Jan Ritsema & Gäste (F/NL)

The dutch theatre director Jan Ritsema (1945) makes theatre that triggers these strange moments where thinking and performing meet each other. Ritsema directed repertoire from Shakespeare, Bernard-Marie Koltès, Elfriede Jelinek and all the time again Heiner Müller for big and small companies in Europe, and he dramatised novels from James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Rainer Maria Rilke and others. Pieces made in cooperation with others, like “Weak Dance Strong Questions”, “TodayUlysses” and “Pipelines, a construction” had a huge success in Europe in the nineties and tens. Ritsema is not interested in the big illusion and fiction machine through which theatre often is represented, but in the live presentation of bodies on stage that think and that provoke thinking. Theatre as the place where actors and audience in their live gathering can think together. In 1978 Ritsema founded the International Theatre Bookshop in Amsterdam and over the years has published more than 400 books. In 2006 he created the PerformingArtsForum (PAF) in St. Erme/France, an alternative artists residency, run by artists, in which every year some 700 international artists exchange their experiences and knowledge and create work.
www.pa-f.net