danzon_eng

© 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...