Tag Archives: next wave festival

HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

Thomas Ostermeier’s complex multimedia adaptation of Édouard Louis’s History of Violence features inventive camerawork (photo by Teddy Wolff)

St. Ann’s Warehouse
45 Water St.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 1, $46-$56
718-254-8779
stannswarehouse.org
www.schaubuehne.de/en

Thomas Ostermeier is one of the world’s most ingenious and unique theater directors, able to take a narrative and shape and twist it into something wholly unusual and unexpected. In 2017, his Schaubühne Berlin company, where he has been resident director since 1999, delivered a literally electrifying version of Richard III, while last year they brought their self-reflexive, multilayered Returning to Reims, based on Didier Eribon’s 2009 memoir, to St. Ann’s Warehouse. Ostermeier and Schaubühne are now back at St. Ann’s with History of Violence, a radical, highly inventive multimedia interpretation of the 2016 nonfiction novel by Édouard Louis, a close friend of Eribon’s; the bestselling book is based on a brutal attack Louis suffered on a Christmas Eve and its traumatic aftermath.

As the audience enters the theater, Édouard (Laurenz Laufenberg) is seated on a chair up against a large wall with a screen, looking exasperated. The play begins with three characters (Christoph Gawenda, Renato Schuch, and Alina Stiegler) conducting an intricate forensic investigation of a crime scene, in full protective gear like astronauts on the moon, using a cellphone camera and electric duster to find fingerprints as Édouard watches and Thomas Witte plays the drums stage left. The camera images are projected in stark, often uncomfortable close-ups on the rear screen; the video design is by Sébastien Dupouey, the coldly efficient, multifaceted set by Nina Wetzel.

Over the course of two intermissionless hours, the dark tale of what happened to Édouard is told in flashback, with Édouard, his sister, Clara (Stiegler), Clara’s husband, Alain (Gawend), and Édouard’s attacker, Reda (Schuch), either re-creating real-life scenes or speaking directly to the audience in the present through microphones, in both first and third person. Édouard openly shares the violation he experienced and the fear that has built up inside him, which has left him with an intense animosity for humanity. “I hated everyone. / I thought: / how can you. / That morning after Reda left, / I woke up with a strange taste in my mouth. / With the knowledge that I’d never / be able to bear the slightest trace / of anything that looked like happiness. / I could’ve slapped the next / smiling person I saw. / I’d have grabbed them by their lapels, / shaken them as hard as I could, / even children, / the frail or the disabled, / I’d have liked to shake them / and spit in their faces, / scratched them until I drew blood, / scratched their faces off, until all the faces disappeared.”

The reaction of the police and hospital personnel to the events results in a certain consternation because Édouard invited Reda to his apartment, while issues of class, sexual orientation, and race come to the fore. “The question wasn’t: / is he going to kill me? But rather: / how is he going to kill me?” Édouard explains, adding, “Later on the police and Clara / congratulated me for my bravery. / Nothing seems to me more alien to that night / than the concept of bravery.” At the hospital, he says, “I waited. / But nobody came. / I sat there feeling like / I was an extra in a story that wasn’t my own, / but had happened to someone else / that I didn’t know.”

A coproduction with Théâtre de la Ville Paris and Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles, History of Violence is another audiovisual stunner from Ostermeier, who deserves the kind of attention that is lavished on Ivo van Hove, the Belgian multimedia mastermind. The show is part of a series of Louis-related events that included the BAM Next Wave presentation of a work based on his 2014 memoir, The End of Eddy, which ran at the Fishman last week and also deals with sex and power. History of Violence, which continues at St. Ann’s through December 1, is a work for our time, telling a poignant, deeply intimate true story using cutting-edge twenty-first-century techniques with an innovative style, holding nothing back as it explores trauma in extraordinary ways.

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: HAMNET

Dead Centre makes its BAM debut with Hamnet (photo by Ernesto Galan)

BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
October 30 – November 3, $25
718-636-4100
www.bam.org/hamnet
www.deadcentre.org

New BAM artistic director David Binder continues his season of BAM debuts with Hamnet, presented by Ireland’s Dead Centre. In 1585, William Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway, gave birth to twins, son Hamnet and daughter Judith. Hamnet died tragically in 1596 at the age of eleven; three years later, the Bard wrote perhaps his greatest play, Hamlet, at least partly about a young man haunted by the death of his father. Founded in 2012 by Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd and based between Dublin and London, Dead Centre has previously staged Beckett’s Room, Lippy, (S)quark!, Souvenir, Chekhov’s First Play, and Shakespeare’s Last Play; all but Lippy deal with writers, including James Joyce and Marcel Proust in addition to Samuel Beckett, Anton Chekhov, and Shakespeare. It has long been debated whether Shakespeare wrote Hamlet specifically in reaction to the death of his son, or whether Hamnet also inspired part of other works. For example, in King John, published in 1623, Constance says, “Grief fills the room up of my absent child.”

