“the audience reacted to almost every single sonnet with rapturous applause”
—Der Spiegel
Iambic pentameter gets a surreal makeover in this pop-opera romp through Shakespeare’s sonnets from director Robert Wilson and composer Rufus Wainwright. The Bard’s enigmatic poems are pared down to 25 selections, set to everything from medieval German Minnesang to cabaret rock and performed by Bertolt Brecht’s historic Berliner Ensemble. As pallid, genderqueer[1] dramatis personæ, the virtuosic performers smirk and sneer through expressionistic slapstick, while Wilson’s signature sculpting of time, light[2], and gesture evokes an absurdist dream.

photo bam.org

Directing, stage design, lighting concept by Robert Wilson
Music by Rufus Wainwright
Costume design by Jacques Reynaud
Conducted by Hans-Jörn Brandenburg, Stefan Rager
Co-direction by Ann-Christin Rommen
Lighting by Andreas Fuchs and Ulrich Eh

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Henry sits on a beach, remembering and imagining stories and incidents from his life. Tormented by his father’s suicide, his own disfunctional family history and his failure as a writer, hallucinations and reality merge as he attempts to stoke the fire of his creativity.

First broadcast on radio in 1959, Embers takes us on a journey into the haphazard world of Henry’s imagination, a world of ever-shifting mental leaps, ruminations and ambiguities where creative storytelling and unfinished memories both real and unreal coalesce into one. Was Henry’s father washed out to sea whilst taking his evening swim, or did he commit suicide?

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‘We never found your body, you know…’

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Bob Wilson is probably one of the most famous stage directors. In the ’70s he started experimenting and creating his own path, which became clearer and clearer with the years. Now it’s enough to see the lights in a performance to be sure it is a performance directed by him. For those that already knew the theatre in Craiova, it was quite a blast to see the transformation that the performance brought in. The show looked as if you could freeze it frame after frame, and you got yourself some beautiful pictures: great balance colors, impressive details, stunning costumes and impactful characters.

When seeing a live performance of one of Wilson’s works you understand why every member of the team is important for the overall show. From actors, to machinists, if everybody works according to the stage director’s advice, the result is stunning.

photo Julian Mommert

photo Adi Bulboaca

photo Adi Bulboaca

photo Julian Mommert

photo Julian Mommert

photo Adi Bulboaca

photo Adi Bulboaca

photo Adi Bulboaca

photo Adi Bulboaca

photo Julian Mommert

photo Julian Mommert

photo Adi Bulboaca

Translated in Romanian by Vlad Russo și Vlad Zografi
Nathional Theatre “Marin Sorescu” Craiova
A Robert Wilson production

Distribuţia/Cast

Bérenger Valentin Mihali
Daisy Iulia Bleonț
Jean Claudiu Bleonţ
Dudard Valer Dellakeza
The Grocer’s wife Tamara Popescu
The Grocer Angel Rababoc
The Old Gentleman Nicolae Poghirc
The Logician Ilie Gheorghe
The Housewife Raluca Păun
The Waitress Monica Ardeleanu
The cafe Proprietor George Albert Costea
Mr. Papillon Cosmin Rădescu
Botard Constantin Cicort
MRS. Boeuf Mirela Cioabă
A Fireman Dragoş Măceşanu
The Old Neighbours Iulia Colan, Ion Colan
Rhinoceros: Corina Druc, Geni Macsim, Natașa Raab, Costinela Ungureanu,
Clara Vulpe, Cătălin Băicuș, Cosmin Dolea, Claudiu Mihail, Ștefan Mirea,
Marian Politic, Anca-Maria Ghiţă, Eugen Titu, Cătălin Vieru

Costume Jacques Reynaud
Associate directors Charles Chemin, Tilman Hecker
Lighting designer John Torres, A.J. Weissbard
Lighting designer Rui Monteiro
Video projections Tomek Jeziorski
Music Adam Lenz
Sound designer Daniel Drăgoescu
Audio coordination Tom Brânduş
Dramaturgy Konrad Kuhn
Assistent director Bobi Pricop
Scenographer Adrian Damian
Asistant costume designer Adriana Dinulescu
Stage manager Gina Călinoiu
Laurenţiu Tudor
Technical director George Dulămea
Lighing operator Dodu Ispas
Sound operator Valentin Pârlogea
George Udrea
Prompter Bogdana Dumitriu
Stage assistant Crista Bîlciu
Dramaturgy assistant Luiza Mitu
Video projection: Florin Chirea

