Ausgewählte Artikel
Eye Magazine, Toronto - 08.05.04, Alex Bozikovic
The Interpreters
Volcano Theatre conduct their experiments at Summerworks and beyond. THE ARABIAN NIGHT Featuring Phillipa Domville, Michael Healey. Written by Roland Schimmelpfennig. Directed by Ross Manson. Presented by Volcano Theatre and the Goethe-Institut as part of Summerworks Theatre Festival. 6-14.08.2004
Like any scene, the Toronto theatre world gains energy from personal relationships and chance encounters. But Volcano Theatre's Ross Manson, committed to international theatre, has discovered that such connections don't have to be local. "I know Roland quite coincidentally," Manson says of Roland Schimmelpfennig, whose play, The Arabian Night, he brings to Summerworks this weekend. "It was before I was a director and before he was an actor..." ...
It was a collaboration on Michael Ondaatje's Billy the Kid that took young Manson to Munich in 1992. There, he struck up a fiendship with Schimmelpfennig, then a 25-year-old assistant director. "We totally hit it off," Manson says. "Roland and I basically went around the bars of Munich for a couple of weeks." And that was that, until Manson returned to Germany last year and spotted a new play by his old drinking buddy. ...
Indeed, Schimmelpfennig -- in his mid-thirties -- has had a tremendous run over the past eight years, with more than a dozen stage and radio plays, productions around the world and a residency at Berlin's prestigious Schaubühne theatre. And yet Schimmelpfennig's work is little known here in Toronto. Manson, who has had a long association with the local Goethe-Institut, is excited to change that. ...
"It's a play our writers should be seeing, and our directors, because it's another mode that we should know about," Manson argues. And yet Manson says there's nothing foreign about The Arabian Night's themes and techniques. "It's younger-generation writing, and I think it translates very readily into an immigrant nation like Canada," he says. "These characters exist in Toronto."
The Globe and Mail, 12. Mai 2004
Sarah Milroy: Maggs dusts off some old mugs
Ausstellungseröffnung Arnaud Maggs: „Joseph Beuys -Düsseldorf, Photographs 1980
Canada’s celebrated senior artist revisits his series of simple frontal portraits of Joseph Beuys.
[… Arnaud Maggs’] new exhibition at the Goethe-Institut in Toronto […] casts us back to […] the series of scrupulously precise portrait studies that cemented his reputation in the Canadian art world. […] At the opening of his show in Toronto last week (it was his 78th birthday), Maggs’ […] eyes sparkle[d] with the memories of one of his life's choicest interludes; his meeting in Dusseldorf with Joseph Beuys, the charismatic German artist who was then at the peak of his international renown. […]
Maggs's pilgrimage to Dusseldorf was inspired by his visit to the 1979 retrospective of Beuys's work at New York's Guggenheim Museum. "I looked at the show, and I thought: 'I have to photograph this man,' " he recalls. "It was the sheer enormity of all the different projects, the huge pieces that would take a crane to move -- parts of train tracks, things like that. There was one vitrine that had all these little bugs eating away at something." He was enchanted, and the next year, he went to Germany.
[…] "I rang his doorbell, and Beuys answered the door. I showed him a bit of my work, and asked him if I could take his picture. He said that he was very busy, and I said: 'Well, that's okay because I have all the time in the world.' […] And Beuys responded: " 'In that case, why don't you come by at 11 a.m. next Wednesday.' "
Maggs returned as arranged to the little white stucco house at No. 4 Drakeplatz. […] The shoot proceeded amiably for about two hours (Maggs took 200 pictures) […].
Maggs has displayed the fruits of this encounter in various formats over the years. Initially, the shoot was presented in two works, each composed of 100 photographs -- one work made up of the frontal views, the other of the profile views. Maggs arranged the images in five rows of twenty, displaying the prints sequentially to reflect the duration of the meeting. Despite Beuys's best efforts to remain static, however, you can pick up subtle gradations of fatigue and stress in his countenance, and delicate variations of mood. "The musculature around the eyes changes," Maggs says. "Sometimes he looks so vulnerable and open, it's like peering into his soul." The installation of the portraits in five rows was, Maggs says, a response to a minimalist work by Carl Andre on view in Dusseldorf at the time -- a grid of 100 flat copper tiles on the floor. In the current show, Maggs is showing eight outtakes of the frontal shoot, printed large, cropped and mounted on aluminum. As well, he is exhibiting a series of frontal portraits of six students from the Dusseldorf Art Academy […].Several of the student subjects Maggs worked with appear in [Thomas] Ruff's early portraits. […Maggs] himself must admit to borrowing from one of his heroes, Albrecht Durer (also, incidentally, a hero for Beuys). Durer, he says, made a series of frontal and side portraits, where he situated the human head in a kind of grid, like graph paper, the better to come to grips with the individual features of each subject. […]
NOW Magazine, 5-11.08. 2004,
The arabian night by Roland Schimmelpfennig (Volcano) RATING: NNNNN Standing ovation
The arabian night by Roland Schimmelpfennig (Volcano) RATING: NNNNN Standing ovation German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig's taut script about five characters wandering through an apartment gets an atmospheric production full of nuance, humour and lots of insight into the desert that is human relationships. Tiny bits and pieces of the Arabian Nights tales swirl in this magical, mythical work, directed confidently by Ross Manson and performed by as good a cast as you'll see at the festival.
