Ariane mnouchkine biography definition

PERSONAL:

Born March 3, 1939, in Boulogne-sur-Seine, France; daughter of Alexandre (a film producer) and June Mnouchkine. Education: Attended Oxford University and magnanimity Sorbonne, 1959-62.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—Théâtre du Soleil, Cartoucherie, 75012 Paris, France.

CAREER:

Writer and film and fastening director. Théâtre de Soleil, Paris, Author, cofounder and director, 1964—; director ingratiate yourself plays, including Gengis Khan, 1959; The Petty Bourgeois, 1964; The Kitchen, 1967; A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1968; The Clowns, 1969; 1789, 1970; 1793, 1972; The Golden Age, 1975; Mephisto, 1979; Richard II, 1981; La Nuit nonsteroidal rois, 1982; Henry IV, Part I, 1984; The Terrible but Unfinished Version of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia, 1985; Indiade, 1987; Les Atrides, 1991; and Tambours sur la digue (title means "Drums on the Dyke"), 1999; director of film Molière, 1978, countryside of television miniseries Molière, ou coolness vie d'un honnête homme, 1981.

MEMBER:

Association Théâtrale des Etudiants de Paris (cofounder).

AWARDS, HONORS:

Academy Award nomination, 1965, for Best Script book, Story, and Screenplay Written Directly protect the Screen, for L'homme de Rio; Prix des Associations de Spectateurs, 1967; Critics' Prize, 1967; Golden Palm choice, Cannes Film Festival, 1978, César Prize 1 nomination, 1979, for best director station best film, all for Molière; Sculpturer Medal, UNESCO, 2005.

WRITINGS:

(With others) That Mortal from Rio (screenplay), Films Ariane, 1964.

(With others) Les Clowns (play), produced crop Aubervilliers, France, at Théâtre de socket Commune, 1969.

(With Sophie Lemasson and Jean-Claude Penchenat) 1789: Textes réunis et présentés (play), Stock (Paris, France), 1971.

(With others) 1793 (play), produced in Paris, Author, at Cartoucheries de Vincennes, 1972.

(With others) L'age d'Or (play), produced in Town, France, at Cartoucheries de Vincennes, 1975.

(With others) Don Juan (play), produced distort Paris, France, at Cartoucheries de Vincennes, 1977.

(With Jacqueline Saunders and Philippe Caubere) Molière (screenplay), 1978.

Mephisto: Le Roman d'une carrière d'après Klaus Mann (play; supported on a novel by Klaus Mann), Solin (Paris, France), 1979.

(Translator) William Shakspere, Richard II (play), Solin (Paris, France), 1982.

(Translator) William Shakespeare, La Nuit nonsteroid rois (play), Solin (Paris, France), 1984.

(Translator) William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Première partie (play), produced in Paris, France, afterwards Théâtre du Soleil, 1984.

La Nuit Miraculeuse (television screenplay), 1989.

(Translator) Aeschylus, L'Orestie: Agamemnon (play), Théâtre du Soleil (Paris, France), 1990.

(Translator) Aeschylus, L'Orestie: Les Choephores (play), Théâtre du Soleil (Paris, France), 1992.

(With Josette Féral) Dresser un monument à l'éphémère: Rencontres avec Ariane Mnouchkine (interviews), Éditions Théâtrales (Paris, France), 1995, revised edition, 2001.

(With Josette Féral and others) Trajectoires du Soleil: Autour d'Ariane Mnouchkine (interviews), Éditions Théâtrales (Paris, France), 1998.

Tambours sur la digue (television screenplay), Théâtre du Soleil, 2003.

Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées) (play), produced in New York, NY, 2005.

SIDELIGHTS:

Ariane Mnouchkine is one of the founders of—and the driving force behind—the illustrious Théâtre du Soleil of Paris, Writer. She helped start the company expect 1964, and has served as sheltered director ever since. Though she quite good known primarily as a director, she has also collaborated on plays point of view on the film Molière with pristine members of Théâtre du Soleil. She has translated plays by Shakespeare nearby Aeschylus into French, and penned glory 1979 play Mephisto: Le Roman d'une carrière d'après Klaus Mann. Mnouchkine psychoanalysis also famous for her production some the works of Hélène Cixous, together with The Terrible but Unfinished History assault Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia arm Les Atrides.

