Roslyn Sulcas

That is probably all about to change. On Sunday, Menzies, 45, will be front and center of Netflix’s much-anticipated third season of “The Crown,” in which he takes over the role of Prince Philip from Matt Smith, who played the part for the show’s first two seasons. It isn’t Menzies’ first leading role in a popular series; he played the 20th-century academic Frank and Frank’s 17th-century alter ego, Black Jack Randall on “Outlander.” But the high-profile and worldwide distribution of “The Crown” is bound to be a game changer for Menzies, who has been lauded for his portrayal of Philip in early reviews.

“The big surprise of the new series of ‘The Crown’ is that Olivia Colman isn’t the best performer in it,” Carol Midgley wrote in The Times of London, going on to praise Menzies as superb — “in voice, mannerisms and plausibility, chuntering about being served venison twice in a week and rolling his eyes at the melodramas of Princess Margaret.”

The role had been linked to both Paul Bettany and Hugh Laurie when Menzies was cast, and he might have been seen as relatively low-profile in comparison to his co-star Colman (who won an Oscar last year for her portrayal of Queen Anne in “The Favourite”) and Matt Smith, the former “Doctor Who” star.

But Peter Morgan, the creator of “The Crown,” said in an interview that Menzies had “a real stillness, maturity and dignity” that everyone had felt was perfect for the role of Philip.

“The Tobias surprise!” Morgan said. “Personally, I don’t know how he isn’t a household figure already. He is utterly persuasive and serious in a role that is often a cartoon figure.”

Menzies, who will also play Philip in Season 4, currently in production, isn’t at all sure that he likes the idea of being properly famous. “It does feel different, and I am trying not to think about it,” he said in an interview last month at a central London hotel. “I like being invisible in my life around London.”

In person, he is friendly, reserved and circumspect, giving the impression of someone who lives intensely in the mind. “One of the things I most treasure about Tobias is that you can sit in silence with him very calmly, or have a three-hour conversation with him very calmly,” said Robert Icke, who first directed Menzies in 2015 in the Wallace Shawn one-man play, “The Fever,” which was shown in a bedroom at the Mayfair Hotel. “Sometimes he used to come over and read, and we wouldn’t speak at all.”

The director Rupert Goold, a close friend, said that Menzies had always been hardworking (“lots of actors think they are, but he actually is”) and thoughtful, drawn to the process of acting rather than to celebrity or status.

“He has always been a kind of secret weapon,” Goold said in a phone interview. “There are a lot of great male actors of his generation here in the U.K., but I would put Tobias right up there in the top group.”

For Menzies, “The Crown” comes near the end of a year full of delightfully deadpan spots in some of the buzziest shows on television. He reprised his doctor role for the final season of Amazon’s “Catastrophe,” was an awkward maybe-love interest for Aisling Bea in Hulu’s “This Way Up” and made a surprise appearance in the “Game of Thrones” finale that resulted in one of the most meme-able moments of the season. (“Uncle, please sit.”)

“The Crown” finds him offering a portrait of the prince as a middle-aged man. Season 3 runs from 1964 to 1977, when Philip was in his 40s and early 50s, and Menzies’ portrayal is built around the idea of Philip questioning his identity and sense of self.

“In some ways, it’s a continuation of themes in the first seasons: being second to his wife, sacrificing his own life and career to some extent,” he said. “But there is a further digging in to that, a sense of the road not traveled. I think we all have those thoughts.”

Menzies watched and enjoyed the first two seasons of “The Crown,” and was immediately keen when approached about the part. “Philip had struck me as an interesting and complicated person,” he said. “It seemed like an exciting, challenging role to take on.” As is usual for him, he did his homework.

“There is a lot written, a lot of footage, and it’s both intimidating and an amazing resource,” he said. “There is the technical aspect of working on the voice and physicality, which I enjoyed; those parameters can paradoxically be very creative. But it can be its own crazy rabbit hole.”

The act of living in the imagination — having “the privilege to spend time bringing other psyches to life” — is what he loves about the work, Menzies said. But he didn’t have any acting ambitions as a child or teenager.

“My big passion was tennis,” he said. “I was quite good for a bit, around 10 to 13.”

He grew up in Canterbury, where he moved with his mother and brother after his parents separated, and went to a rural Waldorf school. His mother took him to a lot of theater, he said, enumerating some shows he remembered: “Street of Crocodiles, Cheek by Jowl’s all-male ‘As You Like It,’ Rambert, a lot of contemporary dance.”

After high school, he started a performing arts course at Stratford-upon-Avon college. “It was intuitive,” he said. “I don’t really know why I went.” Initially he gravitated toward the more physical side of performance, getting accepted (“weirdly, since I had virtually no training”) into both the Laban Center for Movement and Dance (now called Trinity Laban) and the Jacques Lecoq school of mime in Paris.

Laban ultimately felt like too much of a stretch, but he wanted to go to Lecoq. “I couldn’t get the money to go,” he said, “but what I could get was a grant for drama school.” He ended up at the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.

“I suppose that’s when I got the acting bug,” he said. “It took me a while to work it out, and that I was any good at it.”

He planned to be a stage actor specializing in experimental theater. But before he had even finished drama school, he got on job on the long-running television drama “Casualty,” which gave him a crash course in working on camera. Unlike most fledgling actors, he stayed busy from then on, appearing in dozens of British shows (“MI5,” “Black Mirror,” “The Honorable Woman,” “The Night Manager”) and starring in others, like the HBO series “Rome” and Starz’s “Outlander.”

“The questions he would ask, how much he would push about working the text, that was invaluable for me to see,” said his “Outlander” co-star Caitriona Balfe in a telephone interview. “It taught me, this is what you can ask when you are an actor who really thinks about where the meat of the scene is, what is superfluous and what isn’t.”

Menzies also has worked steadily in the theater. Goold, who has collaborated with Menzies on numerous productions, most recently “The Hunt,” said he had probably worked with him more than any other actor.

“He projects a quality that has both masculinity and sensitivity,” Goold said. “And he combines incredible relaxation with an ability to probe and uncover, never leave any stone unturned; at that level he is unparalleled.”

Icke described Menzies as “really unusual, in that he is not a super-emotional actor, won’t burst into tears and scream and shout, but is very complicated and deep.” Icke added that he “has an unusual superpower: He is better than almost any actor I have worked with in animating difficult chunks of text, lifting an idea and making it profound.”

