in response to the recent atrocities and ongoing (still ongoing) hostage situation. Six months after the premiere, when many people in the auditorium were returning to see Bucket List for a second or even a third time, Berlin was particularly charged by a series of relatively small, international and local student and general protests against Israel’s conduct in the ongoing war between it and H amas. Many of those protests had featured anti-Semitic slogans, occupied lecture halls, and even violence against Jewish individuals and institutions. Later in the month, a scandal would erupt when the President of the Technische Universität Berlin, Geraldine Rauch, liked several tweets with anti-Semitic content and then fought successfully to keep her job atop one of the city’s most important universities. It was, in short, an out-of-the-ordinary time for the Theatertreffen premiere of a play by two Israeli artists that meditated on the trauma of October 7, a world of increasing war, division, and terror, and the schizogenic, über-normality of ongoing, clever, smartphone-set sociality with its boring-stressful, rapid- change “turn to the left, turn to the right,” mass shock-therapy choreography (to quote one of the production’s central musical numbers.) Sitting in the theatre, I had a moment of deja-vu taking me back to the previous years’ Theatertreffen, when I saw the Ukrainian director Andriy May’s Putinprozess, a play that delved into the personal experiences of theatre-makers forced to flee from war as their theatres became bomb shelters and targets. Here again with Bucket List the reality of war and the suffering of its many victims flooded the cultural space. There ought to be a German or French word for the basic ambivalence of even highly engaged cultural consumers towards the transformation of cultural spaces into war-time spaces of activism, trauma coping, and refuge. Whatever that useful, important, healthy, dangerous, callous, or irresponsible Kriegsunterdrückungsgestalt might actually be named, it could be felt—again, ambivalently—in the audience just as it was complexly thematized in both productions, a year apart: a reminder of our world’s increased exposure to new, lethal conflagrations over that interval of time. The mood had decidedly shifted, partially, of course, due to the different historical responsibilities involved in the Ukrainian/Russian versus the Israeli/Hamas/Palestinian conflict. Whereas in the previous year, the instinct for both repression and bold certainty seemed stronger in the audience, the audience for Bucket List seemed sadder, more troubled, and more wary. Bucket List. Photo © David Baltzer Bucket List has a loose, impressionistic narrative about a patient who remembers waking up on a Saturday with his world having fallen apart, a thoroughgoing sense of alienation from self and the previously known life-scene. His name, surfacing uncertainly and somewhat robotically out of the second musical number (a darkly hilarious pastiche derived from the “Bobby” opening number of Company ), is Robert, but the scien ce-fiction context leaves open if anything about “Robert” and “his” memories are real at all or simply a postmodern, perhaps personalized insertion of “normal” memories into an otherwise mostly erased psyche. That is to say, the main plot conceit is that Robert is an imperfectly compliant recipient of a new, thorough happy-memory-replacement therapy developed by the overdrivenly neoliberal health-care firm, Zeitgeist, which hopes to profit from an accelerating PTSD pandemic. The acted-out personal memories, which largely comprise the show, might thus belong to those more painful memories to which Robert still clings in order to give his now lonely identity dramatic coherence and context. But the “sad” memories thus displayed seem troublingly not-painful-enough, framed as they are by the diagnosis of PTSD and the visually surrounding, abstracted evidence of unutterable, mass violence. Perhaps, the darker subtext of the productions suggests, even these ultimately bittersweet, sentimental moments of personal anguish are a strategic part of Zeitgeist’s functional brainwashing. In the clinical language of the attending doctor characters: suffering may be pathological when the technology to erase it exists, but a little bit of disorderly, remembered suffering may help melancholic loser-consumers (as Robert is specified) more wary of Zeitgeist to still feel human, a perhaps important factor in their tolerance of the prescribed therapy. The doubling, ensemble aes thetic of Bucket List —with its four engaging actors (Ruth Rosenfeld, Damian Rebgetz, Carolin Haupt, and Christopher Nell) d ressed in black and fluidly trading roles and observer positions—leaves open, like much of Ronen’s work, the extent to which material used in the show is autobiographical, and to whose specific autobiography it belongs. The basic sequential, episodic narrative of individual departures, losses, and partial returns stages different but emotionally and intellectually intertwined moments of breakage: adolescent rebellion, the end of a first love relationship, the long split of a mature marriage, the recovered memory of an early sexual trauma, and a mid-life individual breakup with reality. That latter breakup takes place as “Robert” undergoes a process akin to “mindfulness meets lobotomy” in which the promise of Zeitgeist begins to be realized: “in the very near future, the act of remembering will become a choice.” Reality continues to phone-stalk Robert and the ensemble, and the traumas of Saturday, October 7th, 