THREE PLAYS
An Outpost of Progress, Mayakovsky, and A Hunger Artist
FOUNDER & DIRECTOR | William Kentridge
CO-FOUNDER & DIRECTOR FOR THE CENTRE | Bronwyn Lace
ORIGINAL TEXTS | Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Franz Kafka
Presented at Broadway Theatre Center in partnership with the Warehouse Art Museum | WAM, Milwaukee Chamber Theatre, and the Centre for the Less Good Idea.
AN OUTPOST OF PROGRESS
A playful interrogation of Joseph Conrad’s short story An Outpost of Progress, this is a work that merges live performance with tabletop theatre to expand on the relationship between narrator and characters, as well as the themes of power, brutality, and greed inherent in the story. It is a tale of miscommunication, betrayal, servitude, and the crumbling colonial project.
MAYAKOVSKY
Mayakovsky makes use of the illusory optics of the Pepper’s Ghost to pair the adapted text of Russian playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky’s self-titled verse drama, Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy with the drawings and animations of William Kentridge. Live performance, narration, and projected puppetry and animation converge to re-imagine the avant-garde tragedy.
A HUNGER ARTIST
A staged interpretation of the Franz Kafka short story, A Hunger Artist, the performance sees actor Michael Mazibuko reciting, with striking sincerity, the tale of Kafka’s fasting showman. Death, art, isolation, futility, and human relationships are some of the central themes of the work. Like many of Kafka’s stories, this is a tale that continues to find resonance in the contemporary world.