In its most basic terms, Menzies said, acting is “often just a question of meditating on who the person is, why they are saying what they are saying, why they are behaving as they are behaving.” In “Outlander,” he added, one of his characters was a sexually, physically violent sadist. “He does things I’ve never done in my life, but you imagine yourself into why he might do this, and then find the bits in you where you’ve had feelings of aggression, murderousness, darker impulses. We all have those feelings; we just don’t act upon them.”

So, comedy next? Menzies laughed. “No, I’m more maudlin in my tastes,” he said, adding that he would love to work with the film director Joanna Hogg (“here’s my pitch Joanna!”) and with European theater directors like Thomas Ostermeier or Ivo van Hove.

“I think my tastes are getting more and more esoteric,” he said. “I recently went to a library of performance art and saw the wildest stuff, somewhere between a religious event, a performance and a happening. I thought, now this is what I want to do.”

This article originally appeared in

With 'The Crown,' a 'Secret Weapon' Could Become Not So Secret

LONDON — You have probably seen Tobias Menzies in a host of television shows (“Outlander,” “Rome,” “Catastrophe,” “Game of Thrones”). You may have seen him in a movie (“Casino Royale,” “Atonement”). And if you’re a theater buff who visits England, you might have caught him in a number of leading roles (“The History Boys,” “Hamlet,” “Uncle Vanya”). He is that ascetically-but-unobtrusively-handsome actor, with those deep grooves running down each side of his face; the one who disappears so thor...

LOS ANGELES — Bella Lewitzky was a fervently Californian choreographer, a force-of-nature creator who had no particular desire to make it in New York.

Instead, she believed in her own center of choreographic gravity, in Los Angeles. So it seems fitting that “Kinaesonata,” not seen for more than 20 years, has been revived for L.A. Dances, a festival at L.A. Dance Project.

For those not familiar with Lewitzky’s work, which was rarely presented after her company disbanded in 1997, “Kinaesonata,” staged by Walter Kennedy, a former Lewitzky dancer, is a revelation. In this 1970 piece, set to the insistent rhythms and atonal lyricism of Alberto Ginastera’s Piano Sonata No. 1, the dancers move with a deeply rooted, grounded quality that feels very much of its time. But the movement, with its balletic purity of line, its off-center angles and its rapid, joyous flights through space, also feels startlingly vivid and fresh.

The festival, running through Nov. 24, also features eight commissioned pieces, most from Los Angeles choreographers, as well as two works by Benjamin Millepied, the founder and director of the company. It’s a forward-looking enterprise; since starting L.A. Dance Project in 2012, Millepied has maintained that the city is a fertile ground for dance.

But to look forward, you also have to look back, Millepied said after a performance in late October at the company’s studios in downtown Los Angeles. “You can give opportunities and try to nurture a generation of choreographers,” he said, “but it’s important that the audience, dancers and choreographers also get some context, that they see this work and understand there is a history here too.”

Lewitzky, who grew up in San Bernardino, California, trained with, and later danced for, prominent choreographer Lester Horton, who would become a profound influence on the young Alvin Ailey. She ran a company in Los Angeles for three decades and founded dance departments at CalArts and the Idyllwild Arts Academy.

Her company performed on the East Coast for the first time in 1971, and despite an enthusiastic critical response, only a handful of times after that. “Bella wasn’t that interested in performing in New York” or in critical success there, Kennedy said, adding that her attitude was partly a reaction to Horton’s desire to “make it” in New York.

Although known in the dance world, she never achieved the brand-name recognition of her friend and contemporary Merce Cunningham or of other West Coast dance-makers like Simone Forti or Anna Halprin. But judging by “Kinaesonata,” she was a choreographer with a style and technique as decisive and crafted as any of her more celebrated peers.

That style and aesthetic comes from modernism, Millepied said. “It has these formal shapes and geometries that make you think of architects of that time,” he said. “Dancers today want to move like hip-hop dancers; the rigor of this kind of work — the way you move in and out of positions and create shapes — isn’t what might be most exciting to them. But it’s a real education.”

Millepied said he hoped to revive other works by Lewitzky and by other significant California choreographers, like Forti and Halprin. “There has been an important, distinctive modern dance tradition here,” he said. “It’s vital for the young LA choreographers that I want to commission from to see the discipline, the focus, how much craft there is in this work.”

Millepied had been trying to find out more about Lewitzky’s choreography when he discovered the Twitter account of filmmaker Bridget Murnane, who is working on a documentary about her. Murnane sent him several videos, and he immediately picked out “Kinaesonata.” While some Lewitzky works “need a little context,” Millepied said, “this clearly shows the level of her craft and imagination.”

He was less happy with the unitards and black backdrop of the original — “I wanted people to look at the dance without costumes that scream 1970s” — and commissioned artist Charles Gaines to create new scenery and costumes. (This was apparently a bone of contention among Lewitzky loyalists, but the bright color-block shorts and tops, overlaid with transparent mesh, gave the piece a vibrant, crisp feel.)

“Kinaesonata” dwarfed most of the other works that I saw on programs A and B of the L.A. Dances festival. (Program C, which includes “Kinaesonata” and pieces by Tino Sehgal, Madeline Hollander and Millepied, opened in Paris last week and continues in Los Angeles this month.) There were patchily intriguing moments in Shannon Gillen’s “Run From Me,” in Charm La Donna’s “Kora” (which benefited from its wistfully elegant music by Toumani Diabeté), and in the opaquely dystopian “Split Step,” by visual artist Emily Mast and choreographer and director Zack Winokur.

More successful was Kyle Abraham’s “Chapter Song,” a skillful series of vignettes set to Philip Glass (“Einstein on the Beach”), Kendrick Lamar, Barbra Streisand and others. Abraham tucks ballet, hip-hop and a little humor into his piece, which has athletic floor work, slow, precise balances and enigmatic gestures. It doesn’t quite add up, but it’s never dull.

Two L.A. Dance Project company members, Gianna Reisen and Janie Taylor, also created chamber works for the festival. (Five of the festival’s eight commissions are by women.) Reisen, who has choreographed for New York City Ballet, didn’t help herself with a rather undifferentiated violin score by Andrew Bird, but the dynamics and timings of her trio suggested her talent for shape and composition.

Perhaps the greatest surprise of the festival was Taylor’s “Adagio in B Minor,” a duet set to Mozart’s piece for solo piano. Taylor, a former principal dancer with New York City Ballet, has never choreographed before; in a conversation from Paris, she said Millepied “drew it out of me” after she had created a duet during an improvisation session.

