International Theatre Institute Research Articles

Covid Conversations 2: Anne Bogart

Maintaining and nurturing an ensemble theatre have been Anne Bogart’s foremost concerns in these past near-thirty years since she and Tadashi Suzuki founded the Saratoga International Theatre Institute (SITI) in 1992. Suzuki had established the Suzuki Company of Toga (SCOT) in 1976, making a secluded mountainous landscape of Japan its home to this day. Bogart’s venture in the United States, although inspired by Suzuki’s model of a production-based troupe of high artistic standards that, at the same time, developed its unique training methods, by no means merely duplicates its predecessor. In this Covid Conversation, Bogart briefly maps a segment of SITI’s history, reflecting on the company’s inter-arts endeavours with differing dance idioms and its engagement with Greek tragedy. She discusses the effects of the Covid pandemic on her troupe, also interrupting its performances of The Bacchae at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. Her most recent opera production, Tristan and Isolde, was closed for the same reason at the Croatian National Theatre – a key work in her portfolio of nineteenth-century grand opera as well as contemporary avant-garde opera. An acclaimed theatre director, Anne Bogart runs and teaches the Graduate Directing Programme at Columbia University in New York. At the SITI summer school in Saratoga, she and the company have workshopped the Viewpoints method that she has elaborated from Mary Overlie’s six principles for theatre and dance training. Bogart’s international workshops have further developed her method. She is the author of A Director Prepares (Routledge, 2001) and of many influential books that include (with Tina Landau) The Viewpoints Book (Theatre Communications Group, 2004). The Art of Resonance is forthcoming (2021, Bloomsbury). Maria Shevtsova is the Editor of New Theatre Quarterly whose most recent book is Rediscovering Stanislavsky (Cambridge University Press, 2020). The following conversation took place on 27 August 2020, was transcribed by Kunsang Kelden, and was edited by Maria Shevtsova. It is followed by a short coda announcing the transition of SITI into a resource centre.

Fritz Bennewitz in India: Intercultural Theatre with Brecht and Shakespeare by Joerg Esleben, Rolf Rohmer and David G. John

Reviewed by: Fritz Bennewitz in India: Intercultural Theatre with Brecht and Shakespeare by Joerg Esleben, Rolf Rohmer and David G. John Vera Stegmann Fritz Bennewitz in India: Intercultural Theatre with Brecht and Shakespeare. By Joerg Esleben with Rolf Rohmer and David G. John. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. Pp. xv + 365. Cloth $52.50. ISBN 978-1487500382. The East German theatre director Fritz Bennewitz (1926–1995) had a colorful career and left a remarkably versatile body of work that may not be widely known outside the field of GDR studies. Born in 1926 in Chemnitz, he was drafted in World War II, taken as a prisoner of war by the Americans in 1945, and had to work in a coal mine. After the war, he studied humanities in Leipzig and theater in Weimar; and from 1953–1955 he was a lecturer on Marxist-Leninist aesthetics at the Theater Academy Leipzig. In 1955 he became senior director of the Meiningen Theater, which he [End Page 182] transformed into the second most important Brecht stage in the GDR. In 1960 Bennewitz took over as director of the Deutsches Nationaltheater in Weimar. Beginning in the 1970s, Bennewitz's artistic career was increasingly shaped by international experiences. He directed plays and conducted workshops in Romania, West Germany, the US, Switzerland, Venezuela, and most frequently in India, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines. Bennewitz first went to India in 1970 to produce Brecht's Threepenny Opera with students at the National School of Drama in New Delhi. This visit initiated a twenty-four-year-long engagement with Indian theatre, during which he returned regularly to India to produce plays. His long-time involvement with the International Theatre Institute and his role as the institute's vice president since 1984 facilitated these visits. In 1991 Bennewitz received the coveted Sangeet Natak Akademi Award, the highest award for performing arts in India, as only the second non-Asian to be granted this honor. His last productions concentrated on Goethe's Faust, in Hindi at the Tata Theater in Mumbai and in German at the Meiningen Theater. He could not complete the latter, since he died of cancer in 1995 and was buried at the historical cemetery in Weimar. Research on Bennewitz's work has recently grown dramatically. The Fritz-Bennewitz-Freundeskreis, founded in January 1996, established the Fritz Bennewitz Archive in Leipzig, which is curated by Rolf Rohmer, one of the contributors to the volume. Canadian scholar David G. John, another contributor to this volume, published Bennewitz, Goethe, Faust: German and Intercultural Stagings in 2012; and Esleben's Fritz Bennewitz in India represents the product of team work and the most advanced state of intercultural Bennewitz scholarship to date, for which prominent Indian scholars, such as the cultural critic Rustom Bharucha, were consulted as well. The book is divided into two parts: the larger first part, about two thirds of the volume, covers Bennewitz's letters about his experiences in India, translated and adapted into English by Esleben and presented with Esleben's contextualized commentary and annotations. Interestingly, these letters are now first presented in English; a publication of the original letters in German never materialized, primarily for financial reasons. Most of these letters were addressed to his friend and confidante Waltraut Mertes. It is a one-sided correspondence; Mertes's responses have not been preserved. The shorter second part of the book contains external sources about Bennewitz: a character sketch by the Indian theater personality K.V. Subbanna; excerpts from Esleben's interviews in India with theater practitioners and scholars Amal Allana, Samik Bandyopadhyay, Akshara K.V., Prasanna, and Anuradha Kapur; a biographical essay by Rolf Rohmer; and an article by David G. John on Bennewitz and Brechtian political theater in India. A complete chronology of Bennewitz's productions in South Asia and his Indian projects in Germany, as well as a glossary of Indian and German theatrical terms, complete this rich and detailed sourcebook. Bennewitz's letters cover a fascinating array of subjects. We learn in detail about [End Page 183] Bennewitz's productions of plays by Brecht, Shakespeare, Goethe, Chekhov, and Volker Braun; we hear about the Indian performances that Bennewitz witnessed, and his...

