Review: The International Online Theatre Festival: A Kaleidoscope and Catalyst for Global Change
The Constant Principle, Stanislavsky Electrotheatre (Moscow, Russia). Photo: Andrey Bezukladnikov
Natalie Rine, Associate New York Critic
As we grapple to understand what globalization looks like post-COVID (coupled with the already existing rise of nationalist and isolationist policies in countless countries), it is helpful to cast an eye abroad and understand how artists around the globe are continuing to create, express, and share ideas and stories through theatre as a means to explore what the world can be. Global theatre news outlet TheTheatreTimes.com held their second annual International Online Theatre Festival that ran this year April 15 to May 15, celebrating a range of work from global artists and companies, as well renowned filmmakers who have turned to theatre as a mode through which to explore process, craftsmanship and performativity. This year’s festival featured 25 productions from leading international companies including Reckless Sleepers, TR Warszawa, Stanislavsky Electrotheatre and the Schaubühne. The festival’s 2020 theme “in a world where you can be anything…” aimed to create an online space that “blurs geographical boundaries, rejects simplifications about borders and national identities and brings us together as a community to think about what it means to be human.” Notably, all productions were free to watch, wherever in the world you are, championing democratic free and open access to art for all.
The festival was further extended until May 31, and IOTF PS + 11: EXTENDED featured productions from Argentina, Brazil, Poland, Portugal, South Africa, Chile, and the US to provide further engagement built upon the festival’s theme: how realities can be transformed and transfigured, and what theatre offers in terms of conceptualizing the world we might want to forge, create, or envisage moving forward. It’s about theatre as the art of the possible in a time when we are asking “How might theatre adapt to a (post-)COVID-19 world?”
The answer is, of course, a conglomeration of different storytelling approaches. While the full breadth of the festival exceeds any one review, the eleven featured productions of IOTF PS + 11: EXTENDED resonates deeply within our current US climate of unrest, despite featuring productions filmed from many different years ago. The plays grappled with questions of identity (where did we come from and where are we going?) marrying innovative and sometimes surprising mediums to focus on the roles of technology, colonization, and community within each country’s varying political and social realities.
The extension’s featured productions include US director Annie Dorsen’s ground-breaking Hello Hi There, a manifestation of her Algorithmic Theatre approach wherein computer programming is essential to composition and metaphor, teaching computers to “make theatre.” Hello Hi There uses the famous television debate between the philosopher Michel Foucault and linguist/activist Noam Chomsky from the Seventies as inspiration and material for a dialogue between two custom-designed chatbots: every evening, these computer programs, designed to mimic human conversations, perform a new – as it were, improvised – live text. The result is riveting, always on the cusp of “what will they say next?” and “will they ‘mess up’?” The concept of “messing up” in this context is as marvelous as watching an actor recover flawlessly from a flub; the computers have a myriad of line permutations as any given response in the conversation they’re having, so they may repeat themselves if the flow of the conversation gets circuitous… but then, doesn’t natural human conversation as well? This is the beauty, hilarity, and heartwarming of this unsuspecting piece, where chatbots’ create theatre before your eyes, developing a relationship, making discoveries, and resolving conflicts even sprinkled with comedic timing (thanks to a hilarious script/program) despite the inability to color inflection. Looking to a future and present inundated with computer programming, Dorsen’s piece unzips the possibilities for productive cooperation between human and machinic logics in the realm of performance.