But her “Adagio,” which she performed with the marvelous David Adrian Freeland, is a small gem, full of charm and surprise. Taylor suggests the courtesy of ballroom dancing, the awkwardness of first encounters, and the way that ballet’s formality can both channel and mask emotion. And it has a beguiling, unexpected ending that feels musically perfect. Like “Kinaesonata,” it conveys the joy of dancing and the artistry of dance-making.

L.A. Dances Festival: Through Nov. 24 at L.A. Dance Project, Los Angeles; ladanceproject.org

(Critic’s Notebook)

Reviving a Homegrown Modernist Out West

It was 6 p.m. in Paris and midday in New York, and Jérôme Bel was peering intently at the computer screen on his kitchen table.

Dancer Catherine Gallant suddenly appeared in the Skype window. “We’re on Governors Island. Shall I show you the view?” she said. Bel, who is often described as an experimental choreographer, groaned theatrically and said, “I wish I could be there.”

But it was Bel’s decision not to be in the rehearsal room in New York, where Gallant was about to run through “Isadora,” his new solo about the modern-dance pioneer Isadora Duncan. He will not be at Gallant’s performance Wednesday at the Crossing the Line festival, nor at any other performance of the work in North America. That’s because Bel decided this year, for ecological reasons, that he would not work in any way that involves flying.

It was a tough decision. Like most successful performing artists, Bel depends on an international touring circuit. But at a moment of growing youth protests about climate change and increasing consciousness about greenhouse gas emissions from air travel, he feels no other choice is possible, he said.

“My career is really international, not national,” Bel said after the rehearsal, speaking in rapid French that was punctuated by eyebrow-lifting and gesticulations: “I don’t know whether I’ll be able to hang in there.” (Expressive shrug.) “If not, too bad.” (Flourish of hands.) “I’ll go and live in the country and teach dance to children.”

Meanwhile, he is reinventing his professional life, one project at a time. The decision to quit flying came in February, he said, after it dawned on him that, while he was in Paris, assistants had flown to both Hong Kong and Peru to stage his works. “I realized that I was lying to myself, trying not to use too much heating, eating organic food, but being a hypocrite, because my work contributes to the ecological crisis,” he said. “I made the decision that I would no longer be part of this artistic jet set.”

Initially, Bel thought this would mean the end of his career. His two full-time assistants, whose job is to coordinate and plan his tours, were horrified. But several projects were already in the works, including the Duncan solo, which Bel had begun creating with French dancer Elizabeth Schwartz, with the intention of touring the United States.

So she could avoid flying there, Schwartz suggested he contact Gallant, a fellow Duncan specialist based in New York. Bel and Gallant decided to try working via Skype. Over several sessions, they worked on changing and adapting the existing text that frames and contextualizes the Duncan dances Gallant performs in the show.

Before the run-through of the solo in the Governors Island studio, Gallant tested how far left and right she could move before being cut out of Bel’s view. As she danced, the screen froze several times, and Amelia Dawe Sanders, Gallant’s assistant, had to repeatedly log onto the Wi-Fi, which kept disconnecting, and adjust the microphone.

Bel remained calm throughout, making notes while waiting for the Skype session to reconnect. “Of course it is difficult and unsatisfactory,” he said later. “It’s like being visually impaired and hard of hearing. But this is a price I am willing to pay.”

On the other end, Gallant was more anxious. The interruptions were disappointing, she said, because it was important for her to be able to perform the solo right through. “You’re really just crossing your fingers,” she added.

“It’s not the same as being in a room together, especially generationally, for someone like me,” said Gallant, 63. “But I realize that this opportunity exists for me because of what Jérôme decided.”

Bel is not the only internationally successful artist with an anti-flying stance. Berlin-based performance artist Tino Sehgal refuses to travel by plane, as does British theater director Katie Mitchell. (There are even fewer cultural institutions with this policy; the Helsingborg Concert Hall in Sweden is a rare example.)

“It reduces the scope of where I can work,” Mitchell said in a telephone interview.

“I have been reflecting on, and wondering, whether Skype will evolve, whether our understanding of how we make things will evolve,” she said. If more artists used the video platform this way, she added, “it would open up a whole range of possibilities about how we make work and can use technology.”

For some, however, the difficulties are greater. In a telephone interview, Belgian choreographer Anne-Teresa de Keersmaeker, who leads the dance company Rosas, called Bel’s decision “very courageous.” But, she added, “his practice is very different to what we do; when you work with highly skilled dancers performing the specific writing of a choreographer, you can’t transmit that by Skype.”

And, transmission isn’t the only issue. “Let’s not be naïve: Our performance practice is part of the mechanics of a capitalist market,” de Keersmaeker said. Even her recent decision to have Rosas travel only by train in Europe, increases travel costs and takes more time, she said. “We will ask the people who invite us to share the expense,” she said. “Will they be willing?”

Bel said he had persuaded theaters for upcoming tours to allow train trips; in the fall of 2020, he is to go by train to Moscow and his assistants to four cities in China. He said these questions had forced him to interact with theater directors and presenters in a new way. “You have to explain that for 40 hours of train, you need to tour the country, go to more than one city.”

It’s not just his own travel, but the carbon footprint of the arts internationally, which preoccupies Bel. “If you won’t buy tomatoes that don’t come from France, or wherever you live, why do we watch culture that is flown in from other countries?” he said.

Courtney Geraghty, the artistic director of the Crossing the Line festival, said that it was important to awaken peoples’s consciences about environmental issues, but also important to show work from abroad. “In countries where there is nationalism and protectionism,” she said, audiences need “cross-cultural dialogue and international voices.”

Bel acknowledged that his decision was radical, and that his choice was not available to all. “Everyone intelligent and sensitive to this cause must invent their own solutions,” he said. “But our work in contemporary art is to change things.” (Huge swirl of arms.) “We must change this.”

When the Choreographer Won't Fly, the Dancers Rehearse by Skype

PARIS — “Can you see me? Can you hear me?”

In the auditorium, a team checked the red velvet seats, making sure that each was in the correct position. On the stage, performers rehearsed, apparently oblivious to the controlled chaos all around.

It was a week before the scheduled opening, on Friday, of the Théâtre du Châtelet, one of Paris’ most famous stages, which has been closed for a 2 1/2-year, $34.7 million renovation. In one of the lobbies, a large table had been set up for a group of inspectors who had spent the morning examining every aspect of the renovation. They were deciding whether to give formal permission for the theater to open.

