dieter deschidere

BABEL international theatre festival from Tony Bulandra Theatre, Targoviste, has opened its door for the 6th edition. Having had the first BABEL experience last year, it is my pleasure to be back to watch all performances and report about them. Under the special aspect of cultural tourism it is worth to inform people in Western Europe, esp. in German speaking countries about this extraordonairy annual event that takes place in „Count Dracula’s” former capital of Walachia.
Only some km away from Bucharest, It’s great to meet theatre people from all over the world, to discuss with local and international audience, to visit workshops and book launches beeing informed about the latest news from Romanian theatre enviroment …

BABEL’s 2016 heading is BODY … so I am looking foreward to the shows.
dieter3

Saturday night there had already been staged a wonderful play after Shakespeare, ROMEO JULIET, directed by Orina Niculescu from the US It is quite unusual to open an international theatre festival with puppets. The more I was surprised how puppetiers and their 70cm protagonists took the audience. Some children started to interact. At the end of the tragedy there had been standing ovations … Regarding the puppets it was a show about Romeo and Juliet in their 30ies, and they did it again. Love stories always repeat themselves during the times, and the audience fell in love with both the actors and the puppets.

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Last night has been very special. I am still touched by BAO PRETO, a monodrama after Bernardo Soares and Fernando Pessoa by theatre community Pesquisa, Lisbon, Portugal, directed by 75 years young Joao Mota.
A clown found a child in the middle of a war attack in some ruins. He saved the baby (consisting of some old blankets). The child was satisfied by the clown who struggled to give anything to the child. And of course he sang lullabies, he developed them and animated the audience to deal with him.
There had been very touching moments, when the lullabies turned into some magic spells that helped to forget the war. The clown did anything to entertain the baby, to keep the spectators away from cruel reality of war. He repelled the bullets, but in the end they killed him. What a tragedy for the baby and for us all after these efforts with whole body and all soul usage.
But sometimes magic spells can turn bad situations into good ones. So we all started to sing. Magic spells and hope and strong wish and willpower brought back to life the clown.
A touching performance by a clown with no name accompanied by a musician who did the the sound, too. The performance has been an hommage to the famous Russian clown and pantomime Oleg Popov, who retired in 2011. In 2015, Popov returned for the first time to Russia after 28 years of self-imposed exile in Germany.
The „Sunshine Clown” Popov had also a very emotional comeback on the 2016 stage of BABEL by a great „sunshine actor” from Portugal.

After intensive research the names of the CLOWN WITH NO NAME was discovered : it’s the sympathetic actor Miguel Sermao who conquered the hearts of the audience and his compagnon beside the stage Hugo Franco (all live music and sounds…)

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