Wings of Desire Program - American Repertory Theater

Wings across the WaterThe performance that you’re about to see will last just over an hour and forty minutes.It took more than two years to produce. Gideon Lester, the A.R.T.’s Associate ArtisticDirector, reveals some of the challenges involved in bringing this Dutch/American coproductionof Wings of Desire to the stage.It’s always a complicated business to put on a show. Whatever the scale of the theatreor the nature of the play, creating a production is a time-consuming, labor-intensiveprocess involving many levels of collaboration between a host of artists, technicians,and administrators. When the show is an international co-production, and thescript is a new adaptation of a poetic screenplay, the task becomes gargantuan.For the A.R.T. and for our partners at Toneelgroep Amsterdam, the challengesinvolved in producing Wings of Desire were exactly the point of the project. How wouldit be possible, we wanted to know, for two theatres working in different cultures and languages,with entirely different artistic and administrative systems, to come together tomake a truly international production? What challenges would we need to solve in orderto create this unique theatrical event, one thatcouldn’t be made in the Netherlands or theUnited States alone? Wings of Desire is astory of barriers crossed and differences overcome,so the material and the endeavorseemed well suited – indeed at times the journeywe confronted felt every bit as epic asDamiel’s.In The Five Obstructions, the provocativeand inspiring documentary that he made withhis mentor Jørgen Leth, the Danish filmmakerLars von Trier argues that to conquer apparentlyinsurmountable obstacles is an essentialpart of the creative process. Confronting challengesrequires artists and their support teamsto become highly inventive, and can lead tothe best kind of collaboration. In the fall of2004, when we began discussing Wings ofDesire with the director Ola Mafaalani, weknew that the road ahead would be litteredwith challenges and obstacles. Many of themAn early rehearsal in Amsterdam were unknown to us, but they were the reasonto take the journey.The first challenge we faced was building a budget for the production. ToneelgroepAmsterdam and the A.R.T. operate under very different financial conditions; as is thecase with many large European theatres, more than 70% of T.A.’s is covered by statesubsidy, while in the United States substantial government funding for the arts is a thingof the past. For that and many other reasons we construct our budgets in profoundly