“Over centuries of feverish speculation, the most compelling reflections on the presence of Shakespeare’s emotional life in his plays — preeminently, James Joyce’s brilliant pages in Ulysses, but there are many others — have focused on Hamlet,” Shakespeare expert Stephen Greenblatt wrote in 2014 in the New York Review of Books. “This biographical attention to a work deriving from recycled materials and written for the public stage would seem inherently implausible, were it not for the overwhelming impression on readers and spectators alike that the play must have emerged in an unusually direct way from the playwright’s inner life, indeed that at moments the playwright was barely in control of his materials. I will attempt in what follows to trace Hamlet back to a personal experience of grief and to sketch a long-term aesthetic strategy that seems to have emerged from this experience.” The sixty-minute multimedia piece, running October 30 to November 3 at BAM Fisher, features text and direction by Moukarzel and Kidd, with dramaturgy by Michael West, set design by Andrew Clancy, costumes by Grace O’Hara, lighting by Stephen Dodd, sound by Kevin Gleeson, video by Jose Miguel Jimenez, and choreography by Liv O’Donoghue. Aran Murphy plays Hamnet, addressing the audience directly as he shares his tragic tale.

NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: THE SECOND WOMAN

The Second Woman repeats the same scene from John Cassavetes’s Opening Night one hundred times (photo by Heidrun Lohr)

THE SECOND WOMAN
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space, 321 Ashland Pl.
October 18, 5:00 pm – October 19, 5:00 pm, $25
718-636-4100
www.bam.org/secondwoman

Last month, Cyril Teste’s multimedia adaptation of John Cassavetes’s 1977 film Opening Night kicked off FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival, an immersive production highlighted by the US stage debut of French star Isabelle Adjani. Cassavetes’s film stars Gena Rowlands, his wife, as a theater actress getting lost between fiction and reality during out-of-town previews of a show called Second Woman; Cassavetes plays her leading man. Now BAM is presenting another unique exploration of the film in its Next Wave Festival. Beginning at 5:00 on the afternoon of October 18 and continuing for twenty-four consecutive hours, actress Alia Shawkat (Arrested Development, Blaze) will perform the same scene from Opening Night one hundred times, each with a different man playing opposite her. (There will be short breaks at 7:00 pm and then every two hours.) Created, written, and directed by Nat Randall and Anna Breckon, Second Man features video direction by EO Gill and Breckon (there are four cameras in use), lighting by Amber Silk and Kayla Burrett, sound by Nina Buchanan, and set design by Genevieve Murray/FUTURE METHOD STUDIO.

As opposed to theater, which is live every night, a movie scene can be done over and over again until everyone involved — particularly the director and the star — is happy with the result. However, in this case, Shawkat — who in Miguel Arteta’s Duck Butter played a character on a twenty-four-hour date with another woman, making love every sixty minutes — will be caught in an endless loop, a repetition that will be different every time as the other actor changes. “The Second Woman takes as its starting point the idea that emotions and identities are culturally and historically specific, and that gender identities are defined by, and produced through, emotional cultures and norms,” Randall and Breckon explain in a program note. “Taking gender, as a particular relation to cultural power and privilege, as its focus, The Second Woman explores the ways in which gender privilege and power expresses itself through feeling.” Advance timed tickets allow entry at 5:00 and midnight on Friday and 4:00 and 8:00 am on Saturday; otherwise, you can buy tickets at the venue, and you are allowed to leave and come back at any time as space permits.