Editing team:
Editor – Nicolae Coande
Translations: Lia Boangiu, Luiza Mitu

Machinists:
Costel Miu, Cristi Petec, Alin Stan, Marian Camen, Nicu Guran, Robert Deca, Fane Rotaru, Toma Stratonie, Mihai Nărămzoiu, Toni Cojocaru
Stage property:
Nelu Păşescu, Nina Răducanu, Marieta Mierlă, Sandu Cotea, Tavi Popescu
Cabines:
Lavinia Petec, Elena Cotea, Mirela Nicolae, Mariana Săceanu
Lights:
Ştefăniţă Rezeanu, Vilică Ruiu, Radu Săndulescu
Make up:
Minela Popa, Mihaela Guran, Oana-Veronica Popa, Anca-Maria Ghiţă, Costinela Ungureanu, Adrian-Cristian Ţîrcă

The post Robert Wilson: Rhinoceros at National Theatre Marin Sorescu in Craiova appeared first on INHALE MAG.

Robert Wilson
CocoRosie
Berliner Ensemble

Master of the avant-garde theater, Robert Wilson was called to Spoleto by Giorgio Ferrara, starting from his first year as artistic director, to begin a successful collaboration that has lasted for six years, and thanks to which the great director’s works were staged for the first time in Italy with the Berliner Ensemble (Threepenny Opera, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Lulu) and new productions for the Festival like Happy Days with Adriana Asti and Krapp’s Last Tape where he himself acted, original incursions into the world of Samuel Beckett, as well as the The Old Woman by Daniil Kharms, interpreted in the last edition by the legendary Mikhail Baryshnikov and American actor Willem Dafoe. This year, Wilson returns to Spoleto with his new show Peter Pan.

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THE DANCE OF DEATH

Luca Ronconi
August Strindberg
“Danza macabra by Strindberg is a renowned text, always interpreted by critics as an exemplum of married life which is a domestic hell, where there is confrontation and clash, between the satanic nature of the wife, Alice, and the vampy personality of the husband, the Captain, who tries to suck the life out of the second man, Kurt, who is psychologically fragile and submissive.” (Roberto Alonge)
With the staging of Strindberg’s Danza macabra, Luca Ronconi returns to the Festival of Two Worlds for the sixth time, an intense and invaluable collaboration desired by the artistic director Giorgio Ferrara as a sign of the extraordinary creative force which distinguishes the work of the great artist.

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THE DUBLINERS

by JAMES JOYCE
15: THE DEAD – Part 1
director Giancarlo Sepe

“The project of THE 4 DUBLINERS (Wilde, Beckett, Joyce, Yeats) began in 2012 with the resumption of TALES OF OSCAR WILDE and had a second encounter with BECKETT’S BEDROOM, two great successes; now we have this very particular experiment on space with THE DUBLINERS/by JAMES JOYCE/ 15: THE DEAD/ Part 1. In my opinion, the soul of research, is actually linked to the scenic space which affects the rhythms and visions, and certainly the marvellous church of St. Saviour will play its part in this set up.” (Giancarlo Sepe)

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THE PRESENCE OF ABSENCE
Dah Theatre
directing and dramaturgy Dijana Milošević
Listening to the accounts of women from Bosnia, Serbia or Kosovo who have lost their loved ones, we realized that their lives are inhabited with a constant presence. The presence of absence; the presence of the absent ones.
Dah theatre is an independent group from Belgrade, among the most internationally recognized, with over 22 years of activity. Their work tackles relevant political and social issues, maintaining and extremely poetic stile and an engaging performing quality, which fuses theatre, music and dance.
In the contemporary world, destruction and violence can only be opposed by the creation of sense.
motto of DAH Theatre

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A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
Tim Robbins
by William Shakespeare
A surreal world composed of fairies and spells, enchanted lovers, the Queen Fairy who flirts with a donkey; an up-side down world that turns right-side up thanks to the blunders of the night. The actors of the company who work with director Tim Robbins and artistic co-director of the company, Cynthia Ettinger, revive the forest of Shakespeare, accompanied by original music, with a physicality and very energetic approach to the magic language of Shakespeare.
“Among Shakespeare’s texts, this is one of my favorites: there are so many layers of truth, falsehood, dream, reality, magic and deceit. A marital dispute turns the entire reality upside down, and the chaos generated results in outrageous and wildly entertaining behavior”. (Tim Robbins)

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Stage Design for a Ballet by David Dawson.
Royal Ballet of England, Royal Opera House, London, 2013.

photo enohenze.de

photo enohenze.de

Henze has been curator of the exhibitions and symposiums at the past three installments of the NODE Forum for digital arts in Frankfurt. His work has been exhibited internationally in galleries and museums, including the Moscow Biennale, Art Cologne and Frankfurter Kunstverein. His creative direction for commercial clients such as Mercedes-Menz has gained international awards including D&AD’s Black Pencil and ADC Gold.