Scenes of Cold War Diplomacy: Romania and the International Theatre Institute, 1956–1969

The article maps Romania’s involvement with the International Theatre Institute during its first decade of membership. The argument revolves around a number of East–West convergence high points such as the 1959 Helsinki Congress or the 1964 Bucharest Symposium. It analyzes the connections developed by Romanian theatre specialists within the framework provided by iti, the specialized networks they helped create and the domestic impact of these interactions. The article examines the multifaceted Romanian involvement with these projects in national and international context. It begins in 1956, Romania’s first participation at the Dramatic Art Festival in Paris, the forerunner of iti’s Theatre of Nations Festival. It closes the arc of the story with the 1969 international symposium on training young theatre directors. The article shows that soon after joining iti ranks, Romanian theatre artist were propelled into the international limelight and were recognized by their Western peers. It advances the idea that East European theatre practitioners had a role in shaping their respective community of knowledge as much as their Western counterparts did.

If ‘The World Was Ruled by Artists’: The 1967 International Theatre Institute World Congress and Cold War Leadership

The Twelfth International Theatre Institute (ITI) World Congress met in New York City over 4–10 June 1967 at the same time as the Arab–Israeli War was taking place. This context very much framed the delegates’ debates over the idea of artists as national leaders. One panel in particular, The Responsibility of Theatre to the Progress of Society, on Friday 8 June, offered an opportunity for the delegates to wrestle with the concept. The participants focused on three key questions: how audiences were witnesses to national reinvention, how theatre could serve as a pedagogical form, and how the intersection of these two allowed audiences to see themselves as citizens. This article focuses first on ITI's place in the geopolitical moment and then on the contributions during the conference and after by a specific set of artists from diverse countries, including the US, India, France, Morocco and Nigeria. The conversations represented a profound articulation of how theatre was influencing the complex ways in which nations were identifying and defining themselves and their citizens.

Theatre and the Avant-garde Today : An Interview with Tobias Biancone, Director General of the International Theatre Institute (UNESCO).

Entretien avec Tobias Biancone, Directeur Général du International Theatre Institute (ITI), réalisé le 8 juillet 2014 au Café & Deli du Shanghai Theatre Academy (STA). Mr. Biancone était invité à donner une conférence plénière dans la cadre du colloque international Performance Studies international Conference 20 (Psi20) : il aborda le thème « Avant-garde, Tradition, Communauté », et évoqua sa vision du théâtre contemporain chinois.

