From Easter to Midsummer’s night, Budapest and Hungary will become a celebratory meeting point for theatrical world as 400 companies from 58 countries converge to perform in the 10th International Theatre Olympics. Originally taking place in Greece in 1995, the event is theatrical gathering in the spirit of tradition, modernity, and the ancient Olympics. This year, companies from as far as Mexico and Japan will journey to the nation’s capital and venues around Hungary. With theatre, street theatre, dance, puppetry exhibitions and alternative arts, summer in Hungary will be packed with performance of all styles, shapes and sizes. The festival opening ceremony will take place on 15th April with street performances and concerts all over Budapest (further details TBA).
A moment, a journey, an encounter have the potential to drastically shape the course of our lives, and in the case of National Geographic photographer Loren McIntyre, it would be an encounter with the people of the remote Javari Valley in Brazil in 1969 that would change his.
This may not have been a brief encounter, but it was brilliant! According to Simon McBurney, the Amazon rainforest has no regard for western time frames, and neither, apparently, does he. The Encounter took several years to write, or rather, to create, and the result relies almost entirely on sound. Each seat in the Old Vic’s main theatre is fitted with a set of headphones that feeds McBurney’s voice into our ears. The textured foam backdrop that stretches up to the ceiling not only provides a dry environment for the sound, but also allows for the clever light design to reflect both the weather, and the protagonist’s ever worsening mind set.
Lion Boy is an adaption of the eponymously titled hit series of novels by Zizou Corder, alias of authors Louisa Young and her daughter Isabel Adomakoh Young. Playwright Marcelo Dos Santos has revived the original 2013 production, strengthening and refining the storytelling to recreate the vivid and whimsical world of the books at The Tricycle Theatre.
