The circus and performing arts troupe Baró d’evel, formed by the award-winning French/Catalan duo Camille Decourtye and Blaï Mateu Trias, expands its repertoire with a smart and sophisticated production for eight human performers, one white horse and a flock of pigeons. Falaise, that premiered at Barcelona’s Grec festival in July, is the second half of… Read more »
Grec Festival offers a great opportunity to experience a work by the Australian choreographer Lucy Guerin. For nearly 20 years, this Adelaide-born choreographer has been a reference point in contemporary dance, working out of Melbourne’s sophisticated and individualistic independent dance scene. Split, the word implying a forced, irreversible division, works on levels that are personal,… Read more »
In a two-hour block separated into segments, the Swiss production 120 Days of Sodom carefully dismantles Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notorious ‘art horror’ film, released in 1975. Based on the writings of the Marques de Sade (interest in whose work never seems to fade) it tells the story of a group of fascists who kidnap 18… Read more »
Citing the influence of physicist Stephen Hawking and the author Jorge Luis Borges, and using Bernard Herrmann’s musical score from the Hitchcock film Vertigo for its scene changes, 4D Òptic by the Argentine playwright and director Javier Daulte marks an exciting trip into 2019. This “restoration, not revival,” of Daulte’s 2004 play is absolutely in… Read more »
This pitch-perfect Catalan production captures the comedy and charm of Sarah Ruhl’s provocative play In the Next Room / L’habitació del costat. Set in America in the late 19th century, at the time of Thomas Edison’s invention of electrical lighting, the pioneering Dr. Givings receives female patients complaining of ‘hysteria’, to whom he applies a recent… Read more »
In the entertaining thriller play Cronología de las Bestias, written and directed by the Argentine Lautaro Perotti, Spanish actress Carmen Machi is unforgettable as Olvido, a beer-swilling mother with a strange fixation on the washing machine, whose missing son Beltrán shows up behind the sofa after a 12 year absence. Instantly recognised by his antsy aunt… Read more »
Like his first piece, Living With the Lights On, Mark Lockyer’s “love letter to Spain” is an intense, sprawling monologue of inner and outer experiences, realisations of recent and distant past, delivered in an entertaining attack of sincerity. Unlike his first piece, Keep on Walking, Federico is set in an anonymous “authentically Spanish” village on the… Read more »
Frenchman Bertrand Lesca and British-Greek Nasi Voutsas take on the EU and the Syrian crisis in the first two parts of a subversive ‘accidental trilogy’ bound by an austere tragicomic visual language. Accessible and entertaining, expect big themes, character-driven performances and the capacity to shift the mood very suddenly from light to dark. EUROHOUSE Developed… Read more »
A funeral as the setting for the second dance piece in a trilogy is an intriguing departure point in this new creation by the choreographer Lali Ayguadé. iUanMi, like its predecessor Kokoro, is a contemporary dance piece for four performers that explores internal and external worlds and the transformative relationship between them. An enormous curtain… Read more »
In this entertaining homage to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein a team of Catalan multidisciplinary creators have adjusted the plot of the 1818 original to present an atmospheric if ‘diet’ version of the tale. A Wagneresque soundtrack and enigmatic images of the natural world provide the scenery for the story of mad scientist Dr. Frankenstein, who, in… Read more »
