The snapshots are thrust at us urgently, as if they were passports being shown at a border crossing, official proofs of national identity. Mostly, they are prosaic pictures of family members or houses. Sometimes a diploma will be offered up instead, or theater reviews clipped from newspapers or a membership card to a duck-hunting club. Later, other, more frightening, pictures will be shown, but they all serve the same function.
For the men and women assembled in “Aftermath,” the smart and sobering documentary drama that opened on Tuesday night at the New York Theater Workshop, these flimsy objects have more than sentimental value. They are confirmations that all of the characters onstage are citizens of a country called Iraq, a place that they haven’t visited recently, but one that they love and that still exists. Or does it?
Assembled by its creators, Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, from interviews with Iraqi refugees living in Jordan, “Aftermath” might be said to be set in limbo. Its performers, first seen sitting rigid on benches with their backs to us, seem to exist in an eternal waiting room.
When they turn around to tell their stories, with a courtly politeness that eventually shades into a sorrowing, baffled rage, there’s no doubt that it is we, the Americans in the dark, to whom they’re speaking. It was our country invading theirs, in 2003, that brought them to the point that, as one puts it, “I am floating between here and nowhere.”
From the New York Times’ review of Aftermath, by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen. I saw this earlier in the week as part of the Melbourne Festival, and was floored.
What makes theatre elite here [in Australia] is not the ideas that inform it, but how expensive it is. And the less that is offered, the more parochial and intimidated the audience; the more parochial and intimidated the audience, the more parochial and intimidated the programming. So it is that what is considered mainstream fare elsewhere becomes risky and dangerous here. This is the problem of “canonical collapse” in its true vicious circle.
I’d argue that the most grievous impact of canonical collapse is on new writing. It’s a simple equation: the richer the cultural soil, the more diverse, more confident, more informedly experimental is the work that comes from it. Writers can make do by amassing libraries of work they might never see performed, but then what? The culture itself discourages the work that might emerge from that stimulation. Without a cultural context which recognises the forces, influences and ideas that informs what they write, without audiences driven by curiosity rather than a fear of seeming stupid and a desire for confirmation, they might as well be writing in an alien language.
— “A divagation” by Alison Croggon on the state of Australian theatre and Australian theatre-writing (via theatre notes)Incoming Malthouse Theatre Artistic Director Marion Potts gives the 2010 Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture, in Melbourne, September 2010.
“I want women to stop being burdened by the many voices that question their legitimacy and erode their faith in themselves. Why are we being made to hold meetings and form alliances which place even more scrutiny on us? It’s essential that we do it, but I resent having to. But more importantly how can we get this to stop being an issue? It goes right back to the question of agency. How can women have an impact on the world around them if they are never allowed to imagine one on stage? Or if all they see on stage is one that re-enforces the dominant paradigm and almost teaches them to value what they’re not?
This idea of theatre as the place where we vent, explore, deliberate, imagine who we want to be needs to be at the heart of the company’s work. I want it to be reflected in the collegial and collaborative way I work, not set out as some kind of charter. It needs to be borne of what we do in the rehearsal room, to extend and permeate through the company’s culture in everything from our Education Program to our HR practices. It needs to be felt by our audiences, not told to them, it needs somehow to seep out of the bricks and mortar of our building.
…
By way of conclusion - I have to remind everyone that Paul Keating was the last Prime minister to have attended the performance of a major organisation. Or perhaps that’s not a conclusion but an incitement to discourse… in any case we invite Julia Gillard to a theatre nearby, anytime soon.”
Opening Night, dir. Ivo van Hove, for Toneelgroep Amsterdam. (A theatrical adaptation of John Cassavetes’ 1977 film.)
After the Fall – Europe after 1989 - A Theatre Project of the Goethe-Institut
“Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the cross-border theatre project After the Fall investigated the repercussions of the ensuing fundamental changes in Germany and Europe. The Goethe-Institutes in 15 European countries commissioned 17 playwrights to produce works reflecting the social and political changes in their own countries.”
I’m off to see this Victorian Opera production, directed by Kate Cherry, at the Arts Centre this evening.
Let’s begin with sofas and how much I loathe them on stage. Especially ratty brown ones. I often write ‘absolutely no sofas’ in the production notes of a script, and with one terrible exception (an armchair) back in 2000, I’ve managed to keep soft furnishings out of my work. If you want to see couches, go to Ikea.
To me, sofas on stage are the theatrical equivalent of bookshelves in documentary films—the expert interviewed in front of his packed bookcase. This is not because I’ve got anything against domestic or office décor per se, (I love books and have crowded shelves of my own) it’s because a sofa represents a certain kind of play and production.