The Globe and Mail, Toronto, 6.8.04, Mary Nersessian
Summer theatre in the city.
Tales of love found, love lost and emotional landmines help kick off this year's SummerWorks festival.
Persian carpets, benches and abandoned boiler rooms will set the scene for love found, love lost and emotional landmines during the 14th annual SummerWorks Theatre Festival. It’s the festival’s second year to be entirely juried. Ross Manson says he was drawn to direct The Arabian Night, a Volcano company production, because it is not a political statement. At first glance, the synopsis suggests a commentary on social cohesion post-Sept. 11 and U.S. President George W. Bush’s war against terror. Roland Schimmelpfennig’s play brings together five Arabs and Caucasians faced with a mundane dilemma. They are in an apartment building without water on a sweltering summer night of a large Western city. “Culturally, the West needs to look at plays that introduce Arabs—but not necessarily as a comment on 9/11,” Manson says. Indie theatre company Volcano and the Goethe-Institut are co-producing the Canadian premiere of the play, which has opened to acclaim in Europe and the United States. This one is a magic carpet ride — the set is bare but for a series of overlapping Persian carpets and a live accompaniment by Greek and Arabic music ensemble Maza Mezé. The musical cues are a response to what the actors are doing, Manson says. Manson first met the playwright about 12 years ago when they both worked in Munich on a Werner Herzog translation of Michael Ondaatje’s Billy the Kid.
The Toronto Star, 09.08.2004,
ROBERT CREW The Arabian Night casts a memorable spell
The location is an apartment block in a large, western city. The time is now. And throughout the building, a whole series of dramas is gradually unfolding. The Arabian Night by German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig is now at Factory Theatre, 125 Bathurst St., as part of the SummerWorks festival. And it is the kind of piece that will linger in the memory, long after others have faded. […] Cleverly staged by Volcano's Ross Manson, the tension builds until the end, which is shattering (figuratively as well as literally). It's superior stuff.
Eye, 19.08.04,
David Balzer Edward Schleimer
Kitchener-based portraitist, printmaker and poet Edward Schleimer hasn't shown in Toronto since 1976, and his current series at the Goethe-Institut, "The Angst of Edward Schleimer," is from 1982, openly influenced by the moody, characteristically Teutonic expressions of Kollwitz, Beckmann and Schiele. Still, you'd be hard-pressed to find a fresher, more affecting show in the city this summer. But it's the purity of Schleimer's style that makes his mental paroxysms worthwhile: a combination of swirling strokes and hard slashes that are remarkably assured given the disturbed gut they emanate from.
Eye, 23.09.2004,
Jason Anderson Run Franka Run
As the fleet footed heroine of Run Lola Run, Franka Potente and her red Chia Pet hair provided one of the most indelible images in recent world cinema. With her exuberance and intelligence, the 30-year old German star has energized nearly every movie she’s starred in, whether it be Teutonic arthouse fodder or Matt Damon spy flick. The Goethe-Institut launches its fall film season with series with Run Franka Run!, a Potente-filled series of seven features and one short: Run Lola Run, The Princess and the Warrior, Blow, Am I Beautiful?, It’s a Jungle Out There and, in its Toronto premiere Blueprint. If you can’t run to the Goethe-Institut, then at least walk briskly.
Toronto Star, 25.09.2004,
William Littler Ich bin ein Berlin lover
Europe's most exciting city? […] there is a city on the banks of the River Spree currently so dynamic in its building by day and playing by night that the pulse quickens at the very mention of its name: Berlin. […] It is a city well worth celebrating even in faraway Toronto. […] My latest visit took place in May, in anticipation of the event that opens today, Toronto's third annual Canadian German Festival, […] organized around the theme Toronto Meets Berlin. [There were] more than 20 events planned, ranging from a Franka Potente film series to a day-long Mayor's Symposium on city planning to various visual arts and tourism events, culminating in a Toronto Symphony Orchestra concert conducted by one of today's leading German maestros, Gunther Herbig.
