One late afternoon last week, an intent but amiable sat watching a rehearsal in the near-empty theater at New York Theatre Workshop. It's a space that's been good to Ms. Clarke: In 2003, her revised " : Lusthaus" played here to rave reviews and packed houses.
Now, she has returned to give her unique dance-theater-music treatment to the villagers of a dusty hamlet in 1880's Sicily. Her new evening-length work "Kaos," inspired by the Taviani Brothers' film of five Pirandello short stories, opens December 4.
Onstage, a haggard woman shouted in Italian at a girl.
Along the right side of the stage ran a tall, ancient stone wall straight out of a photograph of Sicily. Yet as the eye traveled across the stage, the scenery gradually evaporated, until all that remained was an exposed wall of theatrical lights.
"What I like is that we go from the super-realistic to a bare theater wall," Ms.
Clarke said, sipping a cup of tea. The set design (by ) also reflects the tone of the piece: think Italian neorealist cinema meets dance-theater. "There's cinematic acting, with a kind of naturalism to it.
But there's also something more stripped away that's a little bit stylized." She paused. "And to find that balance is not easy.
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Like other recent Clarke eveninglength works, including " Vienna: Lusthaus" and "Belle Epoque" (2004), "Kaos" has a daunting array of moving parts: set, props, choreography, acting, and live music (sometimes played onstage). But unlike those predecessors, "Kaos" also relies heavily on a spoken narrative and storylines. The four Pirandello stories Ms.
Clarke chose and streamlined (with dramaturg Giovanni Papotto and playwright Frank Pugliese) form the meat of "Kaos."
Text was conspicuously absent from "Miracolo d'Amore," Ms. Clarke's 1989 piece based on a selection of stories, and 1999's "Vers la Flamme," an amalgam of Chekhov short stories.
The 62-year-old Ms. Clarke is taking a step closer to pure drama with "Kaos," which is essentially a collection of short plays accented by dance and music. The challenge of so much text, she said, is "to make the work linear and understandable without becoming literal.
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One answer to that challenge lies in Ms. Clarke's decision to have"Kaos"performed in the original Italian (with surtitles).While the foreign language serves to keep audiences focused on visual storytelling, the chief reason behind her choice emerged during an early table reading.
After 10 pages in English, Ms.
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