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Mr mills Does A Festival - EIF 2007

Investing ancient myths with 21st century hipness and treating modern idioms with old world respect gave pretty much everything in Jonathan Mills’ inaugural EIF theatre programme an audacious kick that suggested both a continuation of Brian McMaster’s own provocations and a statement of individual intent. The fact too that most productions’ mixing and matching of art-forms could have placed each show under pretty much any heading in the programme points to a forward-looking future where genres blur in a manner in which younger audiences weaned on pop culture have long been savvy to.

In this respect, the drama programme remains as iconoclastic as McMaster’s, but more resembles the sort of things the Holland Festival schedules. A melding of contemporary, Classical and ancient music of one form or another being integrated into all seven productions is crucial to such a shift.

So where John Tiffany’s National Theatre Of Scotland production of The Bacchae looked to a mix of old school Harlem Revue and Broadway bounce by having Dionysus’ Bacchae a ten-strong black female gospel choir, Barry Kosky mixed Monteverdi with Cole Porter for his Vienna Schauspielhaus version of Poppea. And where Benjamin Bagby’s solo Old English rendition of Beowulf may have been hard going, Theatre Cryptic’s collaboration with Singapore’s T’Ang Quartet preferred four thoroughly modern compositions to make its point.

Objections to The Bacchae pointed to the choir’s allegedly anaemic turn, suggesting that the score was merely a watered-down white idea of black music. Elvis Presley, The Rolling Stones, Prince and Madonna once received similar accusations. Tiffany’s showbiz styled number on The Bacchae actually harks back to the EIF of the 1960s and 1970s, when celebrity turns such as Alan Cumming’s in classic plays were a regular and often equally scurrilous occurrence.

In programming both The Wooster Group and Mabou Mines, Mills re-introduced two pioneering companies of the post 1960s American avant-garde. The Wooster Group’s La Didone, a blitz of opera and trash culture sci-fi flicks, was as laugh out loud hilarious as was Lee Breuer’s deconstruction of Ibsen, Mabou Mines Dollhouse. Set against Robert Woodruff American Repertory Theatre production of Rinder Eckert’s Orpheus X, which saw a rock star recluse attempt to rescue an underground poet, all three productions splintered expectations of how the canon should be portrayed with an often gleeful abandon more akin to the worlds of contemporary dance and conceptual art.

While fully in tune with its past, after this year’s classical gas, the future of EIF, it seems, is already with us, and looks set to make a whole lot more noise yet.

The Herald, September 1st 2007

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