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Chicago Goes Global: Second International Theatre Festival Sets Lake Michigan on
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13631 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1988 |
2,943 Words |
| Author
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Nicholas Rudall
Nicholas Rudall is artistic director of the Court Theatre,
Chicago, and professor of classics at the University of
Chicago. |
Chicago had been hot for April. It had felt like deep spring. Now it was cold again as a crowd of about a thousand people gathered in the quickening dark of Navy Pier, a rusting, forbidding, monstrous, metal finger that jabs into Lake Michigan. People stamped their feet and made airy ghosts with their breath as they huddled together before a makeshift stage backed by the lake and Gary's steel mills miles away. Then the drumming began, insistent and loud. Fireworks exploded. Masked demons with tails and horns shrieked and whirled through the smoke. "Fuego!" we were told to shout, "Fuego! Fuego! Fuego!" to the rhythm of the maniacal medieval drums. And we shouted. And the fire demons came and romped among us. They led us into the cavernous metal heart of the pier through a smoke-filled passage that was all redness and shadow. Claustrophobia. Figures slithered among us. Always the drumming and the demonic screams.
Masked Dancers
Later, on the lakefront again, the stage was crackling with fire and spinning with masked dancers when behind us on a metal parapet there suddenly appeared twenty white figures lit by white flames and waving enormous white banners. The demons attacked and routed these figures of good, and once again the air was filled with smoke. Firecrackers cracked. Victory was celebrated with spinning torches, phalluses, and the sudden whoosh of the first rocket in the black sky, which then exploded in color. The last rocket puffed a halo in the air and there was silence for a few eternal seconds, then we all roared. Chicago's Second International Theatre Festival had begun.
These men and women who had dragged us into a
... (1998 of 16529 Characters)
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