Toronto Star, 27.09.04, Christopher Hume
Lucky Berlin a city AND a province
There are many lessons Toronto can learn from Berlin: some tell us what to do, others what not to do. At a day-long conference yesterday, Torontonians heard from a variety of Berliners about their city's weaknesses as well as strengths. Organized by the Goethe Institute and the Consul General of the Federal Republic of Germany, the session was attended by Toronto Burgermeister David Miller and the mayor of Berlin Mitte, Joachim Zeller. […] The conference was part of the Canadian-German Festival, Toronto Meets Berlin. The lineup includes classical music concerts, film screenings and art exhibitions. The intention is "to strengthen the ties between Toronto and Berlin and to open up new avenues for continued collaboration, exchange and understanding ...."
The Globe and Mail, 09.10.04,
Gary Michael Dault Picking up a few mega-souvenirs of tyranny
How quickly history becomes bric-a-brac! Take the Berlin Wall, 12-feet high, brutally divisive, and, in 1989, 23 years after its erection, it is summarily torn down -- a crystallization of the deconstruction of the Communist state -- and carried off in pieces, as a mega-souvenir, to the four corners of the globe. Now, 15 years after the Wall's dismantling, and as a way of marking that anniversary, two Toronto-based photographers, Vid Ingelevics and Blake Fitzpatrick, have mounted a small but telling exhibition at the Goethe-Institut in Toronto, as part of its recent Toronto Meets Berlin cultural festival. They have photographed both [slabs and full top-to-bottom sections of the wall still bearing their original graffiti]. In their big black and white photographs of isolated Wall fragments, arranged in the lobby of the Goethe-Institut, the individual hunks, now presented with a kind of museological reverence, look like moon rocks or fossils.
Echo Germanica,
October 2004, No. 10, SFR Happenings
The German Festival is in full swing [with] an all night techno rave [that] saw thousands moving rhythmically through the night, [… and] Beethoven’s Violin Concerto after an elegant reception in the fabulous lobby of Roy Thomson Hall, Toronto. [… Moreover] The Goethe Institute is having a fabulous series of film presentations […] and there are various art galleries showing Berlin related art.
The Interpreters
Volcano Theatre conduct their experiments at Summerworks and beyond. THE ARABIAN NIGHT Featuring Phillipa Domville, Michael Healey. Written by Roland Schimmelpfennig. Directed by Ross Manson. Presented by Volcano Theatre and the Goethe-Institut as part of Summerworks Theatre Festival. 6-14.08.2004
Like any scene, the Toronto theatre world gains energy from personal relationships and chance encounters. But Volcano Theatre's Ross Manson, committed to international theatre, has discovered that such connections don't have to be local. "I know Roland quite coincidentally," Manson says of Roland Schimmelpfennig, whose play, The Arabian Night, he brings to Summerworks this weekend. "It was before I was a director and before he was an actor..." ...
It was a collaboration on Michael Ondaatje's Billy the Kid that took young Manson to Munich in 1992. There, he struck up a fiendship with Schimmelpfennig, then a 25-year-old assistant director. "We totally hit it off," Manson says. "Roland and I basically went around the bars of Munich for a couple of weeks." And that was that, until Manson returned to Germany last year and spotted a new play by his old drinking buddy. ...
Indeed, Schimmelpfennig -- in his mid-thirties -- has had a tremendous run over the past eight years, with more than a dozen stage and radio plays, productions around the world and a residency at Berlin's prestigious Schaubühne theatre. And yet Schimmelpfennig's work is little known here in Toronto. Manson, who has had a long association with the local Goethe-Institut, is excited to change that. ...
"It's a play our writers should be seeing, and our directors, because it's another mode that we should know about," Manson argues. And yet Manson says there's nothing foreign about The Arabian Night's themes and techniques. "It's younger-generation writing, and I think it translates very readily into an immigrant nation like Canada," he says. "These characters exist in Toronto."
The Globe and Mail, 12. Mai 2004
Sarah Milroy: Maggs dusts off some old mugs
Ausstellungseröffnung Arnaud Maggs: „Joseph Beuys -Düsseldorf, Photographs 1980
Canada’s celebrated senior artist revisits his series of simple frontal portraits of Joseph Beuys.