Remembering Arnold Wesker: Loose Connections from Left Field

Arnold Wesker, who died in April 2016, denied having been an ‘angry young man’ and, though the cliché clung, he declared, ‘But I am an angry old man.’ In this memoir, Simon Trussler, while reflecting on causes for the anger, does not attempt an analysis of the life and works, but recollects the times when their shared interests and intentions brought them into contact, and explores some of the reasons why the youthful climb to a peak of success was followed by a slow decline not in output or activity but in the critical response to a writer perceived as having gone out of fashion. NTQ's former co-editor, the late Clive Barker, was closely involved with Wesker in the early Centre Forty-Two project and its aim to open wider access to the arts, while Trussler helped to initiate Wesker's later involvement in the International Theatre Institute. Other ‘loose connections’ with Wesker's life and career here flesh out the facts and received opinions of the formal obituaries. Simon Trussler was one of the founding editors of the old Theatre Quarterly , as later of New Theatre Quarterly. He conducted two major interviews with Wesker in the original TQ, both later reprinted in book form, and with Glenda Leeming co-authored the first full-length study of Wesker's plays (Gollancz, 1981). Among many other publications, he is author of the award-winning Cambridge Illustrated History of British Theatre (1994).

“In the Interest of the State”: A Cold War National Theatre for the United States

The emerging cold war was a key moment for the question of a national theatre for the United States. Anxieties were strong around how the country should fulfill its new role as world super-power, while a need for national institutions to represent the United States created the context for the first truly fruitful collaboration between the live performance communities and the federal government. One the most important sites for this work was the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA) during the first fifteen years following the end of World War II. In that period, a small group of theatre professionals, who were also war veterans, worked to transform ANTA into a public foundation for the performing arts. To understand the role theatre’s leadership played in moving the US government from suppressing to supporting the arts, this article focuses on the strategies and tactics of its postwar leadership, looking at both ANTA’s history and one of ANTA’s key projects—the International Theatre Institute (ITI), founded in 1948 as a nongovernmental organization of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Practical issues of funding were central, and ANTA’s leaders and others pointed to funding as evidence of national values. The pursuit of federal recognition and funding as the surest path to a national theatre, however, permanently altered the movement for a national theatre. As the 1950s wore on, the call became less for an institution that could be designated as a national theatre, and more for the imprimatur of “national” that only the federal government could bring.

The Reflection Forums at Moving Stage Lab

In 2005 Bruce Barton and I were commissioned by the Danish chapter of the International Theatre Institute (ITI) to design and facilitate an ambitious laboratory on theatrical devising. The intentions and framework given by the ITI were to foster exchange between twenty-four professional stage artists from the Scandinavian and Baltic countries through a physical workshop with an online reflection component. The participants included playwrights, dramaturges, directors, choreographers, performing artists and designers. The workshop, known as Moving Stage Lab (MSL), was held in the summer of 2006 as part of the Nordic Theatre Days Festival in Copenhagen.

A Farewell to Peter Hepple

Peter Hepple, who died on 12 October 2006, had been an Advisory Editor of New Theatre Quarterly from the first issue of the relaunched journal back in 1985, and worked with us in the late 1970s during the old Theatre Quarterly's successful campaign to recreate a British Centre of the International Theatre Institute, of which he remained a council member. Here, in a tribute first published in The Independent on 14 October 2006, Ian Herbert remembers the man in the mac who was welcomed everywhere.

British Brutalism, the ‘New European Drama’, and the Role of the Director

The explosion of new theatre writing in Britain during and since the 'nineties contrasted with a dearth of original plays on continental Europe, east and west. Sanja Nikcevic attributes this in part to the dominance over the previous decades of the role of leading directors, who increasingly sought out raw materials to shape productions conforming to their own or their company's ideas. She traces the attempts in a number of countries to correct the imbalance by encouraging new writing through workshops and festivals—yet also how the explosion and importation of the British ‘in-yer-face’ style then affected the kind of new writing that was considered innovative and acceptable at such events. She argues against the claims made for the political significance of plays such as Sarah Kane's Blasted, suggesting rather that the acceptance of the normality of violence without reference to its social context negates the possibility of remedial action. A former Fulbright Scholar, Sanja Nikcevic is Head of the Department of English Literature at the University of Osijek, Croatia. Her full-length publications include The Subversive American Drama: Sympathy for Losers (1994), Affirmative American Drama: Long Live the Puritans (2003), and New European Drama: the Great Deception (2005). She was the founder and for eight years the president of the Croatian Centre of the International Theatre Institute.

‘New Theatres – New Writing?’

Report on the International Theatre Institute forum held at the Soho Theatre and Writers Centre Studio, London, on 25 February 2003.

