 Footsbarn theatre fest
 The largest travelling theatre company in the world is coming to Chennai. Magic Lantern, in association with Prithvi Theatre and the Alliance Francaise of Madras, has organised The Footsbarn Theatre Festival - performances by the Footsbarn Travelling Theatre of France - in Chennai on February 18 and 19, at the YMCA grounds,
Nandanam.
Shashi Kapoor, Sanjana Kapoor and the Footsbarn team will be present at the venue.
Over the last decade, Magic Lantern has been working at revitalising the theatre scene in Chennai and Tamil Nadu. Magic Lantern believes in taking theatre to audiences to rekindle interest among whole generations who have had little or no exposure to it. It has, to this effect, been performing in city schools and village squares across Tamil
Nadu.
Today, in Chennai, there is palpable excitement in the air, a renewed interest in theatre. Audiences coming back to theatre crave for variety, which the city is not able to offer at the moment. Magic Lantern hopes to feed this growing interest through strategic partnership with like-minded companies and theatres like
Prithvi.
 "Our dual goals are to bring quality theatre to Chennai on a regular basis and to showcase local talent in Chennai and elsewhere in India. This collaboration with the Prithvi Theatre is a first step in this direction. Magic Lantern's plans for the immediate future are to run a theatre hall which will give Chennai regular weekly shows of contemporary performing arts - theatre, dance, music."
Performances "Perchance to Dream...." February 18-19, at the YMCA open-air theatre.
Footsbarn is an international company, with roots in popular theatre and which, from its beginnings, adopted an itinerant way of life. In over three decades of existence, Footsbarn has produced nearly 60 plays and travelled to the six continents. The collective creations reflect the multi-national character of the group.
Footsbarn has remained true to a certain aesthetic, the travelling players and storytellers of older times, with a particular passion for Shakespeare and Moliere and other classic universal stories. Movement, burlesque, masks and original music are given as much importance as the text. The actors possess a multiplicity of talents and theatrical techniques all of which inhabit and enrich every performance.
'Perchance to Dream' is a collage of extracts of several of Shakespeare’s plays, all of which have been staged by Footsbarn in the thirty years of the companies’ existence: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1976 & 1990), King Lear (1983), Hamlet (1980), Macbeth (1986), Romeo and Juliet (1992)...The texts reply to one another. Romeo’s words echo those of Lear, Juliet’s of Hamlet. It’s a celebration of theatre in all it’s forms: masks, shadow theatre, circus acrobatics and so on.
The lines are interchangeable from one character to the other. Hamlet, Juliet, Macbeth, Lear and the others come together to form a choir. In fact, it doesn’t matter who speaks. The human condition is always the subject matter. At the end, the white sheet that covers the stage is a shroud. There is no despair, however. The show’s first images remain in the minds of the audience. They know that the cycle of the seasons will play out again and that there will be laughter and dreams of love. 'Perchance' could be heard both as a philosophical fable and a charming fairytale.
 Footsbarn has chosen pivotal extracts from the five Shakespearean plays in order to portray man in the grip of the most intense human emotions, such as passion, tenderness, jealousy, ambition, pain and joy...stylistically, this collective production is a kaleidoscopic mix of such diverse elements as masks, marionettes, silent film, mime, music, dance and song that the company has gleaned during its travels, thus creating the kind of universal theatrical language that is its personal stamp...the action attains a dream-like, hallucinatory quality.
Footsbarn's language goes beyond the purely theatrical and becomes a metaphysical and philosophical commentary on both theatre and life, and points out how narrow is the borderline between illusion and reality.
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