European Festivals Research Articles

Questions of Survival: towards a Postmodern Feminist Theatre

Deborah Levy is a playwright, poet, and novelist, whose theatre work is informed by a concern to combine visual imagery, music, and text. After working with visual artists and sculptors, and performing her poetry in pubs and galleries and on the cabaret circuit, she was commissioned by the Women's Theatre Group to write Pax. This was followed by Clam, three more plays for the fringe, and then by Heresies for the RSC. She is currently working on an adaptation of Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus. A collection of Deborah Levy's poetry, An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell, and a novel, Beautiful Mutants, have both been published by Jonathan Cape. She has also worked as a writer and director with the Magdalena Project, for whom she directed a devised theatre piece entitled The B File, based on her own short story ‘Swallowing Geography’. This was performed in October 1991 in the theatre of Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, where it was well received by both critics and audience, and has since been staged for the European Arts Festival at Chapter, and at the Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast. It was in Cardiff that Irini Charitou, who acted in both productions of The B File, talked to Deborah Levy about her concerns and interests as a feminist playwright who has chosen postmodernism as a means of articulating her cultural position. Irini Charitou, who complements the interview with a brief introduction to Pax, Clam, and Heresies, is presently researching towards an MPhil on contemporary British and Greek women's theatre at the University of Lancaster.

A Brief Overview of Musical Ensembles with Brass Instruments in European Festivals of State

And there was musicperformed. Historical literature is chock full of annoyingly vague references such as this to musical instruments. Indeed, one soon becomes both frustrated and discouraged in attempting to ferret out really meaningful eyewitness accounts in hopes of discovering something that adds substantially to our knowledge of instruments and performance practices. Fortunately, there is one extremely fruitful corpus in this regard that helps fill this gap in a substantial way, with the additional bonus of cogent and reliable engravings depicting the scenes described: the specialized genre known as festival books. Part of a 300-year-old tradition of commemorating and preserving historically significant but otherwise ephemeral events of state by means of permanent written and visual records, these often sumptuous volumes, more often than not large and elegantly conceived, were produced upon command in limited quantities for a discriminating and elite audience of peers in order to broadcast and perpetuate for all times the festivities celebrating important political affairs, such as coronations, marriages, births and baptisms of progeny, official entries and state visits, peace treaties, oaths of allegiance and fidelity and state funerals.' Fortunately, many of these books describe in detail the musical performances that took place at these festivals. Some present us with both text and pictures, while others offer brief, tantalizing references without any illustrations of musical ensembles. Conversely, some volumes contain engravings of musicians without any significant references in the text to theirperformances. In themain, however, festival bookscan with provide us with important written and visual clues concerning the role of music in these events of state, the instrumental and vocal ensembles that provided this key ingredient, sometimes even organological details, and information on contemporary performance practices as well. Let's look at a few of these festivals from the perspective of the brass instruments that participated in the music-making.

The Actors Lab: The Ritual Roots of Human Action

The Actor’s Lab, a professional research and performance ensemble from Hamilton, Ontario, was founded in 1971 on the campus of McMaster University by Richard Nieoczym, then a student of religious studies and philosophy. Influenced by Jerzy Grotowski’s root work on the actor and those elements which psychologically stand in the way of the actor, the Lab today conducts activities ranging from occasional public performances (including periodic para-theatrical events) to special performance workshops and conferences. Continual group and personal research in the form of ‘studies’ is maintained as an ongoing activity by the Lab’s six members, all of whom are in their 20’s and 30’s and come from Catholic or Protestant, Anglophone backgrounds. As suggested by its original name, Le Théâtre de I’Homme, the Lab has always tried to achieve a theatre of essential man and essential actions. Its themes, gestures, settings and rhythms are consequently quite typically elemental and non-narrative with strong emphasis on shadow, silence and a flowing form of movement that appears most often as dance-like. Performances by the Lab are neither thematically nor typically Canadian, though some of its playwrights and all of its members are from Ontario. Through the years, the Lab has performed at Festivals in Europe (BITEF and Wroclaw to name just two) and in the United States (the New Theatre Festival in Baltimore). In the following essay, written for CTR by Prof. Ronald Grimes of the Religion and Culture Department at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, the Lab’s work is looked at in its relation to the ritualistic roots of all personal and social action.

