Avignon Festival Research Articles

The Breach by Naomi Wallace (review)

Reviewed by: The Breach by Naomi Wallace Erica Stevens Abbitt THE BREACH. By Naomi Wallace. Directed by Sarah Frankcom. Hampstead Theatre, London. May 12, 2022. In an era of social crisis in Britain and the United States, this production of Naomi Wallace’s provocative coming-of-age drama The Breach marked a series of firsts. It was the first time this award-winning British-American playwright had been featured at London’s Hampstead Theatre, despite its ongoing commitment to innovative drama. It was the first production for this venue directed by Sarah Frankcom, known for her fearless dedication to contemporary playwrights during her tenure at the Manchester Royal Exchange. It was also The Breach’s English-language premiere. Ironically, this play, written by a Kentucky native, and commissioned by the Actors Theatre of Louisville, was firmly rejected for production by a number of American stages. In France, where translations of Wallace’s play are popular, and her Obie-award-winning drama One Flea Spare is in the permanent repertoire of the Comédie-Française, The Breach received its world premiere (as La Brèche) in a critically-acclaimed production at the 2019 Avignon Festival. (A Québécois version of La Brèche was performed in Montreal in 2021, and the play has recently been translated into German.) Set in Kentucky in 1977 and 1991, The Breach dramatizes the lives of four people—first as teenagers, and then, for the three of them who survive into adulthood, as grown-ups—as their youthful dreams collide with the realities of a country ravaged by the Vietnam War and the destructive impact of Reaganomics. The central figure is feisty sixteen-year-old Jude (Shannon Tarbet, a standout in a powerful cast). She fiercely guards her geeky, brainiac younger brother Acton (Stanley Morgan), carving out a basement sanctuary in their blue-collar home, where their hard-working widowed mother scarcely ever sets foot. When Acton is mercilessly bullied at school, he seeks protection from rich kid Hoke (Alfie Jones), and his eager sidekick Frayne (Charlie Beck). Thirteen years later, when the adult Jude (Jasmine Black-borow) returns to town after Acton’s suicide, she reunites with a grown-up Hoke (Tom Lewis), now CEO of his father’s pharmaceutical company, and a wary, chastened Frayne (Douggie McMeekin), still trailing in Hoke’s wake. As the past and present intersect, secrets are revealed, and troubling questions resurface: Did the boys drug and rape Jude on the night of her seventeenth birthday with her brother’s consent? Or were they tricked by the siblings into a promise of protection for Acton and a lifetime of guilt? Was a crime committed—and, if so, who were the victims? And what happens next? In the Hampstead production of The Breach, the cast members encircled each other in a series of scenes moving fluidly across time and place. Frank-com honoured the playwright’s stage directions to embody wild moments with still bodies, which meant that actors appeared to hover on the edge of disturbing encounters. This approach (ably assisted by choreographer Jennifer Jackson) worked best with the younger performers, who vibrated with barely-repressed energy as they paused, almost in mid-flight, to speak of their father’s fatal fall or the shocking arrangement to trade access to Jude’s body for Acton’s survival. In the older actors, this risky technique was only fully realized near the end, when Blackborow (as the adult Jude) stood quietly, almost transfixed, delivering a joyful speech about the new life she planned with her daughter. Supporting the productive tension between gritty realism and the surreal, dream-like nature of this [End Page 85] Click for larger view View full resolution Shannon Tarbet (Jude) in The Breach. Photo: Johan Persson. [End Page 86] Click for larger view View full resolution Stanley Morgan (Acton), Douggie McMeekin (Frayne), Jasmine Blackborow (Adult Jude), Shannon Tarbet (Young Jude) in The Breach. Photo: Johan Persson. disturbing narrative, Naomi Dawson created a minimalist set, both intimate and dangerous. Deftly lit by Rick Fisher, with a soundscape by Tingying Dong evoking the anarchic undertones of an American generation in transition, the performance space reinforced the play’s...

