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REASONS
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V EUROPE
THEATRE PRIZE.. |
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III ENTRP |
ROBERT WILSON
The Jury of the fifth Europe Prize for Theatre
ha unanimously awarded the Prize to Robert Wilson
in recognition of his thirty years' work aimed at
creating a personal reinvention of scenic art that
has overturned the temporal dimension and retraced
the saptial one. He refused to render a mere production
of reality and offered an abstract or informal vision
of the text and also redefined the roles, whenever
possible, through global intervention in the creation
of his performances where he played the author,
director, performer, scenographer and magic light
designer. Architect by profession, the artist pursed
an indisciplinary language that did not ignore the
visual arts in enhancing the importance of the image
and, restorting the support of music, he approaches
dance and simultaneously attempted to find a pure
harmonious value in the spoken word, in an ideal
tension towards a form of total theatre.
It has been said that his works can been considered
part of a single opus in continual evolution that
constitutes the synthesis. During his career Wilson
has confronted himself with different genera and
drawn them closer thanks to the conformity of language.
He has executed classical works and specially written
works and for this reasons has stimulated the interest
of eminent writers, such as Heiner Müller and
William Burrough, establishing a particular bond
with the former.
He has dedicated himself to teaching non theatrical
literary works often adapted into monologues interpreted
by eminent actors, such as Madeleine Renaud and
Marianne Hoppe. He has ventured into the production
of opera and ballet, he has created musicals sui
generis in collaboration with illustrious emerging
personalities, he has promoted performances especially
with Christopher Knowles, he has directed spectacular
fashion parades. His prolific activity as designer
and visual artist can be seen in his paintings,
sculptures, installations, graphic works, exhibitions.
He was awarded the major prize at the Venice Biennale.
Nothing new can be archived without changing the
conceptions of organisation. He was a decisive promoter
of coproduction of festivals since the ' 70s, of
the creation of prototype - performances that could
be translated in various nations with new casts,
and also of the creation of evening works to be
completed later in production studios. Thank are
due to him for the embrace between different nations,
languages, styles and traditions.
Even when using bigger and bigger and more and more
international teams of collaborators Wilson has
never renounced making his own imprint of perfectionist
in a developing opera. He is to be accredited with
centre, centre of experimentation and training where
his work as a teacher has helped him in retain an
inexhaustible flow of fresh ideas from the contact
with the young.
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COMPAGNIA
DELLA FORTEZZA
For the last 9 years " Compagnia
della Fortezza " directed by Armando Punzo has
tenaciously overcome numerous difficulties and obstacles
in order to pursue the idea of a type of drama that
is redemption and liberation, affirmation of dignity
that each individual can, and must, claim.
The experience undertaken and tirelessly carried on
inside the Volterra prison has led to the production
of " Masaniello " , " Marat Sade "
, " Prisons " and recently " The Blacks
" , and has attracted great Italian and international
interest and attention. The introduction of drama
inside a prison institution created a pathway that
established a new line of communication and dialogue
between the actors - prisoners and the audience gathered
inside and outside the prison. In The Blacks, the
actors - prisoners acting themselves, admonish the
society watching them and stage an ironic and ferocious
performance with strong new evidence Genet s drama
has been integrated freely by the actors. Punzo described
the genesis of the play: We had started work on Moby
Dick by Melville, but the result was not satisfactory
I was rereading ' The Blacks ' by Genet at the time
and was greatly struck by the intuition that lies
at the core, the story of a company of blacks performing
a play centred on a crime committed by blacks against
a white woman, to a white audience. I said to myself:
Look! The blacks are them, the ones locked up in here,
while the whites are the outside audience " This
project gave birth to an original sacred and desecrating
ceremony where provocation is the extreme response
to a condition of unease, where the audience is fully
aware of its condition of being white, free and innocent.
This ceremony highlights the actors' skill in reinventing
language to suit and enhance their possibilities and
expressiveness , and emphasises their audacity in
using the ideas offered by Genet to the utmost. The
only means of communication for the excluded is drama
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THÉÂTRE
DE COMPLICITÉ
Théâtre de Complicité,
which is one of the most original and inventive British
theatre companies, was founded in 1983. It was created
by four young people whose aim was to bring the physical
disciplines they had learned at the Jacques Lecoq
Mime School in Paris to the largely text - based British
theatre. But over the last thirteen years the company
has not only acquired an international reputation.
It has also grown organically. It now combines a strong
mimetic skill with the exploration of complex literary
texts. It has forged its own uniquely brilliant style
which makes it a worthy winner of the New Realities
Prize. Its founder members were Simon McBurney, Marcello
Magno, Fiona Gordon who had all studied together in
Paris and Annabel Arden who was a contemporary of
Simon' s at Cambridge University. The first production,
Put It On Your Head, was a darkly hilarious examination
of an English seaside resort and attracted modest
attention. There followed a series of shows dealing
with such subjects as our attitudes to death, food,
Christmas and office - life. Gradually built up a
following for its original vision , grotesque comedy
and dazzling mime. But the breakthrough came in 1988
when it presented a 15 - week season of its work at
London' s Almeida Theatre including its first - ever
production of an existing text: a version of Durrenmatt'
s The visit which contained a prize winning performance
by Kathryn Hunter as the vengeful plutocrat and which
used mime to recreate the atmosphere of a small, run
- down European town. Peter Brook, who saw the production,
rated it as superior to his own version in the late
1950s. Since then Complicite has become one of the
most sought - after companies on the international
touring circuit and has adapted literaly texts to
the stage including Bruno Schulz' s Street of Crocodiles,
John Berger' s The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol and
J.M. Coetzee's Foe. But it has expanded its range
and style without sacrifing its experimental instinct
or physical discipline . Above all, it shows an astonishing
ability to re - create whole communities such as that
of a small Polish town in Street of Crocodiles and
a peasant village in the Hautes - Alpes in Lucie Cabrol.
Complicité are currently working on a co -
production of Brecht'' s The Caucasian Chalk Circle
with Britain' s National Theatre. But it remains one
of the most audacious and genuinely experimental companies
at work in European Theatre today.
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