Showing posts with label Toronto. Show all posts

Monday, February 17, 2014

"I am America" performance by the Open Program of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards in Toronto.

Last night the Studio Theatre of the U of T was again packed, this time to see "I am America" by the guys from the Open Program of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards.

It was a great night, full of energy and, as some of the people said during the short Q&A session, with many reminiscences of the Grotowskian tradition of doing things.

Once more singing was a very important part of the work but not the less the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, the vocal game and in some moments a very impressive fluidity of the movement of many of the actors.

If in "Electric Party Songs" we saw a young group singing, this time we saw and noticed a theatrical group of young artist doing very well what they wanted to do and that is remarkable, as spectator very appreciable and enjoyable.

Public was less shy in the applause and more enthusiastic in their comments after the performance.

Some of the guys of the Open Program are very young but it was impressive the way they grew on stage during their actions.

Being a critical work on America, the country, through the voice and questions of immigrants (if I understood correctly) I felt opened to the critic of the Americanism, and some of the ironies there were very enjoyable; America is a country and a being who they (or we?) dream with, fall in love, hate and think eternally about.

I kept some images in my memory, especially around the American flag used as a dress and wings, and some remarkable vocal and physical moments.

I couldn't avoid to recall the taste of "Akropolis" (one of the great works directed by Grotowski) during some editions of actions and in the tempo of the actors' work.

At the end, again during the short Q&A session, and old man mentioned about the difference between the joy he felt in this work and the suffering (probably he used other word) people felt in the first Grotowskian works, and Mario Biagini made him notice that the inner work of the main actor in The Constant Prince, Cieslak, was a line of associations related with a very pleasurable moment during the adolescent years of the actor (his first sexual encounter) but the public, worked by the edition of the actions by the director, saw other thing, a man being tortured. Joy then has been always present in this group, even without the physical presence of Grotowski, and this time openly exposed.

Finally I can say that Mario, actor himself, is a master of directing audiences when talks about his work with Grotowski and the group, using his own skills to reach the people who is listening to him, we all were almost static with his words about Grotowski giving to the people through his work, founding the truth (Mario’s truth) in his voice and body in every sentence, giving us what is in his experience as an artist and as human being.

Lovely moments, and now looking forward to see what will happen next in this residence of the Open program in Toronto, with their masterclasses, screening and performances to come.

(I didn't take any photographs of the performance, sorry. I wanted to concentrate myself in the work I was going to see. So, you have here only two of the group during the applause, just as a visual document of the event).

Texts, photographs and videos in this Blog are all author's property, except when marked. All rights reserved by Gustavo Thomas. If you have any interest in using any text, photograph or video from this Blog, for commercial use or not, please contact Gustavo Thomas at gustavothomastheatre@gmail.com.

Sunday, March 10, 2013

"Sayonara" and "I, Worker". Japanese contemporary theatre in Toronto (2013)

"I, Worker" (Photo from the program by Tsukasa Aoki)

After some months without seeing any theatre performances (totally dedicated to publishing my plays, writing poems, training Butoh and editing photographs) I returned as a spectator of two short plays by Japanese playwright Oriza Hirata: "Sayonara" (さようなら) and "I, worker" (働く私) as part of the Robot Theatre Project.

The performances were also part of a cultural festival around Japanese culture, Spotlight Japan, here in Toronto, Canada at the Berkeley Street Theatre.

It was interesting to come back to the theatre not exactly because of the quality of the plays and performances but because of the performers: half of the cast were real robots.

The program says the following about the project:

"Robot Theatre Project began four years ago at Osaka University. The initial goal of our project was to change the status of robots from being merely displays at expositions to becoming essential elements of theatre arts. At these expositions, where scientists gather to present their latest technologies, we saw that while robots "impressed" audiences, they never "moved" them - and we wanted to show that robots could really move people. We believe that our mission should be to help lead current research efforts that examine how robots can be part of the future of human society - how robots can be created so as not to alienate people, or scare children or the elderly."

Sayonara was in English and Japanese (with subtitles) and I, Worker totally in Japanese (with subtitles as well), so there was no problem in understanding what what was being said on stage.

Sayonara, as the name refers to directly, is a "Good bye" from the life of the real human, a lady, and of a kind of android which has served as her company. The play is full of poems and also some references to the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011.

I, Worker is the story of two couples, two humans and two robots and how they interact when one of the robots begins to refuse to work, like the man of the human couple did, it seems, some time before as well.

Real robots in relationships with humans in an almost no science fiction imaginary. Interesting for the questions the plays provoke in the spectator's mind (not much, you will see), but I think still a little bit short-sighted about those kinds of relationships in a not so far future.