Ouverture

Set Design for a new collaboration with David Dawson. Ballet performed by Dutch National Ballet.

photo enohenze.de

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Since 2011 Henze has collaborated regularly with David Dawson on designs for Dutch National Ballet and Royal Ballet.

Hecatomb is a cooperation between artist Eno Henze and musician Matthew Dear aka Audion. It is both an installation piece and a video show for Audion’s World Tour.

Here’s the installation version as shown at Kunstraum Kreuzberg in the ‘let the ryhthm hit ‘em’ exhibition, curated by Matthias Mayer. Scroll down for the tour doucumentation.

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Untitled from lambretta on Vimeo.

Timelapse

With his newest creation David Dawson marked his return to the Dutch National Ballet. Here, Dawson reflects upon the legends from Greek Mythology and the ideas of Memory. Each passing scene weaves a magical journey back in time, exploring the ideas that lay within these stories and questions their continued value and meaning to our modern day psyche.

photo enohenze.de

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Tscherenkows Traum

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War and Peace, this panoramic epic history, thus ceases to be only a great testimony of an enormous historical change and becomes the material of our current, highly topical questions. Tolstoy’s historical skepticism and pessimism, his groundless fervent anti-Masonic attitude, his harrowingly naive faith in people power, a faith that completely marginalizes the role of the individual, these are all distant and meaningless notions to us today, unnecessary for the understanding of War and Peace. Tolstoy was fanatically obsessed with the idea of a rational and moral society and quite convinced that it was possible to transform it by means of a non-violent moral revolution, so that even Gandhi himself said later that his idea of non-violent resistance had arisen from his reading Tolstoy.

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Medea

“In the very beginning there is no past from which we descend. There is only the future which has to be completed with patient endurance of the present. And that is my story. Euripides´ story is his and does not belong to me, it speaks of some other woman. In view of Jason … maybe … This memory resembles him, Jason on the ship-deck … Although in my memory he is much more beautiful. When my soul has summoned him from the past, he became more beautiful, because of the light with which it enlightened him. „I know you stranger“, he said, „because I saw you once in my heart“. I was too touched by the word „heart“, and never noticed he called me a „stranger“. But that is what I always was, for him and for others.”

photo pandurtheaters.com

photo pandurtheaters.com

Onehundred Minutes

of theatre time. 100 minutes that devour life. 100 minutes of Dostoevski’s heroes snatched from the safety of the novel, who with all impetuosity, unforgiving and total existential endeavour follow the intellectual, moral – ethic, philosophical and religious – mystical frame of the Brothers Karamazov. In the search for the origins of the new Europe, borderline situations of European history, decipherment of its signs and matrixes pitched in the thought code of the icon and the hatchet according to the principle of this basic duality, it composes the unique arithmetic of passion and the personal nervous system of the dramaturgic duality of good and evil, the crime and the victim.

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INFERNO
The age of idols. The new Babylon of mental flaws. These images are archaic projections, preceding words and morals. You see the Imperial Theatre of Sex, the supreme Temple of the western eye. The pagan past, never dead, burns again in our mystic hierarchies of stardom.

photo pandurtheaters.com

photo pandurtheaters.com

BAROQUE

A pre-French Revolution salon. The entire history of Western world in a shelter in the eve of the cataclysm of the Great Change. Outside, the world is cracking across the heavy stitches, forged through millenniums. Inside, silk is cracking under the touches of fear and beauty. Soon nothing will ever be the same. The Outside and the Inside will definitely become two remote Universes, while the human existence will be transformed into an eternal journey in the quest for their connection point.

photo pandurtheaters.com

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It is all the more fascinating that it is Wilson’s newest piece, Peter Pan, which has sparked the most enthusiastic and euphoric reviews in years throughout the German press, for this adaptation of James M. Barrie’s play in a translation by Erich Kästner does leave nothing of the Disney version’s carefree dreaminess and celebration of youth but unearths the dark and unsettling aspects of Barrie’s original work. By creating his signature world of evocative images, Wilson turns the notion of childhood predicated on safety, naïveté, and innocence upside down and makes Peter Pan his own.