2023, and its (ongoing) aftermath blend with other known and unknown traumas via crucial moments of marked linguistic slipperiness and generally suggestive scenic elements. The minimalist, abstract set, designed by Magda Willi, looked similar to an Apple Store installation, dominated by clean, white, pseudo-humanely rounded shapes and simple architectures for basic, flexible staging and (product) interaction. The symmetrical, bulky wh ite background module of this corporate-like display structure featured two large holes vaguely suggestive of eye pupils. There, in silent projection, slightly abstracted images of war intermittently accompanied the split-screen jazz-rock-opera d rama of formerly mundane, now privileged, romance. From the side of the stage, a three-person band provided the varying rhythms and catchy Broadway sound for what the opening number suggested was the irresistible, childlike offering of war’s singing. The virtuoso, musical coolness of the band was centered in a memorable number featuring the guitarist (Thomas Moked Blum) singing the part of a BBC correspondent reluctantly taking a break from a cocaine-fueled love affair to report on hundreds of adults and children being killed, raped, and abducted, before returning home to his pleasure pad like a good professional, “not such a bad day” after all. Anguish, the cheerful cruelty of economic coercion and enforced agreeability in still- buffered milieus, the questions of how to create, live, react, and grieve responsibly culminated in the final number. The anonymous articles of light white clothing falling from the rafters throughout the play littered the stage. Crumpled on the floor, they represented Robert’s left-behind memories, the ghosts of the ungraspable real dead from James Joyce to the Holocaust to today’s latest non-headlines, and the discarded drafts of a writer, as Robert finally sang, trying to pass on hope without simply contaminating another page: through failure, neglect, limitation, selfishness, inability, forgetfulness and inattention—the same negatives that created the possibilities and inevitability of imagination. The aesthetic was high, humane postmodernism, the moment of the postmodern that never took decisive hold because the internet changed everything. This was the moment, now “precious,” when there was to have been a return to the idea of progressive understanding of what it was to be (universally) human via the recognized, shared experience of becoming diversely what we all were, in the midst of plastic chaos. C’est la vie. Ronen, Shaban, and the ensemble showed and mourned a generational aesthetic that has become an impossibility when there are much more urgent and serious processes and concerns at stake. In her laudatio after the show (a speech that this year replaced the ordinary audience talk-back), Carolin Emcke described her experience of this Theatertreffen premiere, a half year after the original premiere, as a kind of looking back through a snow globe at both the estranged recent past and the world-picture of childhood and earlier life. The internet, after all, performs an entirely different world- picture, one that has finally put the ambiguously emerging fence up between this aesthetic age and that of postmodernism, when the individual for all its subjectivization was still operative as the crucial center of discernment. The internet, that corporate never- endingly blank-staring, data collecting Zeitgeist, has a different, eusocial teleology, decidedly towards the hive mind and what that mind wants to articulate, or manage through aesthetics. Macbeth. Photo © Armin Smailovic If Bucket List survives—as it should—in an anthology somewhere, it ought to be read as a paragon of just-human honesty. In the theatre that night, the play was alive in a different manner. The audience’s applause was complicated, indiscernible, and consciously so: tepid, non-committal, or serious, it reflected as well as the play and players on stage did (although less bravely) the inability of art to break through the forcefields of caution and concern that are both refuge from and perpetuators of our new scenes of war, loneliness, and capture. I, for one, as I believed we all in that audience felt poignantly as isolated ones, believe that powerlessness is not a critique of works like Bucket List but a confessed limitation of art essentially in the face of bad politics. When Ronen appeared on stage after the show to accept the recognition given by the Theatertreffen producers, she wore a glamorous green, sparkling robe, the stunning color in contrast to the white set, black-clad actors, and the white, anonymous garments that had drifted down during the 75-minute piece from near some invisible heaven, to be picked up and used by the actors in recreations of remembered scenes. In one of the most poignant and funny episodes of the play, “Clara” (Carolin Haupt) had donned a fallen white dress and re-enacted a scene of childhood ballet training, dancing ever more vigorously as her teacher (Ruth Rosenfeld) admonished her to gesture with her left leg: “the other left!”, the teacher continued to correct her, until Clara gave up in frustration, unable to correct a mistake she was not making. The color of Ronen’s robe that evening reminded us of the difficulty of saying which is the correct way to grieve, to be active, to do honor to the dead and the living: through the pale seriousness of representation, through the postmodern exposure of so many crumpled-up unread drafts of history littering the theatre floor as the floor and waste bucket of the writer’s