Transcript thREE LEADERS in theatre today

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None has more influenced the theatre in the
past half century, and no one is more
provocative in it today, than the English-born
director and theorist Peter Brook, born in 1925.
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Beginning his directorial career with freshly
conceived experimental productions of
Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jean-Paul Sartre, and
Jean Cocteau, Brook was appointed, at age of
twenty, to direct at the Shakespeare Memorial
Theatre , where his 1955 Hamlet was a
sensation and became the first English play to
tour Soviet Union.
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Brook’s heart remained in experimental
stagings of new and classical drama, however,
and in three landmark productions with the
newly founded Royal Shakespeare Company
in the 1960s he received immense international
acclaim. These productions:
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Shakespeare’s King Lear (1962)
Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade (1964)
US(1966)
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Moreover, Brook’s essays on drama in Encore
magazine in the 1960s, and his publication of
The Empty Space in 1968 (translated into 15
languages), presented a brilliant
recategorization of theatre that remains
pertinent today.
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Brook divided the current theatre into 3
branches:
Deadly (conventional)
 Holy (Artaudian)
 Rough(Brechtian)
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Rejecting all three, Brook concluded his study
with manifesto on behalf of an “immediate”
theatre.
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In 1971 Brook moved to Paris and created the
International Center of Theatre Research,
which he continued to head.
Brook’s stage work in the 1990s studies the
individual human and includes notable
productions such as The Man Who, an
adaptation of Dr. Oliver Sacks’s study of
neurological illness, and Le Costume, a South
African play by Can Themba.
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In 2001-2002 Brook’s Hamlet toured Europe
and America with an intercultural cast.
Brook’s most recent productions continue his
commitment to interculturalism: Tierno
Bokar(2004), Sizwe Banzi Est Mort (2006).
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At the age of eighty-four and still directing and
writing Brook remains one of the most
adventurous and fascinating creators of the
theatrical avant-garde.
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No director has more successfully explored –
and essentially renovated – the visual elements
of current avant-garde theatre than Texas
native Robert Wilson.
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Born in 1941 and initially trained as an architect,
Wilson emerged in the European avant-garde
in the early 1970s as a brilliantly innovative
creator (a playwright-designer-directorproducer) of what at the time wee considered
performance-art pieces, or tableaux vivants
(‘living pictures’), rather than dramas.
According to his own words, when asked in a
second grade what he wanted to be he replied
“King of Spain” (and in fact it was the title of
his first major production later on)
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After winning first prize in a children’s art
contest in sixth grade he was asked “Now tell
us, Bob Wilson, what do you think the Nicest
Thing in the Whole World?” and he said “Big
thick cat’s paw!!” (cat’s paws primary image in
his first major work as well)
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In addition to the performance work he was
beginning to do, Wilson created a major
outdoor sculpture in 1968, similar to the earth
works of artists like Robert Smithson.
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He was also performing with avant-garde
dancer Kenneth King and director Meredith
Monk. He also came to the attention of
choreographer Jerome Robbins, who began
provide some financial support for Wilson’s
projects and incited him to teach movement
classes at his American Theatre Laboratory.
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The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud, which
incorporated much of King of Spain, was
performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music
(BAM) in 1969.
It was four hours long and consisted of a series
of largely non-verbal parts and painstakingly
slow movements.
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Wilson took pains to note “This was not slow
motion, but ‘natural time’ as opposed to the
‘accelerated time’ of conventional theatre”. By
this he allowed audience time and space to
think.
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In a certain sense, the use of ‘found’ everyday
objects and performers and the repetition of
images in Wilson’s work can be seen as an
aspect of Pop Art as typified by the work of
artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Andy
Warhol, who transformed the prosaic and
commercial into subjects of high art.
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In the midst 1980s he became widely known in
his home country and widely admired for the
extent of his vision and artistic ambition.
Since the mid-1970s, Wilson’s work has been
more focused within practical time-and-space
limits, and he has begun to direct more
conventional works , including classic dramas,
operas, and original pieces of mixed genres.
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In his first dramatic production Euripides’
Alcestis at the American Repertory Theatre in
Cambridge (1986) he used original music by
performance artist Laurie Anderson, the
addition of a Japanese kyogen epilogue,
innovative laser lighting effects, and what has
become Wilson’s trademark – glacially slow
actor stage crossings – created intense mystery
and engagement.
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Wilson continues to work in every aspect of the
theatre: he is the director, author or adapter of
the text, and the principle designer of all his
productions.
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For his immensely popular 2004 production of
Les Fables de La Fontaine at the Paris, Wilson
returned to animals, selecting and adapting
nineteen of the beloved children’s stories by the
17-th century French fabulist Jean de La
Fontaine.
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Wilson continues to innovate in the twentyfirst century, particularly in the area of boldly
color-saturated lighting and contemporary
music.
Wilson work is no longer considered
performance art: his pieces have a theme, they
are not improvised, and the performers usually
play characters rather than themselves…BUT
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“I hate ideas”, Wilson has said, and in their
place he presents visions, dreams, and
impressions.
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Wilson has often been classified as a
postmodernist, but the pervasiveness of the
iconic symbol, the constant striving for the
beautiful image, and the harmonious and
unified structure of his works places Wilson’s
mise en scene firmly within the modernist
framework. His texts, however, with their use
of pastiche, quotation, and self-referential
content, certainly relate him to the postmodern
movement.
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Julie Taymor, born in 1953, is clearly the junior
member of this select grouping, end her record
of achievement is consequently far slimmer
than Brook’s or Wilson’s. Nonetheless, her
contribution to the theatre is no less than
colossal.
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The world knows Taymor for the gigantic
commercial success of her Disney-produced
The Lion King, which won Broadway’s Tony
Award for best musical in 1998 and won
Taymor an unprecedented two Tony Awards
in both direction and costume design.
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Born in Newton, Massachusetts, Taymor spent
many of her youthful years in global travel and
study, learning traditional Asian culture and
performance techniques in India, Sri Lanka,
and Japan, learning from Balinese dancers and
Indonesian wayang kulit masters in Seattle,
and studying with noted avant-garde masters
Jacques Lecoq at the School of Mime in Paris
and with celebrated theorist/director Herbert
Blau at Oberlin College in Ohio.
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Soon she started to direct classical plays.
Her first Broadway production was Horacio
Quiroga’s Juan Darien in 1996, a fantastical
music-drama about a baby jaguar who
becomes human.
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The Lion King, however, with its budget of $20
million (an all-time Broadway record), far
exceeded any scale on which Taymor had
previously operated.
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Moreover, The Lion King is a global show for a
global audience.
Designing the costumes and codesigning the
masks and puppets, Taymor ingeniously
mixed Javanese rod puppetry and Balinese
headdresses with African masks and stilts.
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Taymor continues to create exciting an often
brave spectacles, now on film as often as on a
stage.
Her 1999 film of Titus, adapted from her earlier
stage production, is a remarkable though
controversial version of one of Shakespeare’s
earliest, least liked, and certainly most savage
plays.
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Her 2002 film Frida, about the life of Mexican
artist Frida Kalho, won six Academy Awards.
In 2007 she made another film Across the
Universe, musical based on Beatles’ songs.
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For the Metropolitan Opera in New York she
staged a lavish production of Mozart’s Magic
Flute, which she adapted into a shorter version
staged in New York and carried nationally by
satellite in 2007, and for the Los Angeles Opera
she staged the world premiere of Grendel.