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500 ans plus tard

500 ans plus tard

Six playwrights from six countries present original texts on a common theme: the “Discovery of the Americas” 500 years ago. The organizers of six international festivals signed the “San José Agreement” at the Festival Internacional de San José por la Paz in Costa Rica in the fall of 1989.

A Gril Skipping

Graeme Miller (Grande-Bretagne)

A Gril Skipping

They skip, sing rhymes, drink, run, shoot up and chase each other. They rush about like whirling dervishes taking the world by storm, drawn into games that spread like a contagious disease, imposing obedience and conformity, called back to order by the strident ringing of the bell.

BLACK WORKS

Julian Maynard Smith (Grande-Bretagne)

BLACK WORKS

Theatre for dreamers. In which shapes form and reform in ever-changing patterns, where one is utterly free to put a horse in a greek vase, where bodies disappear in fine clouds and isolate themselves in devastated landscapes, where nothing is certain and anything can happen.

El coronel no tiente quien le escriba

Carlos Giménez (Vénézuela)

El coronel no tiente quien le escriba

A man has been waiting for his veteran’s pension for fifteen years, and meanwhile lives in time stood still, unaware of the slow deterioration of things around him. Adapted from a short story by Gabriel García Márquez, a harrowing song to a Latin America where everything is carried to excess. In the midst of muddy swamps laced with apparitions, actions of a rough-hewn beauty that overlap as if in a dream, bloody rituals throbbing under the heat and obsessive music, the colonel remains riveted to his hammock like a cocoon. You can’t eat illusions, his wife reproaches him. You can’t eat them, but they do nourish you, he retorts.

En los zaguanes angeles muertos

Alberto Félix Alberto (Argentine)

En los zaguanes angeles muertos

Obliged to spend the evening with hosts whose language he doesn’t understand, a man takes a tormented journey in porches filled with memories and the spectres of his subconscious.

HA Ha!…

Lorraine Pintal (Québec)

HA Ha!…

Between Pagliaro, the Alouettes, announcements for “Whisper!,” language that takes off like a runaway horse, and the unbridled delinquency of a gigantic fair, four characters bogged down in ticky-tacky lives rip into at each other gleefully — “And when I bite, there’s a piece missing” — in the most scintillating and merciless jeu de massacre in Québec dramaturgy. Wild, abrasive and tormented, the seventies as seen by Réjean Ducharme look as fresh as ever.

Hosanna

Lorraine Pintal (Québec)

Hosanna

Ringing affirmation of the legitimacy of homosexuality? Metaphor for a country in search of its own identity?

Juan Darién

Julie Taymor et Elliot Goldenthal (United-States)

Juan Darién

Ravishing! Marimbas and african musical instruments give way to japanese drums. The solemn beat of a gong punctuates the joyous trills of maya flutes and the deep tones of an aborigine didjeridu. The latin chants of the requiem are interrupted by animal cries, trumpet blasts and pagan melodies, while a stream of leafy images unfolds before our eyes: a jungle, a village, birds, serpents, a sparkling flight of white butterflies…

La classe morte

Tadeusz Kantor (Poland)

La classe morte

In the farthest threshold of memory, in a small corner stand a few poor rows of wooden benches… dried books crumble into dust… in both corners, like geometric models chalked on the blackboard, lurks the remembrance of punishments endured… the school washrooms where we first tasted freedom… the students-old folks with one foot in the grave, the absent ones… they raise a finger in a familiar gesture, and remain immobile in that position… as if they were asking something irrevocable…

Les trous du ciel

Marie Chouinard (Québec)

Les trous du ciel

A small community, huddled together in a band and functioning to the rhythm of rituals, walks and dances under the stars, known as “holes in the sky” to the Inuit.

Les UBS

Denis Marleau (Québec)

Les UBS

The Ubs are Mother and Father Ubu, “grotesque representatives of the human species” who single-handedly sum up the absurdity of existence. Colossal in his stupidity and cowardice, naive, mean and power-hungry, Ubu holds the entire world in his enormous stomach.

Orlando

Bia Lessa (Brésil)

Orlando

Orlando is a young Englishman of the Elizabethan court. In a metamorphosis spun out over four centuries, he is gradually transformed into a woman. In the course of his constantly changing existence, in love with each passing moment, Orlando watches the world around him change: ivy covers the walls, electricity is harnessed as a source of power. He appreciates the pulse of life all the more acutely because his own identity is always dissolving and re-emerging in different forms.

Peau, chair et os

Gilles Maheu (Québec)

Peau, chair et os

In a Prussian blue and blood-red setting wracked by a motionless hurricane swirl a man, a woman, a bird and a blade sparkling in the sun. Retouched with Heine Müller’s explosive eroticism, the myth of Alcestis — the young wife who agrees to die so that her husband will live and then returns from the underworld, silent and veiled —becomes the starting point for a mesmerizing portrayal of a strange image: once you look, you can no longer turn away.

Rebis

Alvaro Restrepo (Colombia)

Rebis

On the floor, a circle, lines, a clay vase and a naked body painted red and black. Synthesis of human and animal, in turn primitive, contemporary, sensual, meditative and vegetative, the body changes, becomes tree, becomes mineral…

Rompe Candela

Palo Q'Sea (Colombia)

Rompe Candela

Eight gigantic animals, dancers, jugglers, comedians, masks, demons that subvert the order of the world, Death, the devil, an explosion of rhythms and of colours: direct from the Andes, a carnival enlivens our streets and our parks with the vibrant music of the Columbian coast.

The Crackwalker

Urjo Kareda et Andy McKim (Canada)

The Crackwalker

Young losers living an economic and emotional dead-end existence on the fringes of society. One of them a prostitute, another attracted to a petty crook who may have raped her friend…

The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice

Reza Abdoh (United-States)

The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice

America is crumbling! Projecting rilke and Cocteau into an orwellian postnuclear world reworked by the Marx Brothers, an explosive insane waltz in which Orpheus and Eurydice – heads shaven, batteries in the neck and genders reversed – explore a punk underworld where eroticism is strictly forbidden.

The man I Love

Manfred Karge (Canada)

The man I Love

The story is true: In the dark years of the depression before world war two, a young, jobless frenchwoman, in order to survive, decides to assume the identity of her late husband. Colleagues, soldiers, other women—all are taken in by her act for years and years. But keeping up such an artifice for such a long time takes its toll…

Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love

Jim Millan (Canada)

Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love

He play is true to its title: a painful farce, part tenderness and part shudders of horror, that arrives from the west in a swirl of controversy. Fragments of stage float in space—bed, bar, futon—where a motley assortment of characters in search of their identity leave messages on each other’s answering machines, revel in gruesome tales, have seen it all and bob from sex to violence to an existential void. I’ve never met anyone born after 1960 who wasn’t incomplete somehow, one of the protagonists remarks offhandly. Brad Fraser’s Edmonton is almost Dostoyevskian with its unnerving alleys, its cultural isolation, its small circles of tormented souls at a loss as to what they desire.