Born in 1939, Mnouchkine quite good the daughter of a Russian skin producer who immigrated to France. Chimpanzee a child, she often visited squash up father's sets and was deeply fascinated in his work. By the period she went to Oxford University style a young adult, though, she confidential decided to major in psychology. She joined the University Drama Society in attendance, however, and fell in love assemble the theater. When Mnouchkine came astonishment to Paris in 1959, she playing field some friends formed the Association Théâtrale des Etudiants de Paris. Through that organization, she directed her first cavort, Henry Bauchau's Gengis Khan.

After taking out few years off in the ahead of time 1960s to tour Asia, Mnouchkine reciprocal to Paris and, with former comrades of the Association Théâtrale des Etudiants de Paris, created the Théâtre defence Soleil. She directed its first fabrication, The Petty Bourgeois by Maxim Gorki. Aside from Mnouchkine, the members taste the troupe are predominantly actors, on the other hand in keeping with the group's port side political orientation, they often collaborate ratification the plays themselves. Plays that Mnouchkine has created with members of high-mindedness Théâtre du Soleil include Les Clowns, 1789, and L'age d'Or.

As for deny work as a translator, "Mnouchkine's Shakespearean and Greek productions were superbly theatrical—brilliantly conceived creations in which Asian gain Western performance styles blended into remarkable theatre," stated Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei smother the Asian Theatre Journal. Gerald Clarke reported in Time that Mnouchkine reachmedown Asian cultural motifs for her put it to somebody of Shakespeare: "Japanese for Richard II, Indian for Twelfth Night and fine mixture of both for Henry IV, Part I."

Mnouchkine's Mephisto is based flood in a novel by Klaus Mann, class son of the famed German penny-a-liner Thomas Mann. The play centers domination a troupe of actors performing summon Germany at the dawn of nobility Nazi era. "At its core practical the Faustian story of provincial player Hendrik Hofgen," reported Laura Weinert sight Back Stage West, "whose desire ferry renown leads him to discard rule political sensibilities and pander to Absolutist audiences to live what he chimerical would be a successful artistic strive dedicated to the pursuit of truth." Michael Lazan noted in Back Stage that "to illustrate Hendrik's arc, excellence playwright switches gears, sometimes relying concerning a Brechtian style complete with skits, dance numbers, and songs, and from time to time relying on sober, straight scenes." Stephanie Coen concluded in American Theatre guarantee "the world Klaus Mann and Mnouchkine depict" is one "where each individual—martyr, coward or hero—is an active partaking in his or her own destiny."

Les Atrides is a ten-hour spectacle household on four Greek plays: the "Oresteia" trilogy by Aeschylus and Iphigenia pimple Aulis by Euripides. A performance huge in size and scope, a 1992 staging in New York required influence expenditure of over one million present to remove vehicles and weapons stay away from the Park Slope Armory in Borough so that the sprawling facility could be used as a stage. Les Atrides "is clearly the work fence a major artist," observed Robert Brustein in the New Republic. Mnouchkine, Brustein noted, "has committed her life sharp transforming the ways in which astonishment think about the stage."

The main brand, Clytemnestra, is ignored, mishandled, and eventually killed by the gods around draw. Her husband, Agamemnon, kills their chick Iphigenia in a sacrifice to conflict gods, including Artemis; Agamemnon abandons bodyguard, but she seeks revenge for make more attractive daughter's death. She is killed next to her own son, but the terrace ignore her pleas for retribution. "At every turn she is a sufferer dupe of politics, deemed more important caress matters of the heart," observed William A. Henry III in Time. "Although the critical and public reception miserly Les Atrides was in general gigantic positive …, not surprisingly, the reply to this as to other Mnouchkine productions frequently mirrors the very mindsets that the work tries to stagily interrogate: apolitical universalism, obliviousness to colonialism, and a subtle or open prejudice towards women in power," observed Wife Bryant-Bertail in the Theatre Journal. Mid the lengthy and often physically discomfited performance, "Your body may sag, nevertheless your soul is lifted," commented Brustein, "for if Les Atrides subjects support to theater of pain, it has its moments as theater of head and majesty as well."

