danzon_eng

Waiting for "Guernica Guernica" (20 September 2025, Jahrhunderthalle - Bochum) Can war be depicted on stage? The performing arts certainly find a thousand and one ways to tell a story, but can they convey the horrors and devastation of war and the sociology and psychology of the victors and losers without being didactic, informative or descriptive? FC Bergman, the Belgian theatre collective whose work I have followed for many years, successfully answered this question with their wordless performance Guernica Guernica, which premiered in the Bochum Jahrhunderthalle from 19 to 21 September 2025, during the final week of the 2025 Ruhrtriennale, directed by Belgian director Ivo van Hove. I will now attempt to explain how they achieved this through my impressions of the performance.  FC Bergman chose to depict the war using the Guernica incident. It's easy to understand why. Guernica is the name of a Basque town in Spain where a state bombed its own civilian population f...

Waiting for Der Freischütz Bregenzer Festspiele, Bregenz (7 August 2025) Waiting for  Der fliegende Holländer   Oper im Steinbruch ,  St. Margarethen  (8 August 2025) If there is another country in the world besides Italy where opera is held in such high esteem today, it must be Austria. Much like in Italy, opera reaches the masses in Austria during the summer months through open-air festivals. Around the same time as the Salzburg Festival — the oldest and arguably the world's most prestigious performing arts organisation — two open-air opera festivals take place in July and August, this year one for the 79th time and the other for the 29th: Bregenzer Festspiele (Bregenz Festival) and Oper im Steinbruch (Opera in the Quarry), formerly known as Opernfestspiele St. Margarethen (St. Margarethen Opera Festival). Both festivals boast exceptional venues: the first is on the water, on the shores of Lake Constance; the second is in the countryside, in a Roman-era quarry at t...