Directing with the Viewpoints

Theatre Topics 10.2 (2000) 155-168 [Access article in PDF] Directing with the Viewpoints Joan Herrington Figures Since Anne Bogart began to develop the Viewpoints in the Experimental Theatre Wing of New York University (ETW) twenty years ago, her approach has become a training tool, a staging tool, an "everything" tool, adopted and adjusted by theatre artists around the world. The Viewpoints, a technique used to focus actors' awareness on different elements of performance (tempo, duration, gesture, spatial relationship), no longer remain exclusively among the avant-garde; rather, in the last decade, a generation of mainstream directors has begun to incorporate Viewpoints training and practice into the rehearsal process. Some have studied with Bogart; some have studied with her students; some have studied with Viewpoints creator Mary Overlie; and some have only attended a workshop. The only significant source of information on the Viewpoints is a collection of articles, Anne Bogart: Viewpoints (1995), which was a welcome response to a clamor for information. But this multiperspectival work raised more questions than it answered, lauding the benefits of working with the Viewpoints while affording only a few glimpses into their application in rehearsal. Jon Jory warns in the foreword that "lots of people are going to incorporate [Bogart's] theory into their practice, and just like Konstantin's acolytes, many will misunderstand it, do it badly and give it a bad name" (xvi). Motivated by Jory's words, and aware that there was much to learn from theatre artists well-versed in the Viewpoints, I attended the rehearsals and workshops of three directors: Bogart, Leon Ingulsrud, a founding member and director of the Saratoga International Theatre Institute (SITI), and Kevin Kuhlke, director of the ETW. 1 I also interviewed several other directors, including Scott Zigler, who studied with Bogart and is currently director of actor training at the American Repertory Theatre. These directors apply the Viewpoints in both professional and academic theatres, and their varied techniques, continually reexamined and reshaped, are creating theatrical works of unusual physical and visual clarity. In doing this research, my objective is to examine how these directors incorporate this tool into the rehearsal process and to describe what happens in the creation of shows. While we wait, as Jory notes, for Bogart to write her book, I hope this article provides insight into how she and other Viewpoints directors do their work. [End Page 155] Basic Principles There is not, as many believe, a "right" way to apply the Viewpoints. In fact, there are variations in the approach to cast training, the degree of integration, the process of staging, and the format of improvisation. Because the Viewpoints have evolved slowly over the past twenty years, and because different directors have encountered them at different points in their development, even the four directors discussed in this article employ different sets of Viewpoints. 2 Despite this diversity, I found remarkable agreement on the rewards of their use. It became clear to me that, despite their mystification, the Viewpoints produce effects that are quite specific. The primary and most obvious benefit is the collaboration between actors and directors, which generates "viscerally dynamic moments in the theatre" (Bogart qtd. in Drukman 32). The Viewpoints assume that actors who are sentient and open to the complete environment, who are motivated by instinct unimpeded by intellect, will create powerful stage movement and composition. In her plenary speech at the Viewpoints Conference in January 1997, Bogart clarified, "In the Viewpoints work, nothing is invented--everything is a response." Viewpoints training and its integration into rehearsal empower actors by providing the tools, vocabulary, forum, and secure ensemble with which actors can independently conceive a stage composition or enhance staging provided by the director. Less acknowledged, and sometimes more difficult to reconcile in rehearsal, is that working with the Viewpoints involves relinquishing some of the control it has taken directors a century to acquire. When actors become active participants in the overall creation of the show, power is redefined: the traditional director/actor hierarchy disappears. Veteran Viewpoints directors are clearly willing to make this trade in order to reap other rewards. Because practice of...

Collaboration and Cultural Clashing: Anne Bogart and Tadashi Suzuki's Saratoga International Theatre Institute