studio and bedroom, or through the recovered, inherited, and willed exuberance of individuality, hope, complexity, even ironic glamour that was and is a thread of the happiness with which those victims of human violence live and lived through or did their best to live through it all? The audience seemed to share an understanding that we have no real right left leg left to stand on, in any case. The next show I attended, back at the Festspiele main theatre, was for me—as for many attendees—the highlight of a superb festival. Lina Beckmann (Germany’s 2011, 2022, and 2024 Actress of the Year) open ed Laios unassumingly, charmingly, as if giving a pre- theatre talk to acquaint the audience with the classical context s of the play they were about to see. A short, open question-and-answer session about the knowledge of Greek myth that we were bringing to our spectatorship segued seamlessly into one of the most beguiling, memorable dramatic monologues I have ever witnessed. In a 90-minute, true tour-de-force, the equally unassuming and breath-taking Beckmann donned masks, applied makeup, and performed virtuoso stretches of dialogue, narrative, alternative narrative, and commentary, all with a historically deep yet satisfyingly contemporary perspective on the myth she was relating. Making use of an “antique” hurdy gurdy in place of an aulos, Beckmann dove into the complex, queer biography of Oedipus’ usually brushed-over father, gripping the audience with expertly mixed light humor, tragic pathos, postmodern alienation, Butoh aesthetics, and archeological enactment. The simple bare set design by Johannes Schütz displayed an array of props and reconstructed ancient masks, fitting for Beckman’s marathon-like, two-hour performance, which rarely failed to be imbued with a sympathetic, humane spirit even as she changed registers of acting and narration with world-class finesse, endurance, conviction, and irony. A particularly effective, minimalist element of the staging was the use of what seemed to be a negative, live, back-projection system to occasionally create glowing “positive” white shadows of foregrounded props and human figures on the darkened stage backdrop. Annete ter Meulen provided the lighting design, Wicke Naujoks the costume design, and Sybille Meier the dramaturgy for a show sparkling with carefully interwoven, intricately non-distracting historical, political, and pop-cultural references and ornamentation. A feeling of relief and gratitude swelled in the audience for Karin Beier’s masterfully directed production. Theatre was back. We had forgotten. Beckmann’s performance used the full range of human voice, spirit, emotion, knowledge, and craft. It was tasteful, almost perfectly modulated. Perhaps three-quarters through there was a feeling of too-much, some repetition to be cut—perhaps the species was lost hopelessly in the spin-cycle of senseless, layered myth—but this was caught by the astonishing speed of the abrupt end, leaving ringing in the air the pathos-laden recognition question asked equally suddenly by the classical texts to their contemporary audiences, by both Laios and Oedipus to each other as unknown father and son, and by the actress to herself and all of us really living in that room—in a symmetry with the lighthearted, informal opening of the play: “ Bist du das?”, “Are you that?” Here was a production again that understood the grain of the voice, the thousand variations of quiet and rhythm, for example. Individual moments—Beckmann’s uncanny coughing prophecy as the oracle in a late-night snack café or her brief embodiment of the sphinx—were enough to justify anyone’s return to theatre spectatorship; no film or image or reading could match the layered, immersive, physical understanding of the Sphinx and the Pythia that this live experience granted its audience. More impressive, in a way, was to be in the audience and feel that all of this was mutually appreciated, that theatre’s return—a novel and progressively incremental cultural achievement—was being greeted and appreciated collectively by a sensitive, living, packed audience, alive to subtlety, in historical agreement about how much of the useless noise (polemics, false honesty, and all that) could be supplanted by complex, understandable rendering. Roland Schimmelpfennig’s poetic text—part 2 of the 2023, five-part Beier-Schimmelpfennig Thebes series, ANTHROPOLIS , created at the Hamburg Deutsches Schauspielhaus— performed a new archeological layer of classical reception. We gave Beckmann seven enthusiastic standing ovations, the applause itself only ending out of the humane impulse to give the actress a chance to rest and recover after such an act, to disappear again with our gratitude into her life. Walking out of the theatre back onto the street in the crowd, the feeling was palpable: art had changed the season. The city buzzed and hovered again in the talk, reflective social silence, and enlivened eyes and ears of the groups lingering, coalescing, and dispersing into a hopeful evening. After the previous two experiences, I entered my last Theatertreffen production of the year suffering from the curse of high expectations. The veteran Dutch director Johan Simons’ Macbeth production had been marketed as a revelation of Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy as a meta-comedy. What this meant in practice was that most of the speed, quick-pivoting nuance, and dizzying altitude variations of Shakespeare’s text were suppressed in favor of slapstick and elastic improvisation. The very long production (3 hours and 20 minutes) from