Reenactment in Theatre

Theatre, because of its ability to represent through restaging, would seem to be the quintessential platform for reenactment. The Orestea (una commedia organica?) by R. Castelluci and Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, restaged at the Paris Automne Festival in 2015, twenty years after its 1995 world premiere in Prato, is the starting point for a reflection on the status of restaging in theatre. This case study is the occasion to apply Walter Benjamin’s philosophical concept of the Jetztzeit to a theatrical context, and to consider also the ‘citational’ value of theatrical reenactment. These concepts are useful to study not only the reenactment of theatrical gesture and acting but also to consider the practice of restaging related to the theatrical event conceived in its entirety.

INTERVIEW ROIT FELDENKREIS

Roit Feldenkreis started in the arena of classical music in the “classical” way. As a young girl she trained in Israel and the USA to become a soprano singer with everything that entails, practice, discipline and hard work in the face of challenge. This seemingly predictable beginning has converted into a road of exploration for Roit in which she has been constantly investigating and pushing the boundaries of the classical tra- ditions as well as cultural and geographical boundaries as an international orchestra conductor. Prizewinner at the London Classical Soloists Conducting Com- petition (2014) and a leading musician in the International music arena, Roit has served for 8 years as the Founder and Music Director of the Israeli Moshavot Chamber Orchestra, a leading orchestra in Northern Israel (2011-2019), located in the prestigious Elma Arts Hall. Under Roit’s leadership, the orchestra has dedicated itself to performing innovative world-premiere compositions by living composers from Israel and around the world, as well as regularly performing fami- ly-oriented concert series to promote classical music to un- der-privileged youth and annual charity concerts with talented young soloists. and a leading musician in the International music arena, Roit has served for 8 years as the Founder and Music Director of the Israeli Moshavot Chamber Orchestra, a leading orchestra in Northern Israel (2011-2019), located in the prestigious Elma Arts Hall. Under Roit’s leadership, the orchestra has dedicated itself to performing innovative world-premiere compositions by living composers from Israel and around the world, as well as regularly performing fami- ly-oriented concert series to promote classical music to un- der-privileged youth and annual charity concerts with talented young soloists. “classical” way. As a young girl she trained in Israel and the USA to become a soprano singer with everything that entails, practice, discipline and hard work in the face of challenge. This seemingly predictable beginning has converted into a road of exploration for Roit in which she has been constantly investigating and pushing the boundaries of the classical tra- ditions as well as cultural and geographical boundaries as an international orchestra conductor. Prizewinner at the London Classical Soloists Conducting Com- petition (2014) and a leading musician in the International music arena, Roit has served for 8 years as the Founder and Music Director of the Israeli Moshavot Chamber Orchestra, a leading orchestra in Northern Israel (2011-2019), located in the prestigious Elma Arts Hall. Under Roit’s leadership, the orchestra has dedicated itself to performing innovative world-premiere compositions by living composers from Israel and around the world, as well as regularly performing fami- ly-oriented concert series to promote classical music to un- der-privileged youth and annual charity concerts with talented young soloists. exploration for Roit in which she has been constantly investigating and pushing the boundaries of the classical tra- ditions as well as cultural and geographical boundaries as an international orchestra conductor. Prizewinner at the London Classical Soloists Conducting Com- petition (2014) and a leading musician in the International music arena, Roit has served for 8 years as the Founder and Music Director of the Israeli Moshavot Chamber Orchestra, a leading orchestra in Northern Israel (2011-2019), located in the prestigious Elma Arts Hall. Under Roit’s leadership, the orchestra has dedicated itself to performing innovative world-premiere compositions by living composers from Israel and around the world, as well as regularly performing fami- ly-oriented concert series to promote classical music to un- der-privileged youth and annual charity concerts with talented young soloists.

Untying the “Musical Sphinx:” Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in Nineteenth-Century Pest-Buda

It is well known that Beethoven’s Ninth was followed by a temporary crisis in the genre of the symphony: the next generation found it difficult to get away from the shadow of this monumental piece. The Ninth was first performed in Hungary in 1865, more than 40 years after the world-premiere. We should add, however, that during the first half of the nineteenth century, no professional symphonic orchestra and choir existed in Pest-Buda that would have coped with the task. Although the Hungarian public was able to hear some of Beethoven’s symphonies already by the 1830s – mainly thanks to the Musical Association of Pest-Buda – in many cases only fragments of symphonies were performed. The Orchestra of the Philharmonic Society, founded in 1853, was meant to compensate for the lack of symphonic concerts. This paper is about the performances of Beethoven’s symphonies in Pest-Buda in the nineteenth century, and it especially it focuses on the reception of Symphony No. 9 in the Hungarian press, which cannot be understood without taking into consideration the influence of the Neudeutsche Schule (New German School).

