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© Antero Hein While two performers define the boundaries of the living room of a house with tape on the floor of the bare stage space, another performer transforms himself into an old and fat protagonist in the middle of the defined space, wearing a padded costume and spray-whitening his hair. Meanwhile, the fourth performer, respecting the boundaries of the living room, places an upside-down U-shaped piece of furniture at the back of the room, which we soon realise that it will represent a fireplace, and places an illuminated box with the word 2005 on the side facing us. One of the performers trips the performer who transformed into the old man and knocks him down, and the story begins: In 2005, an old man is choking to death on the floor of his living room. What follows is a collage-like narrative, going back and forth years, decades, centuries, millions of years, billions of years from 2005, consisting of the stories of people, plants, beings who have lived or will live in this livi...

La Terra di Nod ( Het Land Nod) by FC Bergman  Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia © Andrea Avezzù To experience FC Bergman's Het land nod (The Land of Nod), we are in a gigantic room in one of the art chamber-like museums of fine arts built in Europe in the second half of the 19th century to display the collections of royalty. The room, measuring 18 metres by 12 metres and 10 metres high, was built from scratch in a disused factory in the nearby industrial area of Marghera because it did not fit into any of the existing theatres in Venice. Half of it is used as a tribune for the audience and the other half is used as a stage. Later I learned that this space is not supposed to be a part of an anonymous museum, but it is an exact replica of the Rubens Room of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerpen, which had been closed for four years for renovation in 2015, when this show premiered (and only recently reopened in November 2022). The first thing that strikes me on entering the room ...

Naturae - Armando Punzo  Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia © Andrea Avezzù  Although art lovers know Venice best for its art and architecture biennials and its film festival, La Biennale di Venezia, the organisation responsible for these three events, has also been organising theatre, dance and music festivals every year for years. Especially in the 70s, the Teatro Biennale hosted the most important international representatives of the performing arts of the time, from Robert Wilson to Peter Brook, from The Living Theatre to Jerzy Grotowski. In those years, Ariane Mnouchkine staged L'Âge d'or (The Golden Age) by a canal, John Cage and Merce Cunningham staged their works in Piazza San Marco and Brook in the courtyard of a monastery. Like the Dance and Music Biennials, the Teatro Biennale, instead of taking over the city as it did in the 1970s, has recently been using the 300-400 year old Italian Navy shipyard buildings in the monumental Arsenale area, which the Biennale di Venezi...

© Joerg Letz Born in Brussels and based in Germany, Michael Maurissens produces works both as a dancer/choreographer and as a director focusing especially on dance films.  Maurissens   who came to Istanbul for 3 months through the German Cultural Fund, also carries out various joint studies in Turkey with the Goethe Institute and Kulturakademie Tarabya. Continuing his productions as a producer, cameraman and editor in the field of film, Maurissens' documentary film The Body as Archive , which focuses on the body as an archive and the memory storage and processing mechanisms of the body, and also explores different ways of archiving especially in the field of performing arts, screened at Zone60 Atelier on June 7th and  at Kadir Has University on June 9th . Maurissens also held a dance-film workshop in Duende with the support of Kunststiftung NRW between June 8th-11th.  We asked questions for you to Maurissens, whom we hosted in our conversation in ten question series....

Korean dancer/choreographer Sung-Im Her graduated from the famous P.A.R.T.S. dance school and later worked with important dance companies such as Les ballets C. de la B. and Needcompany. NUTCRUSHER, choreographed by Sung-Im Her questions the objectification of women, the relationships we establish with our bodies, and how the body is represented, with repetitive gestures and an energetic language of movement, taking the influence of the #metoo and #timesup movements in the background in South Korea. NUTCRUSHER will take place at Alan Kadıköy on June 5-6, 2023, as part of the 2022-2023 seasonal shows of the Istanbul Fringe Festival with the support of the British Council. On this occasion we interviewed Sung-Im Her. What is the essence of performance in your opinion? We are doing live performance and there is uniqueness to it. We breathe and feel together in the same place, same moment, with no phone, no internet, no digital. For me, that is the core part of live performance and I reall...

©Bart Dewaele What is the essence of theatre in your opinion? If there is such a thing, probably it lies in people being together, exchanging thoughts and images, challenging ideas and practicing new & other ways of looking at the world. A place to briefly escape, and experience the world in a different way. Do you believe in the transformative power of art? How? Yes, and no. No, because it would be silly to think theatre can change the world. However, people will. And those people can visit a theatre building. So theatre for us is one way - among many others - to pull at the fabric of collective consciousness. To interact with the way people look at and interpret the world around them. So step by step, yes. When you are working on a piece, what sources inspire you? The main source of inspiration is the people we talked to during our research, and the conversations we had. Apart from that we don’t really watch a lot of other shows or films, or visit exhibitions while we are working...

© Emilia Therese Danish playwright and theater director Christian Lollike (1973) was among the participants of Nordic Focus, which was held for the first time this year as part of the New Text Festival. Within the scope of the event supported by the Danish Embassy, Danish Cultural Institute, Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Danish Ministry of Culture, Danish Consulate, Consulate General of Sweden, the Swedish Research Institute and the Swedish Arts Council, Lollike's play Cosmic Fear or Brad Pitt's Day of Paranoia  was performed as a staged reading. Lollike is working with stage and installation art in theaters, public areas and virtual platforms. He has produced a comprehensive amount of theatre texts and his texts are being played in and outside Europe. During the last couple of years, Lollike’s work has been dealing more and more with inter-aesthetics and he has made a ballet, an opera installation and a political party. His artistic drive derives from wanting to underst...