TAKING THE ACTORS SERIOUSL : MICHIEL VANDEVELDE S “PARADISE NOW (1968 – 2018)”

The article departs from a phrase in Paul Ricoeur’s “Memory, History, Forget- ting” (2003), and attempts to take Ricoeur at his word, by taking seriously the troupe of Flemish teenage actors performing Michiel Vandevelde’s “Paradise Now (1968–2018)”, a re-working of the iconic performance by The Living Theatre, which when it was presented fifty years ago at the Avignon Festival offered itself as a preparation for its audience to take action, individually and collectively, personally and politically, beyond the space of the theatrical representation. Vandevelde and the teenagers’ re-do functions rather differently. Drawing as much on film history and news and popular media as on theatre history, it offers a compilation of iconic images winding back to 1968, an occasion for these young 21st century performer- citizens – at once theatrical actors and “actors” of their own history – to voice their ambivalence about the potentials for common action in the present moment and the times ahead. The article considers the role of the “actors” (including the absent and the dead) in historical representation. It argues that the temporal form of the serial or chronicle (one image after another in chronological order) rather than the supposedly more complex – and human – dramatic plot (which structures relations between beginning, middle and end), attends to “taking the actors seriously” – in their actions and their passions – as a pressing task for our times.

Dead Children, Resilience, and Diversity

Dead Children, Resilience, and Diversity

Now

Now

Democracy and Theatre in Catalonia Since 1975

Democracy and Theatre in Catalonia Since 1975

A Poem by Heart

A Poem by Heart

Covid Conversations 5: Robert Wilson

World-renowned for having made a totally new kind of theatre, director-designer Robert Wilson first astonished international audiences in Paris in 1971 with Le Regard du sourd (Deafman Glance) and then with his twenty-four-hour Ouverture at the first edition of the Festival d’Automne in 1972. He also refers in this Conversation to Einstein on the Beach, premiered at the Avignon Festival in 1976, as another example among more of France offering him a home before he eventually founded the Watermill Center in 1992 on Long Island in the State of New York. Watermill, a laboratory for multidisciplinary creativity, opened its doors to the public in 2006 and is a focal point of the Conversation as a whole. Wilson’s immediately pre-Covid-pandemic production of The Messiah by Mozart was premiered at the Mozartwoche Salzburg in February 2020 and performed subsequently in Paris during a brief Covid ‘lull’ in September of that year. Discussion of this pivotal work leads to reflections on the opera productions that he had staged not so long before it, emphasizing the elements fundamental to his compositions – light, time, space, architecture, and silence. The Conversation, followed by audience questions addressed to Wilson, took place live online and on Facebook on 4 December 2020 as a prelude to the Festival Internacional Santiago a Mil in Chile, which opened on 3 January 2021. This was the Festival’s twenty-eighth year, but in a significantly restricted form due to Covid-19. A sequel to the Santiago interchange, also online but this time located in Paris, occurred on 17 September 2021. It resumes dialogue mainly on the Watermill Center’s broader cultural and social goals in the present and for the future, noting as well Wilson’s then current activities in Paris: a heavy schedule of four productions from the beginning of September to the end of December 2021, and a sound installation planned for 2022.Maria Shevtsova gratefully thanks the Fundación Teatro a Mil and its General Director Carmen Romero for their initiative in inviting Robert Wilson with her to converse publicly as part of the Festival a Mil, and for permission to edit the transcript for publication in New Theatre Quarterly. Thanks are due to interpreters Margit Schmohl and Jorge Ramirez, and to Maria Luisa Vergara for organizing the audience participation included below, as well as to Alfonso Arenas, former Coordinator of the Education and Communities Area at the Theatre Foundation a Mil. Warmest gratitude is extended to Robert Wilson for his generosity in all sorts of ways, and not least for finding the time to continue the Conversation in Paris. Thanks for their kind support to Nuria Moreno, Production at Teatro Real Madrid, Christof Belka, Executive Director of RW Work Ltd, Clifford Allen, Director of Archives of the Watermill Center, and Leesa Kelly and Noah Khoshbin, curators of the 2021 outdoor exhibition Minneapolis Protest Murals at the Crossroads Summer Festival held at the Watermill Center. The exhibition presented 190 public artworks from the 900 boards of the Minneapolis Protest Murals which were created organically in Minneapolis following the murder of George Floyd on 25 May 2020. Special thanks for their gift of images are given to photographers Lucie Jansch, Javier del Real, Kristian Kruuser and Kaupo Kikkas, Lovik Delger Ostenrik, and Martyna Szczesna. Kunsang Kelden and Maria Shevtsova transcribed this Conversation in two parts. Shevtsova, Editor of New Theatre Quarterly and author of Robert Wilson (Routledge, 2007; updated edition, 2019) edited and annotated the combined transcript for publication.

