Guest Blog: Festival Artists

Caravan of Thieves

Caravan of Thieves - Gypsy Swinging Serenading Circus Freaks! Us musicians here in Caravan of Thieves do quite a few shows across North America and what inspires us to keep working at this is the opportunity to play our music and have unique performance experiences when we can. Our involvement in Chautauqua! and in Arts and Ideas Festival is just that. When we received the call about doing Chautauqua! and heard we would need to arrange music to fit the story, be involved directly in a theatrical production and just use some of our style and flair that goes into...

Moby Dick is a huge novel.  A masterpiece of literature with a gripping plot, a cast of amazing characters, a mythic monster, themes of life, death, vengeance, industry and the questioning of an interventionist god.  A road movie on a ship with an obsessive sea captain, a noble pagan, a pious first mate and a young adventurer and supporting characters that include a drunken landlord, a ragged docklands prophet, a happy-go-lucky second mate, a pugnacious third-mate and about twenty five other motley crewmen.  All against the backdrop of a whaling voyage across three oceans and as round an...

I’m so looking forward to being back in New Haven. I travel all around the world with this work and meet all sorts of different venues and festivals and International Festival of Arts and Ideas is one of the best. It’s such a unique structure for a festival with genuinely stimulating intellectual ideas at the centre of the whole thing. I’m so envious that we don’t have a festival like that in the city where I live!

My research trip to Edgerton Park last year was a mesmerising time. It was in the middle of autumn which meant that the colours were glorious. Susurrus is all about looking at...

In 2007, Fishamble: The New Play Company premiered Sebastian Barry's play The Pride of Parnell Street in Dublin, and Cathy Edwards and Mary Lou Aleskie invited the production to the International Festival of Arts & Ideas. It made its US premiere during the Festival in 2008 and I have wonderfully warm memories of the reception it received there and the audiences enjoying learning Irish slang words like 'gouger' and 'skanky skanger' - we seem to have a wide range of insulting terms in Ireland! The production was then invited by Elysabeth Kleinhans and Peter Tear to 59E59 Theaters in New York...

by Kate McEvoy
Festival Participant

Circus! What a piece with which to strike the first note of the festival.  Go see it!  The University Theater transformed by something like may pole streamers flowing from the ceiling to suggest a traveling tent.  A ring painted with images that suggest those of a child’s nursery in yesteryear.  Counterpoint clowns who subtly draw children in by tossing out a ball to be batted back and forth.  A quietly hilarious scene in which a lion tamer’s charge, who is clad in a ruff and saggy pants long-johns, rebels against jumping through a hoop and quits in a huff...

Where History Has Been Written: the Budapest Katona József Theatre
Anna Lengyel

             After the suppressed revolution of 1956, Hungarian cultural politics realized the necessity of allowing a few tiny leaks in an otherwise densely woven web of censorship. One such example was the predecessor of Katona József Theatre, which later became its most-devoted ally: the provincial Kaposvár Theatre, where a young theatremaker named Gábor Zsámbéki was made artistic and managing director (two functions usually filled by the same person in most Hungarian theatres until recently) and where a still...

It is interesting to think back to when I gave the lecture last June. I remember being very nervous before hand, but pleased afterwards as it seemed to go down quite well. Presenting 'Siren' in New Haven was great in itself, but it has also made doing other shows in the US more achievable, including at the Here Arts Centre in New York as part of Under the Radar and in Minneapolis and Columbus in February. Hopefully we will have some more opportunities to present Siren in the US over the coming year.

I remember asking myself whether audiences would be willing to sit and concentrate through 90 minutes of nonstop music. Originally I thought it better to separate the pieces by saying a few words about the connection I see in the multi cultural tapestry I wanted to present. But it felt somewhat contrived: I did not want to explain in words how each piece is related to all the others: I wanted the work to "explain itself ".

I never believed that music should be solipsistic: I knew early on in my career that I am taking a risk by insisting on always presenting new music. In most of my...