Tag Archives: Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: STATE OF SIEGE

Théâtre de la Ville returns to BAM with a timely take on Albert Camus’s State of Siege (photo by Jean Louis Fernandez)

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
November 2-4, $35-$110
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.theatredelaville-paris.com

“When State of Siege first opened in Paris, there was no dissenting voice among the critics. Truly, few plays have ever enjoyed such a unanimous slashing,” Albert Camus wrote in a 1958 preface to a collection of four of his plays, including State of Siege. “This is the more deplorable since I have never given up thinking that State of Siege, with all is shortcomings, is, of all my writings, the one that most resembles me.” He also insisted that the 1948 allegorical drama about the search for liberty amid a spreading plague was not an adaptation of his 1947 novel, The Plague. Regardless of what has come before, State of Siege is now in good hands with Théâtre de la Ville, Paris, which returns to BAM November 2-4 with a timely take on the play. The company was previously at BAM with its unique and inventive versions of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author in 2014 and Ionesco’s Rhinoceros in 2012. Serge Maggiani stars as the Plague, with Hugues Quester as the Man, Alain Libolt as the Judge, Valérie Dashwood as the Secretary, Jauris Casanova as the Alcade, Matthieu Dessertine as Diego, and Philippe Demarle as Nada. The inimitable Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota directs, with sets by Yves Collet, lighting by Collet and Christophe Lemaire, sound by David Lesser, costumes by Fanny Brouste, and video by Mike Guermyet. On November 3 at 6:00 in Wendy’s Subway Reading Room at the BAM Fisher, Demarcy-Mota will give a free lecture on the work and its relevance to what is going on in the world today.

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL 2017

Tanztheater Wuppertal/Pina Bausch’s Café Müller returns to BAM for Next Wave Festival (photo by Bo Lahola)

BAM Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton St.
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, 30 Lafayette Ave.
BAM Fisher, 321 Ashland Pl.
September 14 – December 16
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

As usual, we are considering moving in to the Brooklyn Academy of Music for three months after the announcement of the lineup for the thirty-fifth BAM Next Wave Festival, running September 14 through December 16 at the Harvey, the Howard Gilman Opera House, and the Fisher. “This year’s Next Wave showcases artists from Switzerland to Senegal in creative dialogue with historic events, personal histories, and the present moment,” longtime BAM executive producer Joe Melillo said in a statement. The roster includes old favorites and up-and-comers from around the world, with several surprises. Dance enthusiasts will be particularly impressed with the schedule, which begins September 14-24 with a superb double bill of Tanztheater Wuppertal/Pina Bausch’s Café Müller and The Rite of Spring, which were part of the first Bausch program at BAM back in June 1984. For The Principles of Uncertainty (September 27-30), Maira Kalman teams up with John Heginbotham, Dance Heginbotham, and the Knights to bring her online graphic diary to life. New York Live Arts artistic director and cofounder Bill T. Jones returns to BAM with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company and composer Nick Hallett for A Letter to My Nephew (October 3-7), about his nephew, Lance T. Briggs, who battled illness and addiction. Senegalese artist Germaine Acogny takes center stage for the emotional solo piece Mon élue noire (My Black Chosen One): Sacre #2 (October 4-7), choreographed specifically for her by Olivier Dubois of Ballet du Nord, set to music by Stravinsky. Also on the movement bill are Joshua Beamish/MOVETHECOMPANY’s Saudade, Cynthia Oliver’s Virago-Man Dem, ODC/Dance, Brenda Way, and KT Nelson’s boulders and bones, David Dorfman Dance’s Aroundtown, Hofesh Shechter Company’s Grand Finale, Xavier Cha’s Buffer, Big Dance Theater’s 17c, and Tesseract, a multimedia collaboration between Charles Atlas, Rashaun Mitchell, and Silas Riener.

Schaubühne Berlin presents the U.S. premiere of its unique take on Richard III at BAM Next Wave Festival (photo by Arno Declair)

The festival also boasts impressive theater productions, kicking off October 11-14 with Schaubühne Berlin’s tantalizing version of Shakespeare’s Richard III, translated and adapted by Marius von Mayenburg, directed by Thomas Ostermeier, and starring Lars Eidinger. Théâtre de la Ville, Paris is back November 2-4 with Albert Camus’s State of Siege, directed by Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota. Tony-winning Belgian director Ivo van Hove takes on Ayn Rand in Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s four-hour The Fountainhead November 28 to December 2. Rachel Dickstein and Ripe Time bring Naomi Iizuka’s adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s Sleep to the Fisher November 20 to December 2. Fresh off her Broadway stint in Marvin’s Room, Lili Taylor stars in Farmhouse/Whorehouse: An Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra, directed by Lee Sunday Evans (December 12-16). Geoff Sobelle, who went solo at BAM for The Object Lesson, is joined by an ensemble of designers and dancers for Home (December 6-10). And be on the lookout for Manfred Karge, Alexandra Wood, and Wales Millennium Centre’s Man to Man, Thaddeus Phillips and Steven Dufala’s A Billion Nights on Earth, the Cameri Theatre of Tel-Aviv’s adaptation of Etgar Keret’s Suddenly, directed by Zvi Sahar and PuppetCinema, Manual Cinema’s Mementos Mori, Marc Bamuthi Joseph/The Living Word Project’s /peh-LO-tah/, and James Thierrée and Compagnie du Hanneton’s La grenouille avait raison (The Toad Knew).

