Arnon Grunberg

Feelings

Surprise

On theater, Rau and beauty (or épater les bourgeois):

'Mr. Rau’s taboo-challenging productions over the last decade led one publication to call him “the world’s most controversial director.” Born in Bern, Switzerland, he broke out in 2009 with “The Last Days of the Ceausescus,” about the trial and execution of Romania’s Communist leader and his wife; he was sued afterward by Ceausescu’s son for using the family name.

In 2015, he attracted attention for a project that included the staging of a mock criminal court in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to ask if the mining industry was complicit in massacres there. Two Congolese politicians were sacked shortly afterward.

He drew more headlines in 2016 with “Five Easy Pieces,” about Marc Dutroux, a notorious Belgian pedophile and murderer, in which the actors were children.'

Read the article by Alex Marshall in NYT here.

And here's Lyn Gardner in The Guardian:

'Five Easy Pieces reflects those feelings, and it’s no surprise that it has been co-commissioned (with Ghent company Campo) by one of the UK’s most provocative and challenging festivals, the Sick! festival, which this year has an impressive roster of shows probing the nature of identity and what it means to belong in a conflicted world. Rau’s piece explores how we construct personal identity at times of national trauma, and to do so it uses the same sort of format as Five Easy Pieces, written by Stravinsky as a piano primer for his children.'

Read the article here.

I have two tickets for Five Easy Pieces on Saturday night in NYC, if you want to see Five Easy Pieces, write me a short mail (info@arnongrunberg.com), not more than 200 words, explain why you want to see Five Easy Pieces or preferably why it is of the utmost importance to you to see this piece. Poems might be be accepted as well.

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