Another entry from the US, City Garage presented its’s filmed 2013 world premiere of Opheliamachine, a female response to Heiner Muller’s famous “Hamletmachine.” Kaleidoscopic episodes of text, projection, video, and song convey the complexity of women’s experiences across themes of rebellion, death, and control with a fierce, piercingly flippant modern tone. The play finds Ophelia trapped inside the machinery that has created her consciousness, fighting to be heard but trapped in a prison of self-made solipsism. Hamlet wants to understand the world, but “all he can do is stare at it,” overwhelmed by the ceaseless flood of media beauty and violence he consumes. Both of their chosen occupations of time echo the fragmented, present-day pain of social distancing, where both sexes are desperate to find new ways of connecting when caught between our confused “real life” emotions and a warped, virtual sense of sexuality and identity. The production seduces and dazzles the senses with expert synchronicity of multimedia and breakneck direction. Actors zip from sedation to mania—lounging, licking, strutting, thrashing, and savoring alternating moments with a modern abhorrence for attention spans. Ultimately Opheliamachine offers a slap-in-the-face, tongue-in-cheek salve for postmodern, perpetual unfulfillment.
In a similar spirit of unrest is Argentina’s Mariano Pensotti, providing a unique take on the legacy of the Russian revolution in his exquisite Arde brillante en los bosques de la noche / Burning Bright in the Forest of the Night. Produced by HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires, Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), and Maria Matos Teatro Municipal / House on Fire, with the support of the Cultural Programme of the European Union, it shows the complex ways in which identity formation in Argentina is inextricably linked to broader European histories. Divided into three parts that interweave characters and themes, the play utilizes puppets (replicas of the actors who manipulate them), a play-within-a-play, and a film to juxtapose history and fiction. The play is inspired by Soviet revolutionary and feminist Alexandra Kollontai and her concerns about freedom, the body, and sexuality, as well as the ways that capitalist society shapes a woman’s identity. The design and structure of the piece are fiery and overt, flooding bold swaths of bloodred lighting to hit themes over the head, declaring alongside the text, “The body is a revolutionary territory,” and in performance, is also designed and staged to be such. By structuring fictions inside fictions, the play takes on the formal ideas of the Russian avant-garde—placing the body and its representations in conflict as each iteration of the characters literally transform upon contact, as well as vacillating between spectator and actor in their own stories, questioning who is ultimately ever in control of the story we tell.
Another exploration of identity comes from a collaboration for the first time with Escenix, Chile’s first platform for streaming performance works, to present Xuárez, Manuela Infante’s 2015 award-winning production of Luis Barrales’ play revisiting Chile’s colonialist past through the figure of Inés Suárez – a mythical Spanish 16th -century conquistadora. Suárez played a key role in halting Mapuche advancement on Santiago when Michimalonco, a Mapuche leader, sent troops in to rescue a group of cacique (native chief) prisoners held by the Spanish. Billed as a way of understanding some of the faultlines and dynamics that underpin contemporary Chile, Xuárez is a complex, richly rewarding performance built akin to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern musing and mucking through the day’s issues. Barrales’ text tightropes impassioned pleas and quiet intensity that masterfully revisits a problematic past in ways that illustrate the complex intersections of race, gender, and class in nation-building.
These were only a snapshot of the works presented in the festival, and more information along with digital talks and resources can be found here. The fervor, innovation, and conversations exhibited through the festival’s global works should act as a beacon as we navigate forward; storytelling has and always will be a catalyst for community catharsis no matter the variance in subject matter or location. By bringing together different voices and perspectives in a digital sphere, The International Online Theatre Festival is a paradigm example of how the theatre community worldwide should and can continue using virtual platforms, streaming, archives, and sharing to foster discussion, magnification, and empathy across emotional and physical borders in a twenty-first-century world.
ABOUT
IOTF: The International Online Theatre Festival ran on TheTheatreTimes.com from April 15-May 31 and is presented in collaboration with Stanislavsky Electrotheatre, Schaubühne, Stage Russia, Ninateka, Escenix, La Marea, Teatro Nacional D. Maria II and DigitalTheatre+, with the support of The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, Emerson College, and all the companies who have given permission for their work to be screened and shared. IOTF: The International Online Theatre Festival is curated by co-Artistic Directors Xunnan Li, Alma Prelec, and Gabriel Vivas-Martínez, doctoral candidates at Royal Holloway and Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. For more information, please contact: iotf@theatretimes.com.