Cross-cultural Exchange and Cultural Mobility

This period of shared, relaxed time puts the performers in harmony with the theater, the rehearsal, and their fellow actors. It's like musicians tuning in the same room together. When I participated in this pre-rehearsal hangout, despite my initial antsiness, and not knowing what to do with this unstructured time, I found that my mind grew calmer. The flexible start was a moment of meditation before a strenuous activity: a deep breath before the dive.

Our US union regulations and laws require us to take breaks of a certain time, at a certain time. But nothing requires us to take *exactly* and *only* 5 minutes every hour or 10 minutes every 90. Why not, as an experiment, give them more? Why not make one break longer, and looser? An ongoing series of reports from rehearsal rooms and interviews with theater people in Poland; how US artists can modify or adapt Polish techniques for their own rehearsal kitchens.

Yes, some rehearsals (not all, mind you) are paid, and have to be regulated, legally, as work. But why did we decide, as US practitioners, that theater rehearsals fell so wholly into the realm of work and were so utterly unlike things such as parties or play? Why did we push rehearsals all the way to one end of the work-play spectrum? How did we become afraid of rehearsing without a stopwatch?

Artistic director and playwright Wendy MacLeod and I wondered aloud: what would happen if, right then, that playwright was placed in a remote community of writers for two weeks, at Ohio’s quiet and serenely beautiful Kenyon College? And what if that playwright could work with the commissioning theater’s literary manager as an advising voice and with all the tools at hand—actors to read, writers to hear, and, at the end, a fully staged reading? And no ticket sales. No critics.

Utilizing the theatrical convention of the Jester, Daria Wilke explores the suppresion of homeosexuality in reflection of the jester’s inner freedom.

In this installation of PROPAGANDA: A Festival Celebrating Russian Voices, Lauren Keating addresses the Russian government passing the Anti-Propaganda Bill and the responses it has garnered.

We need to spend a little time talking about the Julia Child of Polish theater—Jerzy Grotowski—before we can get on to the contemporary companies which have emerged from this figure's work, and their rehearsal practices. So—who was Jerzy Grotowski? If you've ever seen the film "My Dinner with Andre", you've heard of the experiments of this compelling, controversial, sham-or-shaman theater director.

In the middle of the National Theater Festival and National Independent Theater Festival in Bucharest, the divide between idependent theatre and state theatre—artistic freedom and money—becomes clear.

Dara Weinberg reports from rehearsal rooms and interviews with directors in Poland; how US artists can modify or adapt Polish techniques for their own kitchens.

But what interested me in that scene, besides the actual incredible fact that in a Romanian city somebody had decided to build, in 2011, a wall between “white people” and “gypsies,” was the current Romanian political discourse. And I was interested in whom I was addressing too. I realized that I was speaking, just like the current political discourse, to a middle-class of which I was a part.

This series presents perspectives on contemporary theater in Romania. It is curated by Iulia Popovici, who recently concluded a month long ArtsLink residency at HowlRound.

The fall of communism in 1989 ledway to the democratisation of art. Ioana Tamas gives the breakdown of how arts management had to be developed to make this transition successful.

Sibiu International Theatre Festival creates a dialogue from the performances of different cultures. It brings up the questions of how artists perceive and what that means within our work.

Writing about a national theater as far away from the United States as the Romanian one means, in the end, performing exoticism—playing the monkey for the zoo visitors that do expect a monkey. Because, in the end, it’s not about the theater—a specific economic and aesthetic system designed to produce and share artistic work—it’s about how a society, in this case Romanian society, is perceived at an international level.

Mitch Mattson offers an overview of the work accomplished by Voices of Now: India.

Holly L. Derr covers Radar L.A. 2013, an interdisciplinary and internationally focused theater festival in Los Angeles theater

Hannah Wolf introduces her position as an American in Romania, teaching and researching at the University of Theatre and Cinema in Bucharest.

Eleanor Regan finds during her study abroad experience that theatre that interrogates a subject actively and presents a real viewpoint gives the audience the most to chew on.