Robots don't work in our houses yet, but they have been in fiction films for years, from the stupid ones in the sixties to the one in Kubrick's masterpiece, "2001, A Space Odyssey", and so on -Star Wars, Blade Runner, Terminator, etc.-, doing all we can ever imagine and more each time. So, we are trained to see those things as spectators, no doubt, but to our disappointment we only see on stage, first, one that almost has no movement and, afterwards, two more others which interact like those in those sixties series but without being really funny. So, where and what is the new thing here? Thinking about real relationships with real robots? But haven't the best films and novels about them done that now? Of courses, and very well!

They only new thing I can see here is that real robots are coming to the theatrical stage too, as in novels and films, and the company gets a good promotion for working as a kind of artistic show of whatever happens in the industry, specializing in human interaction (like 'commercial happenings" in public relations or in advertising), and we'll have to wait many years to see real action with those robots live. Then we won't have to write short long-term fiction, and will see real problems in our relationship with them, we'll be impressed and actually moved by them, I hope.

Here the promotional video by the Japan Foundation:

Sunday, September 9, 2012

"Golem", A street perfomance by Shadowland Theatre at the Ashkenaz Festival in Toronto (2012)

Ashkenaz Festival Street Performance "Golem" by Shadowland Theatre (Toronto. 2012)

Every two years Toronto celebrates the Ashkenaz Festival, and one of its main events is the performance and parade, in the end of the festival, by Shadowland Theatre, on one subject referent to the Ashkenaz culture.

This year the theme was "the golem", that mythical monster of the Renaissance Praga, which once he is alive gets mad and kills everyone who's not a believer, and the only thing could stop his fury is being in love.

Shadowland Theatre works using giant puppets, Klezmer musicians and non professional actors who are volunteers from the Jewish community of Toronto.

Slideshow of photographs from the "Golem" performance in Toronto

Thursday, August 30, 2012

Toronto Buskerfest 2012 (Some photographs)

This occasion I could only spend some hours of one of the four days of Toronto Buskerfest 2012, the already famous street performances festival organized in many Canadian cities during summer. I had the opportunity to see two full spectacles, one by a Mexican acrobat, Pancho Libre, and another one by Ernest The Magnifique, an australian performer.

I'm sharing some of my photographs and I hope you like them.

Pancho Libre Performance at Toronto Buskerfest 2012

Ernest The Magnifique Performance at Toronto Buskerfest 2012

Slideshow of photographs of Toronto Buskerfest 2012

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Interview to Robert Lepage and my account of "Playing Cards 1: Spades" during Luminato 2012

Robert Lepage Interview At Berkeley Theatre. Luminato 2012 (Toronto, Canada)

Robert Lepage interviewed at Luminato Festival (By Gustavo Thomas. Toronto. 2012)

Robert Lepage is one of the Canadian figures I have followed most during my already 3-year-long stay in Toronto. Every year he stages at least one production in the city, but I have also searched for his work in his home city, Québec.

Over time and through seeing his stagings, attending lectures on him and somehow studying his work, his image has set foot on the ground of my perception. Therefore I no longer need to avail myself of the qualifiers the Canadian press and critics shower him with, like "genius and visionary," and I’ve been able to place him as a theater director who knows well how to tell stories scenically and who makes great use of technology applied to the theater, as well as a financially successful artist who is secure in his continuous and personal exploration (which has a very chaotic character or, in any event, is carried by the same current of his own successes).

I've seen great moments in his productions, and other not so fortunate moments too; I'm rarely satisfied with the acting and I’m always surprised by the great love the Canadian public shows his work, as well as by the prices they pay to see his productions.

His latest production, the reason for this interview and which was also presented at the 2012 Luminato Festival in Toronto, “Playing Cards 1: Spades”, is part of a planned tetralogy with students (or so I understood) of the University of California in the United States.

Playing Cards 1: Spades. Luminato Festival (By Gustavo Thomas. Toronto. 2012)

I had the opportunity to see Spades the night before the interview, at its premiere, so my head was full of questions about the reasons for the creation of this staging. The interview itself, conducted by researcher Renate Klett at one of the beautiful stages of the Canadian Stage Company in Toronto, did not elaborate at all on the creative work of Lepage and was little more than a kind of advertising report, in the style of a television review that included an interview with the creator, where the director talked about how the production came to be, how he achieved certain effects, and some additional curiosities about working with the actors. Obviously informative but not critical at all, the interview was boring for me and even cloying, with positive adjectives about Lepage's work that I would not expect from a serious researcher. In the end I thought, somewhat maliciously I admit, that if part of her work (including payments and trips around the world) depends on the proximity to very important people, then it would be professional suicide to openly and publicly criticize your interviewee.

My need to see and hear a critically objective interview was mostly because the production gave me the feeling of it being in a very high state of immaturity (that somehow Lepage accepted himself), uncharacteristic of all that I had seen from this director.