SARATOGA SPRINGS, August-September 1992 Anne Bogart stands firmly rooted-note pad in her left hand, energy focused in her right-in the green room of the Spa Little Theatre, Saratoga Springs. actors and I, the visitor, form a loose circle around her as Bogart gives notes after the first run through of Orestes by Charles L. Mee, Jr., The only reason I'm in the theatre is because of what Tom Nelis did tonight. He went all the way with it. Pursuing an idea is so brave and so vulnerable, she says passionately.' Her comment refers to Tom's experiment with an old-fashioned gas mask. gadget had popped up in the green room that day and he used it for his entire speech, a serial killer's testimony, taking everybody by surprise. Brave and vulnerable also perfectly describe Bogart's enterprising venture with Japanese avantgarde director Tadashi Suzuki-the formation of Saratoga International Theatre Institute in Saratoga Springs, New York. vision is grand, the preparation for their inaugural season, brief. Much needs to be worked out but what I witnessed in Saratoga from 26 August through 13 September 1992 is promising. It all started in 1988 when Bogart was invited to speak at Suzuki's International Festival in Toga-mura, Japan. Peter Zeisler, executive director of Theatre Communication Group, formally introduced the two directors, planting the seeds for their joint endeavor. In sharing ideas the two artists found that their concerns about the state of the theatre worldwide were excitingly similar. Both believe in a physical approach to the art of acting as theatre's cornerstone, both want to battle the corrupt state of the arts under capitalism, and both endorse theatre's responsibility in larger cultural and political matters. dialog continued and their desire to change the function and impact of theatre on an international scale finally inspired them to launch the current project.

A History of Stanislavski in Translation

Stanislavski has become a minor industry, both in theatre training and in publishing, with courses and related books endorsing, elaborating, or questioning his ‘System’. But how much of the System is really accessible to an English-speaking readership, and how full a view of Stanislavski's fully-formed ideas does it represent? Even the order and timing of the appearance of his works in English has, argues Jean Benedetti, determined our reception of his thought, and left us ignorant, sometimes wilfully, of the real development of his thinking: and in the following article, he traces the complicated and often fraught history of the translation of Stanislavski's works into English, revealing how (sometimes from the best of intentions) a slanted and incomplete view of the System still dominates our perceptions. Following a career in the theatre, film, and television. Jean Benedetti was Principal of the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama from 1970 to 1987, and since 1979 has been chairman of the Theatre Education Committee of the International Theatre Institute. In 1982 he published Stanislavski: an Introduction, and his biography of Stanislavski, the first in the West in forty years, was published in the autumn of 1988, and in paperback earlier this year. He is currently working on a documentary history of the Moscow Art Theatre.

The Parallel Chile: an Open Letter to Eugenio Barba

On 11 September 1973 the Chilean armed forces, led by General Augusto Pinochet, overthrew the democratically elected Socialist–Communist coalition government of President Salvador Allende Gossens. The coup marked the beginning of severe repression against leftists, trade unionists, journalists, and artists, many of whom were exiled, killed, or merely ‘disappeared’ after being arrested. This letter focuses on the years following the coup: it was written almost one year before the plebiscite on 5 October 1988 when Chileans voted against Pinochet continuing in power as president for another eight years, preparing the way for the elections of December 1989. Despite these hopeful developments – and previous coverage of theatre under the dictatorship, by Catherine Boyle in NTQ 15 (1988) and Enzo Cozzi in NTQ 22 (1989) – we felt it important to publish this moving account by a Chilean actively involved in the struggle, written to Eugenio Barba following the UNESCO-sponsored meeting on Latin American theatre they both attended in Lima, Peru, in April 1987. Its author, Hector Noguera, is a professor in the Theatre Department of Santiago's Catholic University as well as director of the university's professional theatre company, a founding member of several independent groups where he continues to direct and act, and president of the International Theatre Institute in Chile.

Chilean Theatre in the Days and Nights of Pinochet: An Interview with Hector Noguera

Hector Noguera is a professor in the theatre department of Santiago's Catholic University as well as one of Chile's leading directors and actors. He is a director of the university's professional theatre company, the School of Communication Arts' Theatre, and is a founding member of several independent groups where he continues to direct and act. Noguera is also president of the International Theatre Institute (ITI) in Chile and has represented Chile at many international conferences, including the UNESCO-sponsored meeting on Latin American theatre in Lima, Peru, in 1987, and the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) congress in Salento, Italy, the same year. In 1988 he was invited to direct his first English-language production at the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, a translation of Chilean Antonio Skarmeta's Burning Patience (Ardiente Paciencia), a play about Pablo Neruda which Noguera had directed in Santiago the previous year.

