Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

280 Chapter 10 Global Theatre Today
The Synetic Theater in Arlington, Virginia’s 2014 production of Hamlet. . . The Rest Is Silence is, like all of their
productions, wordless. Directed by the company leader, Paata Tsikurishvili, it is a combination of music, mime, and
movement, the latter created by choreographer Irina Kavsdze, who is also featured in this production as Ophelia,
shown here surrounded by the ensemble. © Koko Lanham
garbage can lids, pipes, brooms, and other everyday
objects for its drumming; its rhythms are furious,
its choreography is explosive, and its intensity is
relentless—and often comic.
Blue Man Group, which followed, is a similarly
plotless, percussive performance that also employs
riotous clowning, interaction with the audience, and
food fights; it is performed by three head-shaved
actors covered from the neck up in glossy blue goop.
The group was created in New York City by former
school pals Chris Wink, Matt Goldman, and Phil
Stanton, who opened their first show, Tubes, at the tiny
off-Broadway Astor Place Theatre in 1991. They (and
their professional heirs) are now a near-permanent fixture
in New York, Boston, Chicago, Berlin, Orlando,
and Las Vegas, and they may also be seen on tour in
more than fifty American cities each year and on board
the Norwegian Cruise Line.
One form of physical theatre, dance-drama, uses a
mixture of speech and dramatic choreography to create
a dance-centered theatre event—or, depending on
how you look at it, a very theatrical form of dance.
Dance-theatre was popularized in Germany by the
late Pina Bausch, whose Tanztheater Wuppertal company
created playful and harrowing dances that flirted
with a plot without ever resolving into a clear sense
of story. In America, dance-theatre gained prominence
through the work of Martha Clarke, a veteran
of the Pilobolus dance troupe. Clarke first received
wide acclaim for her dance-theatre pieces in the late
1980s, particularly The Garden of Earthly Delights,
based on the famous painting by Hieronymus Bosch.
She refashioned and revived this production to wide
acclaim in 2008–2009. Her major works in the current
century include Vienna: Lusthaus, which evoked
the artistic and sexual ferment of Vienna at the time