The play seemed to me, as a spectator, distant and cold, with a sort of naive view of the life of immigrants and of the American mindset. Everything happens on a circular stage with dozens of effects that became more of a problem for the actors than a solution for telling a story.

On the road that has taken me around the world to see great productions, some with wonderful technological effects and some without them (or, in any case, with the effects of a great training in acting), I do not find the work of Lepage as a whole as deep or enlightening, and I see it now only as just another example of a good stage show that has managed to reach economic success with respectability.

My experience with Einstein On The Beach was something completely different, where you know you’re in the face of a monumental masterpiece in every way. But that is the subject of another blog post.

Robert Lepage interviewed at Luminato Festival (By Gustavo Thomas. Toronto. 2012)

Renate Klett Interviewing Robert Lepage At Berkeley Theatre. Luminato 2012 (Toronto, Canada)

Renate Klett interviews Robert Lepage. Luminato Festival. (By Gustavo Thomas. Toronto. 2012)

Monday, June 18, 2012

Robert Wilson, Lucinda Childs and Philip Glass talk about Einstein on the Beach (Toronto. 2012)

Philip Glass, Robert Wilson and Lucinda Childs. Contemporary Opera's Big Bang discussion at AGO. Luminato 2012 (Toronto)

Robert Wilson, Lucinda Childs and Philip Glass talk about Einstein on the Beach. AGO. (By Gustavo Thomas. 2012)

Last Wednesday June 6th, 2012, at AGO (Toronto), the three gods of American Performing Arts talked about their creation of Einstein on the Beach, premiered in 1976. It was an amazing two hours discussion, not only because they talked about this mythic masterpiece of the performing arts but because they were there, alive, in front of us, 35 years later of the creation of it.

I got some interesting quotations (could not be entirely accurate, I wrote them while listening to them):

- Philip Glass: "Einstein of the Beach is unique because there was no, and there is no, other creation like this. There is no references, simple."

- Philip Glass and Robert Wilson: "We didn't know what kind of piece this was, but when it was performed in France, French critics called it "a contemporary Opera", and we thought it was right. It was an opera in the sense of opus, a work."

- Bob Wilson: "Form is boring, what's important is how you feel inside that form."

- Bob Wilson: "You don't have to get anything, just experimenting the piece."

- Bob Wilson: "Einstein on the Beach has a classic structure, but each of us created their own piece inside that structure."

- Bob Wilson: "All the actors, singers and dancers are dressed with the style of clothes Einstein used to wear. All of them are one part of Einstein."

- Bob Wilson: "I worked the stage direction and illumination designed with the three ways of seeing in painting: the hand (close up), the body and the landscape."

Robert Wilson, Lucinda Childs and Philip Glass talk about Einstein on the Beach. AGO. (By Gustavo Thomas. 2012)

Robert Wilson. Contemporary Opera's Big Bang discussion at AGO. Luminato 2012 (Toronto)

Robert Wilson talks Einstein on the Beach. AGO. (By Gustavo Thomas. 2012)

Philip Glass. Contemporary Opera's Big Bang discussion at AGO. Luminato 2012 (Toronto)

Philip Glass talks about Einstein on the Beach. AGO. (By Gustavo Thomas. 2012)

Lucinda Childs. Contemporary Opera's Big Bang discussion at AGO. Luminato 2012 (Toronto)

Lucinda Childs talks about Einstein on the Beach. AGO. (By Gustavo Thomas. 2012)

Robert Wilson, Lucinda Childs and Philip Glass talk about Einstein on the Beach. AGO. (By Gustavo Thomas. 2012)

Monday, June 4, 2012

Einstein on the Beach this week at 2012 Luminato Festival in Toronto

Einstein on the Beach (Photo by Lucie Jansch, from Luminato's site)

Yes, in an unique opportunity that I never thought I had in my life (of course I ignored the permanence of this production from the 70s) Einstein on the Beach, the Opera with music by Philip Glass and stage direction by Bob Wilson, comes to Toronto for some performances at 2012 Luminato Festival.

I'm writing this short post as an introduction to that which will come after listening, on Wednesday June 6, to Glass and Wilson in a discussion panel, and that after seeing the opera itself in its 4 hour-version.

As you can find much information on the internet about the Opera and its importance for the performing arts of the late twentieth century I won't talk more on the subject. But personally I'll do it a little bit:

I've always fantasized about this production and his music, specially since I first saw photographs of Bob Wilson's direction and later listening to that amazing Philip Glass's music which has followed me throughout my artistic life. Some of you remember my post about my pain and regret when I was living in Beijing and, because of a trip to London, I was unable to see Pina Bausch and her company in one of his last tours (who would imagine that she would die so soon?), in a performance that included her legendary Cabaret Berlin. I do not want to make the same mistake, Wilson and Glass will be here, together, talking about their creation and I'll be there to listening to them as well. What should I say about the performance? The tickets cost a fortune but I bought them and I'll be seated in the best possible place.

