Playbill: While much of Playbill’s editorial focus is on Broadway and London’s West End, we always have an eye turned toward further shores! As spring break season and summer vacation looms, why not make a point of supporting an international theatre company as a part of your appreciation for the culture you travel to?
4 comments:
I am so happy that I am seeing more international theatre representation on the blog feed and in the articles that are going out. I like how the article organized itself by continent. I would find it so hard just to choose one from each continent out of all the theatres outside America. I particularly enjoyed reading about the theatre from Australia, Ilbijerri. I found it very inspiring how the group highlights aboriginal stories using “non-traditional” performances. I also love how they produce projects on current times and impactful subjects. Another thing I learned from this article was how much of a hub Buenos Aires, Argentina, is. I have heard of Buenos Aires’s nightlife and general thriving scene, so it was fascinating to read about how theatre largely contributes to this. I was also happy to see that one of the theatres was a Broadway-esque theatre that's not the West End. I think it's important for people to have access to fun, big-budget theatres with stories in their language.
I really love traveling with my family so I was interested to read this article about different theaters around the world. Whenever I go to a new place, I love to check out the performing arts in the area. For example, when I was in Spain this summer, me and my family and friends went to see a Flamenco show, because this dance style is native to Spain. I loved exposing myself to a new type of theatre I have never seen before in person. When we went to Italy 3 summers ago, my mother and I went to see an opera. I believe we saw La Traviata. It was really different from the operas I had seen in the United States so it expanded my understanding of what opera is and what it could be. I think that Terra Kulture in Nigeria seems so cool. I’m really interested in their production design. The costumes and VMD seem really different from Western Theatre so I’m curious to know what the design process is like.
I love how Playbill is beginning to highlight international theatre. The art of theatre, no matter how extravagant and commercial it may be is ultimately rooted in storytelling. Non-verbal folklore, dance, puppet shows, and more are all rooted back in theatre. I’m not only interested in the glitz of theatre design but also performance art as a whole and the research that exists behind performance art in other cultures. As my current time is quite limited, I hope to delve into performance art studies more so over the summer. I agree with this article that seeing theatre when traveling is one of the best ways to learn about a culture. While this article did highlight the more commercial ventures in every country, I think some of the best education comes from seeing hole-in-the-wall local work. While I’m not staying in a big enough city during my upcoming trip to Costa Rica to see theater, I still plan on engaging in local art, rituals, and music to develop a sense of the culture of the country.
This article was very interesting and I highly enjoyed reading it. One thing that I feel that I lack in as a theatre consumer is my lack of knowledge of global theatre and how it interacts and shapes the cultures that it images out from. I very much am glad that I read this article because now I feel like I have a better understanding of a small section of global theatre and I would love to learn more about all of these. I would love to visit all of these theatres as well as many others in my life in order to learn more, better educate myself, and become a better theatre maker because of it. Overall, I really liked this article and really am so glad that I read it and now I have more places and theatres that I hope to visit eventually if I have the opportunity to.
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