It isn’t often that a production will justify a reviewer’s use of the delightful word “pixilated,” especially as a homonym.  That said, if ever there was a time, it is now.  In Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon’s utterly transfixing and transporting 4D tribute to Scots-Canadian pioneer filmmaker Norman McLaren, here for a brief three-day engagement at the Kennedy Center, both the filmmaker and his revolutionary animation films are nothing less than pixilated.  Friday night, with the assistance of dancer-choreographer Peter Trosztmer, they drew their animated audience irresistibly along with them. [Read more...]

Say the name Samuel Beckett, and most people think: Waiting for Godot, existentialism.  Theatre of the absurd, where absurd means meaningless.  As we watch Peter Brook and Marie Hélène Estienne’s spare but striking staging of five uneasy pieces by the late Irish playwright, the word also takes on its more everyday meaning.  And we realize that Beckett is not only one of us.  He sees inside of us. [Read more...]