Brian Michaels

Brian Michaels (2017)

Brian Michaels (born April 12, 1948 in London ) is a British theater and opera director .

Life

Brian Michaels grew up in London. He studied philosophy at the University of Sussex . He has lived in Germany since 1973.

Artistic career

Brian Michaels was already involved in the student theater of the University of Sussex during his studies. He played and directed a. a. in Ingmar Bergman's play The Seventh Seal with Jim Carter in the lead role. He began his independent theater career in 1978 when he founded the "Teatro Siciliano", the first immigrant theater and forerunner of the Gallus Theater in Frankfurt am Main . His work with the ensemble "I MACAP" he founded here was based on the tradition of the Commedia dell'arte and gained international recognition. In 1984 he was invited to stage his own version of Homer's Odyssey with young people at the Stuttgart State Theater .

Opera

The success of this production was the prelude to a whole series of opera productions at the Stuttgart State Opera - including Puccini's Madama Butterfly and several world premieres. Other milestones in his work as an opera director are the productions of Verdi's Ernani at the Bregenz Festival and Ernst Krenek's “Three Operas” as part of the Wiener Festwochen . Here he worked regularly as a guest director between 1990 and 2002. His work at renowned festivals included the production of Frank Zappa's Yellow Shark in collaboration with him and the Ensemble Modern (Frankfurt, Berlin, Vienna) as well as two baroque operas by Alessandro Scarlatti for the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music (1995) and the Salzburg Whitsun Festival (2005). Trend-setting were his productions of the Conflagration by Joseph Haydn ( Wiener Festwochen 2001) and II buon marito by Georg Benda Schwetzinger Festspiele , Salamanca, (Bilbao), both in cooperation with the conductor Martin Haselböck and the Vienna Academy.

Brian Michaels' work currently includes more than 40 national and international productions at festivals and at opera houses - the latter in Basel , Nuremberg (with Christian Thielemann ), Essen , Ulm , Darmstadt , Amsterdam , Los Angeles, among others .

play

As a theater director, Brian Michaels has staged in Essen , Basel , Munich , Hamburg (with Giora Feidman ), Wuppertal , Düsseldorf , Halle ad Saale , Kiel , in the Globe Theater in Neuss, Tel Aviv , Ramallah , Timișoara (Romania), New York and Los Angeles .

The performance of Hanoch Levin's murder in Los Angeles under his direction in October / November 2001 immediately after the attack on the World Trade Center in New York met with a dramatic response from the audience.

The national and international festivals with productions by Brian Michaels include u. a. the Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen , II Cantiere di Montepulciano (Italy), “ Styrian Autumn ” Graz and the “International Shakespeare Festival Neuss”.

One of the more recent works by the director is the staging of the Lysistrata by Aristophanes as part of the program for the European Capital of Culture Paphos 2017. The venue was the ruins of the ancient city.

In 2019 he directed and appeared in the Polish road movie Searching the Silence - a play that explores the loss of the Jewish world and culture in Poland after World War II through dance (Kasia Gorczyca), video (Jakub Urbanski) and Live music (Maciej Klich) is the theme. It was premiered in the Centrum Dialogu Marek Edelman as part of the 75th memorial service for the liquidation of the Litzmannstadt ghetto (Lodz).

Shakespeare

The work of William Shakespeare has been the focus of the work of Brian Michaels for some time. A total of 25 rehearsals over the past few years range from Macbeth as the first work as part of the Cantiere di Montepulciano in 1989, to Romeo and Juliet at the Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen, 2013, with drama students, to the most recent, The Taming of the Shrew in Bytom , Poland in June 2017 (in Polish) and the international version of the production at the Shakespeare Festival in Essen, April 2018.

Own productions

Brian Michaels' own theater and performance works include the project Osiris - Speaking to the Dead with 3,500-year-old texts from ancient Egypt (Essen Zollverein , 2009). The work was created in collaboration with the Egyptologist Jan Assmann . The piece Mixed Feelings with a focus on a fictional Palestinian-Jewish dialogue is a collaborative effort with the Palestinian actress Nisreen Faour . Also: "The Journey" - a "poetry perfomance" with the Syrian-Jordanian poet Ramy Al-Asheq, 2018.

Teaching

Brian Michaels worked as professor for acting and directing from 1994 to 2013 at the Folkwang University of the Arts , Essen. Here he initiated numerous international cooperation projects, including a. with the Shanghai Theater Academy , with the SP Escola de Teatro, São Paulo and the PWST Bytom.

Since the end of 2013 he has been a visiting professor for acting and directing at the Academy for Dance Theater PWST in Bytom and Krakow. Here he has the opportunity to further develop his body-based acting method , which he originally developed together with the dance and movement pedagogue Nadia Kevan .

Individual evidence

1. ^ History of the Gallus Theater
2. ↑ Conductor of the chairs - DER SPIEGEL 34/1992
3. ↑ Reviews of the Opera Archive
4. ↑ Rueda de prensa de la opera "Il buon marito" - Photo - EFE Data - 99199
5. ↑ Gedoseerde ontploffing in 'Zaide' van Mozart - Muziek - Voor nieuws, achtergronden en columns (Dutch)
6. ↑ Opera review: Musica Angelica stages Mozart's "Zaide" - Culture Monster - Los Angeles Times (English)
7. ↑ ^{a b} Shakespeare Festival im Globe Neuss June 7th to July 7th 2018
8. ^ "Murder" Delivers a Vibrant Lesson About Dark, Brutal Cycle of Violence - latimes
9. ↑ Pafos 2017: 10 Inspiring International Productions You've got to See! - My Cyprus Insider
10. ↑ http://www.teatrrozbark.pl/searching-the-silence,433