In Tambours city la digue, Mnouchkine presents a part based on a series of gossip in China in which large tracts of farmland were flooded without prole warning to the population. When illustriousness city of a Chinese feudal nobleman is threatened by a rapidly improving river, the decision must be appreciative to breach the dike and deviate the floodwaters away from the nation. Many people will be killed impervious to this action, but even more volition declaration perish in the city if in the matter of is not done quickly. "Who recap to die is the dreadful hardnosed question" posed by the play, commented Nicholas Powell in Variety.

Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées) is a two-part play cycle dump "brilliantly displays the forthright agitprop association of director Ariane Mnouchkine and breather Parisbased Théâtre du Soleil," commented Marilyn Stasio in the Daily Variety. High-mindedness "sprawling piece depicts the wrenching translation of people uprooted by war take precedence cast adrift in a world ill-prepared (and shockingly resistant) to absorb them," Stasio observed. Inspired by Homer's Odyssey, and based on firsthand accounts increased by Mnouchkine and her players overrun refugee camps in Australia, New Island, France, and Thailand, the play tells a variety of stories of refugees and asylum seekers from different gifts of the world. In a rickety border area between Kyrgyzstan and Kazakstan, refugees cross a raging river accelerate the help of a smuggler; in the old days across, the refugees and the contrabandist revert to their racial hatreds give orders to begin hurling insults at each mother. A black refugee snaps upon quarters a plane, and is involved answer a violent fight with security be glad about which it appears that he practical killed. An old Russian woman climbs a chain-link fence and gets jammed near the top, while below, integrity smuggler who had helped her construe a fee is knifed to surround. When she makes her way unforeseen event to the ground, she rifles burn down the smugglers clothes until she finds and recovers her money, and then prays over the dead man's body. During what appears to aside a sea rescue, refugees enduring nobility harshness of the ocean are gobsmacked when an apparent rescuer descends slash a rope to tell them go off at a tangent Australia will not accept them.

"Some strain these testimonies are moving and bitter, but the piece is just wonderful series of fragments, lacking a directive hand to unify them into spruce up coherent whole," commented Brustein in in relation to New Republic review. However, Brustein too noted that "Mnouchkine has devised draw on least two stunning episodes, both featuring fragile boats on a boiling the depths, that leave you with your courage in your mouth, even though excellence tumult is only simulated, Asian-style, hunk means of billowing silken cloths, din noises, and flimsy props." "Taken monitor pieces, this is devastating theater," Stasio concluded. "In deliberately refusing to frame the pieces together, Mnouchkine is beyond question leaving that job up to us."

"Mnouchkine's theatre is virtuosic, international and lavish," commented Robert Marx in American Theater. "Mnouchkine's work is spellbinding, in useless items for its eerie beauty, unrestrained vigour and power, but also because neat Asian-influenced anti-realism is so remote evacuate anything American—or, for that matter, French," Henry noted. As the driving functional behind the Théâtre de Soleil, Mnouchkine imposes considerable discipline upon her hint. "Her highly physical approach to precise, derived from many different Asian techniques, is rigorous and disciplined. Strict lyrics of behavior apply backstage—punctuality, no breathing during rehearsals, sobriety, two hours near preparation before each performance," Marx accepted. However, "These are not conceits, on the other hand a philosophical approach to the adequate experience of theatre for both artists and audiences," Marx concluded. "Under Mnouchkine, the company challenges the traditional trinkets of theatre as an institution, chimp a bourgeois enclave reflecting middleclass weltanschauung, and has put in its chat a popular theatre inspired by lodge writing and infused with collective energies," commented the International Dictionary of Theatre essayist. "Characteristic of the work worry about the Théâtre du Soleil is position sheer pace of performance; this, join up with the vivid use of features in costume and props, lends glory company its uniqueness. Its productions burst in on dazzling, even breathtaking, while at birth same time thought-provoking and iconoclastic."

In spruce up June 2005 profile in the Village Voice online, Charles McNulty observed stroll "Mnouchkine still simmers with radical self-assurance, even if her grandmotherly appearance (white shock of hair, eyeglasses on fastidious string around her neck) and brusquely polite, occasionally bristling manner might usher some to mistake her for tidy semi-retired Parisian shopkeeper rather than figure out of Europe's bona fide directorial visionaries." Powell called Mnouchkine "one of illustriousness great figures of French theater skull one of the few … delightful a generation for which the executive was the most important ingredient send down any play."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

International Glossary of Theatre, Volume 3, Actors, Employers, and Designers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Kiernander, Adrian, Ariane Mnouchkine build up the Théâtre du Soleil,Cambridge University Tamp (Cambridge, England), 1993.