"Theatre of Roots": Encounter with Tradition

I am taking the risk of giving a label-theatre of roots-to the unconventional theatre which has been evolving for some two decades in India as a result of modern theatre's encounter with tradition. Theatre of roots has finally made its presence felt. It has compelling power, it thrills audiences, and it is receiving institutional recognition. It is deeply rooted in regional theatrical culture, but cuts across linguistic barriers, and has an all-India character in design. Never before during the past century and more has theatre been practiced in such diversified form, and at the same time with such unity in essential theatrical values. Apart from giving a label, I would also like to admit my guilt (my friend, director ShyamanandJalan, talking about this new theatre, calls me the guilty man) for raising the question of relevance of traditional performance for contemporary theatre in a national seminar in I96I which I organized as the general secretary of the Indian Center of the International Theatre Institute (ITI). As part of the great cultural renaissance of the post-Independence period, there has been a most meaningful encounter with tradition in various fields of creative activity. The return to and discovery of tradition is inspired by a search for roots and a quest for identity. This is part of the whole process of decolonization of lifestyle, social institutions, creative forms, and cultural modes. The modern Indian theatre, a product of colonial culture, felt an intense need to search for roots to counteract its violent dislocation from tradition. Directors like B.V. Karanth, K.N. Panikkar, and Ratan Thiyam have had meaningful encounters with tradition and, with their work, have reversed the colonial course of contemporary theatre, putting it back on the track of the great Natyasastra tradition.1 It sounds paradoxical, but their theatre is both avant-garde in the context of conventional realistic theatre, and part of the 2,000-year-old Natyasastra tradition. Natyasastra's survival is strikingly marked in the art of the actor, in the use of music and dance in realizing the performance text, in a whole set of conventions for treating time and space, and in the overall design and structure of a performance. In this context it is of interest to note that the search for roots, the liberation from Western realistic theatre, and the emergence of a new thea-

Essen, 1988 beyond performance: Dance scholarship today

Wann fuihrt Welttheater zum Weltverstandnis? When will world theatre lead to world understanding? With this provocative question Manfred Linke, director of the German Center of the International Theatre Institute (ITT), Berlin, welcomed the international group that assembled in the Grillo Theater on Friday evening, June 10, 1988, to open the International Congress on Dance held in Essen, West Germany. Although referring to the Congress on Dance spearheaded by Kurt Jooss that was held in Essen 60 years earlier, Linke's question seemed no less relevant today. It accurately foreshadowed the tone of the meetings held in the Folkwang Museum for five intensely concentrated days during which scholars, writers, librarians, archivists, and others who concern themselves with dance research attempted to communicate the state of the art in the various situations in which they live and work. During the first two days devoted to Beyond Performance, representatives from about 18 countries, representing all the inhabited continents, presented reports of varying length and subject matter concerning areas of research, writing, and understanding dance within the framework provided by each geographical area. Ample time for discussions after each panel allowed interaction between delegates and commentary as well as questions to the presenters by conference participants. The discussions revealed

The Calcutta International Theatre, Dance, and Martial Arts Seminar and Festival: A Week of Revelation and Confusion

An International Theatre, Dance, and Martial Arts Seminar and Festival was held in Calcutta, India, 14-20 December 1987. Delegates from twenty-nine countries attended the event, sponsored by Padatik, the West Bengal center of the Bharatiya Natya Sangh, the Indian Center of the International Theatre Institute. In addition to Indian performances from Manipur, Orissa, Bihar, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala, performances of Beijing opera, no, and three Indonesian forms-pancak silat (martial art), randai (martial art-influenced folk drama), and contemporary-were featured. While the seminars brought together an interdisciplinary and intercultural group of scholars who presented papers on a variety of topics, the festival featured demonstrations and performances of martial arts as well as traditional and contemporary performances closely related to the martial arts. The program planning committee consisted of Suresh Awasthi, Sunil Kothari, Shyamanand Jalan, Kaushik Dutta Sharma, Carol Martin, and Phillip Zarrilli. The week-long schedule was arranged to include morning seminars and lecture demonstrations on specific martial arts and related performance traditions, afternoon participatory workshops in martial art techniques and video and film lectures on special topics, and evening performances. When possible, an Asian martial art was demonstrated on the same program with the performance in which it was employed.

Toronto Perestroika in the ITI

There are two ways to publicly complain about theatre issues – hassle the government or governments involved or complain to the United Nations. Hassling the government is easy. We’ve all done it in one way or another. Going through the U.N. is harder but infinitely more interesting. Not that I recommend it as a regular practice (unless you’re into frustration as a fetish) but now that the U.N. – in the guise of the International Theatre Institute of Canada – is getting active once again in national theatre matters, it does seem a particularly appropriate time to try to explain the procedure.