Dialectic aspects between periphery and center: the translations of Aeschylus’ tragedies into French by Olivier Py

“Periphery” and “centre” are two concepts which could be examined in terms of geographic, linguistic, or cultural variations and constants at different periods of human history. If world literature is a united system, with an unequal center and periphery, the interlinguistic translation of Aeschylusʼ tragedies into French by Olivier Py in the twenty-first century will serve as an example in order to highlight the various facets of this multidimensional relationship. Olivier Py, an award-winning prose and theatre writer, poet, director, actor, translator, director of the Avignon Festival since 2013, translated and directed all seven surviving Aeschylean tragedies between 2008 and 2017. He thus played the role of a cultural mediator who ensured the transition from the source language to the target language by creating texts designed to be presented on stage, and following the priorities of the codified theatrical discourse of tragedy. Based on this process, the author exam-ines the various spatio-temporal and cultural relationships between periphery and centre in order to present the main points of Olivier Py’s translation strategy.

A Contemporary Clown

Richard III is the perfect Shakespearean figure to look into the clowning tradition at play in the early modern theatrical world. Richard is a wise fool, who delivers the truth under comic appearances, as well as a buffoon, “deformed, unfinish'd, sent before [his] time” (Richard III, 1.3.21), who amuses the audience. Thomas Ostermeier, world renowned director of the Schaubühne Theatre in Berlin (since 1999), presented his Richard III at the Avignon Festival (France) in July 2015. His favorite actor, Lars Eidinger, largely contributed to his success. The latter chose to play a particularly dynamic Richard, in connection with the figure of the medieval Vice. Richard's role marks the pinnacle of Eidinger's acting, with a strong emphasis on improvisation. The spectators are constantly solicited. Improvisation is the perfect form of communication for the clown who mocks his audience and adapts to the conditions of live performance. Thomas Ostermeier, a keen reader of Shakespearean criticism, revisits the figure of the medieval Vice: he deploys twenty-first-century playing techniques in order to explore a complex Shakespearean heritage. Eidinger’s play mode is a perfect illustration of how the clown figure can be revisited to offer a new experience to twenty-first-century audiences.

Immigrant theatre in France: addressing a volatile concept

The present essay provides an overview of the notion of migration from the perspective of its appropriation by the French theater in different social and political contexts. The study focuses on the theater practiced by migrant workers in the 1960s and 1970s. We highlight the political role of the migrants´ native language and culture, with an emphasis on the role of the playwright Kateb Yacine. In the pedagogical context, the investigation describes the interventions made by Augusto Boal and CEDTITADE during the seventies and eighties. We conclude with some notes on the theme, as portrayed by the contemporary theater, with special focus on the Avignon festival.

The Hybrid Theater of Robert Pinget

Abstract The theatre of Robert Pinget was acclaimed at the Avignon Festival till the 1980s, until it became in spite of itself a representative of the theatrical avant-garde greeted by numerous critics and academic texts. It appears, however, that Pinget’s theatre was the victim of a real misinterpretation. Adventurous life, where romance and destiny mingle, lay the foundations of pingétienne irony, this search for personal tone subjects to uncertainties and other contradictions Robert Pinget’s affiliation with Max Jacob’s is an attempt to approach the avant-garde, but to turn away from it in a subtle way in the last moment. This waltz-hesitation of Pinget will be the basis of a tendency to put this work in the “new novel” or the theatrical avant-garde. The literature of Pinget can be considered as a form of the art of the escape the expression of an incessantly renewed amazement through an acousmatic voice. It is through the theory of the double and the quest for secrecy that we can now reposition Pinget’s theater in the perspective of a classical theater on the very margins of the avant-garde and a striking example of an ontological incomprehension between adaptation and the message left by the author.