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The first chapter is set in the children’s room, decorated with a ghastly wallpaper of green ships on a neon-pink base, exhibiting Wilson’s odd version of the English bourgeois home life, a first indication of his counter-intuitive interpretation of the piece. The actors appear in stylized Victorian costumes by Jacques Reynaud, moving through the space in typical Wilsonesque fashion, and uttering their lines independently from each other as the small window to the world becomes bigger and bigger. The plot follows the original play quite closely although a number of events are translated directly into images and dialogue becomes sparse.

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Nevertheless, I have to say that – for my taste – there was still too much dialogue, especially in the first part of the evening, which hindered the rhythm of the scenes and the development of an overarching energy throughout the first hour, as the connection between dialogue and the songs seemed to be at times forced and patched together rather than flowing and progressing. Wilson’s work is the strongest when he’s able to create an equilibrium between text, music, sound, light, and image – a flash of harmony (including all superficially disturbing noises) that gestures towards the diversity of voices in our world. And as the evening went on, the piece became stronger and stronger and was by the end almost hypnotic without being sweet or sentimental at all.

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Once the children are in Neverland, the production picks up speed and becomes more inventive: the dialogue is disrupted by song, dance, and beaming faces, which expose the nightmarish quality of some exchanges, for example when Wendy is asked to become the mother of all the Lost Boys. The scenes with Hook and the pirates can be ruffian at times and in all the playfulness of the fights between the Lost Boys and the pirates, the actual violence of these imaginings is very apparent. It is most striking when Peter, trying to save Wendy from Hook, hides inside the Jolly Roger and kills the pirates one by one, only to emerge radiant and exclaiming: “I am Youth! I am Joy!” It is Wilson’s excellent and breathtaking direction, which enables this childlike and entertaining joy to coexist with an alarming and menacing atmosphere of impending brutality and death. This is also true for the quieter moments, the most unnerving and provocative being when Hook, alone with the sleeping Peter, dreams of “making him into a man”. And yet, this potential nightmare of childhood holds fast to the side of hope and light as well, when for example the fantastic Anna Graenzer as Wendy sings the Lost Boys to sleep with a heartbreaking lullaby celebrating love and family, while in the background Hook and his pirates kill the Indians.

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Thus, Wilson pays tribute to the complicated nature of childhood and life: It is not the protected home of bourgeois life that is to be desired, nor is it the dangerous, anarchic world of Neverland. It is the commitment to both through the company of family and friends. But just when this may become too easy and too sentimental a solution, the audience is reminded at the end of the first and the second act respectively that death will come to us all eventually. And yet again, as Peter and the ensemble sing to us joyfully, “to die would be an awfully great adventure.”
The performances are magnificent to say the least. While the ensemble blithely takes on multiple roles as Lost Boys, pirates, Nana, the Indians, the Mermaids, and the Crocodile, one of the standout performances comes from Traute Hoess as Mrs. Darling, whose Despair song, after finding out her children have disappeared, develops into a primordial expression of pain. Stefan Kurt’s Hook is counter-intuitive yet spirited, quiet but very sharp, and in his surrender to the crocodile rather touching. Sabin Tambrea as Peter Pan is pure joy to behold: in his green skinny jeans and leather jacket, he looks like a cross between James Dean and Heroes-era David Bowie.

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His Peter remains the foil for all projections of what one wants youth to be and thus he is utterly changeable in both voice and body. Tambrea’s Peter never stays in one character for too long as he does not want to be defined or found out. Maybe he does not even know who he actually is, which makes this mixture of sway and vulnerability so enticing and familiar. But the star of the evening is without a doubt Christopher Nell’s Tinkerbell, who crosses the stage in odd spasmodic movements and can only be heard through song. Her wand sends off electric shocks and she delights in torturing the children. But when, while being trapped in a light bulb, she bemoans the fact that Peter does not realize how much she loves him, the audience is treated to one of the finest songs about unrequited love ever written, voicing desire, despair, and anger in equal measure. Indeed, CocoRosie’s songs are a true discovery and the perfect fit for this production as their music succeeds in making available conflicting emotions within a few bars. Thankfully, some of the songs will apparently be made available on their next album, Tales Of A GrassWidow, which will be released later this month.

photo animalnewyork.com

Foto: Frank Wesner
musical-co.net

All in all, Robert Wilson’s Peter Pan is in itself a great adventure. Although it starts slowly and affectedly, it by and by offers the most stunning images and captivating performances, which are filled with plenty of mystery and possess emotional depth, letting us reflect upon our childhoods – all the varied ones each one of us had and has.

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