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: THE BACCHAE

Anne Bogart and SITI Company relate Euripides’ The Bacchae to today’s sociopolitical ills in new interpretation (photo by Craig Schwartz)

THE BACCHAE
Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. at Ashland Pl.
October 3-7, $40-$75
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Anne Bogart and SITI Company return to BAM’s Next Wave Festival with their new interpretation of Euripides’ classic tale of gods and mortals, religion and the state, the earthly and the divine, The Bacchae. “More than any other play in Western civilization, Euripides’ is probably the one that most directly addresses the art of theater,” Bogart explains in a program note. “We are aware, for example, that we are looking at an actor or at a precisely lit staging and scenery, but at the same time we allow ourselves to enter into another world that is merely suggested by what is actually present.” The work, which premiered at the Getty Villa in California last month, is translated by Aaron Poochigian, with set and lighting by Brian H Scott, sound by Darron L West, and music composed by Erik Sanko. The cast features Ellen Lauren as Dionysus, Barney O’Hanlon as Tiresias, Stephen Duff Webber as Cadmus, Eric Berryman as Pentheus, and Akiko Aizawa as Agave. In conjunction with the show, the talk “Speaking Truth to Power: On Fear and Governance” will take place October 5 at the BAM Fisher’s Hillman Studio ($15, 6:00), with Anne Bogart and Monica Youn in conversation with Corey Robin, and BAM and the Mark Morris Dance Group are teaming up for “Introduction to Suzuki & Viewpoints,” a master class with SITI, on October 10 ($25, 12 noon) for theater artists, actors, dancers, performers, and directors.

SPECIAL SCREENING: THE MISSING PICTURE

Director Rithy Panh uses dioramas to fill in the gaps in Oscar-nominated The Missing Picture

THE MISSING PICTURE (L’IMAGE MANQUANTE) (Rithy Panh, 2013)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Tuesday, December 12, $15, 7:00
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.themissingpicture.bophana.org

In conjunction with the December 15-16 U.S. premiere of Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia as part of the 2017 Next Wave Festival, BAM is presenting Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture on December 12 at 7:00, with Panh participating in a postscreening Q&A with Ford Foundation program officer Chi-hui Yang. Winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes and nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award, The Missing Picture is a brilliantly rendered look back at the director’s childhood in Cambodia just as Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge began their reign of terror in the mid-1970s. “I seek my childhood like a lost picture, or rather it seeks me,” narrator Randal Douc says in French, reciting darkly poetic and intimately personal text written by author Christophe Bataille (Annam) based on Panh’s life. Born in Phnom Penh in 1964, Panh, who has made such previous documentaries about his native country as S21, The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell and wrote the 2012 book L’élimination with Bataille, was faced with a major challenge in telling his story; although he found remarkable archival footage of the communist Angkar regime, there are precious few photographs or home movies of his family and the community where he grew up. So he had sculptor Sarith Mang hand-carve and paint wooden figurines that Panh placed in dioramas to detail what happened to his friends, relatives, and neighbors. Panh’s camera hovers over and zooms into the dioramas, bringing these people, who exist primarily only in memory, to vivid life. When a person disappears, Panh depicts their carved representatives flying through the sky, as if finally achieving freedom amid all the horrors.

He delves into the Angkar’s propaganda movement and sloganeering — the “great leap forward,” spread through film and other methods — as the rulers sent young men and women into forced labor camps. “With film too, the harvests are glorious,” Douc states as women are shown, in black-and-white, working in the fields. “There is grain. There are the calm, determined faces. Like a painting. A poem. At last I see the Revolution they so promised us. It exists only on film.” It’s a stark comparison to cinematographer Prum Mésa’s modern-day shots of the wind blowing through lush green fields, devoid of people. The Missing Picture is an extraordinarily poignant memoir that uses the director’s personal tale as a microcosm for what happened in Cambodia during the 1970s, employing the figures and dioramas to compensate for “the missing pictures.” Like such other documentaries as Jessica Wu’s Protagonist and In the Realms of the Unreal, Michel Gondry’s Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, Jeff Malmberg’s Marwencol, and Zachary Heinzerling’s Cutie and the Boxer, which incorporate animation, puppetry, and/or miniatures to enhance the narrative or fill in gaps, Panh makes creative use of an unexpected artistic technique, this time concentrating on painful history as well as personal and collective memory.

RICHARD III

Lars Eidinger makes a major announcement as title character in spectacular staging of Richard III at BAM (photo by Richard Termine)

Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St.
October 11-14, $35-$115, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.schaubuehne.de

