In an ideal world, we might have had full performances from all the European companies represented at the symposium, but apart from the actors' workshops, there are a lot of insights to be gleaned from the talks, screenings and performed extracts (all free and open to the public), in among the arcana of half-cracked performance philosophies.
Having smuggled themselves out of Poland during the Jaruzelski years, Poland's Teatr Osmego Dnia gave a talk at the weekend, entitled "Theatre as an Expression of Rebellion". Explaining that their big torchlit processions and spectacles are a response to the "smell of dictatorship in the air" (not least by the Catholic Church) which followed the fall of Communism, they described themselves as part of a countercultural tradition, their rebellion nowadays more existential and philosophical.
International Visual Theatre from France, a deaf company which has evolved a dancetheatre out of sign language, performed a 25-minute section of Miracle Par Hasard with two deaf actor-dancers. Company choreographer, Joel Linniel, gave a talk in International Sign (simultaneously translated into Irish Sign Language, and only thence into English), claiming that historical bans on signing in education (only lifted in Ireland in 1987) resulted in a serious deterioration in deaf identity; and that deaf culture was best treated as a separate category.
Norway's Grusomhetens Teater (whose work is dedicated to the work of Artaud) demonstrated a tantalising fragment of Artaud's The Phi- losopher's Stone by actress Hanne Dieserud. Director Lars Oyno talked of how Artaud's term, "theatre of cruelty", was much misunderstood.
Chrissie Poulter's ArtsLab, which pulled off The Orpheus Project last year, chipped in with a new, em, performance installation, I Stepped Into The Mirror, a collaboration with artist Kate Buckley. A bunch of actors swaddled in rags in a dim-lit room move around a kind of ritual altar surrounded by guttering candles and overhung by a mask, the actors intoning scraps of the Orpheus text (by the late Kenneth McCleish) and Rilke.
The left-field Dublin clowning troupe, Barabbas, sent along company co-founders Veronica Coburn and Mikel Murfi to gave a talk, about themselves really, mixed with a bit of company career guidance. They were disarmingly frank about their problems in attracting audiences, a factor they greatly, humorously, exaggerated. However, they were serious enough to announce that Barabbas, Calypso and Cois Ceim have now drawn down Arts Council money for a joint "audience development officer".
All the talk about work had a curiously unsatisfying effect, like chewing bubblegum on an empty stomach. So it was refreshing to sit down to an actual performance of Pan Pan's Peep Show: a personable piece of cartoonish absurdism about "ordinary life" - people watching TV, falling in love, making toast, taking a shower, going to work, washing the dog, etc.
If it all sees Pan Pan inching towards their own semi-demented Gesamtkunstwerk, it was certainly a very confident, muscular lead-off to the proceedings.
The symposium continues until Thursday night. Highlights remaining are:
The German ensemble, Marburger Theaterwerkstatt present a full production of Lonely Dogs Feel So Blue, tonight and tomorrow night at 8.30pm.
A talk by Austrian writer, Andreas Staudinger, who works in ["]conceptual collaboration["], creating ["]metalogues["] in a move away from the heavily literary German-language theatre of Mitteleuropa. 4 p.m. today
Talk by Tom Fjordefalk, director of Tyst (Silent), a deaf-culture branch of the National Touring Company of Sweden, at 5 p.m. tomorrow. Based on his five-day workshop, he will present a performance at 6 p.m. Thursday
8 p.m. Thursday: Teatr Osmego Dnia present an ["]open improvisation["] , based on inter- action with the audience.
