danzon_eng

© Richard Terborg  6th Istanbul Fringe Festival's international guest Sanne van Dijk is a puppeteer and storyteller based in Amsterdam. Sanne graduated in acting from the Theatre Academy in Amsterdam in 2006 and also studied puppetry at the Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch in Berlin. Sanne played the main character in the sci-fi film Gliese 581 , which was selected for the 2015 Imagine Film Festival, and was nominated for the International EMMY Children's Awards 2020 for the TV production Dropje (Doopie) , in which she played the main character as a puppeteer. In her work, Sanne draws on her own life experiences to reveal universal truths that transcend different cultures and societies. By daring to speak honestly about her own struggles and challenges in life, Sanne provokes the audience to confront their own struggles. In her interdisciplinary work VLOED (FLOOD) , which we had the opportunity to see at the Istanbul Fringe Festival, Sanne combined acting, puppetry ...

What is the essence of theater in your opinion? I can only speak about the essence of my world. Our essence is to give emotions, playfulness and interactivity to help the audience from 4 to 104, to find their innocent playfulness and imagine and invent. We have 30 little stories in our show, and each one is full of emotions of very different ideas, some contemporary. People all over the world feel these emotions because they are to do with love, with hate, with competition, with jealousy. So, our essence is really to guide the people to that innocent world and imagine. Do you believe in the transformative power of art? How?   Yes. I mean, I go to a museum and some paintings, sculptures transform something in me for sure. Not that I rush back home and want to copy, but they give me that emotion. They give me that strength to continue my way and maybe to invent something. So I do believe that the arts have a very powerful message that we should listen to, and I believe a lot of peop...

A man risen from the ashes: Poussière  Poussière (Dust), on the programme of the Théâtre du Train Bleu, one of Festival Off Avignon's prestigious venues, is a 40-minute puppet show directed by Sophie Mayeux, who is also the founder of the Compagnie Infra company.  Performed in a 60-70-seat hall, Poussière takes place inside a transparent cylinder, a capsule, I assume made of plastic, about one metre in diameter and one and a half metres high, placed in the centre of the stage (set design: Ionah Mélin). In the prologue we witness the end of the world; it could be a nuclear war, a rebellion of nature or a volcanic eruption. Smoke, dust and ash envelop the cylinder; you can't see a thing. In the same way that Phia Ménard, whose work I love, controls the flow of air in her show L'après-midi d'un foehn , a choreography of smoke and dust is created by directing the flow of air inside the cylinder. Then the curtain goes down and when it rises again we see a post-apocalyptic ...

© Christophe Raynaud de Lage I was delighted to see the Compagnie Plexus Polaire at the 2023 edition of the Festival Off Avignon, a company I had never seen before but which had been on my radar ever since I came across the images of their adaptation of Moby Dick on the internet. The company was at the festival not with Moby Dick , but with Dracula - Lucy's Dream , an adaptation of another classic novel, Bram Stoker's famous Dracula . Performances took place at La Patinoire, which La Manufacture had temporarily converted from a skating rink into a theatre space, from 7 to 24 July, every day except Wednesday at 9.50 am. As the title suggests, the protagonist of the show is the beautiful and sexy Lucy, one of the minor characters in the novel, Count Dracula's first victim in England. Lucy is the friend of Jonathan Harker's fiancée Mina and is a sleepwalker.  The show begins directly in Lucy's dream, which she has one night while sleepwalking. Lucy sees herself in her...

© 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...