The Living Theatre and the French 1968 Revolution: Of Political and Theatrical Crises

In 1968, Jean Vilar invited the Living Theatre to the XXIIth edition of the Avignon Festival. This invitation of the American anarchist company was part of the new policy of Vilar who was eager to open his festival to the younger generation and to new theatrical forms. Yet, in the wake of the revolution of May in Paris, Vilar’s festival was debased as a “cultural supermarket” by Jean-Jacques Lebel and the enragés with whom the Living Theatre sympathized and a second revolution took place that summer 1968 in Avignon. The Odéon and Avignon crises of May and July, when theatres became the stages of spectacular heated debates about the creation of a new society, demonstrated the synergy between the political and the theatrical by simultaneously enhancing the theatricality of politics and the politics of theatre. Interestingly (and paradoxically), in spite of the importance of the part played by The Living Theatre in this French Revolution of 1968, official history has been oblivious of the involvement of the American company. This amnesia is symptomatic of the trauma of the lost utopian dreams which 1968 came to represent. The fifty anniversary of the revolution of 1968 is the occasion to lift the veil on the forgotten episodes of this historical moment, to turn back the clock and further discover about the participation of The Living Theatre.

Luna Park (2011): An Aesthetics of Shock

In 2011, Greek composer Georges Aperghis was commissioned by IRCAM to compose Luna Park, a key work in his output that deals with the themes of video-surveillance. Involving dance-like gestures, flutes, video projections, and motion sensors, the composer found a new path for artistic expression through multimedia. Georges Aperghis is one of the leading composers of Contemporary Music Theatre. Already well known for his a series of works composed for the Avignon Festival [Salzman, E., & Desi, T. (2008). The new music theatre: Seeing the voice, hearing the body. Oxford: Oxford University Press], he has built a multi-disciplinary practice, combining comedians, dancers, and instrumentalists within ambitious projects (Commentaires in 1996, Avis de Tempête and Machinations in 2000). Following the different stages of the creation and realisation of the piece, one is struck by a crucial fact: there is no score. We will demonstrate how Georges Aperghis created the work in a process of selection and combination, gradually arriving at the final structure. The visual dimensions of this work are particularly significant, including gestures that are amplified with the use of motion sensors. But how can we understand the structure of a piece where gestures can have as much as structural power than music? The aim of this paper is to analyse Luna Park using material in IRCAM’s archive: interviews, photos, films, as well as the software and hardware used in the performance. Invoking Benjamin’s concept of ‘schock’, the authors will show how these features convey a multi-layered and multi-modal aesthetic perception from the local to the global form. The essay is illustrated by a video of the performance, with dynamic meta-data highlighting these multi-layered aesthetic and semantic dimensions.

Shakespeare at the Avignon Festival in 2015

Shakespeare at the Avignon Festival in 2015

The Reality of Fiction

In the last decade, the playwright and director Gianina Cărbunariu has become one of the prominent young voices in contemporary European theatre. Mihaela, the Tiger of Our Town, which premiered at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, will be performed at the 2016 Avignon festival by Sweden's Jupither Josephsson Company. Other plays include Stop the Tempo, For Sale, Typographic Letters, Solitarity, Metro is Everywhere, and mady-baby.edu (later titled Kebab). The plays have been translated into more than fifteen languages, and they have been performed in Romanian cities and in theatres across Europe, in Berlin, Munich, Paris, Madrid, Brussels, Vienna, Athens, Warsaw, Budapest, Dublin, and elsewhere in Moscow, Istanbul, Santiago de Chile, New York, and Montreal. Cărbunariu has had residencies at the Lark Theatre in New York and London's Royal Court. Her plays and productions have received numerous awards in Romania and in Canada. She is a founding member of the dramAcum independent theatre group in Bucharest. This interview was taped in New York City on December 19, 2015.

