Top Personalities of the Contemporary Theatre Are Coming to Brno
Top personalities of the contemporary theatre are coming to Brno
The second year of the Theatre World Brno International Festival will be held from 27 May to 4 June and will present more than a hundred performances of top Czech and foreign artists. Theatre troupes and performers will occupy Brno theatres, squares and streets for eight days to offer an unprecedented theatre festival in the Central European context, taking place in the spirit of Hamlet’s motto: “Be ready, that’s all.” The main attraction of the festival programme will be the performances of the world’s greatest living director Peter Brook, whose home scene Bouffes du Nord will present The Magic Flutein Brno. The festival is to be dedicated each year to an important figure of world theatre. While the honour was given to Václav Havel in the first year, it will be given to Peter Brook, atop British director and experimenter, in the year 2011.
The main organizer of the festival is the Brno Cultural Centre and co-organizers are all Brno theatres established by the BrnoCity. The festival will be opened by an effervescent Night of Magicians, engulfing the Vegetable Market and its surroundings on Friday 27 May. The following programme held in Brno exteriors and interiors will follow the theme “Shakespeare and the diversity of cultures” and will be borne in three core lines. They will focus on innovative productions of Shakespeare’s plays, cultural diversity of the contemporary world and the best productions of local - Brno - scenes. The weekly meetings will culminate in a glitzy Ceremony of Masks, which will change the LibertySquare into a wild carnival on Friday 3 June. Mozart’s MagicFlute, staged freely by Peter Brook with the ensemble Bouffes du Nord and accompanied by the only piano, will have two repeats on the scene of the Brno City Theatre.
“The arrival of the MagicFlute to Brno is a key event of the theatre season not only in the Czech Republic. With regard to the possibilities of the French ensemble, we were forced to postpone the date of the festival and we were so able to bring Brook’s latest production as the only ones in Central Europe,” said festival directress Sylvie Pospíšilová. An influx of visitors from abroad is expected primarily due to the participation of the prestigious French ensemble.
Fantasy in attractive places
In the line of Shakespearean performances, the tragedy Hamlet performed by the Italian ensemble Teatro del Carretto under the direction of Maria Grazia Cipriani seems to deserve the greatest attention. The production will dazzle particularly with inventive scenes, completed with masks and puppets. The Teatr Polski from Wroclaw will present a reflection of the contemporary world in rougher contours, seen through a grotesque interpretation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Hungarian compatriot theatre Csiky Gerkelybased in Romania, rehearsed the comedy As You Like It in a playful spirit and in the scenes of contemporary multicultural world. The Slovak scene will be represented by the Puppet Theatre Žilina which staged Othelloin a comic spirit.
The dramaturgical line monitoring the diversity of cultures will be represented by the international group La Fabrique, which is based in France and stages its performances in unusual spaces. The performance Kaina - Marseille, reflecting the post-colonial world of Africa, will take place in a real truck and its surroundings. The ensemble La Licorne Theatre will build a theatre arena in the DenisGardens to stage a visually impressive opera Spartacus there. Another international group, also based in France, the Footsbarn Traveling Theatre, belongs to the legends of contemporary alternative theatre and is focused mainly on Shakespeare’s and Moliere’s texts. Its performance The Man Who Laughs is an epic and adventurous story, full of artistic and burlesque elements, humour and eccentric energy. The work of the theatre legend Peter Brook will be represented at the festival by not only The Magic Flute, but also the theatre essay Warum, Warum.
The Theatre World Brno continues the tradition of court festival photographers. Professor Jindřich Štreit will present his personal view of the festival events after Bohdan Holomíček, who documented the first year. An exhibition of Bohdan Holomíček will be opened at the premises of the Moravian Gallery in May 2011 and then it will be transferred to Budapest in the autumn. The festival has already been promoted abroad, mainly thanks to the cooperation with Czech centres and partner shows in the Visegrad region. The originality of the programme will certainly attract anumber of non-resident visitors and we have already noticed an interest in the productions directed by Peter Brook.
Brno has a dense network of professional theatres and the Theatre World Brno Festival is asignificant enrichment, enabling a confrontation of domestic production with foreign countries. Thanks to the support from theBrno City Council, the South Moravian Region, the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and theRegional Operational Programme (ROP Southeast), the festival has established itself, on the national and international level, as a meeting place for the world’s best theatre artists and the general public.
Jan Žůrek: +420728180478+420725415 622
PR