[… Arnaud Maggs’] new exhibition at the Goethe-Institut in Toronto […] casts us back to […] the series of scrupulously precise portrait studies that cemented his reputation in the Canadian art world. […] At the opening of his show in Toronto last week (it was his 78th birthday), Maggs’ […] eyes sparkle[d] with the memories of one of his life's choicest interludes; his meeting in Dusseldorf with Joseph Beuys, the charismatic German artist who was then at the peak of his international renown. […]
Maggs's pilgrimage to Dusseldorf was inspired by his visit to the 1979 retrospective of Beuys's work at New York's Guggenheim Museum. "I looked at the show, and I thought: 'I have to photograph this man,' " he recalls. "It was the sheer enormity of all the different projects, the huge pieces that would take a crane to move -- parts of train tracks, things like that. There was one vitrine that had all these little bugs eating away at something." He was enchanted, and the next year, he went to Germany.
[…] "I rang his doorbell, and Beuys answered the door. I showed him a bit of my work, and asked him if I could take his picture. He said that he was very busy, and I said: 'Well, that's okay because I have all the time in the world.' […] And Beuys responded: " 'In that case, why don't you come by at 11 a.m. next Wednesday.' "
Maggs returned as arranged to the little white stucco house at No. 4 Drakeplatz. […] The shoot proceeded amiably for about two hours (Maggs took 200 pictures) […].
Maggs has displayed the fruits of this encounter in various formats over the years. Initially, the shoot was presented in two works, each composed of 100 photographs -- one work made up of the frontal views, the other of the profile views. Maggs arranged the images in five rows of twenty, displaying the prints sequentially to reflect the duration of the meeting. Despite Beuys's best efforts to remain static, however, you can pick up subtle gradations of fatigue and stress in his countenance, and delicate variations of mood. "The musculature around the eyes changes," Maggs says. "Sometimes he looks so vulnerable and open, it's like peering into his soul." The installation of the portraits in five rows was, Maggs says, a response to a minimalist work by Carl Andre on view in Dusseldorf at the time -- a grid of 100 flat copper tiles on the floor. In the current show, Maggs is showing eight outtakes of the frontal shoot, printed large, cropped and mounted on aluminum. As well, he is exhibiting a series of frontal portraits of six students from the Dusseldorf Art Academy […].Several of the student subjects Maggs worked with appear in [Thomas] Ruff's early portraits. […Maggs] himself must admit to borrowing from one of his heroes, Albrecht Durer (also, incidentally, a hero for Beuys). Durer, he says, made a series of frontal and side portraits, where he situated the human head in a kind of grid, like graph paper, the better to come to grips with the individual features of each subject. […]
NOW Magazine, 5-11.08. 2004,
The arabian night by Roland Schimmelpfennig (Volcano) RATING: NNNNN Standing ovation
The arabian night by Roland Schimmelpfennig (Volcano) RATING: NNNNN Standing ovation German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig's taut script about five characters wandering through an apartment gets an atmospheric production full of nuance, humour and lots of insight into the desert that is human relationships. Tiny bits and pieces of the Arabian Nights tales swirl in this magical, mythical work, directed confidently by Ross Manson and performed by as good a cast as you'll see at the festival.
The Globe and Mail, Toronto, 6.8.04, Mary Nersessian
Summer theatre in the city.
Tales of love found, love lost and emotional landmines help kick off this year's SummerWorks festival.
Persian carpets, benches and abandoned boiler rooms will set the scene for love found, love lost and emotional landmines during the 14th annual SummerWorks Theatre Festival. It’s the festival’s second year to be entirely juried. Ross Manson says he was drawn to direct The Arabian Night, a Volcano company production, because it is not a political statement. At first glance, the synopsis suggests a commentary on social cohesion post-Sept. 11 and U.S. President George W. Bush’s war against terror. Roland Schimmelpfennig’s play brings together five Arabs and Caucasians faced with a mundane dilemma. They are in an apartment building without water on a sweltering summer night of a large Western city. “Culturally, the West needs to look at plays that introduce Arabs—but not necessarily as a comment on 9/11,” Manson says. Indie theatre company Volcano and the Goethe-Institut are co-producing the Canadian premiere of the play, which has opened to acclaim in Europe and the United States. This one is a magic carpet ride — the set is bare but for a series of overlapping Persian carpets and a live accompaniment by Greek and Arabic music ensemble Maza Mezé. The musical cues are a response to what the actors are doing, Manson says. Manson first met the playwright about 12 years ago when they both worked in Munich on a Werner Herzog translation of Michael Ondaatje’s Billy the Kid.
