In Performance: Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (NYC)

Ingmar Bergman’s Persona
the company should be called
August 2 – 4, 2012 @ 8:30pm
August 4 & 5, 2012 @ 4pm
Here Arts Center

Catherine Sullivan’s Five Economies

My favorite treatment of Persona has always been Catherine Sullivan’s grand 22 minute video work, Five Economies (big hunt/little hunt), in which it’s a part of a larger mix of performance style and everyday movement, but the intensely personal film, written as a reaction to Bergman’s own illness, will appear in another staged version at HERE Art Center in New York City.

The company called “the company should be called” is a producing collective comprised of theater makers who have been spent years making more traditional theater and who have come together to make work that “traditional institutions might consider a risk, but [they] consider vital to the vibrancy of New York theater culture.”  Founded and helmed by Craig Baldwin, and with a specific interest in adapting and reinterpreting existing text, the company asserts that they are working toward building a new theatrical vocabulary.  Their inaugural piece was a workshop at Classic Stage Company, entitled “MacB**h” and this performance, drawn from Bergman’s shooting script, was workshopped at TheaterLab and premieres this weekend.

Bergman’s Persona