“It’s all going to be fine,” said Ruth Mackenzie, the Châtelet’s artistic director. “That’s what I keep telling everyone.” (She was proved right; the commission pronounced a “favorable verdict” at the end of the day.)

Mackenzie, 62, is small, forthright and cheerful. When asked about her, everyone said the same thing: She is a powerhouse who doesn’t take no for an answer.

“She is artistically fearless, and an experienced and strategic political thinker,” said Alex Poots, the British director of The Shed in New York, in a telephone interview. In fact, Mackenzie worked as an adviser on culture and media to two British governments, as well as running the Nottingham Playhouse and the Chichester Festival Theater, both in England, and Scottish Opera.

After directing the London Cultural Olympiad, a program of arts events that accompanied the 2012 Olympics, she moved to the Holland Festival, which she ran from 2015 to 2018. “I hoped that would be a job forever,” Mackenzie said. “But Jean-Luc Choplin, who was running Châtelet, suggested I pitch for the job, and it was irresistible.”

Choplin, who had announced that he would leave when the theater closed for renovation, also suggested Mackenzie team up with Thomas Lauriot dit Prévost, his No. 2 at the Châtelet from 2006 to 2013. Although Lauriot dit Prévost’s title is general director, he and Mackenzie said they shared all aspects of the theater’s leadership, from budget planning to artistic choices.

“We started by spending a complete day together in Brussels,” Lauriot dit Prévost said in their shared, spacious office overlooking the Seine River. “We talked about our political vision of what a theater should be in society, what our values were, what we would stand for.”

Mackenzie is the first Briton to run a French national institution and the first female director at the Châtelet since it opened in 1862. But Christophe Girard, Paris’ deputy mayor for culture, said that her nationality was never an issue during the hiring process.

“I think the fact that she isn’t French is useful,” he said. France has its own cultural and institutional norms, he added, and Mackenzie “knows when she doesn’t want to understand, and I think she solves a lot of problems that way. Ruth knows how to use what could be a weakness and make it a strength.”

It’s hard to overstate the cultural importance of the Châtelet, designed by Jean-Antoine-Gabriel Davioud in 1862 as one of a pair of theaters facing each other across a square in the city center. (Its twin, the Théâtre de la Ville, is also currently under renovation.)

It was in the Châtelet where the artistic revolutions and innovations of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes were first seen; here where Mahler, Strauss and Tchaikovsky conducted; where Josephine Baker, Cole Porter and Juliette Gréco all sang.

Although the main purpose of the renovation was to get electrical circuits, fire safety and security up to code, the Châtelet has also had a makeover: freshly gilded moldings, restored paintings and ceilings, new wallpaper, restored statues on the facade, crumbling stone cleaned and repaired.

A renovated building isn’t the only change. Choplin transformed the Châtelet’s identity — previously linked to serious classical music and opera productions — with long runs of American musicals like “42nd Street” and “Singin’ in the Rain,” and he brought in pop culture figures like Damon Albarn and David Cronenberg to direct their own work. Despite initial controversy over his choices, they proved extremely popular. Now, Mackenzie and Lauriot dit Prévost must place their own stamp on the theater.

That’s not an easy task, said Ariane Bavelier, the deputy culture editor of the French daily newspaper Le Figaro. “There is always drama around the Châtelet. Scandal and outcry are in its DNA,” she said, citing the premiere of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” in 1911, and the Jean Cocteau-Eric Satie-Pablo Picasso collaboration, “Parade,” in 1917. (She could have added “DAU,” the huge interactive art project by filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovsky, whose chaotic opening in January was poorly received by critics.)

Mackenzie and Lauriot dit Prévost have deliberately alluded to that part of the theater’s history by opening the theater and their season on Friday with a reworked version of “Parade,” directed by Martin Duncan. Beginning with an outdoor procession featuring giant puppets created by Marionetas Gigantes, a company from Mozambique, the show continues with “Satie’s World,” a series of free, small-scale installations throughout the theater that evoke some of the eccentric aspects of the French composer’s life. Then comes the paying-tickets part: high-wire performances (literal and figurative) by Stéphane Ricordel’s Paris-based circus ensemble Boîte Noire and Streb Extreme Action, a daredevil dance troupe from New York.

“I always knew I wanted three continents — Africa, Europe, America — and to open up the theater to as many people as possible,” Mackenzie said. “The citizens of Paris have paid for this theater and will continue to pay, through taxes,” she added. “What are we going to give them for their money?”

What they are getting in the first season includes a musical version of Albert Camus’ “Les Justes” directed by rapper and writer Abd Al Malik; Australian opera director Barry Kosky’s production of Handel’s “Saul”; Pina Bausch’s little-seen “Seven Deadly Sins,” presented by Tanztheater Wuppertal; and an homage to South African singer Miriam Makeba.

Both “Parade” and “Les Justes” were partly created and scripted from yearlong workshops in different Paris suburbs, drawing on communities who might not otherwise be exposed to theater. “We start as we mean to go on,” Mackenzie said.

In France, she added, community engagement is not necessarily seen as a positive. Her observation was echoed by Bavelier of Le Figaro. “My worry is that when you start to mix up cultural education with artistic vision, you weaken the programming,” she said.

Mackenzie defended her position. “Nothing I am saying means we are delegating the choice of artists to the citizens of Paris, any more than we are asking them to focus the lights,” she said. But, she added, the Châtelet was an imposing place, “full of gold leaf, and however much we love it, you have to think about how people can access what we offer, access the magic.”

She drew breath. “What would I like us to be famous for? That we said we were here to serve every citizen of Paris, and we did.”

After a Renovation, a Storied Theater Hopes to Entice Paris

PARIS — The workmen were everywhere. Backstage and onstage, they were hammering, banging, gluing, carrying, laying tarpaulin, shimmying up ladders and shouting, “Attention!”

What were they waiting for? Not a rock concert. Not a soccer match. Remarkably, they were staking out a spot for a contemporary dance performance. That’s because in Taiwan, contemporary dance is virtually synonymous with Cloud Gate Dance Theater, a company that has a special place in the nation’s cultural life. (There is a Cloud Gate Street in Taipei, and Aug. 21 is Cloud Gate Day.)

The open-air show was a final bow for Lin Hwai-min, the company’s founder, who was stepping down as the troupe’s artistic director after 46 years. Like the company, he looms large in his country’s cultural life, as famous in Taiwan as any movie or pop star.

