A dream come true

24 countries will be on hand for the first European Dream Festival, an extravaganza with everything from Swiss drama to Estonian folk-rock

BY APOLLINAIRE SCHERR | Special to Newsday

September 17, 2006

A highlight of the European Dream Festival will be "A bras le corps," at Danspace Project.

A couple of summers ago, French freelancers in the arts - choreographers, set designers, dancers, theater directors - shut down festivals across the country to protest cuts in their unemployment benefits. The rest of the world promptly declared them nuts, and typically French.

"The Italians said, 'If you are a factory worker and you strike, the factory is shut down. But if you are an artist, you just don't produce your own work,'" recalls experimental choreographer Boris Charmatz, 32, by phone from Salzburg, Austria. "People said, 'Artists aren't striking, they're committing suicide.'"

But in France, art is at least as important as widgets, as closely tied to national identity as labor strikes - even art so cutting-edge that it can't pay its people full-time. And France isn't alone among European nations in its high regard for unpopular forms of expression, whatever the Italians may say. The European Union has laid out big bucks to get Charmatz and several renegade playwrights, musicians, puppeteers, polemicists and poets to New York for the first annual European Dream Festival.

The extravaganza, which begins this week and continues through October, spans 24 countries and 22 venues, including such daring nonprofits as Dance Theater Workshop, the World Music Institute, Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church and PS 122. Events range from a smart "Youth of Europe" film series to explosive physical theater from Slovenia, sprightly Estonian folk-rock, twisted Swiss drama and an age-of-terrorism healing ritual from the Netherlands, in which audience members lie down and let storytellers whisper to them in a babel of languages. Refreshing rigor and lack of slickness are common denominators.

Since the idea was first broached in 2000, the festival organizers - from the German, French, Italian and Czech cultural institutes in New York, which are responsible for much of the funding - have wanted to present work that "under normal circumstances would never be able to come," says Stefan Huesgen, program director at the Goethe-Institut.

So, for example, you won't see Pina Bausch or Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, resident choreographers at lavishly supported state facilities and regular players at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. You will see Charmatz, who has performed in major cities across Europe for a decade, but has appeared here only once (at the Kitchen in 2001).

The purpose of the EU's $190,000 matching grant for the festival is as bland as one might expect from such a bulwark of officialdom: "to introduce people from outside the union to what is going on in the cultural world in Europe." But the

EU bureaucrats in Belgium don't seem to mind that this introduction will take the form of a hip-hop puppet reverie about Hans Christian Andersen, or an "invisible symposium" in which leading European intellectuals played by American actors warn against the spread of the EU. "The poorest of the world will lose out first, then the environment itself, and eventually everybody," asserts Hungarian writer Peter Nadas in a bite-the-hand-that-feeds-you moment.

The American Dream?

"Can you imagine what an American Dream Festival, funded by the State Department, would look like?" asks Vallejo Gantner, artistic director of PS 122 in the East Village. He envisions "Wisconsin high-school marching bands, a Salute the Flag Day. It would be absurd." A market-driven American Dream Festival might look pretty much the way things do: an everyday blitz of "Sex and the City" and pirate movies.

The European Dream Festival, simply by paying these performers to show up, distinguishes itself: European nations are willing to fund under-the-radar art. Maybe not for long, though.

"We are in a moment of transition," says Corina Suteu, a European cultural-policy consultant who directs the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York. In the past few years, countries that typically have invested heavily in the arts - Italy, Spain, France and Germany - have reduced support by as much as 30 percent. "From your [American] point of view, it is still heaven," Huesgen says. "But when the state has to save money, they do it in the cultural arena."

"Culture used to be the vehicle of reconciliation," Suteu explains. "In the wake of World War II, opera houses and huge museums were built so people from every class could participate. But once this access became normal, culture lost its heroic stature."

A recent study by the sociological research division of the French government confirmed that theater and dance were losing audiences to movies, TV and Web surfing. The government is not fighting this trend. "Europeans are beginning to emulate the American system" of letting the market drive taste, says Suteu, and, unlike us, they have no tradition of philanthropy to soften the blow.

