In The Arts Fuse: A Conversation on German Theatre in Boston

In The Arts Fuse, I have a discussion with theatre director Guy Ben-Aharon, and Goethe-Institut Boston Director Detlef Gericke-Schönhagen and Program Curator Annette Klein about their new project, German Stage, a series presenting contemporary German plays to Boston audiences. The program runs in parallel to Ben-Aharon's other series, Israeli Stage, which similarly presents work by Israeli playwrights.

German Stage makes its premiere on October 15th with Voltaire and Frederick: A Life In Letters which is based upon the correspondence between Voltaire and Frederick II of Prussia and was conceived by Gericke-Schönhagen.

Amongst the topics we discuss are the differences between German and American theatre:

Ben-Aharon: Though American playwrights are not well-paid, their work is looked at with great respect by American theatres and directors. One could say American theatre is a playwright’s medium; their dialogue is never changed without permission, and the chronology of a play is something one would never tamper with, unless in a workshop context with the playwright in the room. German directors seem to have a greater ‘power’ than the power of their American counterparts: they are freer to explore and re-explore a play’s theme or story by changing its course, i.e. German directors will take a script and direct the scenes in a different order than what was originally written. This is something American directors would never imagine doing.

As well as the relevance of Voltaire and Frederick II in the 21st century (particularly on Boston stages which last year saw the acclaimed Mary Zimmerman helmed production of Candide at the Huntington as well as the superficial name dropping of David Adjmi's Marie Antoinette at American Repertory Theatre:)

Gericke-Schönhagen: The questions raised by the Enlightenment are more relevant today than ever before. They have shifted from a European level to a global level. If you read how Frederick and Voltaire discussed questions of religion, superstition, so-called blasphemy and persecution from their very first letter on, when Frederick was 24 and Voltaire was 42, you feel as if it was today and you are reading a discussion in The New York Times. Frederic hated the superstitious European monarchs of his time, who often were intellectually uneducated and thus overly influenced by intellectually superior, power-driven advisers from the churches. Frederick was not a democrat, but he was an intellectual, highly educated, radically secular yet tolerant of religious belief.

The conversation continues in The Arts Fuse!

October 13: Albanian Writers Day in Worcester, MA

Satuday, October 13th: My friend Chad Parenteau and I will be reading from Tingujt e erës: Lirikë e re Amerikane or Sounds of Wind: New American Lyrics as part of Albanian Writer's Day at the Worcester Public Library.

Tingujt e erës is a bilingual anthology of American poets both in English and translated into Albanian by Lediana Stillo and edited by Abdyl Kadolli, and published by the Writers Union of Kosova (Lidhja e Shkrimtarëve e Kosovës.)

It was due to the publication of this book that I travelled to Kosovo this past June as a guest of the Writers Union. Some of my adventures were recounted here.

I should also note that outside of a few open mic appearances, this will be the first time I will have given a poetry reading in North America in several years.

Albanian Writers Day is presented by the Bleta Association and will run from 11am to 3pm. The event  is free and open to the public.

The Worcester Public Library is located at 3 Salem Square, Worcester MA 01608

Arts Fuse Review: Les 7 Doigts de la Main's "Séquence 8"

This past weekend The Arts Fuse ran my review of Montréal-based nouveau cirque troupe Les 7 Doigts de la Main's Séquence 8:

The agility of Les 7 Doigts de la Main’s acrobats may be the spectacle that draws audiences in to see Séquence 8, but it’s their decision to treat acrobatics and other types of circus virtuosity as a form of acting that offers a new, intimate direction for the nouveau cirque genre.

Séquence 8 runs through to October 7th at ArtsEmerson.

Arts Fuse Interview: Lenelle Moïse's "Expatriate"

"Rebel" from Lenelle Moise on Vimeo.

While not updating this blog, I also managed to have an email conversation with Lenelle Moïse, whose show, Expatriate is coming to Boston this weekend:

AF: Though American expats can be found all over the world, the Parisian expatriate experience is as much part of American mythology as venturing into the frontier. Traveling to Europe plays a particularly significant role in African-American cultural history when one considers the number of Black artists and intellectuals (many of whom were also queer) who moved to Paris to escape the tyranny of pre-civil Rights America. What’s the symbolic role of Paris today?

