Insite

Few have shaped the American theatrical landscape more drastically than critic, producer, academic, and former artistic director Robert Brustein.  Brustein is truly a Man of the Theater, a rare epithet to bestow on the splintered profession that the theater has become today.  A rare public appearance as part of the Peak Performances 09/10 season will no doubt be studded with his trademark intellectual and cultural provocation.  A talk entitled “The Four Horsemen of the Cultural Apocalypse” suggests no less than the fractious and provocative rhetoric for which Brustein is known, both as a critic and formerly as an artistic director. Read more »

Photo: copyright Laurent Paillier

Late April holds a major anniversary date for South Africa: Freedom Day, celebrated on April 27th, memorializes the country’s first democratic elections, and 2009 marks the fifteenth anniversary of Freedom Day. This year, the South African holiday was all the more significant as it coincided with the country’s fourth general election. 

Peak Performances celebrates this milestone in South Africa’s history by hosting Via Katlehong Dance, formed in 1992 in the “old” South Africa and named for the Katlehong township near Johannesburg. The company’s piece, Woza (translated as the invitation “come”), will be given its U.S. premiere as the final work in the Peak Performances 2008-2009 season. 

In Woza, twelve performers present a combination of dance forms, the most contemporary of which, Pantsula, is a South African township urban dance similar to the American hip-hop tradition. Pantsula is mixed with the older Gumboot dancing that originated as a workingman’s dance in the 1950s. These two distinct styles are then filtered through tap dance, which should give some idea of the aggressive and vibrant quality of the movement. This hybrid dance form, which Via Katlehong calls “mogaba,” uses the dancers’ entire bodies: stamping feet, hand clapping, and rhythmic shouts. 

Read more »

Jorge Cacheiro, in adapting Heinrich von Kleist’s The Prince of Homburg with his MSU theater students, reimagines the piece with Kleist as an onstage character. Off to the sides of this sober, lichen-colored set, we see a young man pacing and mimicking the play as it progresses. He mutters interjections (lines from Kleist’s other writings and not part of the original play) and interacts with the lead characters. Downstage there are model soldiers, as if the set itself is a giant dollhouse, a toy box for the fevered imagination of Kleist himself. This addition is an interesting parallel to the main character, the eponymous Prince of the title. The Prince is tortured: should he obey his army superiors’ commands in battle, or should he pursue the other side’s troupes as he was expressly forbidden? There’s battle on one hand and love on the other, for the Prince continually dreams about the Princess, while he is in battle and after he is in jail for disobeying orders. He is plagued by tactical choices and romantic issues that cloud his judgment and his mind’s eye. Kleist is comparable to the Prince himself—both are dreamers and fear the future; Kleist ultimately took his own life, which is why it makes such sense for Cacheiro to juxtapose the two.

The big issues to look for in this production are group obeisance versus freewill, the present moment versus how one sees oneself and is perceived, and the act of artistic manipulation. Kleist rips his writing off the walls of the set, and the room deteriorates in the second half. Both are visual manifestations of the themes that Kleist and Cacheiro—even the Prince himself—explore together.

Raphael Martin has worked for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Royal Court Theatre, Gate Theatre, and Bush Theatre, all in London. Most recently, he was Literary Manager at New York City’s Manhattan Theatre Club.

“Hi, I’m David Roussève.” A lithe black man with salt-and-pepper dreadlocks appears onstage and welcomes us. 

He begins to tell a tale of contradiction—full of joy and pain, truth and fiction, hope and despair, abandon and inclusion. His dance teeters on the seam where these many elements merge. The dancers themselves are culled from a spectrum of ethnicities; they are tough, energized, and athletic and assist David in his journey of discovery. As he slowly navigates across the stage, David becomes characters from a past that is real and imagined, both deeply personal and more broadly drawing from the wider African American tradition. He is an old grandmother who remembers when she was a slave in the South and a middle-aged black man dying in the hospital. He becomes an old man describing a gnarled alley cat and a victim of Hurricane Katrina who dances out her rage and pain using guttural gestures. These characters intertwine with the dancers. The movement is kinetic, rough, vivacious, and bravura. BBC radio static fills the air with talk of genocide. Sickness suffuses the work, but there are lashings of silly humor. His dancers flit around the stage choking, gurgling, and tickling. An Indonesian dancer taunts the others to eat a raw chili pepper. Video is projected against a back wall. All the while, David traverses the stage—the line of his life—to gorgeous and sad Portuguese fado music. When he gets to the end of the journey, we learn that all the characters are imagined extensions of himself. We become Roussève just as Roussève reflects the history of African Americans in the United States. I was drawn to the work’s chaos, humor, and specificity—the many different faces and bodies onstage knitting together to make Saudade personal and broad all at once. 

Raphael Martin has worked for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Royal Court Theatre, Gate Theatre, and Bush Theatre, all in London. Most recently, he was Literary Manager at New York City’s Manhattan Theatre Club.