danzon_eng

In this year's 77th edition of the Festival d'Avignon, our performing arts editor and writer Ayşe Draz, along with our performing arts writer Mehmet Kerem Özel, engaged in conversations with the artists of the performances they watched between July 6th and 10th. The second conversation is with John Collins, the artistic director of the American group Elevator Repair Service, and Greig Sargeant, who plays Baldwin in the play. © Christophe Raynaud de Lage  Portuguese theatre figure Tiago Rodrigues, the festival director, states in his introductory essay for the 77th edition of the Festival d'Avignon – one of the world's prominent performing arts festivals –, held from July 5th to 25th, 2023, that "We do not accept a world divided by borders, for we believe that the organization of the world, its pasts and presents, must be based on the freedom of languages with their complex richness." Building on this notion, Rodrigues plans to emphasize a different language ea...

© Annemie Augustijns The famous opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny , in short Mahagonny , with the libretto by Bertolt Brecht and music by Kurt Weill, tells the story of a city where, if paid for, there are no rules for entertainment (food, sex, boxing and drink), everything is permitted for entertainment. In this artificial city, people are prevented from realizing that their lives are empty and meaningless by spending their time with entertainment, so much that people are made to forget that they are human by dulling their feelings. So, the plot of the Mahagonny can be read as a critique of American society, so Mahagonny may represent Las Vegas, for example, or it may also describe the corrupted Berlin of the 1920s of the Weimar Republic. Mahagonny, which premiered in Leipzig in 1930, was the culmination of a six-year partnership between Brecht and Weill. Like all cult and timeless works, it was met with protests (organized by sympathizers of the National Socialist ...

© Jan Versweyveld A large empty space in the middle of the stage; the floor of the space is orange-red, near the center of the space stands a white pedestal sink. This is Jude's domain. Jude's painful past comes to life here, and all the characters who made him suffer appear here. In the present where the play takes place, Jude repeatedly leans against the foot of the sink sitting in front of it on the floor and cuts into his arms. The blood falls to the floor; its orange-red color comes from being bathed in Jude's blood over the years. The narrow long spaces around this large empty space on the stage are the places of Jude's friends; the kitchen of the house where he was adopted at a late age, the architect’s office, the painter's workshop, the doctor's office. All these spaces surround the gap in the middle, just as all of his friends surround and embrace Jude, sensing his injury and trying to avoid him from his pains. Each one of them; one as his lover by car...

© Jan Versweyveld A wide corridor-like void in the middle of the playing area that goes deep backwards. The void gets twice as deep with the reflection in the mirror covering the very back. It is as if the depth of the space brings with it the depth of time. Traces of the past in the depths of the space seem to be visible… Chairs are lined up on both sides of this void. The members of the family whose story is told in the play sit on these chairs from time to time. Even if all the family members are seated, there are chairs which remain empty. Maybe those empty chairs mark the family members before and after the story that we haven't seen, expanding the time of the story… Behind the chairs are large transparent surfaces with grotesque and primitive face figures drawn on them with mud. Maybe they are the ghosts of the past… The servant of the family brings chairs from both sides to the front and middle line of the void. The couple, in their 90s, in the center of the story sit on tho...