Moïse: A lot of people associate French culture with pleasure and protest. From escargot to Picasso to the Marquis de Sade to Bastille Day, the French maintain a global reputation for being revolutionary, stylish, occasionally scandalous, and often cool. I think Black American artists—some of them women, some of them queer—share this reputation. Unfortunately, post-civil rights America still marginalizes creative professionals, women, LGBT folks, and people of color. Even President Obama has to deal with people not thinking he’s American enough because he’s of African descent. I wonder if Black expatriates can only feel American when they’re in exile? James Baldwin and Nina Simone had to relocate to France to feel respected as artists. Much of their work focused on American identity politics, but we remember it because it was skillful and beautiful. The French “get” beauty.

I also spoke to Abe Rybeck, founder the The Theater Offensive, a Boston based theatre company whose work focuses on LGBT themes:

AF: You started TTO in 1989, making it roughly contemporary with political movements like ACT UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) and Queer Nation. This means that for over two decades, as well as producing its own work, TTO has also been a presenting organization for queer artists from all over the nation and world. What changes have you seen in the world of queer theater?

Rybeck: Yeah, we grew out of a queer, guerrilla street theater troupe called United Fruit Company that started doing AIDS and liberation-themed activism in 1985. So we actually predated ACT UP by a couple years [ACT UP was founded in 1987]. One of the enormous changes I’ve seen is that in big city theater scenes, queer work isn’t so scarce anymore, which is great. These days, no major theater company in a city like Boston would program its season without discussing what might be of interest to gay men. That puts many gay theater groups around the country in a real competitive tough spot.

On the other, sadder hand, many folks in our community—especially women and people of color—still don’t feel seen or understood or represented by those plays.

You can read the rest of these interviews on The Arts Fuse!

Arts Fuse Review: A.B. Yehoshua's "Hand in Hand Together"

Sorry for the long silence on the blog. As you will see from the next couple of posts, I have been writing, just not here.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a review of Israeli playwright A.B. Yehoshua's Hand in Hand Together. The play was presented as a reading by Israeli Stage, whose founder and artistic director, Guy Ben-Aharon directed and provided the translation. The play told the tale of a series of 1934 meetings between Labor Zionist (and later Israeli Prime Minister) David Ben-Gurion and Revisionist Zionist leader Ze'ev Jabotinsky.

While some plays, when translated, become part of the canon of world drama. The experience of this play caused me to question the limits of theatre in translation, especially political theatre when transported from its native environment:

[...] the didactic nature of Hand in Hand Together is a potential obstacle towards a successful staging for a non-Israeli audience. It no doubt plays well when performed in the Knesset, where many elected officials see either one of the protagonist’s as their ideological forebears, or for an audience that is steeped in Israeli history. But to an American audience the distinctions between Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky may come off as a purely academic exercise.

This disconnect leads to an important question raised by theater in translation: how should one stage a play outside its home country? Will an American audience be riveted by two men debating about early twentieth-century Zionism? Should it be staged with a nod towards naturalism, or given the importance of its ideological and historical discussions, would the story be best brought to the stage with theatrical effects and puppets used in a Brechtian manner? Perhaps an explanatory dumb show as the heroes debate? Would that self-conscious approach improve the storytelling, or would it be seen as mocking the central conflict? When a play is performed outside of its native country, should the mode of theatrical presentation become another part of the translation?

September 17: The Small Theatre Alliance of Boston Meets the Theater Commons

On Monday, September 17th, the Small Theatre Alliance of Boston meets with the Center for the Theatre Commons at Emerson College to learn about the projects being developed at the Commons for use by the new play sector.

