Aline Arbo and the awareness of freedom
If something is remembered for the 2013 Greek Festival, it is to discover an extraordinary Dutch company and director: Toneelgroep and Ivo van hove. The years have passed and those memory are still alive Remains tragedies Filling for hours of Gran Teatre the stage of the Fabià Puigserver of the Teatre Lliure. Would return in 2014 (The Fontainhead), in 2015 (The Humaine Voix) and in 2019 (To Little Life), already converted into the International Theater Amsterdam (ITA). And they started to become familiar faces like that of Steven van Watermeulen, Marieke Heebink and Chris Nietvelt.
Just the three names – miss Hans Kesting– that appear in the cast of The Hoursthe stage adaptation of the novel of Michael Cunningham that turned into a movie for Stephen Daldry it was worth it to Nicole Kidman an Oscar. They say he won him by a nose, by the prosthesis they put to resemble more to the profile of Virginia Woolf. But we do not be fooled by the apparent familiarity of the company and, to a certain extent, the staging. This show brings the signature of the Norway ALINE ARBO (1986), since 2023 new artistic director of the ITA, an institution in which he had already been involved as an associated artistic director.
Arbo debuts in Barcelona – always grateful that new European airs will blow around the city with the second part of its “self -awareness” trilogy, opened in 2022 with The Yars fromAnnie Ernaux and closed this 2025 with The Laws of Connie palmen. The three chapters with the circle as a stage leitmotif. In the case of The Hours (‘The Hours’), the audience will encounter a continuous movement to explain a day in the life of three women separated by decades and united intimately by a book: Mrs. Dalloway. The day Woolf begins to write his famous novel; A woman (Laura Brown), a perfect model of the wife and mother of the American Dream of Postwar White Suburbs, has a painful life revelation after reading the book; A writer (Clarissa Vaughan), a replica of the Dalloway of the late 20th century, organizes a party for his sick friend and poet of AIDS. Arbo is allowed a license with respect to the original text: the incorporation of Cunningham himself as a narrator.
According to the director, “it is an incredibly beautiful story of three women whose lives are inextricably united. All three fight with the roles they have assigned to them and look for their own freedom. What I love in the book is how he manages to combine existential issues with social issues through parallel plots. When portraying women from completely different eras, questions arise on the current level of emancipation and Hidden in our culture. “
Arbo, born in Tromsø, a city located in the Arctic Circle, in a family of firm progressive militancy, is characterized by a markedly physical theater, always committed to social and feminist issues – he is convinced that the theater is only understood as a collective act of social transformation – and with music always present as a differential element of its staging, as well as in this montage. An inseparable figure of his creations is that of the musician, composer and close collaborator Thhijs vuure.
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