This is Not a Chair: Complicite's Master and Margarita

In this article Liliane Campos links Complicite's Master and Margarita (2011) to the company's previous productions, from The Street of Crocodiles (1992) to Shun-Kin (2008). She develops a close analysis of The Master and Margarita as it was staged at the Avignon Festival in July 2012, arguing that the company's aesthetic is characterized by a tension between narrative fragmentation and visual connections. While Complicite's shows overflow with postmodernist multiplicity and division, the urge to connect these ‘shards of stories’ is a driving force in Simon McBurney's artistic direction. This dynamic is explored here both on a semantic level, as a consequence of Complicite's physical language, and on a narrative level, through the use of framing and frame-breaking devices. The article highlights the company's recurrent themes and the defining traits of its performance style. Liliane Campos is a Lecturer in English and Theatre studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris. She has published various articles on British drama and performance, and two books about the role of science in contemporary writing and devising for the theatre.

O teatro em fuga ou Quando o teatro escapa de si mesmo

The text presents a concise analysis of three works presented in the Avignon Festival in 2013, which can be considered scenic modes that escape the theatrical territory. Considering the notion of theatricality on the threshold between reality and fiction, the works analyzed emphasize a shift of interest from creative procedures related to the scene to actions directed to the spectator.

Amateur Reviewing at the Avignon Festival: The “Mirror Group”

Amateur Reviewing at the Avignon Festival: The “Mirror Group”

French theatre today: the view from New York, Paris, and Avignon

In 2005 literary and film critic Edward Turk immersed himself in New York City s ACT FRENCH festival, a bold effort to enhance American contact with the contemporary stage. This dizzying crash course on numerous aspects of current theatre paved the way for six months of theatregoing in Paris and a month s sojourn at the 2006 Avignon Festival. In French Theatre Today he turns his yearlong involvement with this rich topic into an accessible, intelligent, and comprehensive overview of contemporary theatre. Situating many of the nearly 150 stage pieces he attended within contexts and timeframes that stretch backward and forward over a number of years, he reveals theatre during the first decade of the twenty-first century to be remarkably vital, inclined toward both innovation and concern for its audience, and as open to international influence as it is respectful of national tradition.French Theatre Today provides a seamless mix of critical analysis with lively description, theoretical considerations with reflexive remarks by the theatremakers themselves, and matters of current and American cultural politics. In the first part, New York, Turk offers close-ups of theatre works singled out during the ACT FRENCH festival for their presumed attractiveness to American audiences and critics. The second part, Paris, depicts a more expansive range of theatre pieces as they play out on their own soil. In the third part, Avignon, Turk captures the subject within a more fluid context that is, most interestingly, both eminently and resolutely international. The Paris and Avignon chapters contain valuable and well-informed contextual and background information as well as descriptions of the milieus of the Avignon Festival and the various neighborhoods in Paris where he attended performances, information that readers cannot find easily elsewhere. Finally, in the spirit of inclusiveness that characterizes so much new theatre and to give a representative account of his own experiences as a spectator, Turk rounds out his survey with observations on Paris s lively opera scene and France s wealth of circus entertainments, both traditional and newly envisioned.With his shrewd assessments of contemporary theatre, Turk conveys an excitement and an affection for his topic destined to arouse similar responses in his readers. His book s freshness and openness will reward theatre enthusiasts who are curious about an aspect of culture that is inadequately known in this country, veteran scholars and students of contemporary world theatre, and those American theatre professionals who have the ultimate authority and good fortune to determine which new works will reach audiences on these shores.

Roman Tragedies , and: Coriolanus , and: Julius Caesar , and: Antony and Cleopatra (review)