the Schauspielhaus Bochum featured three talented, decorated actors sitting in what looked like a bare, well-lit, not well-kept modern neoclassical bath or decrepit sanatorium spa environment (stage design by Nadja Sofie Eller). There was plenty of irony, reference, and momentary pastiche to unpack, and the full insider audience had the intellectual chops to do so. But there was also a lot of time to think again about the invocation of the old writing advice never to set a short story in a bathtub. In sum, the audience witnessed a lengthy production of Waiting for Godot set to the text of Macbeth , as if we were invited to the long eternal life of the three witches, occasionally painfully acting out the script (or not), changing and condensing roles, waiting for something that would never come, waiting in that sense primarily for an authentic impulse to do something, embarrassed when that thing was active, heroic, violent, or requiring movement. A smart but long and intricately created satire produced at the audience’s expense is a puzzle to critique, like a meal of fine morsels that ironically deconstructs taste and dramatic expectation beyond all simplicity, action, and brevity. Ghosts. Photo © Marc Brenner About a quarter of the audience chose to take their seats on the smart side of things, but many in the audience used the long time of watching actors play smart theatre games on stage to look around the room and wonder if we were required to admire the emperor’s new clothes, 124 years after Ubu Roi , let alone more than four centuries since audiences first took in James I’s accension and Macbeth . Boos were reported in the intermission. For all its brilliant performative quotations, the production might have benefitted from borrowing the concept of the most famous Macbeth production of the century so far. Adding Punchdrunk’s 2011 Sleep No More into the comic world of the citational production—inviting the audience to wander and enter into the active game-playing of the actors—would have enlivened the piece; more precisely, as it was, it felt like the audience was cast as regressive, back-in-time, pre-2011 certainly. The use of a standard picture-box proscenium stage and a standard darkened auditorium felt here like an act of cruelty, creating an artificial sense of a fixed, conservative bourgeois theatre where most of the audience would have been relieved to experience anything more truly experimental. In an exception that proved the rule, one of the most memorable, humorous, and gripping moments of the production—when the three actors sat at a table open to the audience in front of the curtain for the feast scene—performed this gesture of openness. The acting, as an extended study of relational improv, was memorable, almost never naturalistic, and thickly layered over the much- daggered text. Marina Galic, Jens Harzer, and Stefan Hunstein fluidly played all the characters in Shakespeare’s tragedy. Simons’ casting and dramaturgy indeed innovatively and critically exposed the play’s structure of doubling and tripling in a sophisticated, meta-comical fashion. Galic took on the meta-role of the driving second (as Lady Macbeth, Banquo, and the Macduffs) to her real-life spouse, the much celebrated, Iffland-Ring-wearing Harzer as the king (Macbeth, Duncan, and Malcom). With Hunstein as the comically weirdest of the weird sisters, sometimes joining the pair in extended, bizarre make-out sessions, the impressive acting trio created many memorable, sparkling, insightful moments in the productions’ often revelatory, though drawn-out reduction sauce. I walked home that evening from this year’s Theatertreffen, then, ambivalent, wondering if the trend towards supposed insider productions and the decadent professionalization of the audience would continue (getting its second life after the pandemic) or if the new truly green sprouts of complex, generous, humane cultural achievement would be sustained and allowed, well, to flower. In the conversations afterwards, it struck me that critics and audience members downplayed a significant, surprising “return” of the German theatre towards a literary, new-author’s theatre: amidst the praise for productions like Bucket List and Laios , the writing was only minimally mentioned. Given the high and impressive production values from the other artists an d arts involved in making great theatre, that might be understandable. But it would be dishonest to not add the corrective that these productions also featured texts that deserve to be read and studied, that buoyed the performances and scenic designs and assemblages also on display. Just as Shakespeare, the outsider poet from Stratford, composed plays that we know drew much of their compelling material from the spectacular genius of ensemble—from the extraordinary talents of actors, architects, politicians, and impresario-businesspeople—a remarkable new generation of playwrights in Germany are sneaking their play texts like ghosts through the cracked mirror side-stage doors of a post-literary theatrum mundi. As superstitious as we might be, it would be a shame if we contemporaries again largely failed to remark upon them. Image Credits: Article References References About the author(s) Dan Poston is an Assistant Professor in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Tübingen. His intellectual biography of the quintessential public taste-maker Joseph Addison was published by the University of Virginia Press in December 2024. 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. 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