Music aficionados have plenty to choose from, with Olivier Py Sings Les Premiere Adieux de Miss Knife, Kronos Quartet, Rinde Eckert, and Vân-Ánh Võ’s My Lai, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Michael Gordon, David Lang, Julia Wolfe, and Michael Counts’s Road Trip, Gabriel Kahane’s Book of Travelers, Rithy Panh, Him Sophy, Trent Walker, Jonathan Berger, and Harriet Scott’s Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia, Wordless Music Orchestra and Chorus’s two-part John Cale: The Velvet Underground & Nico, and the New York premiere of American Repertory Theater’s Crossing, an opera inspired by Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” composed, written, and conducted by Matthew Aucoin and directed by Diane Paulus. The season is supplemented with several postperformance talks and master classes.

THÉÂTRE DE LA VILLE: SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR

Théâtre de la Ville is back at BAM with an awe-inspiring production of Luigi Pirandello’s absurdist masterpiece (photo by Jean-Louis Fernandez)

Théâtre de la Ville is back at BAM with an awe-inspiring production of Luigi Pirandello’s absurdist masterpiece (photo by Richard Termine)

2014 NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL
Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. between Ashland & Rockwell Pl.
October 29 – November 2, $20-$75
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.theatredelaville-paris.com

As audience members begin filing into the BAM Harvey to see Théâtre de la Ville’s awe-inspiring production of Luigi Pirandello’s absurdist classic Six Characters in Search of an Author, there is already a man onstage, suspended from above, painting a trompe-l’oeil blue sky backdrop; he is soon joined by a young woman who sits at a sewing machine, making costumes while quietly singing “O sole mio.” These two actions subtly announce that what we are about to see is artifice — what Pirandello called “the theater of the theater” — albeit multilayered artifice of the very highest order. For the next two hours, we are treated to a rapturous display of intensely clever stagecraft, filled with self-referential jokes about the theater, intellectual discussions of illusion vs. reality, and a search for nothing less than the very meaning of existence. A dictatorial director (Alain Libolt) is preparing his cast and crew to rehearse the second act of Pirandello’s The Rules of the Game when six mysterious people, all dressed in black, suddenly appear, claiming to be fictional characters abandoned by their author and now seeking a place where they can tell their story, which is the whole reason for their being. The director, the stage manager (Gérald Maillet), the actors (Charles-Roger Bour, Sandra Faure, Olivier Le Borgne, and Gaëlle Guillou), the carpenter (Pascal Vuillemot), and the assistant (Jauris Casanova) are at first dubious of the six strangers, but soon the father (Hugues Quester) convinces them to hear them out, so they delve into a soap-opera-like tale of faded love, mourning, incest, sibling rivalry, and horrific tragedy also involving the sexy stepdaughter (Valérie Dashwood), the grieving mother (Sarah Karbasnikoff), the estranged son (Stéphane Krähenbühl), the awkward teenager (Walter N’Guyen), and the adorable little girl (Sierra Blanco).

Glorious production seeks to life the veil on some of the many mysteries of the theater (photo by Richard Termine)

Glorious production seeks to lift the veil on some of the many mysteries of the theater (photo by Richard Termine)

No one onstage has a name, save for the surprise arrival of Madame Pace (Céline Carrère); everyone else represents a stock character determined to experience their individual purpose, their raison d’être, whether in the play, the play-within-a-play, or the play-within-a-play-within-a-play. There are no rules to this sly game directed by Théâtre de la Ville head Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota, who was last at BAM in October 2012 with another delightful absurdist classic, Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinocéros. This is his third time staging Six Characters in Search of an Author, and he clearly knows his way around this existential journey of life as theater, and theater as life, expertly translated and adapted by François Regnault. The cast is uniformly excellent, led by Libolt, Dashwood, and Quester, who won the Critics’ Award for Best Actor for Théâtre de la Ville’s original 2001 production. Throughout the play, which is itself, of course, set in a theater, various characters look out at the seats, which to them are empty but to the actors playing them are filled with onlookers, furthering the self-referential nature of the show and the relationships between actor and audience, creator and creation. The director even references the subtitles at one point, reminding everyone that this is, at its most basic, an Italian play put on by a French company in an American city. Every moment is pure genius, a palimpsest of metas that keep piling on in glorious ways, a celebration of just what the theater can do and be, from behind the scenes to the last row of the balcony.

NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR

Théâtre de la Ville production of Luigi Pirandello absurdist classic will search for the meaning of existence in Brooklyn (photo by Jean-Louis Fernandez)

Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. between Ashland & Rockwell Pl.
October 29 – November 2, $20-$75
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.theatredelaville-paris.com

“Unfortunately, there always has to be a third, unavoidable element that intrudes between the dramatic author and his creation in the material being of the performance: the actor,” playwright, novelist, and poet Luigi Pirandello wrote in his 1908 essay “Illustrators, Actors, and Translators.” That tenet is central to one of his most famous works, 1921’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, which is being presented at the BAM Harvey Theater October 29 to November 2 by Théâtre de la Ville, Paris, last at BAM in October 2012 with another absurdist classic, Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinocéros, Described by the playwright, who was born in Agrigento, Italy, in 1867, as a comedy “without acts or scenes,” Six Characters questions the very nature of its own being as a dramatic work as a half dozen abandoned characters appear onstage in need of a new author to define their existence. Adapted and translated by François Regnault and directed by Théâtre de la Ville head Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota, with set and light design by Yves Collet, music by Jefferson Lembeye, and costumes by Corinne Baudelot, this production once again stars Hugues Quester, who won the Critics’ Award for Best Actor for his performance in the play back in 2001. In conjunction with the show, BAM is teaming up with the Onassis Cultural Center NY for the discussion “On Truth (and Lies) in Authorship,” with Demarcy-Mota and host Simon Critchley, being held on October 30 at 6:00 at BAM Fisher Hillman Studio ($15), as part of the Hellenic Humanities Program.

NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: RHINOCEROS

Théâtre de la Ville, Paris, will present Eugène Ionesco’s classic absurdist tale RHINOCÉROS this week at BAM (photo by Jean-Louis Fernandez)

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
October 4-6
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.theatredelaville-paris.com

As much as Jean-Paul Sartre is associated with the idea of existentialism, playwright Eugène Ionesco is linked with the word absurd. Born in Romania in 1909 and raised primarily in France, Ionesco changed the face of dramatic narrative with such works as The Lesson, The Chairs, The Killer, and Exit the King. One of his most famous plays, 1959’s Rhinocéros, which was turned into a 1973 film starring Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder, and Karen Black, can now be seen in an inventive adaptation by Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota and Théâtre de la Ville, Paris, running at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House October 4-6 as part of the thirtieth Next Wave Festival. “I like to come back to playwrights who question the place and role of the individual in collective history, on his responsibility, his freedom of thought, beyond any form of individualism,” Demarcy-Mota, who has also recently directed works by Horváth and Brecht, explains on the company website. The allegory about totalitarianism features set and lighting by Yves Collet, music by Jefferson Lembeye, and costumes by Corinne Baudelot, with François Regnault serving as artistic collaborator; Serge Maggiani plays Bérenger, Hugues Quester is Jean, and Valérie Dashwood takes on the role of Daisy. “”Ionesco knows how to depict dialectically every man’s cowardice, conformism and hypocrisy,” Demarcy-Mota adds. Rhinocéros “is a funereally burlesque play that we wish to render with full energy.” As a bonus, on October 5 at 5:00 at the Rosenthal Pavilion at NYU’s Kimmel Center, the esteemed panel of Demarcy-Mota, Edward Albee, Israel Horovitz, and Marie-France Ionesco will participate in the free “Next Wave Talk: On Ionesco,” moderated by NYU French literature professor Tom Bishop.

Nowhere is safe in Théâtre de la Ville’s thrilling production of Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist classic (photo by Pavel Antonov)

Update: Théâtre de la Ville director Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota promised a Rhinocéros rendered “with full energy,” and he and the company deliver all that and more in their engaging version of Eugène Ionesco’s 1959 absurdist classic, running October 4-6 at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House as part of the thirtieth Next Wave Festival. Following a short introductory excerpt from Ionesco’s sole novel, The Hermit, the curtain opens on a group of people in a town square just going about their daily business. Jean (a big, blustery Hugues Quester) bikes in to meet his friend Bérenger (Serge Maggiani), a bedraggled man recovering from a hangover, not able to remember much of what occurred the night before. A rhinoceros suddenly roars through the town like a tsunami, leaving in its wake a stunned crowd not quite sure what it really just saw, instead getting caught up in existential discussions of cats’ paws. Eventually life goes on, with Bérenger, who has a crush on Daisy (Valérie Dashwood), arriving at the publishing house where he works, only to encounter another stampeding rhino. As everyone around him starts turning into rhinos, the hapless Bérenger is determined not to succumb to the mass hysteria. Featuring terrific staging (courtesy of Yves Collet) that includes a raised-level office, collapsing rooms, and a majestically morphing figure in addition to a slowly building score by Jefferson Lembeye that nearly explodes at the end, Théâtre de la Ville’s Rhinocéros cleverly captures the philosophical underpinnings of Ionesco’s tale of the fight for individualism in the face of growing totalitarianism and an ever-increasing conformity that is overwhelming a consumer-driven society. Evoking Franz Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis, Don Siegel’s sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and such recent disasters as Hurricane Katrina and the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami, the show combines humor, pathos, and playful investigations of logic as the community is overcome by a collective consciousness that seems unstoppable. Ionesco might have written Rhinocéros because of what he saw occurring in Eastern Europe in the 1930s, but it still feels as fresh and relevant as ever in this outstanding production.