By midafternoon, the skies had cleared and the lines had swelled to thousands. At 7:30 p.m., around 50,000 people were seated decorously on the plaza between the National Theater and the National Concert Hall. Camera operators were stationed nearby, filming the dance for a live broadcast on national television.

When Lin arrived onstage, the audience members applauded, shouted and held up banners proclaiming their love. At the end of the show, they waved their phones, creating a sea of lights.

Cloud Gate, which will now be run by Cheng Tsung-lung, the director of the company’s junior troupe, has long been an established presence on the international dance scene. “Lin Hwai-min is the name card of Taiwan in the performing arts, one of the most important representatives of our culture,” said Chang Hui-chin, the director general of Arts Development at the Ministry of Culture, who was attending the outdoor performance. “He has connected us to the world.”

Lin Yatin (no relation to Lin), an associate professor of dance at the Taipei National University of the Arts, said there was no professional contemporary dance troupe in the Chinese-speaking world when Lin founded Cloud Gate in 1973. That was a moment when Taiwan was seeking its own cultural identity following 50 years of Japanese rule (1895-1945), after which it was ceded back to China. In 1949, China’s nationalist government lost control of mainland China and fled to Taiwan, establishing martial law.

“They made my parents’ generation Japanese, and they tried to make us Chinese,” Lin said before the concert. “I didn’t set out to reflect Taiwanese society, but when I started choreographing, I knew I wanted it to be something of our own.”

What he came up with was a remarkable blend of Western and Eastern dance forms and aesthetics, fusing Martha Graham and other contemporary dance techniques with Chinese classical and folk dance and ballet. In the 1990s, he would add martial arts, meditation, tai chi and the breathing techniques of qigong to his dancers’ regimens.

“When Lin founded Cloud Gate, Taiwan was still under martial law rule, with no recognition, knowledge, appetite and audience for dance of any kind,” said Chien Wen-pin, the executive and artistic director of Taiwan’s new $348 million National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts. “The early success of Cloud Gate was indirectly responsible for the founding of Taiwan’s National Theater and Concert Hall and the National Symphony Orchestra nearly 15 years later. It is not an overstatement to say that Cloud Gate and Lin have created for Taiwan three generations of audiences for culture from square one.”

Lin, 73, a charismatic man who looks preternaturally youthful, said he had wanted to be a dancer ever since seeing Powell and Pressburger’s classic ballet film “The Red Shoes” at age 5.

His upper-middle-class family “never took it seriously,” he said, but when he published a short story at 14, he used the earnings to pay for ballet classes. He studied journalism, published two books of short stories, and won a fellowship for the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. There, he began a course in dance, learning Graham and Doris Humphrey techniques, among others. “I spent more time at the barre than writing,” he said.

He started to dabble in choreography soon after, and attended two summer sessions at the Martha Graham School in New York. After finishing his degree in Iowa, he returned to Taiwan, and began teaching in the English department at Chengchi University in Taipei. But a dance department at another university heard about his experiences in the United States and asked him to teach.

“I was reluctant at first, but found I could offer a lot,” he said. “The kids I taught wanted to perform, so we started Cloud Gate.” (The company is named after an ancient Chinese ritual dance.) Their first two performances sold more than 3,000 tickets. “It was a good story,” Lin said. “A famous young writer had turned himself into a choreographer.” A good story, maybe, for everyone else, that is. “I almost had a nervous breakdown,” he said. “I thought, I’d better learn how to choreograph.”

Frustrated by his generation’s ignorance about Taiwanese history and traditions, he also decided to learn about his country. “I didn’t know a thing about my own culture,” he said. “I read our poetry, spent time at museums, went to see traditional opera. I felt the company needed to connect to our own country.”

That connection has probably been the secret of Cloud Gate’s success at home. (When the company’s studios burned down in 2008, Huang Haluko, the company’s manager said, there were so many spontaneous donations that the company was able to build a new $22 million home by 2015 without a fundraising campaign.) But Cloud Gate also quickly received international recognition after it began to tour abroad in the late 1970s, winning acclaim for the elegance of Lin’s fusion of styles and the beauty of his stage settings.

Joseph V. Melillo, the former artistic director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, who first invited the company to perform “Nine Songs” there in 1995, said in an email that no one challenges Lin’s “maturity of choreographic style and composition” in the Asian dance world, adding that Lin was an unparalleled teacher and had produced a new choreographic generation.

Lin is modest in the face of these accolades. “All modern dance companies tend to fall apart when their founder dies,” he said before the show. “I consider myself the caretaker, not the identity. Cheng Tsung-lung is ready for a challenge. It would be terrible to keep a Prince Charles in the house.”

Cheng, 43, is in many ways very unlike Lin. His background is not literary or intellectual; his parents, migrants from the south of the country to Taipei, sold slippers on the street before starting their own small factory. Sent to a school with an extensive dance program, Cheng excelled but became addicted to amphetamines in his early teens, he said. Being arrested by the police for possessing drugs and performing community service was a turning point, he said. After graduating, he worked as a truck driver by day, and studied dance part-time at college at night.

He joined Cloud Gate, but after four years, a spinal injury forced him to stop dancing and led him to focus on choreography. He became the resident choreographer and artistic director of the junior troupe, Cloud Gate 2.

His physical style and inspirations are his personal history, he said, citing “13 Tongues,” a 2016 work based on his memories of the vivid street life of his childhood, and which Cloud Gate 2 performed earlier in the week at the company’s sleek and curvaceous building, in a verdant setting outside the city.

Cheng said that he was shocked when Lin asked him to take over Cloud Gate, but that he tried not to feel intimidated or nervous. He said his central focus was to maintain a connection to society. “Dancing is a way to connect people, and now the baton is with me,” he said. “You don’t have to abandon the past to have new beginnings.”

But on Saturday, the theme was continuity, not change. “My parents brought me, and now I bring my children, and it’s the same for so many,” said a woman near the front of the stage. Lin echoed the sentiment in his speech, alluding quickly to his retirement and that of several dancers, before moving on briskly. “Cloud Gate Theater of Taiwan will keep moving forward,” he said. “See you here next year.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/arts/dance/cloud-gate-dance-taiwan.html" id="f206f17e-bb6c-35d6-a3f5-952e13de0af4">The New York Times</a>.

TAIPEI, Taiwan — A lunchtime bout of torrential rain, lightning and thunder couldn’t keep a crowd of intrepid souls from lining up at Liberty Plaza here Saturday. They simply put up their umbrellas.