For now I leave you with the material from the festival site:

The Fusion of a Total Artwork: Einstein on the Beach (by Jorn Weisbrodt)

Video promo Luminato

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

"Parting Memories" by Violeta Luna. A Conceptual Theatre. Panamerican Routes Festival in Toronto. (2012)

Violeta Luna during Parting Memories (Photo from Internet)

Last Saturday (May 21th) I went to see "Parting Memories", a piece of conceptual theater by and with Violeta Luna at the Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto, as part of the Latin American theater festival "Panamerican Routes", organized by the Latin American-Canadian collective Aluna Theatre.

Violeta is a Mexican visual & stage performance artist who has worked as an asociated artist in La Pocha Nostra (the collective of Guillermo Gómez-Peña) and in Secos & Mojados, in the city of San Francisco. "Parting memories" is part of a project that Violeta is currently creating with Secos & Mojados about Latin American immigration to the United States and the personal burden that emmigration itself means.

I have called it "conceptual theatre" because the elements of the piece (not a dramatic one because of her performance) are linked at different levels of narrative language according to an unique concept, immigration to the United States, and it is the viewer who joins the threads of these levels.

There is a first level (which I consider is the strongest one) which consists of a recording of the narration of more than 30 years of the life of a Salvadorean illegal immigrant; a second level that presents us, at the same time as the audio narration, a video with different images, first of a woman who is unearthed in a criminal investigation process (perhaps a murder scene) and who is the artist herself (or the one that speaks, or just another immigrant in any case... ) and the different steps of preparation for crossing illegally into the United States (list of requirements, souvenirs, maps, etc.) with the ubiquity of the Mexican passport; and finally a third level, staged, alive, with Violeta Luna exposing (at the same time as the other discourses), and mainly through visual images, the body (hers) in relation to different objects of an immigrant (emigrant) memory, objects that one take on a journey of such magnitude, plus the physical experience that the body has at the moments it is classified as "illegal" and therefore as a criminal in another country.

Violeta Luna during Parting Memories (Photograph from Internet)

It is a very rich stage proposal where the dramatic power lies mainly in the story told by the Salvadorean woman, while the body of Luna offers more of a background or frame, a display material that enriches the first discourse.

Although there is a use of interaction with the public, I don't feel this acquires a cathartic power in the body of the viewer, but rather a contemplative one. In any case, there is only one point where I consider that this interaction was so strong that it went from the basic concept to the real body of the viewer, and that was when, after Violeta asked the public to stamp her half-naked body (with seals reading "illegal", "criminal" and "terrorist"), the artist stamped the leg of one of the female spectators, thus becoming the person who decided now who which stranger was to be labelled as legal or illegal.

Obviously for every traveller like me who lives continuously as an immigrant, even as a legal one, this is a very powerful work, but I have my doubts whether it is as powerful for those viewers who are part of the world that one immigrates to. Non-immigrant Canadian spectators (and I can believe that this applies to Americans of the same kind) react in a manner that I would think of melodramatic, with some sympathy. If that is part of the goal of the performance, it works, without a doubt; if not, then it is a "but" to the goal itself because, why join a series of "sentient" samples of the plight of an immigrant, like the continuous news notes and exposés that flood daily the American or Canadian press?

In any case I wonder, as in any work that offers an account of a social problem, how far does the single exposure of these problems in the world of art work beyond being part of the current affairs?

Violeta Luna will give a 3 day workshop that would be worth taking.

Violeta Luna's performance "Parting memories" at Theatre Passe Muraille (Toronto. May 19, 2012)

Violeta Luna after Parting Memories performance at Theatre Passe Muraille. (Photo by Gustavo Thomas. 2012)

Parting Memories stage after the performance at Theatre Passe Muraille. (Photo by Gustavo Thomas. 2012)

Saturday, April 28, 2012

Tamasaburo Bando Poster Exhibition at The Japan Foundation in Toronto (2012)

Tamasaburo Bando Poster Exhibition at The Japan Foundation (Toronto, 2012)

Sign at the entrance of The Japan Foundation in Toronto (2012)

I've written before about my fascination with Tamasaburo Bando, since I saw a video of him performing till the moment I had the chance to watching him performing live in Beijing in 2008. Today I celebrate The Japan Foundation brings to Toronto some posters and photo books as well as screenings of some of his greatest performances and, specially, an amazing documentary, The Written Face.

While watching those amazing images today I found a very interesting quotation. When Tamasaburo was 20, in 1970, Yukio Mishima wrote of him, amazed by his face and his performance:

"The fascination of this beautiful young man is of another era than our own. But it may carry with it a magical power, which by the right and privilege of his young age, will succeed in completely overturning the prevailing tastes of our time."