Arts around the world

London
Troilus and Cressida

Writer and director Matthew Dunster’s period-costume production of Shakespeare’s tragicomic Troilus and Cressida opens on July 12 at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. The Trojan War’s long endgame and the downfall of the Trojan hero Hector serve as the backdrop for a love affair between Troilus, a Trojan prince, and Cressida, a Trojan taken prisoner by Greek troops. The play was greeted with confusion in Shakespeare’s time – and in the Victorian era – for its mix of doom and bawdy humour. Dunster recently raised his profile and garnered praise for writing 2008’s You Can See the Hills, an adolescent boy’s monologue on learning about the opposite sex. Paul Stocker and Laura Pyper take the leads, and the production also stars Jamie Ballard (Ulysses), Christopher Colquhoun (Hector) and Matthew Kelly as Cressida’s uncle Pandarus. Ends September 20.

Barcelona
Dies de Dansa

The square outside Barcelona’s Ajuntament, or city council, serves as a fitting stage – or soapbox – for the opening of the Dies de Dansa, a four-day festival of avant-garde and street dance in public spaces, whose performers aim to stir up public debate on how city-dwellers interact with urban planning. Dozens of Spanish and international troupes – ranging from breakdancers to the high-concept Japanese dancer Pijin Neji, whose contemplative works make use of video projections and body paint – will fill slots of 10 to 30 minutes at outdoor spaces each day; the festival moves to beach town Sitges for its final day, July 14.

New York
Lincoln Center Festival

The avant-garde Parisian director Ariane Mnouchkine and her ensemble the Théâtre du Soleil open the annual Lincoln Center Festival on July 7 with the US premiere of Les Éphémères (2006), a two-night cycle of short scenes whose loosely linked protagonists contemplate human suffering and the end of the world.

Other highlights in the three-week programme of modern dance and theatre include Israeli dance troupe Emanuel Gat Dance performing the choreographer’s Winter Variations and Silent Ballet (July 14-17); African blues from Londoner Justin Adams and Gambian fiddler Juldeh Camara (July 21); and an original-language performance of Alexander Pushkin’s Boris Godunov by the Chekhov International Theatre Festival. Productions run until
July 26.

Potsdam
Rohkunstbau

The 16th annual Rohkunstbau, an annual show of site-specfic contemporary art installations, opens on July 12 at Schloss Marquardt, a restored stately home in Potsdam, about half an hour’s train ride from Berlin. Ruminations on the lost, idealised city of Atlantis are the theme; the 10 German and eastern European artists use the theme to explore social collapse, as in Sabine Hornig’s o. T. (Computer), a nine-foot-high photograph of discarded computers, and the layering of history, as in Thomas Scheibitz’s oil paintings, which take Mondrian’s primary-colour abstraction as their jumping-off point. Closes September 13.

Bregenz, Austria
Antony Gormley

A show of four installations by the British sculptor Antony Gormley opens on July 12 at the Kunsthaus. Gormley, born in 1950, is best known for using his body to make life-size cast-iron figures – in his installation Another Place he set 100 of them on a beach outside Liverpool – which emphasize the materiality of the human form. This show includes figurative works as well as the abstract “Clearing V” (2009), in which Gormley uses 12 kilometres of aluminium tubing to create a “three dimensional drawing in space”, and “Body” (1991) and “Fruit” (1993), two impressive, hefty pendulums. Closes October 4.

Tokyo
Paul Gauguin

The Post-Impressionist’s allegorical masterpiece “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” (1897-98), in which a jungle scene serves as a meditation on man’s purpose in life, is the centrepiece of a show of Gauguin’s paintings, drawings and sculptures, which opened this past Friday at the National Museum of Modern Art. The 50 works in the exhibition – which ran at the Nagoya outpost of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts until last month – have been chosen to highlight the “inner wildness” with which Gauguin depicted natives on Tahiti and Martinique, whom he met in his search for a primeval Paradise. Closes September 23.

Auckland
New Zealand International Film Festival

Jane Campion’s Palme d’Or-winning Bright Star (2009), the story of the love affair between the poet John Keats and his neighbour Fanny Brawne, opens the New Zealand International Film Festival on July 9. Festival circuit favourites are on offer, including Pedro Almodóvar’s Los Abrazos Rotos (2009) and Lone Scherfig’s An Education (2009); lower-profile works to be found in the festival’s Incredibly Strange and Masters sections include Chan Wook Park’s Thirst (2009), an unsettling tale of a vampire priest, and Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962). Two features by Kiwi directors, the documentary This Way of Life and the coming-of-age story The Strength of Water, make national premieres. Runs until July 26 in Auckland, then tours New Zealand through to the end of November.