In Taiwan, a Contemporary Dance Troupe Brings in the Crowds

<h1>DUBLIN — A large portrait of Samuel Beckett — peaked hair, deeply furrowed brow, piercing blue eyes — loomed over the public area of the Palace Bar, an 1823 watering hole long beloved by journalists and writers. At midday, the bar was all dark wood and filtered light, muttering male voices, and the faint whoosh of glasses filling with beer.</h1>

Enter Mark Morris, swathed in pink pashmina.

It was late May, and Morris, a choreographer, was on tour with his company, the Mark Morris Dance Group, which was performing his Beatles-inspired “Pepperland” around Ireland. At the time, he was working on a new piece, “Sport,” which will have its premiere on Wednesday, alongside two older pieces, at the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center. But Morris isn’t just in the spotlight in New York this July. He will also stage three Beckett pieces for the Happy Days: Enniskillen International Beckett Festival — his first foray into pure theater — which will run from July 25-28 in Northern Ireland. And where better to discuss this than over a Guinness in a pub once frequented by Beckett.

The pairing of Morris, an American choreographer known for his playfulness, and the Irish playwright (who died in 1989) famous for his dark, often obscure and mordant writing, is not an immediately obvious one. As Morris put it, “you could get someone English-er and cheaper.”

But Sean Doran, a director (with Liam Browne) of the Happy Days festival, said the connection was obvious to him.

“It lies in the lightness of being of his work,” Doran, who previously commissioned “Pepperland” from Morris, said in a telephone interview. “It is underestimated how lightly Beckett wore his seriousness. In my view, his work is as much about lightness as darkness, everyday language as much as intellectual depth. Mark has the seriousness of intent and lightness of communicative ability that puts him very much in the world of Beckett.”

Many artists, Doran added, “would shy off at the idea of doing Beckett.”

“But Mark never hesitated,” he said.

Morris’ version was that “Sean gives me way too little notice, to trick me into doing stuff.” More seriously, he added that he had always loved Beckett’s work and had seen innumerable productions of his plays. “I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that Beckett’s directions are extremely strict,” he said. “You have to stay within the rules, and yet sometimes a production works and sometimes it doesn’t. When Sean asked, of course I was interested.”

Although Doran has incorporated some dance into the festival (notably Maguy Marin’s “May B” in 2015), this is the first “Happy Days” commission from a choreographer. It is also perhaps the first time a choreographer has staged Beckett’s works; neither Doran nor the Beckett biographer James Knowlson could think of another instance. (Doran recounted commissioning Merce Cunningham to create a version of the Morton Feldman opera with a Beckett libretto in 2005; it ultimately fell through.)

“We really want to do more with dance and movement in the festival, and the commission from Mark, which we consider our headline work, is a very visible flag of that,” Doran said. He added that it was fundamental to the festival to bring new voices to Beckett’s work, “not just those who have been anointed in the tradition.”

Doran started the conversation with Morris by suggesting “Come and Go,” a three-minute work for three women, from 1965. He also proposed “Quad,” a pure-movement piece created for German television in 1981. Then Morris added “Catastrophe,” from 1982, which Beckett dedicated to the then-imprisoned Czech writer Václav Havel. Three works, he said, “seemed like the right number of pieces in that they all kind of refer to each other in their implication of infinitude.”

The three pieces are very different from one another, but they are alike in their exactingly detailed stage directions. (For “Come and Go,” they are longer than the written play itself.) “I felt a choreographer’s eye on that detail, literally down to the fingertips, would be very different to a theater director’s eye,” Doran said. “The work is so open to other art forms; it doesn’t have to be theater practice only.”

This kind of lateral thinking about Beckett is characteristic of the Happy Days festival. Doran started it in 2012 in the small Northern Irish town of Enniskillen, where the teenage Beckett attended the Portora Royal School, and where an Irish Republican Army bomb killed 11 people at a Remembrance Day service in 1987. From the start, the festival has had a determinedly eclectic approach, focusing on Beckett’s passionate interest in visual arts, music and movement, as well as highlighting his interests in cinema, comedy and sport. (This year’s other offerings include Beckett’s “Cascando,” “Ohio Impromptu,” and “Not I,” and also Schubert’s “Swan Song,” directed by Romeo Castellucci, and “Walking for Waiting for Godot,” a performance in the border area between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.)

“There are very few artists who could genuinely be described as total artists, but Beckett is that,” Doran said, adding that in the 1930s, Beckett seriously considered becoming an art critic and was a proficient pianist whose awareness of musical meter, rhythm and sound permeated his work. He was also, Doran said, intensely interested in space and movement, mapping out the precise gestures, angles and dynamics of his characters’ bodies.

“Beckett directed many of his own plays and always brought out the musicality of the work,” Knowlson wrote in an email. “Often his productions became works to which the word ‘balletic’ could be applied with an emphasis on repetition and echo of movements. Most of them were pieces of work that could well be described as choreographed.” It would be welcome, he wrote of the commission from Morris, “to have a choreographer bring his own experience with movement and gesture to these particular plays.”

Morris, who developed the work at the Banff Center for Arts and Creativity in Canada, said he immediately decided to use dancers “who went way back historically to my earliest days.” He wrote to Rob Besserer, Susan Weber, Teri Weksler and Elisa Clark (who danced with Morris’ company more recently than the others). “The audition was an email that said, ‘Can you walk and are you interested?’” Morris said.

His approach was straightforward. “I am basically going straight from the written text and instructions. And then you question what Beckett didn’t specify, what is not excluded,” he said. “On purpose, I didn’t memorize or plan anything before starting.”

Although he said he was initially “nervous and feeling like a charlatan,” he found the process deeply interesting. The hardest part, he said, was the dancers’ anxiety about memorizing the lines in “Come and Go” and “Catastrophe,” in which he will also perform. Following in Harold Pinter’s footsteps (no pressure!) he will play a director rehearsing an unnamed play in which an immobile man (“The Protagonist”) on a podium is physically exposed and manipulated. “It’s much more horrific than I thought, but also much funnier,” Morris said. In an email message, he wrote that he had decided to play the director “so I’d have something to do in the festival with my friends.”

“It’s also very like my real job,” he said.

“At the beginning I didn’t realize I would have to speak,” Clark said in a telephone interview. “As a trained dancer, you know there are infinite possibilities in how you connect Shape 1 and Shape 2,” she said. “I realized you had to think about words like that, in terms of timing and connection.”