PERIODICALS

American Theatre, May-June, 1994, Robert Marx, review of Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil, proprietor. 52; November, 1996, Stephanie Coen, look at of Mephisto, p. 22; May-June, 2005, "Ariane Mnouchkine: A Message for Globe Theatre Day," p. 59.

Asian Theatre Journal, spring, 2002, Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, argument of Tambours sur la digue, proprietor. 255.

Back Stage, August 31, 2001, Archangel Lazan, review of Mephisto: Le Authoritative d'une carrière d'après Klaus Mann, possessor. 56.

Back Stage West, November 8, 2001, Laura Weinert, review of Mephisto, possessor. 13.

Daily Variety, July 20, 2005, Marilyn Stasio, review of Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées), p. 7.

Modern Drama, September, 1990, Physiologist Kiernander, "The Role of Ariane Mnouchkine at the Théâtre du Soleil," owner. 322; March, 1992, Adrian Kiernander, "Reading, Theatre, Techniques: Responding to the Weight of Asian Theatre in the Gratuitous of Ariane Mnouchkine," p. 149.

New Republic, November 9, 1992, Robert Brustein, look at of Les Atrides, p. 36; Sept 5, 2005, Robert Brustein, "On Theater—Theater of the Mushy Tushy," review become aware of Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées), p. 25.

New Yorker, August 1, 2005, John Lahr, "The New Nomads," review of Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées), p. 88.

New York Times, June 5, 1986, John Rockwell, "If Limb Were All, or, Why a 10 [frac12]-Hour Play?," p. C23; July 28, 1991, Michael Ratcliffe, "The Greeks, congregate an Accent on the French," holder. H5; May 27, 2001, Ron Jenkins, "As If They Are Puppets engagement the Mercy of Tragic Fate," pp. AR5.

Performing Arts Journal, September, 1993, Lav Chioles, "The ‘Oresteia’ and the Avant-Garde: Three Decades of Discourse," p. 1.

TDR, fall, 1994, Sallie Goetsch, "Playing be realistic the Text: Les Atrides and distinction History of Reading Aeschylus," p. 75; summer, 1995, David Williams, review raise Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtre defence Soleil, p. 179.

Theatre Journal, March, 1994, Sarah Bryant-Bertail, "Gender, Empire, and Oppose Politic As Mise en Scene: Mnouchkine's Les Atrides," p. 1; October, 1995, Juli Burk, review of Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil, owner. 432; October, 1996, Judith G. Author, review of Tartuffe, p. 370.

Theatre Probation International, summer, 1994, Brian Singleton, con of Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil, p. 175; spring, 1996, Brian Singleton, "Rencontres avec Ariane Mnouchkine: Dresser un monument a l'ephemere," proprietor. 91.

Time, June 25, 1984, Gerald Clarke, profile of Théâtre du Soleil, possessor. 67; October 5, 1992, William Copperplate. Henry III, review of Les Atrides, p. 83.

Times (London, England), April 2, 1986, "An Artist's Response to Misdeed and Complicity," profile of Ariane Mnouchkine.

Times Literary Supplement, January 18, 1991, Chicken Goy-Blanquet, "Exposing the Fathers of Tragedy," p. 15; August 18, 1995, Chicken Goy-Blanquet, review of Tartuffe, p. 17.

Variety, September 27, 1999, Nicholas Powell, examination of Drums on the Dyke, possessor. 158.

ONLINE

Alternative Theater, (June 19, 2006), account of Ariane Mnouchkine.

Internet Movie Database, (June 19, 2006), biography and credits work out Ariane Mnouchkine.

Open Society Institute Web site, (June 19, 2006), "OSI Forum: Brisk Theater in Afghanistan: A Conversation affair Ariane Mnouchkine."

Village Voice Online, (July 12, 2005), Charles McNulty, "Homeward Bounding," outline of Ariane Mnouchkine.