No doubt about it, Harry Partch is grand. What with building his own bitchin’ instruments, rockin’ it on the outskirts of the ‘avant garde’ -only to be swallowed up by it, much like other great American composers, Charles Ives and Morton Feldman-, and generally just doing his thang, I’ve been a backseat fan for quite some time. But whenever I ( Read more... )

On Saturday I went to the premiere of Jacob Wren’s adaptation of Der Tod in Rom (Death in Rome), a novel by Wolfgang Koeppen, another one of these Gruppe 47 fellars -some of the more famous members to English speakers will be Günter Grass, Ingeborg Bachmann and Heinrich Böll. This was a pretty important movement in German intellectual post war ( Read more... )

“In light of the incomparably more versatile representational potentials of film, television and the internet, what can one actually narrate on stage? Moreover, what new strategies are theater makers inventing such that media based narration becomes fruitful for theater?”

These two questions, here roughly translated from the program, were posed by ( Read more... )

before I subject the reader to a series of rants about the failures of the Berliner Szene, I think it’s only fair to review things that I have liked since I’ve been living in Berlin -thus, there will only be performances dating as far back as August 2005. There’s quite some time separating this blog and some of these performances, so I’m going to ( Read more... )

Though included in the program to ‘Dogs…’ which premiered at the English Theater Berlin on April 29, 2007, I also thought this would be the appropriate forum to share and talk about these ideas. Though specific to this piece -i.e. Dogs-, I believe nonetheless that these ‘guidelines’ are sound and could be interesting for other productions.

expect ( Read more... )