Скачать или смотреть A Midsummer Night's Dream at Water in the Desert

Here are highlights of a highly unique production of A Midsummer Night's Dream that I co-directed with Mizu Desierto for her Water in the Desert Festival. The roles of Titania, Oberon, and Puck were played with a combination of unchanged Shakespearean dialogue and movement inspired by butoh and physical comedy; the Athenian scenes featuring The Lovers and The Nobles were presented with dance only, and the scenes featuring The Mechanicals were performed in a more naturalistic dialogue-only form with original dialogue (save for the play-within-a-play, which was performed by The Mechanicals as a parody of the rest of the play). For the most part I directed the dialogue scenes and she directed the dance scenes, though there was a good deal of crossover between those roles.

We rehearsed the show for months, performed it only one time for free in the Rose Garden at Peninsula Park in Portland for a huge audience arrayed all around the edges of the garden (which is roughly one half of a square block). This is one of the shows that I'm most proud of. Mizu and I worked on a few performances together before this, but this was our only deep and extensive collaboration, and I think it's unique among both Shakespeare adaptations and deployments of the Butoh method.

I am assembling the names of the case from memory, below.

Titania: Mizu Desierto
Oberon: Noah Mickens
Puck: Jay Lieber

Bottom/Pyramus: Dan
Quince:
Flute/Thisbe: Brendan Morrill
Snout/Wall: Tony Davis
Snug/Lion: Jen Dolan
Starveling/Moon:

Hippolyta: Luciana Proano
Theseus: Amien Griffin

Lysander: Kaj-Anne Pepper
Demetrius: Birch Campbell
Hermia: Max
Helena: Danielle Smith

Philostrate: NagaSita
Egeus: Nathan HG

Cobweb: Meghann Rose
Peaseblossom: Gabriel Darling
Mustardseed: Tiger Lily
Moth: Viola Rose

Faeries: Maeve Callahan, Ogo Eion, Erik Ferguson, Arnold Schroder, et al.
Athenians: Carmella Cook, Nick the Creature, Naia Archer, et al.

Drummers: Llewyn Maire, Balam McNally

and honored guests Harupin-Ha (Koichi and Hiroko Tamano)

Live score composed and performed by Synchronicity Frequency and Adam Hurst