The first to suffer are not major institutions such as opera houses and museums, but independent artists such as the French freelancers whose benefits got slashed - the kind of people the Dream Festival is bringing over, not a moment too soon.

Bordering on difficult

As cultural funding in Europe shrinks, the borders of the EU expand. You can drive from Paris to Ljubljana without stopping once to show your passport or exchange money. Western European theaters are producing work by Eastern European artists, whose subsidies are minuscule. Eastern European cities are playing host to artists from Western Europe.

The increasing ease of movement within Europe coincides with mounting difficulty in crossing U.S. borders. Even foreign pop-culture artists with substantial followings here - to say nothing of those on the fringes - have grown discouraged by the ever more complicated visa

process.

Helene Browning of the World Music Institute pauses when

asked how many groups from

Eastern Europe visited before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. "I think we had someone in 1988,"

she says finally. In the next six weeks alone, the institute will

host Lithuanians, Estonians and Hungarian and Romanian Gypsies. But since Sept. 11, 2001, the cost of getting them here has risen astronomically. An extra $2,500 per group for expediting visas adds up to $50,000 a year for the World Music Institute.

Beefed-up U.S. security takes a toll on the artists, too. "Just to get a visa - and I'm French, not Afghani - you have to list all your travels since you were a child: which dates, where, your whole life," Charmatz anxiously explains. "I went to the States as a tourist when I was young, but I forgot when it was exactly. Especially to the States, I should tell the truth, because they know when I came. But I don't have my old passport; I don't know anymore."

Those States - with foreigners blithely coming and going - are gone, which makes the arrival of the European Dream Festival all the more welcome.

Festival highlights

Here is a list of selected highlights of the European Dream Festival, through Oct. 31 at various Manhattan venues. Go online at europeandream.us for complete details.

"The Invisible Symposium." American actors impersonate real European intellectuals debating the present and future of Europe. 7 p.m. Tuesday, New York Public Library, $10-$15. Call 212-868-4444.

"Tower of Babel." Serene yet provocative ritual theater from the Netherlands. Various times Wednesday through Saturday at PS 122, 150 First Ave., $20. Call 212-352-3101.

"Youth of Europe" film series. Thirteen recent features, several not released here, from young European directors. Highly recommended: "L'Esquive" (France); "Something Like Happiness" (Czech Republic); "Revolution of Pigs" (Estonia); "14 Sucks" (Sweden) and "Deep" (The Netherlands). Various times Wednesday through Saturday at the French Institute/Alliance Francaise, Florence Gould Hall at 22 E. 60th St., $10 per film or $40 pass to all 13 films. Call 212-307-4100.

"Dreaming.Andersen." Czech hip-hop puppet sound-art portrait of Hans Christian Andersen. Oct. 12-14, Tribeca Performing Arts Center.

"The Sexual Neuroses of Our Parents." Reading of excerpts of play by young Swiss writer Lucas Bärfuss, who will be present. Oct. 16, Martin E. Segal Theater, CUNY.

"Queen of Lithuanian Folk Song: Veronika Povilioniene." Oct. 19, World Music Institute.

"Wrestling Dostoyevsky." The much-anticipated physical theater troupe Betontanc, from Slovenia. Oct. 19-21, Danspace Project.

"Changing Frames: An Impossible Comparison - European and American Cultural Policies." Day-long discussion organized by European cultural policies expert Corina Suteu. Oct. 28, Columbia University.

"A bras le corps (Total Embrace)" by Boris Charmatz and Dimitri Chamblas. "It will be an 'A bras le corps,'" says Charmatz, "after 13 years of doing 'A bras le corps.' We are changing, but we keep this." Oct. 26-29, Danspace Project.

-APOLLINAIRE SCHERR

WHEN & WHERE

European Dream Festival opens Tuesday and runs through Oct. 31 at 22 venues in Manhattan. For a complete list of events, locations and contact numbers, visit europeandream.us.