Morris began with “Quad,” which “seems like a dance Lucinda Childs might have thought of,” he said. “A startling original piece for a septuagenarian to have dreamed up,” Knowlson wrote of “Quad” in “The Life of Samuel Beckett,” adding that “this nonverbal piece for four dancers also developed naturally out of Beckett’s interest in choreographing movement and from his radical mistrust of language.” In the piece, four figures in brightly colored djellabas move to a percussive beat along the sides and across the diagonals of a square, avoiding the middle and one another.

Beckett wrote a detailed scheme for the order and sequencing of the movement, but didn’t specify pace or instruments. Morris decided to use four musicians, one linked to each dancer, and worked out the musical parts with the composer Ethan Iverson, a frequent collaborator. “The piece is radical, but the way it’s done is very pragmatic, just putting breath into it,” he said. “The timing is actually much harder than it looks; the point isn’t virtuosity, it’s expertise.”

In “Come and Go,” three women sit on a bench (Beckett detailed their exact positions, down to the angles of their hands), talk and whisper to one another, and each exit and re-enter in turn. The piece “is all about rhythm and timing,” Morris said. “And I am all about timing.”

Morris said that he hadn’t thought a great deal about what the pieces are about. “I don’t think it’s my business to impose that,” he said. “And I don’t like the idea of changing or updating things to be ‘relevant.’”

He added that he didn’t find Beckett’s work either opaque or depressing. “I’m hoping for a couple of laughs,” he said. “Perhaps I’m just a crazy optimistic American.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/02/arts/dance/mark-morris-samuel-beckett-festival.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

A Playful American Choreographer Tackles Beckett

Enter Mark Morris, swathed in pink pashmina.

A playful American choreographer tackles Beckett

The Joyce announced Monday that the festival has been planned by Kevin O’Hare, the director of the Royal Ballet, who invited three artists — Royal Ballet principals Lauren Cuthbertson and Edward Watson, and designer Jean-Marc Puissant — to plan programs alongside his own.

“I thought it would be more interesting to get different points of view, and to include artists from other companies we have close relationships with,” O’Hare said in a telephone interview from Japan, where the Royal Ballet has been on tour. “Ed Watson has done some of this already and has a great interest in new choreography. Lauren is really interested in what’s going on in the dance world and it’s a new venture for her. And it seemed like a good combination to have a designer curate a program, too.”

O’Hare oversaw their choices and put together the first program, which includes a gathering of Royal Ballet past and present house choreographers (Frederick Ashton, Wayne McGregor, Christopher Wheeldon, Liam Scarlett), but also two new works by Calvin Richardson and Charlotte Edmonds.

Cuthbertson’s program features mostly new work, including pieces by Stina Quagebeur, Gemma Bond and Robert Binet, while Puissant’s program offers Maurice Béjart’s “Song of a Wayfarer,” performed by Gordon and Hallberg; Kenneth MacMillan’s “Elite Syncopations”; and a second piece by Bond, an American Ballet Theater dancer. New work is also the focus of Watson’s program, which features Fairchild and Kowroski, and will present commissions from Mauro Bigonzetti, Laila Diallo and Arthur Pita.

“It’s a celebration of collaboration and creativity,” O’Hare said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/arts/dance/joyce-theater-2019-ballet-festival.html" id="4ac43f4b-7310-36b2-afd6-9a647ec5f6b5">The New York Times</a>.

Joyce Theater Ballet Festival has a starry lineup

NEW YORK — A high-profile group of international ballet stars from the Royal Ballet, the National Ballet of Canada, New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater will come to the Joyce Theater from Aug. 6 through Aug. 18, for its 2019 Ballet Festival. Among the dancers: David Hallberg, Maria Kowroski, Robert Fairchild, Sarah Lamb and Joseph Gordon.

<h1>NEW YORK — Long before “interdisciplinary” became a cultural buzzword, Heiner Goebbels was smudging all manner of artistic boundaries. For the past three decades, Goebbels, 66, has been puzzling and invigorating audiences with works that aren’t quite concert music, theater, installation or performance art. His music has embraced rock, jazz, classical styles, voice, text and ambient sound with equal vigor.</h1>

In his latest work, “Everything That Happened and Would Happen,” which opens at the Park Avenue Armory on Monday and runs through Sunday, Goebbels takes on 20th-century European history in a characteristically elliptical fashion. He has created a phantasmagoric, ever-changing landscape permeated by spoken text and film, and populated by 12 dancers and five musicians who perform for almost three hours amid a plethora of constantly manipulated props and objects.

“Everything That Happened” was commissioned by 14-18 NOW, a British cultural program that marked the centennial of World War I, and produced with Artangel, an intrepid London-based company that also worked with Goebbels on “Stifters Dinge,” in 2007. The piece had its premiere last year in the cavernous disused Mayfield railway station in Manchester, England.

Although it contains no literal depictions of historical events, the work “evokes the ghosts of the entire 20th century,” Richard Morrison wrote in a review of the premiere in The Times of London, summing up the piece as “sometimes bewildering, occasionally boring, often bewitching and always bizarre.”

Pierre Audi, the artistic director of the Park Avenue Armory, said it is “one of those pieces you need to surrender to over time, and the length is important for that.”

In a telephone interview, Goebbels spoke about the inspirations for “Everything That Happened and Must Happen” and his collaborative creative process. But he remained noncommittal about its themes.

“In this landscape of micronarrations, voices, sounds, images which we present, I guess this question can only be answered individually,” he said.

Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: Why did you want to make this piece?

A: I don’t make a decision to create a work unless I have four good reasons. The first here was that I had never worked with dancers, which I wanted to do. The second was that I wanted to use the scenic elements of John Cage’s “Europeras,” which I directed in 2012 when I was the director of the Ruhrtriennale. The third was Patrik Ourednik’s book, “Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century,” which I had read and found fascinating.

The fourth source was a program called “No Comment” from the Euronews television channel. Every hour, it shows a few minutes of news footage without any comment. In the show, we use the live footage of the day. You see the date and location, but nothing else is explained. You might see someone throwing a milkshake at Nigel Farage, or a school strike for climate change, or students with signs. I am like the viewer: I am not prepared, I don’t know what is coming. You have to make up your mind about what you see and hear. I love this, because it’s a strong intrusion of reality into the artificial world of performance, which I am always looking for.

Q: How did you move from these first ideas and sources to creating material?

