Tag Archives: Samuel Beckett

MAGUY MARIN — TIME TO ACT

MAGUY MARIN—TIME TO ACT—the opening film of the Dance on Camera Festival—will screen online this week.

Presented by the Dance Films Association and Film at Lincoln Center, the documentary—directed by David Mambouch, Marin’s son—celebrates the choreographer whose work “stood out for its theatrical aesthetic, political commentary, and audacious integration of traditional dance with unexpected narrative, musical and physical elements. In 1981, Marin’s work May B, inspired by the work of modernist playwright Samuel Beckett, upset the dance world; it rejected traditional ideals of beauty and embraced a fiercely political perspective.”*

MAGUY MARIN—TIME TO ACT*

Friday, July 17th.

3:30 pm on the West Coast; 6:30 pm East Coast.

David Mambouch, Maguy Marin—Time to Act (2018). Images—performance and filming of Marin’s May B—courtesy and © the filmmaker, the choreographer, the dancers, the photographers, Ocean Films Distribution, and Starinvest Films.

WITKACY / TWO-HEADED CALF AT REDCAT

The plays of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885–1939,* born in Warsaw, and known as Witkacy) languished in relative obscurity throughout most of their creator’s short life. A home country revival took place in the 1950s, and adventurous theater companies in Western Europe and the United States started producing his work in the 1970s.

A key figure of the European avant-garde—a peer of Artaud, Beckett, Genet, and IonescoWitkacy’s resolutely anti-realist theater work has inspired WITKACY / TWO-HEADED CALF, a new collaboration by Natalia Korczakowska (the artistic director of Warsaw’s Studio Teatrgaleria), and CalArts Center for New Performance.

Witkacy believed that nature can be a source of metaphysical experience that gives us a chance to protect our individuality from the soulless social machine of Western civilization. WITKACY / TWO-HEADED CALF is a journey of a neurotic boy and his family from Poland to the California desert—and also a journey into the depths of oneself.**

For the next eight days at Redcat, performing artists from Studio Teatrgaleria and CalArts will present the American premiere engagement of this sui generis production.

WITKACY / TWO-HEADED CALF**

Friday and Saturday, October 18 and 19, at 8:30 pm.

Sunday, October 20, at 3 pm.

Tuesday through Friday, October 22, 23, 24, and 25, at 8:30 pm.

Redcat

631 West 2nd Street, downtown Los Angeles.

*Witkacy allegedly committed suicide upon hearing of the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, but when his grave was disinterred many years later, the body reportedly belonged to someone else.

Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz and Natalia Korczakowska, WITKACY/Two-Headed Calf, performance photographs by Rafal Nowak and Hao Feng. Images courtesy and © the photographers, the performers, the director, Studio Teatrgaleria, and CalArts Center for New Performance.

MATHIEU LINDON

“In 1978, Mathieu Lindon met Michel Foucault. Lindon was twenty-three years old, part of a small group of jaded but innocent, brilliant, and sexually ambivalent friends who came to know Foucault. At first the nominal caretakers of Foucault’s apartment on rue de Vaugirard when he was away, these young friends eventually shared their time, drugs, ambitions, and writings with the older Foucault. Lindon’s friend, the late Hervé Guibert, was a key figure within this group.

“The son of Jérôme Lindon, the renowned founder of Éditions de Minuit, Lindon grew up with Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Samuel Beckett as family friends. Much was expected of him. But, as he writes in this remarkable spiritual autobiography, it was through his friendship with Foucault—who was neither lover nor father but an older friend—that he found the direction that would influence the rest of his life.”*

 

The Semiotext(e) publication of Lindon’s memoir LEARNING WHAT LOVE MEANS (2017) was translated by Bruce Benderson.*

See Bookforum interview with Lindon.

See Andrew Durbin’s article in Bomb.

Above image credit: Semiotext(e).

Below: Mathieu Lindon (right) and Hervé Guibert in Balthus’ studio, Villa Medici, Rome, 1987. Photograph by Hans Georg Berger.

JULIA BULLOCK

Julia Bullock—who brought the house down at Disney Hall last year at the Franz Schubert/Samuel Beckett concert and performance—will sing a program in Santa Barbara ranging from Schubert and Samuel Barber to Billie Holiday and Nina Simone.

John Arida will accompany Bullock on piano.

 

JULIA BULLOCK

Tuesday, April 3, at 7 pm.

Hahn Hall, UCSB

1070 Fairway Road, Santa Barbara.

Below: Julia Bullock in 2014. Photograph by Kevin Yatarola. Image credit: Julia Bullock.

BECKETT AND SCHUBERT

An evening which alternates the work of Samuel Beckett and the music of his favorite composer Franz Schubert sounds interesting enough. The news that the words of the avant-garde playwright would be performed by two of his greatest interpreters—Alan Mandell and Barry McGovern—suggests that attendance is mandatory. Schubert’s music will be performed by Julia Bullock (soprano) and Ryan McKinny (bass-baritone), accompanied on piano by Wenwen Du and Richard Valitutto.

NIGHT AND DREAMS: A SCHUBERT & BECKETT RECITAL is directed by Yuval Sharon, the founder and artistic director of The Industry, an experimental opera company based in Los Angeles. The Industry is currently working with LA Dance Project and the Actor’s Gang on a production based on Brecht’s Galileo, set for September 2017. Last fall, Sharon began a three-year residency as the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Artist-Collaborator.

“The aim is to unleash the music’s drama and the drama’s music, and to explore how the austere theatricality of a single Schubert song can illuminate the sonorous beauty of Beckett’s taut prose.” — Yuval Sharon*

 

NIGHT AND DREAMS: A SCHUBERT & BECKETT RECITAL, Tuesday, March 21 at 8 pm.

WALT DISNEY CONCERT HALL, Music Center, downtown Los Angeles

*laphil.com/tickets/night-and-dreams-schubert-beckett-recital/2017-03-21

theindustryla.org/about/

Samuel Beckett Image: Midnight East

Samuel Beckett
Image: Midnight East