Willem Dafoe invites new and old friends to the Theaterbiennale in Venice
The actor Willem Dafoe is the new artistic leader of the Biennale theater in Venice, who runs until 15 June. For his very first program, he has invited old and new friends, which he has collaborated in one way or another or has followed over the years. This year’s festival audience therefore receives an excellent mix of performing arts from both the US and Europe.
“Theater is Body – Body is Poetry”Willem Dafoe has put a head on the program for Biennale Theatro Venezia this year. In this way he wants to pay attention to the physical theater tradition that he comes out himself, he says while we meet halfway through the festival:
– The presence and intelligence of the body are a unique aspect of the performing arts that I think is absolutely central, says Willem Dafoe. And by poetry I do not mean completely literally, but in the sense that are not prosaic, not normal – things that have no easy explanation.
He has a love for theater that challenges his audience and surprises in one, as he says, a healthy and pleasant way.
– I am interested in theater that wonder. As you see, you make you think “What is this?!”
It’s not Difficult to see the message in his program. The festival was opened with a visit from the famous Avant -Garden group The Wooster Group from New York, where Willem Dafoe was connected and founded for 27 years. The guest game “Symphony of rats”with text by legend Richard Foreman (1937-2025), is a new set under the auspices of the current artistic leader of the group Elizabeth Lecompe – which was also in Venice to receive the best price of the Biennale de Gold Lion for theater.
The Zilveren Leeuw has been assigned to the Swiss actor Ursina LardiAs a guest playing this weekend with Milo Raus The new set of “Die Sherin”. It is a co -production with Schaubühne Berlin, who has also placed his premiere Yana Eva Thönnes “Call Me Paris” in Venice, a story about Paris Hilton And her double matching. They also played Thomas Ostermeiers set of Maja Zades Curry interesting relationship drama “changes”.
To the small island Isola del Lazzaretto Vecchio next to Lido, for which a hospital was infected by plague on 1403-1603, the audience can ride on a specially chartered boat to get into total darkness. Here, in the rough patinated brick building, the Italian director phase Romeo CastellucciThat is another one from Dafo’s invited friends, a kind of walking theater installation entitled “In Mangium di Patate” (“Potato Eaters”). Carefully cool through the dark rooms that we meet there through scenes that are loosely associated with famine, work and mystery. Bodies in corpse bags roll around, a mechanical robot arm carries out a fluorescent lamp, as well as a group of dirty, choreographed miners who emphasize a naked woman from a corpse. They nourish her spoken with something that looks like blood before they provide her with a kind of mechanical beak, so she becomes “to live” And starts talking with a chestnut matt, throw robot -like voice.
A highlight At the festival is of course the premiere of the performance “No title – an experiment”where Willem Dafoe himself is together with the Italian actor Simonetta solder In four exclusive versions for a very fragmentary text, also by Richard Foreman. The replicas are written in the form of more or less awkward, acquaintances, not to say banal, one -liners on playing cards, who read the two players during the 45 minutes short but intensely interesting performance. The duo is at a table, surrounded as a sea of ground glass. Dafoe is initially in a wheelchair, but to the tones of winding Bossanova they change place between each scene, which are divided into frequencies of 10 minutes. The last round happens completely in Italian, which gives the loose, random sentences – in which you have almost found a pattern – a completely different key.
– Richard Foreman was not a traditional playwright, he wrote down his script, but with a very fragmented language, says Willem Dafoe when I meet him two days after the premiere.
– He was able to fully distribute replicas to the actors and this experiment was something I actually did with him before he died. We have recorded it and you also hear a piece of that recording at the start of the performance.
-So it was just a tribute to Foreman to repeat this experiment here in Venice and to explore his non-traditional way to play with the language.
They started throwing things on stage and shouted: “Go back to Disneyland!”
Willem Dafoe Become 70 years on July 22 and has an impressive 50-year career on stage and film in the back, formed as an actor during the experimental avant-garde era of New York. It was a completely different theater tradition, which they also clearly broke. Among other things, by introducing technology in the stage that was previously undesirable. The Wooster Group survived, as Dafoe formulates it, by touring extensively, and was often in Europe and Games.
-I remember a guest game in Zurich when we had a TV monitor on stage for a short prologue, making the audience crazy. They started throwing things on stage and screamed “Go back to Disneyland!”. At that time, technology was not at all welcome in the theater.
Nowadays all forms of technology and multimedia are eating daily in the theater. The time in which we live is also completely different. I ask Willem Dafoe how he looks at the possibilities for theater art, and a festival such as the Venice Biennale, to respond and make a difference in this turbulent, challenging time.
– One of the beautiful things with theater is the opportunity to create direct communities. When politics fails, the art can sometimes be the place where you can solve discourse and the problems. The theater also offers the opportunity to return to something authentic, here we can see the chance where we are and how we ended up here. It is a way to imagine a better life, so the theater is really important in these difficult times.
– With the rapid technological development and our changed social customs, the theater has the chance to give us something that we have lost – namely intimacy, community and human contact. Not to sound like an old Surbber, but you know, you go to the city and people don’t even look at each other anymore. They don’t flirt, they don’t look at each other, but they walk around in their own little bubbles and are completely flooded by their phones. So theater is a great way to meet each other, and “gets dirty again,” says Willem Dafoe laughing.
I love the idea that if I have to add the program to this festival, I also have to go on the floor myself, with the boots on
And talking about each other, there are good opportunities again to see Willem Dafoe in the theater scene again, he reveals.
– Yes, I hope so! I am always looking for interesting things to do and now I have had the privilege of being overwhelmed by interesting film work, but I would like to play more theater.
Of course he gets quite a few suggestions, but few those contexts offer where he can get the chance to do something original and innovative. He is not at all interested in the concept “Well -known game known from Film”is only for commercial bulletproof. But he already has some ideas about lying against next year’s festival.
– I can’t promise anything specific yet, but yes, I definitely want to be on stage here next year in Venice. I love the idea that if I have to add the program to this festival, I also have to go on the floor myself, with the boots on. In you also want to get dirty, haha.
But for that he will not only get this year’s festival in the harbor this year, but can also celebrate his 70th birthday.
– I will work and be on a mountain, so it will be a bit special. But I don’t try to think much about it. Of course, 70 is a special figure, but then, birthdays … every day are the same, says Willem Dafoe.
Subscribe to the newsletter about Performing Arts: Premiere Lion &
Stage path
Listen to the interview of Cecilia Djurberg with Willem Dafoe in English:
With Willem Dafoe in Venice
15:08
