Theatre
LACRIMOSA
Firewalk with me
The hit of the 2004 season at Aurora Nova was Chroma/es: A Lame/matron. Perforrried hy Poland's Teatr Piesr‘. Ko/la lSong of the Goat Theatre; it was one of those rare performances you wanted to watch again the moment it had finished. Staged With perfect control by seven actors who were as gifted Ill movement skills as they were in vocal ability, it was an evocation of ancient Greek polyphonic Singing coupled wrth powerful phy8ical dance.
Now the Wroclaw company is back wrth an even more intense show inspired by events in the French town of Arras in 1.185 when plague was followed by a VICIOUS wrtch hunt. ‘ln style Lacr/mosa is very similar. but the way we put it together is different says director Grzegor/ Bial. 'The performance speaks about intolerance. Violence and cruelty. so we were looking for a posses5ion cult which we found in the ancient cult of firewalkers in Greece.‘ (Mark Fisher) I Assemb/v Aurora Nova. (523 3030, Sat d—Mon 27 Aug (not 7. 73, 74, 20. 21). 2.20pm, {724773 (CQ—EIO). Prevrews 3 8 4 Aug, [5.
NIGHT TIME
Noir thriller
When you think back. you might feel regret for some of the chOices you made in your life. Careers are one thing, but choices made about love are perhaps e» en more Significant. ‘You spend a long time thinking about making a d8ClSlOH, a yen shon time putting into in to practice and a long time suffering the consequences." says director Lorne Campbell.
It's an idea that's intrinsic to Selma Dimitrijevic's new play ‘lt's abOut a woman stepping away from her home. her husband, her life and into the arms
Telephone Booking Fringe 0131 226 0000 International Festival 0131 473 2000
Film Festival 0131 623 8030 Book Festival 0845 373 5888 Art Festival 0777 169 3470
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TRUTH IN TRANSLATION
Stories told under African skies
‘They were given this one mandate: do not become involved,’ says Lessac, ‘but of course, to translate accurately, they had to speak in the first person: “I did this"; “I tortured this person"; “This happened to me". In order to be able to truly interpret somebody else's experience, you gotta be able to feel that person, and the victims and perpetrators of that violence began to flow through the translators. It was a horrific experience for them, but those translators became like a conduit for their country’s story.‘
The process is being replicated as Lessac’s actors, all of them South Africans of a similar age, take on the stories themselves in performance. ‘The new South African constitution pivots on the concept of ubuntu, which means more or less ‘I am because we all are’, and I think that’s what’s happening in Truth in Translation as we tell those stories, and tell them again,‘ he says. ‘If I tell my story to you and you tell yours to me, and we understand, then we make it impossible to dehumanise each other.’ (Kirstin lnnes)
South African television is polyglottic. Characters in ‘soapies', puppets on Sesame Street and even newsreaders skip fluently between the country's eleven official languages, sometimes in the middle of sentences. To an outsider the effect is jarring, but for South Africans it’s necessary; an assertion of their very complex post-apartheid nationhood.
In 1996, the African National Congress set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, founded on the principles of absolute honesty and absolute culpability. Anyone could come and seek justice for atrocities committed under apartheid; anyone could plead for amnesty as long as they made a full confession of their actions; and everyone in the country had to be able to understand what they said. Truth in Translation, 3 major new verbatim play devised and directed by Hollywood ex-pat Michael Lessac with music by South African composer Hugh Masekela, has been sculpted from the
stories of the TRC’s translators; young language I . . Hr: ’ '32“; ’5 3’ .: 737/2 graduates, often in their first jobs, who were hired to "7' g”, gr. " :’ ' ' :’ ‘ ’:—-:’ ' interpret every account into each of the 11 languages. De. . g 2. ': A -"
84 THE LIST FESTIVAL MAGAZINE 2—9 Aug 2007