The Aesthetic Conflict

An aesthetic conflict between advocates of abstract instrumental music (or “absolute music”) and advocates of instrumental music that tells stories (or “program music”) raged throughout Europe and the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century. American critics assessed Dvořák’s Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Symphonies through the lens of this conflict as they premiered throughout the 1880s and 1890s. But listeners could not reach a consensus about where along the aesthetic spectrum his music fell. Which direction the composer’s new symphony might take therefore remained an open question until its 1893 world premiere in New York, when the results surprised everyone.

La serie de TV ‘Medici’: Entre historia, memoria y producto comercial.

The ‘Medici’ series was one of the television events of the year, created and produced by Frank Spotnitz and Nicholas Meyer and directed by Sergio Mimica-Gezzan. The historical drama, which aired on Netflix (2016) in the first world premiere, and which features the events of the well-known 15th-century Florentine family. The contribution aims to deepen the relationship between history, memory and the commercial product.

THE ANNIVERSARY BY A. P. CHEKHOV: UNKNOWN BEGINNING OF THE STAGING HISTORY

There has been no information concerning the stage performances of Chekhov’s The Anniversary before 1900. The article outlines the world premiere of Chekhov’s play on March 31, 1893 in Kiev.

“An American bitch”: Beckett’s Love’s Labor’s Lost

Samuel Beckett is not often thought of as a love poet, but much of his early poetry explores such personal relationships in intimate terms. In Shakespeare’s most poignant plays, love is almost always lost (except for his most formulaic comedies), as it is in Beckett’s poetry, despite one’s labors. This essay explores that thread of love in Beckett’s poetry, and, more importantly, its return in his late media experiments as a series of hauntings, a preoccupation that Derrida would call hauntology. The principal fi gures of Krapp’s Last Tape, “Ohio Impromptu”, “...but the clouds...”, “Ghost Trio”, and “Eh, Joe” remain haunted by failed love as they replay, time and again, the separation and its ghostly aftermath after one of the partners either dies or leaves to pursue what at the time was deemed a higher goal, art, of one form or another. This treatment of Beckett’s writings on love was originally delivered as a keynote address, “Beckett’s Love’s Labor’s Lost”, for the University of Gdańsk Samuel Beckett Seminar, “Beckett’s Faces”, and for the BETWEEN.POMIĘDZY 2018 Festival and Literary Conference as something of a backstory to the laboratory fi lm made during and sponsored by that conference and called Beckett on the Baltic: Love’s Labor’s Lost. Its world premiere was held at the BETWEEN.POMIĘDZY 2019 Festival and Literary Conference.

To the question of choreographic interpretation of male images of W. Shakespeare’s drama of the later period “The Winter's Tale” in the eponymous ballet of C. Wheeldon

The subject of this article is the interpretation of male images from W. Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” by the choreographer C. Wheeldon in the context of its conceptual commonality with the literary original. The goal of this research is to determine the stage means and elements of choreographic language used by the choreographer for creation of male roles, as well as to draw ideological-imagery parallels with the original text. Methodological foundation of this study features the principles of critical analysis of text of the play along with the semantic analysis of choreography, developed in the scientific works of such theoreticians of ballet art as Lopukhov, Dobrovolskaya, Krasovskaya, Surits, Slonimsky. Comprehensive approach towards interpretation of the literary original on the modern ballet stage required  the analysis of such sources, as the English-language peer reviews of the world premiere of the ballet and video materials from the archives of the Royal Opera House in London and the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. The author also applied the method of overt observation based on the personal experience of working with Wheeldon in Bolshoi Theatre, and accompanied by the analysis of rehearsals from the author's archive (over the period from March to April 2019). The author carried out a detailed semantic analysis of the stage interpretation and choreographic language of the male images of W. Shakespeare's play of the later period “The Winter's Tale” in the eponymous ballet of C. Wheeldon (which served as the key instrument for this research). The conclusion is made that the conceptual ground of Wheeldon’s interpretation of the male images is based on the Shakespeare’s text adapted to the realities of a stage performance.  He employs a wide array of plasticity and other innovative means of expression, applying an individual approach towards staging each male role.