A: I did four workshops with dancers, performers and musicians in Germany, France, Vietnam and Manchester to find a form, in which movements and objects, light and sounds, words and the news of the day can all contribute to what the piece is “about.”

We worked with theatrical props, with encounters with other realities in the form of objects, textures, materials. I am not a choreographer, and I told them this, but their movement is choreographed by what they need to do. I wanted to use dancers because I think that, like musicians, they have an instrumental relationship to their bodies; they don’t use their bodies to manifest “meaning” in the same ways as actors. They can simply be.

Q: What about the musicians? Is their material also improvised?

A: Yes, within certain guidelines. According to the order of scenes we developed specific guidelines together regarding intensity, character, timing, duration, instrumentation. Within these frames they react freely to each other every night, with instruments from different eras: a medieval analog organ, a saxophone, electronics, percussion and an ondes Martenot, a kind of early-20th-century synthesizer.

The music is improvised every night, the dancers have their own responses, and I don’t know what the news footage will be. In this way, the piece is a collaboration between musicians, dancers, unforeseeable news and the text, which takes on different resonances depending on all these other things. It’s not a strict composed machinery.

Q: But as the creator of the piece, you have to impose a structure?

A: Overall, I am a composer, and a piece like this is a composition of light, space, color, movement and sound. In the end, my decisions always have a musical reason, like a counterpoint between what we see and hear, or a polyphony composed of the video, the movement, sound and the light.

Music can touch you without you being able to name why. It offers you freedom in how you hear it, and you may hear it differently every time. This is the quality I want to transfer to a nonacoustic field, to theater.

Q: Ourednik’s book is a history of 20th-century Europe, starting with World War I. In creating this work, did you want to say something about Europe?

A: It is interesting that the text digresses radically from any linear chronology, and with a lot of humor. This digression can be a creative pleasure for an audience. Art and politics are a very difficult couple, and I believe that any piece of art, especially theater, can only be political in a nonintentional way, or it’s in danger of just making statements. I don’t want to make statements; I believe that in times of too many opinions, simplifications and too much ideological overflow, art can give us space to determine ourselves, to sharpen our perception, to mistrust what we hear, to look at the context in which things are said and why.

After “Stifters Dinge,” people said to me, “Finally: No one onstage telling me what to think.” I wanted to perpetuate that freedom for the viewer, so that people have space for the imagination.

Additional Information:

‘Everything That Happened and Would Happen’

Monday through Sunday at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/02/arts/music/heiner-goebbels-park-avenue-armory.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Surrender to a boundary-blurring tour of Europe, war and peace

“Everything That Happened” was commissioned by 14-18 NOW, a British cultural program that marked the centennial of World War I, and produced with Artangel, an intrepid London-based company that also worked with Goebbels on “Stifters Dinge,” in 2007.

Water seems to be pooling in a shallow puddle. Bodies — at first you see one or two, then four, then nine — are inert on and under various surfaces. And is that a priest’s confessional at the back of the stage? A shower cubicle as well?

This is the first, disorienting glimpse of Pina Bausch’s 1978 dance “He Takes Her by the Hand and Leads Her Into the Castle, the Others Follow,” and it’s a perfect image of the choreographer’s collision of the real and unreal, the ordinary and the fantastical, the familiar that edges into surreal dream.

Friday, at the Wuppertal Opera House, was the first time in 29 years that audiences could see Bausch’s company, Tanztheater Wuppertal, perform this important early work, which was created when the director Peter Zadek asked her to stage a version of “Macbeth” for a Shakespeare festival. (The lengthy title is said to have come from a stage direction at the end of the sixth scene in Act 1, though it’s not in my edition.)

The piece — restaged here by two original cast members, Josephine Ann Endicott and Hans Dieter Knebel — is important in the company’s history because it was the moment that Bausch, still largely unknown outside Germany, began to ask her dancers questions as a way of generating material. She would use this method until her death in 2009, as she created the epic, fantastical works that became a genre, Tanztheater (or dance theater), and gradually drew a fervent, worldwide following.

But “He Takes Her by the Hand” is also stunningly good, with a raw power and intensity that became muted in Bausch’s later works, which were increasingly dancey and joyful. Ingredients that would become familiar to Tanztheater Wuppertal fans are, astonishingly, fully formed here: dramatic vignettes that accrue to form a strange, coherent world; an eclectic musical mix that includes Chet Atkins, Debussy and Verdi; an exhilarating, repetitive line dance (here a marvelous diagonal procession); childhood rituals; adult fears and dreams; the circularity that haunts human behavior.

In 3 1/2 hours, there is no linear narrative, but there is a great deal of speech — almost all in German, much of it performed by two actors (Maik Solbach and Johanna Wokalek, wonderful) who supplement the seven dancers onstage. Some text is from “Macbeth”; some is a retelling of the story, and some appears to be unrelated.

But nothing is random in Bausch’s works, and it slowly becomes clear (even if you don’t speak German) that this is a meditation on the themes of power, responsibility, culpability and consequences in “Macbeth.” The piece opens with sleeping dancers tossing and twitching wildly, tormented by nightmares, and continues through repeated, varied depictions of female manipulation and helplessness, male power and subjugation. The performers compulsively wash themselves — the shower turns out to be operative, and the puddle useful — sniffing their bodies for odor and changing their clothes, but failing to change their identities. “Take me hence,” the women call plaintively to the men, who move their inert bodies to new places on the stage but can’t remove them from their murderous nightmares.

The superb performers are immured within themselves. Jonathan Fredrickson and Julie Shanahan glower and bicker incessantly on a chaise longue; Breanna O’Mara giggles and apologizes; Oleg Stepanov dances, entranced, to a jukebox tune; Julian Stierle keeps reappearing, a Banquo phantom at windows with one finger in the air, testing the winds of change.

Everyone is Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in “He Takes Her by the Hand.” The lust for power, the destructive act, the pervasive guilt, the inextricable consequences: Here, these all take place in our heads, and in our homes.

‘He Takes Her by the Hand’ runs through May 26 at the Wuppertal Opera House, Germany; wuppertaler-buehnen.de.

WUPPERTAL, Germany — The stage resembles a large, elegantly high-ceilinged living room with a red carpet, sofas, chairs, a piano and two sets of tall French doors. A suggestion of trees in the darkness beyond hints at a garden. But as the lights slowly brighten, it becomes clear there is too much furniture, haphazard and oddly placed, for realism.

Roslyn Sulcas

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