The Toronto Star, 09.08.2004,
ROBERT CREW The Arabian Night casts a memorable spell
The location is an apartment block in a large, western city. The time is now. And throughout the building, a whole series of dramas is gradually unfolding. The Arabian Night by German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig is now at Factory Theatre, 125 Bathurst St., as part of the SummerWorks festival. And it is the kind of piece that will linger in the memory, long after others have faded. […] Cleverly staged by Volcano's Ross Manson, the tension builds until the end, which is shattering (figuratively as well as literally). It's superior stuff.
Eye, 19.08.04,
David Balzer Edward Schleimer
Kitchener-based portraitist, printmaker and poet Edward Schleimer hasn't shown in Toronto since 1976, and his current series at the Goethe-Institut, "The Angst of Edward Schleimer," is from 1982, openly influenced by the moody, characteristically Teutonic expressions of Kollwitz, Beckmann and Schiele. Still, you'd be hard-pressed to find a fresher, more affecting show in the city this summer. But it's the purity of Schleimer's style that makes his mental paroxysms worthwhile: a combination of swirling strokes and hard slashes that are remarkably assured given the disturbed gut they emanate from.
Eye, 23.09.2004,
Jason Anderson Run Franka Run
As the fleet footed heroine of Run Lola Run, Franka Potente and her red Chia Pet hair provided one of the most indelible images in recent world cinema. With her exuberance and intelligence, the 30-year old German star has energized nearly every movie she’s starred in, whether it be Teutonic arthouse fodder or Matt Damon spy flick. The Goethe-Institut launches its fall film season with series with Run Franka Run!, a Potente-filled series of seven features and one short: Run Lola Run, The Princess and the Warrior, Blow, Am I Beautiful?, It’s a Jungle Out There and, in its Toronto premiere Blueprint. If you can’t run to the Goethe-Institut, then at least walk briskly.
Toronto Star, 25.09.2004,
William Littler Ich bin ein Berlin lover
Europe's most exciting city? […] there is a city on the banks of the River Spree currently so dynamic in its building by day and playing by night that the pulse quickens at the very mention of its name: Berlin. […] It is a city well worth celebrating even in faraway Toronto. […] My latest visit took place in May, in anticipation of the event that opens today, Toronto's third annual Canadian German Festival, […] organized around the theme Toronto Meets Berlin. [There were] more than 20 events planned, ranging from a Franka Potente film series to a day-long Mayor's Symposium on city planning to various visual arts and tourism events, culminating in a Toronto Symphony Orchestra concert conducted by one of today's leading German maestros, Gunther Herbig.
Toronto Star, 27.09.04, Christopher Hume
Lucky Berlin a city AND a province
There are many lessons Toronto can learn from Berlin: some tell us what to do, others what not to do. At a day-long conference yesterday, Torontonians heard from a variety of Berliners about their city's weaknesses as well as strengths. Organized by the Goethe Institute and the Consul General of the Federal Republic of Germany, the session was attended by Toronto Burgermeister David Miller and the mayor of Berlin Mitte, Joachim Zeller. […] The conference was part of the Canadian-German Festival, Toronto Meets Berlin. The lineup includes classical music concerts, film screenings and art exhibitions. The intention is "to strengthen the ties between Toronto and Berlin and to open up new avenues for continued collaboration, exchange and understanding ...."
The Globe and Mail, 09.10.04,
Gary Michael Dault Picking up a few mega-souvenirs of tyranny
How quickly history becomes bric-a-brac! Take the Berlin Wall, 12-feet high, brutally divisive, and, in 1989, 23 years after its erection, it is summarily torn down -- a crystallization of the deconstruction of the Communist state -- and carried off in pieces, as a mega-souvenir, to the four corners of the globe. Now, 15 years after the Wall's dismantling, and as a way of marking that anniversary, two Toronto-based photographers, Vid Ingelevics and Blake Fitzpatrick, have mounted a small but telling exhibition at the Goethe-Institut in Toronto, as part of its recent Toronto Meets Berlin cultural festival. They have photographed both [slabs and full top-to-bottom sections of the wall still bearing their original graffiti]. In their big black and white photographs of isolated Wall fragments, arranged in the lobby of the Goethe-Institut, the individual hunks, now presented with a kind of museological reverence, look like moon rocks or fossils.
Echo Germanica,
October 2004, No. 10, SFR Happenings
The German Festival is in full swing [with] an all night techno rave [that] saw thousands moving rhythmically through the night, [… and] Beethoven’s Violin Concerto after an elegant reception in the fabulous lobby of Roy Thomson Hall, Toronto. [… Moreover] The Goethe Institute is having a fabulous series of film presentations […] and there are various art galleries showing Berlin related art.
