NYC World Theatre Day 2013

We had a great turn out for the reading of the Around-the-Globe Chain Play. The reading of the play was followed by a reading of the 2013 International Messages that was penned by Dario Fo.

Here are some of the photos of this exciting event.


The Around-the-Globe Chain Play

 

The International Message

An Ancient Tradition

"We are all a part of an ancient tradition of bringing people together."
                                - Amanda Feldman
                                  March 27, 2013
                                  Introducing the Around-the-Globe Chain Play in NYC

World Theatre Day All Year Round

It is nice to set aside a day every year for theatre artists and audiences around the world to celebrate this art. It gives us a chance to reflect on how theatre changes, impacts or enriches our lives.

However many of us celebrate theatre everyday. TCG has created a list of ways you can participate in the international theatre community, year round.

Check out their list.

World Theatre Day Message 2013

by Dario Fo

A long time ago, those in power resolved their intolerance of ‘comedians’ by banishing them from the country. Today, actors and theatre companies have trouble finding public spaces, theatres and audiences - everything because of the crisis.

Therefore, rulers no longer worry about controlling those who express themselves with irony and sarcasm, since there are no longer places for the actors to perform or spectators to perform for.

In contrast, during the Renaissance, those in power had to struggle to keep comedians, who enjoyed a wide public, at bay.

It’s commonly known that the greatest exodus of comedians happened during the century of the Counter-Reformation, which upheld the dismantling of all theatre spaces, especially in Rome, where their existence outraged the Holy City.

In 1697, under harassing demands from the most reactionary part of the bourgeoisie and the leading clergy, Pope Innocent XII ordered the elimination of the Tordinona Theatre, whose stage, according to the moralists, was accountable for the greatest number of obscene performances.

At the time of the Counter-Reformation, Cardinal Carlo Borromeo, serving in the north of Italy, committed himself to the redemption of the ‘children of Milan’, establishing a clear distinction between art - the highest form of spiritual education, and theatre - the lowest expression of profanity and vanity. In a letter addressed to his collaborators, which I quote by heart, he stated more or less as follows:

While eradicating the evil weed, we had done our utmost to burn texts containing infamous speeches, to eradicate them from human memory, and at the same time prosecute those who spread such texts in print. But even as we sleep, the Devil works with renewed trickery. How far more penetrating to the soul than what the eyes can see! How far more devastating to the minds of boys and young girls is the spoken word, with appropriate voice and gesture, than a dead word in a book. It is therefore as critical for us to rid our cities of performers as we would do with unwanted souls.

Therefore, the only way out of this crisis is to hope that a great hunt will be organized against us, especially against the young people who want to learn the art of theatre: a new Diaspora of comedians, who, from such an imposition, will undoubtedly reap unimaginable benefits from a new kind of performance.

Translated by Mirko Grewing (Milan) and Douglas Howe (New York)

World Theatre Day Tomorrow!

Join us on World Theatre Day (tomorrow) for a reading of the Around-the-Globe Chain Play!





Wednesday, March 27th at 7PM at The Lark Play Development Center (311 West 43rd Street, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10036)

Tickets are free, but reservations are strongly encouraged. www.eventbrite.com 

A reception follows the reading.

A Distinctly Canadian Perspective

The Professional Association of Canadian Theatres (PACT), Playwrights Guild of Canada (PGC) and l'Association des théâtres francophones du Canada (ATFC) have once again joined forces to promote World Theatre Day.

They have come up with some fantastic ways for everyone to contribute to this global celebration.

Check out their site!

Caridad Svich

Meet the playwrights who are contributing to the Around-the-Globe Chain Play.

