Guest directors included master puppeteer Roman Paska and Stan Wojewodski, Director of the Yale Repertory Theatre and Dean of the Yale School of Drama. Besides members of the Abbey Company and other distinguished Irish artists, performers in the Yeats productions included stage and film stars Ciarán Hinds in the role of the Celtic hero Cuchulain, Olwen Fouéré as Cathleen ni Houlihan and Fionnula Flanagan in the title role of The Countess Cathleen. The Music Director of the Yeats Festival was Bill Whelan, The Grammy Award-winning composer of Riverdance, who has often credited his work on Yeats’s plays with inspiring that phenomenally successful piece of total theater. Sacred Mysteries: A Celtic Way of Love and Sexuality Masks of Transformation: Art and Revolution in the Modern World The Cuchulain Cycle: An Heroic Journey in Five Episodes Under the direction of James Flannery, the Festival featured productions of fifteen of the poet’s one act plays grouped under the following titles: Keough, the President of the Coca-Cola Company, the Yeats Foundation sponsored a Yeats International Theatre Festival at the world-famous Abbey Theatre, the National Theatre of Ireland. Potentially, the visionary art of Yeats is capable of reinvigorating contemporary theater while inspiring a radically transformative “total theatre” of the future.įrom 1989-1993, thanks to the support of Donald R. The work of Yeats, in its mythopoeic, ritualistic and spiritual dimension, is also directly connected with the traditional performing arts of Japan, India, South America and Africa as well as some of the leading avant garde thinkers and theater artists of our own time. Because of this, theater artists who can meet the challenges of Yeats are capable of successfully performing virtually any major dramatist from the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare to such masters of the modern stage as Brecht, Beckett and Stephen Sondheim. Yeats wrote in perhaps the widest range of forms of any dramatist in history, yet each of his brilliantly conceived one-act plays is a perfect realization of its meaning. Yeats Foundation has made a special commitment to realizing Yeats’s vision of a “total theatre” combining poetry, music, dance and the visual arts in a highly expressive and holistic engagement with the mind, emotions, senses and imagination of the audience.
Yeats once described the theater he envisaged as “a memory and a prophecy.” Following this, the W.B. Other critics such as Denis Donoghue believe that Yeats’s “ poésie du theatre” provides an example to animate Irish and world theater on into the future. Fintan O’Toole, the highly respected drama critic of The Irish Times, argues that Yeats is the only modern playwright equivalent to Shakespeare in the universality and timelessness of his archetypal imagery.
Theater artists and critics have increasingly come to realize that Yeats’s accomplishment as a dramatist equals his enormous achievement as a poet. A wise theater might make a training in strong and beautiful life the fashion.
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