Earlier this year, after it was announced that the American Voices New Play Institute at Arena Stage was splitting into two branches, and one of those branches, The Center for the Theater Commons, was taking root at ArtsEmerson, I speculated as to what that could mean for the Boston theatre scene. It certainly occurred to me that the local scene needed to become more familiar with the projects being developed at the Commons, even if the Commons' mission covers new play development nationwide.

The philosophy behind the Commons is a practical one: given that there is an abundance of creativity in the new play sector and the unequal distribution of opportunities preventing that abundance from reaching audiences, how does one increase those opportunities. The mission of the branch of the AVNPI that has become the Commons has been the study of this bottleneck and isolated efforts to circumvent this bottleneck so to create both  the tools and shared knowledge base that allow both problems and solutions to be studied in greater detail (see my notes on an early iteration New Play Map) as well as those that assist those working in the new play sector in the effort to widen that bottleneck and placing those tools and knowledge in "the commons" that can be accessed by anyone much like the books at the public library. Other projects have included the online journal HowlRound and #NewPlayTV as well as the popularization of the #newplay hashtag.

As Commons founder David Dower, director Polly K. Carl, and associate directors Jamie Gahlon and Vijay Matthew made their rounds in Boston discussing the philosophy of the commons, I made face-to-face contact and in my capacity as a member of the Small Theatre Alliance's events committee suggested a meetup between the commons and Alliance members involved in the new play sector. This meeting will focus on the tools being developed as part of the commons and getting them into the hands of playwrights, dramaturgs, literary managers, artistic directors and all those with a hand in developing new plays.

The event will run from 7pm to 9pm at the Jackie Liebergott Black Box Theatre in the Paramount Center at 559 Washington Street in Boston.

Facebook users may RSVP here.

Nothing But Trouble: Bread & Puppet Theater's Peter Schumann

Left: 1934 issue of Die Brennessel portrays a Jewish press magnate subverting Germany with a phallic tube of lies
Right: Bread & Puppet iconic avatar of the evils of modernity, Uncle Fatso, with phallic cigar.

In the latest installment of my "Nothing But Trouble" column at the Clyde Fitch Report, I discuss the politics of Bread & Puppet Theater founder, Peter Schumann on the occasion of his receiving Goddard College's Second Annual Presidential Award for Activism. Goddard President Barbara Vacarr, in her speech introducing Schumann, noted:

[...J]ust as individuals do, human societies tend to see what they want to see. They create national myths of identity out of a composite of historical events and fantasy narratives that, if not challenged, lead to destruction[...]

[...V]isionary artists like Peter Schumann are our sharpest eyes, our keenest ears, our most adept linguists as they see that which has been made invisible or unwelcome, they hear the voices missing from our dominant narratives and they speak in languages that pierce unconsciousness and translate slick sound bites into nuanced and deeper understandings of our world.

Of course, the visionary artist is another myth, and when we start examining the myth of Peter Schumann, we find something that should at least give us pause:

Schumann speaks frequently of being born in 1934 in a region called Silesia, but he neglects to mention that it was part of the Third Reich and that his hometown of Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) was a major base of support of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Indeed, the local German population provided a fertile ground for Naziism to take root: in the 1920s, mob violence had already forced much of the city’s Jewish and Polish populations to leave, and, over the course of Schumann’s childhood, the city was rendered Judenfrei through deportations. Breslau was a city surrounded by a network of concentration camps and slave labor camps providing commercial products for the city. Despite the political nature of his art, Schumann never addresses the fact that for the first 11 years of his life, he was a child of Nazi Germany. He never discusses whether or not his parents were party members, whether or not he was a member of the Deutsches Jungvolk (the Hitler Youth subdivision for boys aged 10-14), or how these experiences influenced him. Popular book-length studies of Schumann and Bread & Puppet (like George Dennison’s An Existing Better World: Notes On The Bread & Puppet Theater and Marc Estrin’s essays for Rehearsing with Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater) make no mention of Schumann’s life in Nazi-era Silesia.

The question I have been asking since 2007 since I stopped performing with Bread & Puppet has been how much of Schumann's politics are influenced by his childhood in Nazi Germany?

Read the rest in The Clyde Fitch Report!