David Levine Presents VENICE SAVED: A SEMINAR, Begins 3/21

For VENICE SAVED: A SEMINAR, Levine has assembled a team of acclaimed performers (including Colleen Werthman, James Hannaham, and Jeff Biehl) who will join the audience at the discussion table. Playwright Gordon Dahlquist has provided the discussion topics, which will be illustrated by fully staged scenes from Weil's play. With all the righteous indignation of Mike Daisey's HOW THEATER FAILED AMERICA, Levine and his crew invite the audience to reconsider theater's role in 21st century America.

Simone Weil (1909 - 1943) was a French philosopher and political theorist praised by T.S. Eliot as a "genius on the level of the Saints." She fought in the Spanish Civil War. She was also a Christian mystic. And an anorexic. And a Marxist. And a Jew who fled Paris with her family one day ahead of Hitler's armies. Like her compatriots Sartre and Camus, Weil wrote a play, Venise Sauvée, dramatizing the situation she and her countrymen faced during World War II. Based on the same story Thomas Otway used for his tragedy Venice Preserv'd. Venise Sauvée tells the story of a 17th century conspiracy to overthrow the Venetian Republic, Europe's only democracy, and deliver it into the hands of the Spanish Emperor. On the eve of the coup, one of the conspirators
is seized with pity for the unsuspecting Venetians, and betrays his comrades to the Venetian authorities, who in turn betray him. The unfinished play about the ethics of democracy was discovered among Weil's papers after Weil's death in 1943. She died in exile in England, refusing to eat more than her countrymen were rationed in occupied France.

Best known for his 2007 performance project BAUERNTHEATER ("farmers theater"), in which an method actor played a German farmer on an open field, 10 hours a day, for a month, David Levine's work, which fuses performance, theater, and conceptual art, has been seen in Europe and the USA at Documenta XII, Galerie Magnus Muller (Berlin), Gavin Brown@Passerby (New York) and HAU2 (Berlin), as well as in Cabinet Magazine, The New York Times, ART/US, Bomb, Theater, Theater der Zeit, and the upcoming February 2009 issue of The Believer. He was awarded a 2007 Kulturstiftung Des Bundes grant for BAUERNTHEATER, the film of which has screened in New York, Berlin, Morocco, and Austria. He is the 2007 recipient of a NYFA Fellowship for Cross-Disciplinary/Performative work, and a 2008 recipient of the Etant donnés grant for VENICE SAVED: A SEMINAR. He has directed conventional theater at the Sundance Theater Lab, the Atlantic Theater, the Public, Primary Stages, and the Vineyard Theaters in New York, as well as more experimental work at Soho Rep, La MaMa, and Galapagos Artspace. He lives in New York and Berlin, where he is the Director of the Studio Program at the European College of Liberal Arts. He holds an MA in English Literature from Harvard University.

 

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