Programme announced for 2013 Edinburgh International Festival
This year’s Edinburgh International Festival (EIF), which runs in the Scottish capital from 9 August to 1 September, will be themed around the relationship between art and technology.
© Paula Court
Introducing the programme today, Festival Director Jonathan Mills said: “It is the role of artists to think differently, to offer us provocations and inspiring contrasts to our everyday lives. Artists’ innovation in everyday materials has played a key role in the evolution of artistic techniques and thinking, and of how we experience the world. We celebrate this interaction through historical as well as contemporary work.”
Theatre highlights include The Wooster Group’s live interpretation of a 1964 film of Richard Burton’s Hamlet directed by John Gielgud. Starring Scott Shepherd (Gatz), the production, which runs from 10 to 13 August in the Lyceum Theatre, “remixes the original footage juxtaposed with live performance to channel the ghost of that legendary performance.”
As part of a mini-festival, Gate Theatre Dublin and Pan Pan Theatre
bring productions of Samuel Beckett’s work originally written for other
media to the stage, including filmmaker Atom Egoyan’s production of Eh, Joe (23-31 August). And Scotland’s award-winning theatre company Grid Iron presents a new interactive, promenade performance titled Leaving Planet Earth (10-24 August).
There will also be the world premiere of a one-man version of Kafka’s Metamorphosis (10-12 August) from Taiwan’s Wu Hsing-kuo, who brought his one-man King Lear to the EIF in 2011, and the European premiere of Chilean theatre company Teatrocinema’s stage version of Régis Jauffret’s novel Histoire d’amour (15-17 August).
Elsewhere, the music programme includes the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra with Daniele Gatti and the Festival debut of Oper Frankfurt with director Barrie Kosky; a tribute to Frank Zappa focusing on his orchestral music, and a new commission from Laurie Anderson for New York’s Bang on a Can All-Stars.
And, marking the 50th anniversary of Jean Cocteau’s death, the Philip Glass Ensemble will perform Glass’s score to Cocteau’s film La Belle et la Bête. Glass also appears two nights later with Patti Smith in a homage to Allen Ginsberg titled The Poet Speaks.
As part of a strong dance contingent, Black Swan choreographer Benjamin Millepied’s contemporary dance company LA Dance Project will make its UK debut with works by Forsythe, Cunningham and Millepied’s new work Moving Parts. And Scottish ballet will return to EIF with a four-day dance mini-festival in the Festival Theatre.
On the opera front, Opéra de Lyon will stage a production of Beethoven’s Fidelio set in space, while Angel Blue will star as Lulu in Scottish Opera and The Opera Group’s American Lulu, a “jazz infused adaptation” of Berg’s score by award winning Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth.
Jonathan Mills, who is overseeing his penultimate EIF, added: “From the Broadwood piano company sending Beethoven a metal framed piano, through Samuel Beckett embracing new mediums for drama in radio and television, to the multimedia musings of a subversive spirit like Nam June Paik, Festival 2013 presents a journey inspired by the way technology seizes and shifts our perceptions of the world.”
For full details of this year’s EIF programme, visit www.eif.co.uk
