“Don’t take freedom for granted!” This saying is what Helder Guimarães heard from his parents at the dinner table as they recounted stories of their oppressive past in Portugal. Born after the Carnation Revolution in 1974, the 29 year old Helder, knowing the value of freedom, decided to move to the United States to expand his professional opportunities. Playwright and performer Helder Guimarães in The Hope Theory at Geffen Playhouse. Directed by Frank Marshall. Photo by Jeff Lorch. At the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, Helder Guimarães, an extraordinary magician recognized by The New York ..read more

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Sejong Center for the Performing Arts (artistic director, Sun-Woong Koh) staged the play Littoral by Lebanese-Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad from June 14 to June 30. This was a Seoul Theatre production, with direction by Jeong Kim and translation by Jaeil Lim. This play, also translated as “Tideline,” was written in 1999 and is the first of Mouawad’s epic quartet called The Blood of Promises (Le Sang des promesses), alongside Scorched (Incendies, 2003), Forests (Forêts, 2006), and Heavens (Ciels, 2009). The play is based on the author’s own history of having to leave his home country of Le ..read more

Is Jordan Cheng for real?  The 37-year-old actor, singer, and composer is everywhere these days. In 2023, he won two of the city’s top drama awards and was nominated for two more while adding to his credits three major stage productions, original music for another — and concerts at clubs, Disneyland, and the airport. Banking on his growing recognition and, very importantly, his boyish grace, the Hong Kong Arts Festival is focusing the promotional campaign of its 2024 musical commission, I Am What I Am, on Cheng, who will headline as the leader of a scrappy lion dance troupe.  But it ..read more

After Brexit, UK productions very rarely play in Italy, but Biennale theatre directors Gianni Forte and Stefano Ricci have made an exception. The final days of the Festival put center stage some major practitioners from different parts of the world: the Australian company, Back to Back Theatre, recipients of the Golden Lion Award, presented Food Court; Swiss dramatist and director Milo Rau brought Medea’s Children, while UK’s Tim Crouch performed his 2022 play, Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel. Crouch’s acclaimed Shakespeare inspired one-man plays – his earlier ones include I, Malvolio, I, Peaseb ..read more

In 1979 the very first French iconic rock opera – Starmania, created by Michel Berger (composer) and Luc Plamondon (librettist), premiered at the Paris Congress Centre / Le Palais des Congrès. The original run was concise and lasted for only twenty-five performances, but, despite that, the rock opera Starmania (sub-titled Starmania, ou la passion de Johnny Rockfort selon les évangiles télévisés / Starmania, or The Passion of Johnny Rockfort According to the Televised Gospels) appeared on various stages more than once and underwent multiple successful productions (1980, 1986, 1988, 1994). The ..read more

The European Theatre Convention (ETC) in collaboration with Renew Culture officially launched in July 2024 the ETC Theatre Green Book (ETC TGB). The sixty-nine-page, freely available document brimming with images, graphs, and tables aims to offer a clear, step-by-step, and undaunting roadmap to live arts institutions in their journey towards achieving carbon emission neutrality. For the sixty-three publicly-funded European theatres members of the ETC, this goal is currently set for 2030. The ETC initiative extends and adapts the ideas and methods contained by the UK-focused 2020 Theatre Green ..read more

How do we train students for to work within landscapes that are rapidly changing and for theatre of future that does not exist yet and already is an accumulation of multiple-multi-things? In my book Multilingual Dramaturgies: Towards New European Theatre, I argue that one way of doing this, is to use multilingual contexts to support students in developing a creative and flexible attitude to their skills, so they can respond to and shape various professional, cultural, and socio-political circumstances. This is because, multilingual theatre is a radical and necessary practice that facilitates ..read more

Alright, I’ll level with you. Maligned as it is (and oh is it ever) Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1982 musical Cats is what first made me fall in love with theater. When I was five, I went to a production at Maine’s Merrill Auditorium and from the moment I saw those vaguely creepy spandex clad humanoid felines slink to the stage, I was hooked. Granted, I was five, so take from that what you will about the cognition needed to appreciate a bunch of uncanny kitties prancing about in a death wish competition set to a score of absolute bangers meets 1930’s poetry, but I digress. All this is to say, when I ..read more

Perhaps the 2024 production of La MaMa’s Medea, under Zishan Ugurlu’s direction and reimagining, is an ode to our times like Achille Mbembe’s Brutalism (2024), in which he developed the concept of the border-body, which means a person whose life is reduced to a state of no-value due to their precariousness in the face of borders. Medea is a border-body in this sense, since she is as a precarious border crosser according to the canonical plays about her written by Euripides and Seneca; she is never at home in any of the places she settles down after her first exile. Director Ugurlu elaborates ..read more