Festival d'Automne
A first-rate multi-disciplinary festival covering theatre, dance, visual arts, and music.
Highlights from the program this year include:
Merce Cunningham’s company pay homage to the visionary dancer and choreographer, who passed away this year, with a late piece, Nearly Ninety. A giant-scale work poised between rigor and chaos, featuring 13 dancers in solo, duo and trio pieces. The performance is also musical, as dancers are joined by Takeshi Kosugi, John Paul Jones – Led Zeppelin’s bass and keyboards player- and by the four members of Sonic Youth.
Also worth noting:
a revival of a 1992 collaboration between William Kentridge and the Handspring Puppet Company gives force to Büchner’s unfinished play, ‘Woyzeck On The Highveld’, the story of a poor soldier crushed by forces he cannot control.
The Wooster Group present a little-known play by Tennessee Williams, written a few years before he died, ‘Vieux Carré’.
A retrospective of master of low-budget filmmaking, Guy Maddin.
Theatre director Robert Wilson renews his collaboration with the Festival d’Automne with a version of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera, performed by the Berliner Ensemble. Written in 1928, this story of gang war and corruption pioneered the musical comedy genre. The tale’s darkness is beautifully revived by Wilson’s reinterpretation of expressionist aesthetics.
Check out the complete program here.