Caridad Svich (New York City, USA) received a 2012 OBIE Award for Lifetime Achievement in the theatre and the 2011 American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize for her play The House of the Spirits, based on the Isabel Allende novel. She has been short-listed for the PEN Award in Drama four times, including in the year 2012 for her play Magnificent Waste. In the 2012-13 season: 2012 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award round two recipient GUAPA receives a rolling world premiere courtesy of NNPN at Borderlands Theater in Arizona, Miracle Theatre in Oregon and Phoenix Theater in Indiana; her 4-actor play Love in the Time of Cholera, based on the Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, premiered at Repertorio Espanol in NYC, where it is still running, The Tropic of X premieres at Single Carrot Theatre in Baltimore. There will also be regional US premieres of In the Time of the Butterflies (based on the Julia Alvarez novel) at Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis, The House of the Spirits at Gala Hispanic Theatre in Washington D.C, and academic premiere of her fantasia on 1963, Pop culture and the Kennedy assassination The Archaeology of Dreams at University of Nebraska-Omaha. Her new play Spark received 32 readings across the US and abroad, including a reading at the Cherry Lane Theatre produced by TEL and Mannatee Films under Scott Schwartz’ direction in November 2012 to honor female war veterans (http://www.nopassport.org/spark). Among her key works: 12 Ophelias, Any Place But Here, Alchemy of Desire/Dead-Man’s Blues, Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (a rave fable), Instructions for Breathing, Magnificent Waste and the multimedia collaboration The Booth Variations. Five of her plays radically re-imagining ancient Greek tragedies are published in the September 2012 collection Blasted Heavens (Eyecorner Press, University of Denmark). Her works are also published by TCG, Broadway Play Publishing, Playscripts, Arte Publico Press, Smith & Kraus, Alexander Street Press, and more. Among her awards/recognitions are: Harvard University Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship TCG/Pew Charitable Trusts National Theater Artist Residency at INTAR, NEA/TCG Playwriting Residency at the Mark Taper Theatre Forum Latino Theatre Initiative and a California Arts Council Fellowship. She has edited several books on theatre including Out of Silence: Censorship in Theatre & Performance (Eyecorner Press), Trans-Global Readings and Theatre in Crisis? (both for Manchester University Press) Divine Fire (BackStage Books), and Out of the Fringe: Contemporary Latina/o Theatre & Performance (TCG), and Conducting a Life: Reflections on the Theatre of Maria Irene Fornes (Smith & Kraus). Her translations of Federico Garcia Lorca’s plays are collected in Lorca: Six Major Plays (NoPassport Press) and Impossible Theatre (Smith & Kraus). She has also translated theatre works by Julio Cortazar, Lope de Vega, Calderon de la Barca, Antonio Buero Vallejo and contemporary plays from Mexico, Cuba, Serbia and Catalonia. She is alumna playwright of New Dramatists, founder of NoPassport theatre alliance & press, Drama Editor of Asymptote journal of literary translation, associate editor of Routledge/UK's Contemporary Theatre Review and contributing editor of TheatreForum. She is affiliated artist of the Lark Play Development Center, Woodshed Collective, New Georges, and a Lifetime member of Ensemble Studio Theatre. She holds an MFA in Theatre from UCSD, and she trained for four consecutive years with Maria Irene Fornes at INTAR. She has taught playwriting at Bard College, Barnard College, Bennington College, Einhorn School of the Arts at Primary Stages, OSU, Rutgers University-New Brunswick, ScriptWorks, UCSD, and Yale School of Drama. She is an entry in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Latino Literature. Website: http://www.caridadsvich.com

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Join us on World Theatre Day, Wednesday, March 27th at 7PM at The Lark Play Development Center (311 West 43rd Street, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10036)

Tickets are free, but reservations are strongly encouraged. www.eventbrite.com 

A reception follows the reading.

Sigtryggur Magnason

Meet the playwrights who are contributing to the Around-the-Globe Chain Play.

