Papa’s Time Machine

PAPA’S TIME MACHINE is a highly poetic, inspiring and unconventional play that ingeniously integrates puppet show, life performance with contemporary installation art, video art and live music. The story is based on the interaction between the artist and his father and made possible through the artist’s dedication, determination, wild imagination and splendid collaboration from artists from Hungary and Germany. It took the whole team two years to make over 1,000 components and parts for the life-size puppets. Each adventurous time journey in the play marked a chance to re-experience life and memory, bringing audience with novel visual experience and reminding them of the touching stories between them and their own parents.

April 21-May 1, 2017 Lyric Theater, Beijing Tianqiao Performing Arts Center

White Deer Plain, Beijing People’s Art Theatre

This is a drama played by Beijing People’s Art Theatre, which is a magnificent epic of Wei River Plain’s changes for 50 years and a long scroll picture about gorgeous, colorful, shocking stories in the northern Chinese countryside. A family of two generations of descendants, in order to battle for the rule of White Deer Plain, played scenes of thrilling and sad plots for generations and generations. Taking the treasured site wisely, setting evil honey-traps, dutiful son becoming bandits, father-in-law killing the daughter-in-law, brothers fighting with each other, lovers hating each other…White Deer Plain experienced all the ups and downs of the Great Revolution, the Japanese invaders, and three years of civil war. With ruler’s replacement, national enmity and family hatred, there was full of staggered and tangled relations, and revenge. The ancient land was trembling in the pain of new birth.

Beijing People’s Art Theatre invited MENG Bing, the famous playwright of The Chinese people's liberation army general political department of drama group to adapt this masterpiece, and will show many historical events across half a century to the audience through the stage, with a heavy sense of history and a strong shock.

April 28-May 13, 2017 The Capital Theatre

To Kill A Mockingbird, University of Montana

By Christopher Sergel Based on the novel by Harper lee

FROM NOVEL TO STAGE

Harper Lee’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960, was brought to the screen in an Academy Award-winning adaptation by Horton Foote in 1962 and was later adapted for the stage by Christopher Sergel. Though over 35 years old, this stage adaptation continues to compel and delight viewers worldwide with its warmth, wit, and wisdom.

Audiences find themselves transported to a sleepy Southern town in the 1930s and discover that the issues of that time––prejudice, racism, and human values––are issues of all time.

THE CHINA TOUR PROPOSAL

Montana Repertory Theatre is pleased to propose a 2017 spring/summer tour to China of our nationally renowned production of To Kill a Mockingbird.

We propose four consecutive one-week residencies, traveling to four arts festivals and/or universities to present the play Friday through Sunday. The residencies would include four performances of To Kill a Mockingbird and workshops on American theatre taught by members of the cast. Actors/teachers would be students or graduates of the training program at the University of Montana.

Montana Repertory Theatre and the College of Visual and Performing Arts are excited about this remarkable opportunity to bring an American classic—considered by many to be the most important American novel of the twentieth century—to China. This cultural exchange could be the first of many whereby theatre artists from both countries are encouraged to interact through the University of Montana, The Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center, and various cultural entities in China.

May 18, 2017 Mong Man Wai Concert Hall, Tsinghua University

May 23, 2017 Beijing No.4 High School

The Mother, The State Small Theatre of Vilnius (VMT)

On March 2, 1990, The State Small Theatre of Vilnius was established. In the new home, in the very heart of Vilnius, Gediminas avenue 22, the State Small Theatre of Vilnius finally settled in autumn of 2005. The history of the State Small Theatre of Vilnius is firstly the theatre vision history of director Rimas Tuminas. The performances directed by Rimas Tuminas, such as “The Cherry Orchard”, “Smile upon us, Lord” (1994), “Masquerade” (1997), “Inspector” (2001) and others visited a number of countries – from Sweden to Italy, from South Korea to Mexico – and won numerous prestigious awards and became the theatre’s visiting card.

The current theatre repertory consists of the works by Rimas Tuminas as well as performances created by young directors and acknowledged Lithuanian and foreign directors.

THE MOTHER (VASSA ZHELEZNOVA)

A play in two acts

Director: Kiril Glusajev

Today’s interest in Gorky’s work lies in those voluminous decisions that can be found in the conflicts he created between materiality and spirituality, between sociability and individuality. This is presented notably in his play The Mother, which we may see as a very Lithuanian story, but at the same time it is fully recognisable in every society as a situation where one’s own flesh and blood might try to harm each other for a legacy. Here, the spotlight falls on the person of Vassa Zheleznova. First of all, she is a mother, who has been saving money for her children for 20 years, but now it is clear that the children are damaged and misguided. Unfortunately, while she was building up their future, Vassa didn’t think of looking after the present. A family as a unit is much more sensitive than society. No matter what that family looks like … I am much more interested in theatre when we are talking about a conflict

between humans as individuals, rather than between different social strata, ideologies or sports teams. In this case, we are talking about a conflict between members of one’s own flesh and blood.

May 20-21, 2017 Mengminwei Concert Hall, Tsinghua University

Dreams of Sand, Ytuquepintas Company

We’re used to see art as something that will last forever, like a work that stays alive after the death of the artist. But art can also be short-lived, art can be for just a moment, without having to transform itself into something lasting... at least, not in the physical world! That’s the magic of dreams of sand

In “Dreams of Sand”, Borja González tells us, with only a little bit of sand and his hands, the story of two people throughout their lives, from the dreams that start building up during their childhood, through the experiences of their adult life, up to the point of view acquired by the experiences lived and allowing a retrospective look.

Drawing after drawing, the story carries the spectator to moments filled with emotions, takes him on a journey to different places of the world and, subtly, brings him to think in a poetical way about his own feelings, life experiences and memories.

The show is ideally accompanied by sensitive and beautiful live music, all of which is composed by Roc Sala (Piano) joined in the interpretation by Francesc Pugès (Cello, double bass, musical saw) and Alexandre Guitart (Percussions, baglama, rubab).

May 20-21, 2017 TNT Theatre, 9 theatre, Chaoyang District Culture Center

May 22, 2017 Sunrise Concert Hall, Beihang University