Reviewed by: Roman Tragedies, and: Coriolanus, and: Julius Caesar, and: Antony and Cleopatra Sarah K. Scott Roman Tragedies Presented by Toneelgroep Amsterdam at the Barbican International Theatre Events 2009, London, England. November 20–22, 2010. Directed by Ivo van Hove. Translated by Tom Kleijn. Scenography and Lighting by Jan Versweyveld. Video by Tal Yarden. Music and Sound by Eric Sleichim. Costumes by Lies van Assche. Coriolanus Roeland Fernhout (Cominius), Renée Fokker (Tribune of the People), Fred Goessens (Menenius), Janni Goslinga (Virgilia), Marieke Heebink (First Senator), Fedja van Huêt (Coriolanus), Chico Kenzari (Aufidius), Chris Nietvelt (Anchorman), Frieda Pittoors (Volumnia), Alwin Pulinckx (Brutus), and Eelco Smits (Sicinius). Julius Caesar Roeland Fernhout (Brutus/Lucius), Renée Fokker (Cassius), Fred Goessens (Lepidus), Janni Goslinga (Calpurnia), Marieke Heebink (Casca), Chico Kenzari (Anchorman), Hans Kesting (Antony), Hugo Koolschijn (Julius Caesar), Hadewych Minis (Octavius Caesar), Eelco Smits (Decius), and Karina Smulders (Portia, Lucius). Antony and Cleopatra Roeland Fernhout (Thidias), Fred Goessens (Lepidus), Janni Goslinga (Diomedes), Marieke Heebink (Charmian), Fedja van Huêt (Agrippa), Chico Kenzari (Enobarbus), Hans Kesting (Antony), Hugo Koolschijn (Proculeius), Hadewych Minis (Octavius Caesar), Chris Nietvelt (Cleopatra), Frieda Pittoors (Iras), Alwin Pulinckx (Dolabella), Eelco Smits (Ventidius), and Karina Smulders (Octavia). Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s Roman Tragedies, part of the Barbican International Theatre Events (BITE) 2009 season, was a provocative, ambitious production conflating and reimagining Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra to create a chronicle of emerging populist Roman rule which traced public and private forms of ambition and power. Premiering in Amsterdam in 2007 and staged a year later at [End Page 347] the 2008 Avignon Festival, the London staging of the play was the Dutch company’s Barbican debut and its first production in London after a ten-year absence. The smart set-design, modern-dress costuming, and brilliant music complimented superb ensemble acting and a carefully crafted script to produce a deftly layered, visually stimulating study that vitalized the historical past by depicting, somewhat chaotically, political clashes of the present. Running time was approximately five-and-a-half hours with brief scene changes of three to ten minutes in lieu of an intermission. Actors delivered dialogue in Dutch. Click for larger view View full resolution Chris Nietvelt as Cleopatra and Hans Kesting as Antony (above), with (from left to right) Eelco Smits as Ventidius, Chris Nietvelt as Cleopatra, Marieke Heebink as Charmian, Jacob Derwig as Thidias, Hans Kesting as Antony, Janni Goslinga as Diomedes, Frieda Pittoors as Iras, Alwin Pulinckx as Dolabella, Barry Atsma as Enobarbus, Fedja van Huêt as Agrippa, and Hadewych Minis as Octavius Caesar (below) in Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s production of Antony and Cleopatra, directed by Ivo van Hove. Photo courtesy of Jan Versweyveld. A sleek, visually impressive contemporary set design used the entire Barbican stage to create an open-plan modern conference center. The audience was invited to watch the action on the stage amongst barrel-shaded accent lights, mushroom-colored modular sofas and stuffed chairs, coffee tables, and office planters. Numerous plasma-screen televisions delivered live and recorded images. Additional common areas were located to the far sides of the set, including makeup and first aid stations, a Toneelgroep [End Page 348] Amsterdam information area, and a bar and café serving London Pride and Pad Thai, among other fare. A space was also dedicated to a computer that was connected to a red LED display that ran English surtitles underneath the screen above the proscenium. The audience was invited to type messages that were then transmitted to the display, which meant that a good amount of jocular commentary was delivered when the surtitles were not running. Such messages, often distracting and gratuitous, included the following: “Apparently all Dutch men are gorgeous. I’m moving to Amsterdam” and “Take off your shirt Aufidius.” Click for larger view View full resolution Fedja van Huêt as Coriolanus (above), with (from left to right) Marieke Heebink as First Senator, Renée Fokker as Tribune of the People, Barry Atsma as Aufidius, and Jacob Derwig as Cominius (below) in Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s production of Coriolanus, directed by Ivo van Hove. Photo courtesy of Jan Versweyveld. The production favored the use of technology and media over the presentation...