The Far Side of the Moon opens the door to the theatric journey
By Salome Modebadze
Monday, September 30
Theatergoers have a great opportunity to attend theatric performances of international troupes in the capital Tbilisi. The Tbilisi International Festival of Theatre took start for the fifth time by uniting both local and foreign stage directors, actors and audiences under its umbrella.
In her introductory piece for the traditional brochure of the festival, Festival Director, Eka Mazmishvili, calls the festival “a journey that will help our delicate feelings to become deeper and strengthen our hopes. Hopes - so eternal and so fragile.”
She promised that “during the three weeks in the golden days of Autumn, your thoughts will go deeper than ever and your ideas and dreams will become more daring, and your efforts more essential... The theatre will remind us of everything we might overlook in life…”
The festival was opened with Canadian Robert Lepage’s Far Side of the Moon performed by Yves Jacques and Ex Machina - a multidisciplinary company bringing together actors, writers, set designers, technicians, opera singers, puppeteers, computer graphic designers, video artists, contortionists and musicians who want “to rise to the challenge and become a laboratory, an incubator for a form of theatre that will reach and touch audiences from this new millennium.”
With the help of modern technology for stage design, the single actor of the play transformed in various characters without breaking the unity of the story. During the 135 minute performance without intermission, Jacques managed to make the audience travel to the farthest side of the moon without leaving the earth.
Expressing ordinary human emotions filled both with humor and sadness, the play created an extraordinary show on the stage of Rustaveli Theater September 20-21 and thus became the starting point for the theatric journey which according to the Festival Director “could be called a “frame” of humanity and universe.”
