Taormina, may
6-7-8-9, 1999
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PRIZE EUROPE FOR THE
THEATRE
VII EDITION TO PINA BAUSCH
Since she took over the
direction of the Wuppertal Tanztheater 25 years ago, Pina Bausch has used her training and
experience as a soloist in classical ballet to literally invent a new genre, a combination
of theatre, dance, music, and visual arts in which score and improvisation come together,
very close to the dream of a total theatre that juxtaposes the individual talents of an
extraordinary ensemble with a precise concept of time and space. The results are
deconstructions of Stravinsky or Bartok, reconstructions of Shakespeare or Brecht, or
productions based on a theme - an anniversary, a dance, a farewell, a city - conceived as
children’s games or parlour games and orchestrated like review acts in order to
rummage in the everyday life of the dancers, who pretend to have stopped dancing,
subjected to public questioning and left to the flow of free associations, citing over and
over but without ruling out psychoanalytical stripteases. |
In
these group productions, the great teacher Pina Bausch, who never forgets that she was
once the blind princess in a visionary film by Fellini, forces her actors to assume a role
and a type of ceremonial, where extremely varied personal experiences and backgrounds
combine with the precise geometry of the rhythmic movements. Although the motifs change,
from one animal or flower to another, each show extends into the next to become part of a
hypothetical single continuum, in other words the rite of a show, the story of the
community that performs it with the joy of disguise and the solitude of cohabitation.
However, behind the often heartbreaking splendour of the visual tableaux, the seductive
feline and ineluctable manner in which the troupe advances in single file, and the pattern
of the movements, regular but cleverly out of tune, through this lifelong self-portrayal
the great artist offers all her spectators an ironic and desperate mirror in which to
reflect their existential condition. |
PRIZE EUROPE NEW THEATRICAL REALITIES
V EDITION TO ROYAL COURT
What
is modern British theatre famous for? Its actors? Certainly. Its directors? Possibly. But
it is living dramatists who are the most potent symbol of the British theatre’s
vitality; and the Royal Court Theatre, winner of the Europe Prize New Theatrical
Realities, has done more than any other institution to promote new writing. Since 1956 it
has premiered the work of many of the best-known British dramatists: Osborne, Wesker,
Pinter, Bond, Barker, Hare and Churchill. But this Award is given not so much for the
Court’s distinguished history as for its championship, in recent years, of new
generation of challenging, often profondly disturbing, writers whose work has travelled
widely throughout Europe: writers like Sarah Kane (Blasted and Cleansed), Mark Ravenhill
(Shopping and Fucking) and Jez Butterworth (Mojo) who graphically express their horror at
the moral emptiness and crude materialism of the world they have inherited.
Their plays are filled with images of violence, but behind the violence lies an anger and
confusion at the difficulty of existing in a post-Marxist, post-Christian, post-Utopian
society. Forced to leave its permanent home in London’s Sloane Square in 1996, so
that the building could be restored, the Royal Court has since operated in two West End
venues. But it has lost none of its danger and vitality. Under the direction first of
Stephen Daldry and now of Ian Rickson, it has staged coproductions with companies such as
Out of Joint and Théâtre de Complicité (including a sensational revival of
Ionesco’s The Chairs). It has presented outstanding plays by young Irish writers such
Conor McPherson and Martin McDonagh. It has also launched an international programme
involving exchanges with other theatres throughout the world. But, above all, it has given
voice to a new generation of young writers whose moral anger, urban despair and political
disillusion have sent shockwaves throughout the whole of Europe. |
