Bridge Project – An International Art Initiative
Bridge Project is a global network of institutions, professionals and students. Through international workshops and other art-producing events, Bridge Project explores various ways and means of communication capable of generating creative cultural exchanges that often go beyond the boundaries of one country.
Richard Foreman and Sophie Haviland have taken Bridge Project around the world to work with professional artists and students with various professional experiences. During the workshop, participants create raw film material – “seed material” used in making new works of art.
Richard Foreman was born in 1937 in New York. He is a prominent author and stage director whose plays are appreciated all over the world. He received several OBIE awards for Best Play of the Year, for stage direction, and for “sustained achievement”. He also received the annual Literature award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Lifetime Achievement in the Theater award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN Club Master American Dramatist Award, and in 2004 he was elected officer of the Order of Arts and Letters in France. Seven collections of his plays have already been published, and books studying his work have been published in New York, Paris, Berlin, and Tokyo.
Foreman’s plays have been co-produced by such organizations as The New York Shakespeare Festival, La Mama, The Wooster Group, the Autumn Festival in Paris and the Vienna Festival. He collaborated (as librettist and stage director) with composer Stanley Silverman on 8 music theater pieces produced by The Music Theater Group & The New York City Opera. He wrote and directed the feature film Strong Medicine.
In 1968 he founded Ontological-Hysteric Theater “with the aim of stripping the theater bare of everything but the singular and essential impulse to stage the static tension of interpersonal relations in space. The OHT seeks to produce works that balance a primitive and minimal style with extremely complex and theatrical themes. The core of the company’s annual programming is Richard Foreman's theater pieces, of which he has made over 50 in the last 40 years.”
“Foreman’s trademark ‘total theater’ unites elements of the performative, auditory and visual arts, philosophy, psychoanalysis and literature for a unique result. Foreman’s style is not meant to be ‘cerebral’, but rather, the density of his compositional theater is an attempt to viscerally reflect and process everything that he has inherited from his explorations in twentieth-century thought and art.”
Play duration: between 27th of October and 10th of November