Richard III is one of the greatest characters in William Shakespeare’s canon, a hunchbacked purveyor of pure evil as he rises to power in fifteenth-century England. The deliciously maleficent and vengeful egomaniac has been played on stage and screen by a plethora of master thespians, including Laurence Olivier, Ian McKellen, Kevin Spacey, Al Pacino, Benedict Cumberbatch, Alec Guinness, Peter Dinklage, Mark Rylance, and George C. Scott. But now there’s a new monarch in town, by far and away the best portrayer of the dastardly demon I have ever seen: German actor Lars Eidinger. In Schaubühne Berlin’s ferocious, nonstop version, continuing at the BAM Harvey through October 14 and directed by Thomas Ostermeier (An Enemy of the People, Hedda Gabler, both at BAM), Eidinger is electrifying, literally and figuratively, as the extraordinary last of the Plantagenets. Eidinger speaks most of his dialogue using an old-fashioned bullet microphone that dangles from above, equipped with a light and a camera for extreme close-ups. Eidinger occasionally throws the mic away from him, then grabs it as it circles back in a kind of homage to Roger Daltrey. At one point the night I went, the mic sent out electric shocks right into Eidinger’s face, but he gamely carried on, muttering about “technical difficulties” with a wry smile. Wearing a white T-shirt, black pants and shoes, and a leather-strap helmet, his Richard is part dilapidated Alex from A Clockwork Orange, part steampunk gone wild, in a world of fashionably dressed men and women who, at the beginning, are at a decadent party straight out of a Christian Schad painting. (The fanciful costumes are by Florence von Gerkan.)

Richard (Lars Eidinger) surveys his domain in Thomas Ostermeier’s fast and furious Richard III (photo by Richard Termine)

As he takes care of business with his brothers, Clarence (Christoph Gawenda, also Dorset and Stanley) and Edward (Thomas Bading, also Lord Mayor of London and the Second Murderer), Hastings (Sebastian Schwarz, also Brakenbury and Ratcliff), Buckingham (Moritz Gottwald), Queen Margaret (Robert Beyer, also Catesby and the First Murderer), and Rivers (Laurenz Laufenberg), the hunched, club-footed Richard drags himself around Jan Pappelbaum’s set, which is fronted by a half-circle sandbox, with a two-story metal structure in the back, with poles that characters can slide down. When Richard wonderfully woos Lady Anne (Jenny König), he strips down almost completely, leaving only the black pillow that is fastened to his shoulder to form his hump. (Is it simply Eidinger’s prop, or could it be Richard’s?) Richard also makes his way into the audience several times, grabbing a seat, chatting patrons up, and waking up someone who was dozing off in the front row. He primarily speaks in German, although he ad libs in English, at which points he often looks back at one of the three surtitle screens to see if these words are projected there. He also quotes Tyler, the Creator and raps an Eminem song. But don’t let all of the unpredictable, devilish fun distract you from Richard’s real purpose: systematically dispatching anyone and everyone in his path to the throne, even a couple of puppets. Nils Ostendorf’s loud, furious score is made even more dramatic by Thomas Witte’s live drumming and Sébastien Dupouey’s video projections; Witte sits behind his kit stage left, clearly enjoying Eidinger’s antics. By the time Richard is ready for the final battle scene, there is no one else left onstage; he is fighting himself, as if the whole thing is taking place in his warped, deranged mind. It’s a captivating finale to a rousing version that breathes invigorating life into this always dependable warhorse.

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: RICHARD III

Thomas Ostermeier transforms Richard III into a glittery spectacle in German production (photo by Arno Declair)

Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St.
October 11-14, $35-$115, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.schaubuehne.de

German director Thomas Ostermeier and Schaubühne Berlin return to BAM with a wildly unpredictable, glittery, contemporary take on William Shakespeare’s paean to power and ego, Richard III, running October 11-14 at the BAM Harvey as part of BAM’s 2017 Next Wave Festival. Last at BAM in 2013 with An Enemy of the People —his previous shows at BAM include Nora in 2004, Hedda Gabler in 2006, and The Marriage of Maria Braun in 2010 — Ostermeier now presents the Bard as if caught up in endless expressionistic glam decadence. Lars Eidinger plays the hunchbacked villain, with Moritz Gottwald as Buckingham, Eva Meckbach as Elizabeth, and Jenny König as Lady Anne. The pulsating soundtrack is by Nils Ostendorf, with songs by Tyler Gregory Okonma, Laurie Anderson, Iannis Xenakis, and Thomas Tomkins and Andrew John Powell; Thomas Witte provides live drumming. The luxuriously gaudy visual style comes courtesy of set designer Jan Pappelbaum, with costumes by Florence von Gerkan, video by Sébastien Dupouey, dramaturgy by Florian Borchmeyer (who adapted An Enemy of the People), and lighting by Erich Schneider. On October 12 at 6:00 ($25) at BAM Rose Cinemas, Ostermeier will sit down for an “Iconic Artist Talk” with playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Everybody, An Octoroon), who is adapting Ostermeier and Borchmeyer’s An Enemy of the People for a Broadway run later this season.