At various points I’ve tried to write these more traditional narrative dramas with plots and character journeys and naturalistically-inclined dialogue. The kinds of plays that get programmed in subscription seasons. What usually happens though, is I get to about page 5 and complete anarchy has broken out—I want to introduce a robot or a flock of singing sheep, or I find that one of my sensible characters has flipped his arc to riff on the difference between moths and butterflies, which, BTW, is not night and day. From time to time, generally when I’m looking at a 2-digit bank balance, I’ve berated myself for not trying harder to write this kind of play. But not any more. This is the year I finally admit that I don’t much like conventional narrative drama, and I don’t want to write the stuff. It’s not my shtick. So my motto for 2010 is: embrace your inner maverick.
— Playwright Noëlle Janaczewska.Certain theatres you go to everyone’s in pearls and you feel you’re playing to a certain class, a certain age, and there’s a voyeurism in what they’re watching. They trot home to Islington and drink white wine after watching people screech at each other and take heroin – that’s a trend that needs to be bucked.
But then there are renegade theatre companies where it’s just so exciting you don’t want to leave. Because the theatre is very extreme. If it’s crap, it’s so crap, but if it’s good, it’s the best way of telling a story ever, because it’s live in front of you and it touches you in a way that I don’t think the flatness of a cinema screen or the distance of a book perhaps can. It’s brilliant when it hits the right notes.
— Playwright Polly Stenham (via a faded clipping peeled off my fridge).CAL/Meanjin essay: Is the Carnival Over?
In more concrete terms, the modern history of Australian festivals begins with the Perth and Adelaide festivals, which were established in the 1950s on the template of the Edinburgh Festival. Edinburgh was a postwar creation, established by Rudolf Bing and Henry Harvey Wood with the goal of providing ‘a platform for the flowering of the human spirit’—a remarkably optimistic undertaking in a country still recovering from a scarifying war. At a time when ration cards were still a feature of everyday life, the ‘flowering of the human spirit’ may not have represented an achievable goal in Scotland, but it was certainly a desirable one.
As former Adelaide Festival director Anthony Steel points out, all the Australian capital city arts festivals are based on the Edinburgh pattern. ‘Certainly Adelaide was a direct copy of Edinburgh, and most of the festivals that have started in capital cities in Australia since have been direct copies of Adelaide. The politicians want to keep up with the Joneses and “if Adelaide has one, then we should certainly have one” has been the attitude.’
While Perth is older, it was Adelaide that established itself as the premier event in the antipodes for serious arts lovers. Beginning in 1960, the Adelaide Festival was for some decades the only event where local audiences could see the kind of famous, high-brow artists and companies that are these days slightly jarringly referred to as ‘world class’.
…
A glance at Steel’s 1974 program gives us a glimpse of how refreshing and truly risky those earlier Adelaide Festivals must have seemed. Featuring recitals by Andre Tchaikowski (whose skull is still acting with the Royal Shakespeare Company) and concerts by the Hungarian State Symphony Orchestra, it culminated in a reading of Ogden Nash’s poetry by Premier Don Dunstan, set to Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals and held at the Adelaide Zoo. History records that the performance sold out.
Ben Eltham on the history, trends, policies and passions of Australia’s cultural festivals.
The set of Maurice Sendak & Tony Kushner’s adaptation of Czech children’s opera Brundibar at Yale’s University Theatre, New Haven.
“Just before its premiere in 1942 at the Jewish boys’ orphanage in Prague, its composer, Hans Krasa, was arrested and sent to Theresienstadt, or Terezin, the concentration camp disguised as a ‘model ghetto’ that was essentially a hub for transports to the Nazi death camps. Rudolph Freudenfeld, the conductor of the premiere performances, took the score with him when he and the boys from the orphanage were also sent to Theresienstadt.It was performed at the camp 55 times, providing distraction and perhaps a small respite from the misery. But it was also exploited by the Nazis for propaganda purposes in their attempts to present Theresienstadt as a comfortable environment. Ultimately, Krasa, most of his collaborators on the project and nearly all of the children who performed in it were killed at Auschwitz.”
(via New York Times)
Sydney Theatre Company's 2010 Main Stage season is now online
Includes “Cate and Andrew’s suggestions”: “Not sure which plays to choose? We’ve put together a selection of suggested packages. Think of it like a Chinese menu…”
"The thing about theatre that's completely addictive is that it's live"
Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton talk on Triple J breakfast radio about the upcoming Sydney Theatre Company production of A Streetcar Named Desire.
Theatre's new stage
Blogger, writer and theatre critic Alison Croggon examines the trends in Australian theatre and the claims and counterclaims for writer-driven, rather than director-driven, playwriting.
Elevator Repair Service - Gatz
This is one of the best theatrical experiences I’ve ever had.
