GREAT CITIES UNDER THE MOON | Madách Nemzetközi Színházi Találkozó

GREAT CITIES UNDER THE MOON 12

Odin Teatret, Holstebro, Dánia

Director: Eugenio Barba

Performed in English, Italien and German with Hungarian subtitles.

1 hours, without breaks.

ODIN TEATRET
The Trilogy of the Innocent
The Innocence of War and of Its Victimsga

Innocent is a luminous word. We don’t feel guilty because we are ware that guilt is a reaction of our conscience. And this reaction is not automatically associated with a misdeed that we may have committed considering it a legitimate defence. Let’s look at the face of war: that of a tiger. The tiger tears a child to pieces. This is obviously a tragedy, but it doesn’t tarnish the innocence of the tiger. Innocence does not take damage into account, it demands only purity of intentions. For those fighting in a war, innocence coincides with a respect for their role within the mechanisms of a struggle whose purpose is to exterminate the adversary. We don’t usually associate the word innocent with war, but with its victims, those who don’t commit outrages and destruction. We think of orphans, widows, women who experience the innocence of war on their bodies. Odin Teatret’s trilogy speaks of the many forms of innocence, asking the question: are we all, perhaps, innocent?

Trilogy - Second landscape: the present (2010-2018)

Changing countries more often than shoes

The moon observes and glides over the burning cities below, from the metropolises of Europe to those of Asia Minor, from Hiroshima to Halle, from Imperial China to Alabama. Her voice is mocking or amazed, indifferent or merciful, cold or incandescent. Her compassion knows no melancholy, no solace. „Great Cities under the Moon emerged by accident in 2000 from a barter between our theatre and a group of patients from a psychiatric hospital in Bielefeld, Germany. It was our intention to play this performance only once, but instead it became part of our repertoire. It describes with serenity scenes of exile, abuse and massacre from the History of our time, accompanied by songs of poets dear to us: Bertolt Brecht, Jens Bjørneboe, Ezra Pound, Li Po.” (Eugenio Barba)

Actors:
Luis Alonso, Kai Bredholt, Roberta Carreri, Jan Ferslev, Elena Floris, Donald Kitt, Tage Larsen, Carolina Pizarro, Iben Nagel Rasmussen, Julia Varley

Music by Hanns Eisler, Kurt Weill, Frans Winther and others.

Lighting: Fausto Pro

Director

Eugenio Barba

Gobbi Hilda Stage

Eugenio Barba

Eugenio Barba was born in 1936 in Italy and grew up in the village of Gallipoli. In 1954, he emigrated to Norway to work as a welder and a sailor. At the same time he took a degree in French, Norwegian Literature and History of Religions at Oslo University. In 1961 he went to Poland to learn directing at the State Theatre School in Warsaw, but left one year later to join Jerzy Grotowski, who at that time was the director of the Theatre of 13 Rows in Opole. Barba stayed with Grotowski for three years. In 1963 he travelled to India where he studied Kathakali, a theatre form which was unknown in the West at that time. Barba created the Odin Teatret in October 1964. During the past fifty years Eugenio Barba has directed 76 productions with Odin Teatret and with the intercultural Theatrum Mundi Ensemble. Since 1974, Eugenio Barba and Odin Teatret have devised their own way of being present in diverse social contexts through the practice of the "barter", an exchange of cultural expressions with a community or an institution, structured as a common performance.

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