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Chicago Goes Global: Second International Theatre Festival Sets Lake Michigan on
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13631 |
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THE ARTS
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8 / 1988 |
2,943 Words |
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Nicholas Rudall
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Chicago had been hot for April. It had felt like deep spring. Now it was cold again as a crowd of about a thousand people gathered in the quickening dark of Navy Pier, a rusting, forbidding, monstrous, metal finger that jabs into Lake Michigan. People stamped their feet and made airy ghosts with their breath as they huddled together before a makeshift stage backed by the lake and Gary's steel mills miles away. Then the drumming began, insistent and loud. Fireworks exploded. Masked demons with tails and horns shrieked and whirled through the smoke. "Fuego!" we were told to shout, "Fuego! Fuego! Fuego!" to the rhythm of the maniacal medieval drums. And we shouted. And the fire demons came and romped among us. They led us into the cavernous metal heart of the pier through a smoke-filled passage that was all redness and shadow. Claustrophobia. Figures slithered among us. Always the drumming and the demonic screams.
Masked Dancers
Later, on the lakefront again, the stage was crackling with fire and spinning with masked dancers when behind us on a metal parapet there suddenly appeared twenty white figures lit by white flames and waving enormous white banners. The demons attacked and routed these figures of good, and once again the air was filled with smoke. Firecrackers cracked. Victory was celebrated with spinning torches, phalluses, and the sudden whoosh of the first rocket in the black sky, which then exploded in color. The last rocket puffed a halo in the air and there was silence for a few eternal seconds, then we all roared. Chicago's Second International Theatre Festival had begun.
These men and women who had dragged us into a medieval conflict are the Comedians from Spain. This ritualistic battle is called Demonis, and the company has performed ever ever-changing versions of it around the world, particularly in Europe. The second offering of this inventive troupe was a piece called Alè (Catalan for "breath"). Performed indoors, it takes a wonderfully comic look at the history of mankind. As was to be the case throughout more than a month of international theater, audiences were treated to images of haunting beauty, of horror, and of laughter.
An old woman, like a Velázquez duenna, climbed a ladder, perched atop, and began to peel the pages off a numbered calendar. For ten minutes or so they fell like flakes of time to the theater floor as faceless figures in white coupled and birthed and died. The Garden of Eden was thick with plastic flowers and furry bunnies and peopled with naked Adams and Eves who poked and pulled each other in innocence until civilization came with a suitcase full of underwear. The modern world was a room full of heads of state, literally. The actors wore grotesque and massive masks of world leaders who bickered and battered each other into silence. Such were some of the visions of this troupe from Spain. And this was just the beginning of a remarkable invasion.
Two Hundred Different Roles
The English Shakespeare Company, under the direction of Michael Bogdanov, brought the Wars of the Roses to the Auditorium Theatre. Shakespeare's Richard II; Henry IV Part I and Henry IV, Part II; Henry V; Henry VI, Part I; Henry VI, Part II; and Richard III unfolded across the massive stage. It is an enormous undertaking. Twenty-five actors play over two hundred different roles. There are
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