Sigtryggur Magnason (Iceland) was born on January 20th, 1974. He graduated with a B.A. degree in Icelandic literature and language from the University of Iceland in 1997. From 1998 onwards, worked for various media outlets, such as the Icelandic Broadcasting Service, as an editor of a daily radio programme, and as a media correspondent for the cultural supplement of Morgunblaðið. In the spring of 1997 Sigtryggur published the poetry book Ást á grimmum vetri / Love in a Cruel Winter. Five years later Mál og menning published his poetry book/play Herjólfur er hættur að elska /Herjólfur Has Stopped Loving, which was staged in the spring of 2003 by the National Theatre of Iceland and recorded for radio broadcasting.  In the spring of 2007, Sigtryggur's work Yfirvofandi / Imminent, directed by Bergur Þór Ingólfsson and performed by Edda Arnljótsdóttir, Ingvar E. Sigurðsson and Jörundur Ragnarsson, premiered in Sigtryggur's own home, as a part of the Reykjavík Arts Festival. The work earned Sigtryggur a nomination for Gríman , the annual Icelandic drama awards, as playwright of the year. The work was also performed by the Icelandic Broadcasting Service Theatre in 2009, and won a Gríman award in the same year for best radio play. It was published in a bilingual edition, in Icelandic and English, as translated by Lani Yamamoto. In 2010 the play won 2ndprize in a Nordic radio play competition. In 2011 Imminent was published, along with two other Icelandic works, by Hänschel Schauspiel in Berlin.

In 2007, Sigtryggur's translation of the play How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel was staged by Akureyri Theatre Company. Herjólfur Has Stopped Loving was staged at The Internationalists Theatre Festival in New York in the fall of 2008 (directed by Jeremy Lydic). In June 2012 Herjólfur was staged in The University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida, directed by Lauren Allison. In 2009, Sigtryggur was asked to write a play for the graduating class of the drama department of The Icelandic Academy of the Arts. The resulting work, Bráðum hata ég þig / Soon I'll Hate You premiered in January 2010, directed by Una Þorleifsdóttir. In May 2012 Sigtryggur’s play TRANS was performed in a Champagne Club in Reykjavík as a part of Reykjavík Arts Festival. The play was recorded for the Icelandic Broadcasting Service and premiered on air 17th of February 2013. His newest play, Nú er himneska sumarið komið / The Heavenly Summer Has Arrived, will premiere in Iceland in April.  Sigtryggur is currently working on a TV-series with Árni Ólafur Ásgeirsson and a film script with Árni Thor Jónsson.

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Join us on World Theatre Day, Wednesday, March 27th at 7PM at The Lark Play Development Center (311 West 43rd Street, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10036)

Tickets are free, but reservations are strongly encouraged. www.eventbrite.com 

A reception follows the reading.

Celebrate WTD with a Dancing Chicken!

In honor of World Theatre Day, Thespianz Theatrer from Pakistan performed Crazy Chicken at the Pak-American Cultural Center in Karachi for a very enthusiastic audience.

Thank you for sharing these amazing photos!

Sarah Grochala

Meet the playwrights who are contributing to the Around-the-Globe Chain Play.

Sarah Grochala (United Kingdom) currently lives in London. Her work has been produced in the UK and internationally. Her play S-27 (Finborough 2009; Griffin Theatre, Sydney 2010; Annex Theatre, Toronto, 2012) won the 2007 Amnesty International Protect the Human Playwriting Competition and was shortlisted for the King’s Cross Award and the Leah Ryan Prize for Emerging Women Writers. In 2011, she was the recipient of OffWestEnd.com’s Adopt a Playwright Award for her play Smolensk.
Other plays include: Open Ground (Teatro Technis, London 2005), Waiting for Romeo (Hill Street, Edinburgh 2006; Pleasance, London 2009). She is a founder member of the theatre company Agent 160, for whom she wrote a short adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson’s Red Shoes (Theatre 503, London; Chapter, Cardiff; The Arches, Glasgow; Queen's, Belfast 2012). She is currently an associate artist at Headlong and on attachment at the National Theatre.

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Join us on World Theatre Day, Wednesday, March 27th at 7PM at The Lark Play Development Center (311 West 43rd Street, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10036)

Tickets are free, but reservations are strongly encouraged. www.eventbrite.com 

A reception follows the reading.