Willem Dafoe and Mikhail Baryshnikov’s first encounter last year was uneventful—aside from the two minutes of dead silence at the beginning. It’s an odd tradition director Robert Wilson observes at early table readings. “Everybody starts to breathe a little deeper … or shallower,” Baryshnikov says. “I think Bob is waiting for that moment when someone will get up and say, ‘No, I changed my mind! Not doing this!’ ”He didn’t, though that was just the tip of the weirdness iceberg. Starting June 22 at Bam, they will star in Wilson’s production of The Old Woman, based on a novella by Daniil Kharms, a Soviet writer who died in Stalin’s Gulag. Dressed nearly identically, in Kabuki-style whiteface, Baryshnikov and Dafoe perform a series of surreal vaudevillian scenes incorporating song and dance to relate Kharms’s tale. Baryshnikov, who had been eager to work with Wilson, “fell in...
- 6/19/2014
- by Rebecca Milzoff
- Vulture
Palace, Manchester; Globe; Rose Lipman Building, London
Manchester international festival has always been theatrically lively. This year's programme looks the strongest yet. It opens with a celebration, almost a flaunting of international experiment. Inspired by the absurdist gifts of Daniil Kharms, The Old Woman brings together, under the least flamboyant of titles, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Willem Dafoe and Robert Wilson.
There is no making sense of Kharms. That is his point. The Russian ironist and dandy, who hated old people and pets and was fascinated by Sherlock Holmes, wrote elliptical stories, often tragic in content and comic in expression, sometimes only a paragraph long. An author of children's books who disliked children, he was a victim of the Soviet Union's antipathy to the avant garde. Rounded up by the secret police, he died in a prison hospital in 1942. He was 36.
There is, it turns out, a way of making his work vivid,...
Manchester international festival has always been theatrically lively. This year's programme looks the strongest yet. It opens with a celebration, almost a flaunting of international experiment. Inspired by the absurdist gifts of Daniil Kharms, The Old Woman brings together, under the least flamboyant of titles, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Willem Dafoe and Robert Wilson.
There is no making sense of Kharms. That is his point. The Russian ironist and dandy, who hated old people and pets and was fascinated by Sherlock Holmes, wrote elliptical stories, often tragic in content and comic in expression, sometimes only a paragraph long. An author of children's books who disliked children, he was a victim of the Soviet Union's antipathy to the avant garde. Rounded up by the secret police, he died in a prison hospital in 1942. He was 36.
There is, it turns out, a way of making his work vivid,...
- 7/6/2013
- by Susannah Clapp
- The Guardian - Film News
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