Letter from Europe

The proliferation of European festivals and conferences focusing on contemporary music is becoming so great that if any of the group of musicians regularly invited were to accept all his invitations, he would be kept busy almost all year simply in traveling from one country to another. For there is a small nucleus that meets over and over again, once even in Tokyo (as happened last year) but most often at the annual festivals, such as the Biennale in Venice in April, the Zagreb Festival in May, the ISCM Festival at the beginning of June-last year in London, this year in Amsterdam-and, during the summer, in the courses at Darmstadt, Dartington Hall, Cheltenham, etc.; then again in September in Warsaw, in early October either at Palermo or Berlin, and at Donaueschingen in late October. Although each of these festivals has its local supporters, performers, composers, and a special public that has grown rapidly in recent years, there is an increasingly large itinerant group of young enthusiasts that goes from one place to the other. To everyone's amazement (but to the delight of only some), music festivals are becoming increasingly successful. This year the size of the audiences for the third annual Palermo festival (about 2500 for each event) has stimulated other less thriving Italian music festivals of other types to rethink their plans for next year in an attempt to attract some of this modernistic public, even though music festivals are notoriously expensive to give, requiring sometimes extravagant numbers of rehearsals, and sometimes the assistance of one of the special group of conductors and performers accustomed to the problems of new music. The main artistic orientation of these festivals has become more and more that of the Darmstadt school, not so much because its members have made a concerted effort to control the programs, but because increasing amounts of music of an interesting nature have their source there. By now it is clear that the members of this school have become the arbiters of what it is to be modern in Europe, for the novelty of their music and their ideas have been intensively and quite intelligently promoted by many different agencies. Sometimes it seems that the very fact of such musical activity within a limited sphere, brilliant and fascinating as it sometimes is, will lead quickly to surfeit, but right now this is the lively school and its influences are felt everywhere in Europe where young composers try to strike out

News Reports

AbstractNot long ago a festival of the arts meant to most Americans one of the brilliant annual events held in various cities of Europe: Salzburg, Edinburgh, Cannes, Venice, or remote Prades, to which a few devotees travelled from halfway across the earth in order to attend a galaxy of special events in various arts. Only a few could afford to go and among them the American college student was of necessity in a small minority. The great European festivals continue—and with our heartiest blessings—but today they have begun to have modest counterparts here and there on the American college campus and from the flurry of announcements lately reaching this desk their number and size appear to be growing. Since the end of the war (Cornell, for example, held its ninth festival this spring) many colleges and universities have set aside a few days, usually in the spring, for the offering of a special program in the arts for the benefit of the local community, and from the enthusiastic reports of visitors we conclude that these have been effective not only in bringing a new awareness of the arts to college students but in demonstrating their relevance to higher education—a subject, by the way, of many symposia and panel discussions.

The Lepra Conference Again.

New York, Dec. 15, 1897. <h3>To the Editor:</h3> —Dr. Dyer, one of the editors of the<i>New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal</i>, has published on his return from Berlin, where he attended the Leprosy Conference, not only a very accurate (I have the Berlin<i>Wochenschrift</i>before me) report of the doings of the Conference, but also a very curious one. It has a quality, which I'll be bound, will not be encountered in any reports of the same events, now being published or hereafter to be given to the world by his European colleagues; it will be found even, or rather especially, outside of the profession intensely amusing. Would those Teutons, Latins, Scandinavians, Slavonians, have ever imagined that the novelty of their European festival, the great men assembled in the capital of Germany, the beer and the emperor could violently<i>wake to ecstasy the living lyre</i>of a Yankee (as