Lincoln Center Festival 2010 Announces Updated Lineup

Lincoln Center Festival 2010 is sponsored by American Express. Lincoln Center Festival 2010 is also made possible by Nancy A. Marks, LuEsther T. Mertz Charitable Trust, Isilon Systems, The Skirball Foundation, The Harold & Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, The Katzenberger Foundation, Inc., Trust for Mutual Understanding, The Shubert Foundation, Jennie and Richard DeScherer, The Winston Foundation, The Grand Marnier Foundation, The Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies, Asian Cultural Council, Italian Cultural Institute, J.C.C. Fund of the Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry of New York, Inc., Georges Lurcy Charitable and Educational Trust, Mitsubishi International Corporation, Mitsui USA Foundation, The Harkness Foundation for Dance, Great Performers Circle, Chairman's Council, and Friends of Lincoln Center.

Public support for Festival 2010 is provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Endowment support is provided by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Nancy Abeles Marks, and The Alice Tully Foundation.

Lincoln Center Festival is a presentation of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc. (LCPA), which serves three primary roles: presenter of superb artistic programming, national leader in arts and education and community relations, and manager of the Lincoln Center campus. As a presenter of over 400 events annually, LCPA's programs include American Songbook, Great Performers, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Midsummer Night Swing, the Mostly Mozart Festival, and Live From Lincoln Center. In addition, LCPA is leading a series of major capital projects on behalf of the resident organizations across the campus.

Lincoln Center is committed to providing and improving accessibility for people with disabilities. For information, call the Department of Programs and Services for People with Disabilities at (212) 875-5375.

Lincoln Center Festival 2010 UPDATED THEATER ADVISORY

Musashi (North American Premiere)
Written by Hisashi Inoue
Directed by Yukio Ninagawa
Starring Tatsuya Fujiwara and Ryo Katsuji
Performed in Japanese with English supertitles; 3 hours and 15 minutes, including a 20-minute intermission

July 7-10 at 7:30 p.m.
David H. Koch Theater, Broadway at 63rd Street
Tickets: $35, 55, 75, 100

Lincoln Center Festival welcomes director Yukio Ninagawa back to the stage after sell-out performances of Modern Noh Plays in 2005. Musashi is a noh-inspired play that depicts a ruthless hunt for revenge circa 1600 between two samurai, brought to light through intense drama and riotous comedy. This powerful production stars 28-year-old Japanese superstar Tatsuya Fujiwara.

Famed playwright Hisashi Inoue begins the saga with a showdown between Musashi and Kojiro, after which Kojiro is fatally defeated (whether or not Kojiro survived is historically unknown). Although the legend ends here, Inoue continues to develop the plot. In this production, with its lush evocation of the countryside, the pair unexpectedly meets again six years later at a Zen temple and agrees to a rematch.

Related event: Mr. Fujiawara will make an appearance at the Japan Society (333 East 47th Street) for the North American premiere screening of Isao Yukisada's film, Parade, as art of the Japan Cuts film festival, on Friday, July 9, at noon. For further information, go to www.japansociety.org

Lincoln Center Festival 2010 is sponsored by American Express

Yukio Ninagawa has worked in the theater since 1955 when he joined the Seihai Theatre Company as an actor. He made his directorial debut in Shinjo Afuruu Keihakusa, written by Kunio Shimizu, in 1969. Later, he set up his own companies, Gendaijin-Gekijo and Sakurasha. Over the years, Ninagawa has directed a wide range of productions: Japanese contemporary plays, traditional and classic stage works by such writers as Chikamatsu and Junichiro Tanizaki, and Shakespearean and Greek tragedies. In 1983, he directed his first European production, Medea. Since then he has staged at least one production a year overseas. He is a member of the Shakespeare Globe Council at The Globe Theatre in London, and was awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2002. Ninagawa has received many theater and educational awards in Japan. In addition to Modern Noh Plays at Lincoln Center Festival 05, his recent productions include his first Kabuki production, NINAGAWA Twelfth Night at the Kabuki-za Theatre. In 2006, he became an artistic director of Sainokuni Saitama Arts Theater, Japan, and founded a unique performing group, the Gold Theatre, for people over 55 years old. That same year, he was invited by the Royal Shakespeare Company to stage Titus Andronicus as part of the Complete Works Festival and was honored to be the only Japanese director to participate in that special event.

Hisashi Inoue, one of Japan's most popular playwright's, died this past April. He was 75.
Inoue was also a pacifist and was known for his activities promoting peace as one of the nine founding members of the Article 9 Association, an anti-war organization. Throughout his career, Inoue was a prolific playwright, novelist and essayist. He was educated in Sophia University. During his university years, he became Cultural Affairs and Promotions Chief of the France-za Burlesque, a vaudeville theater in downtown Asakusa, for which he began writing scripts. Starting in 1964, he wrote scripts for a puppet play program, Hyokkori Hyotanjima, on NHK television. Inoue made his theater debut with the play The Belly Button of the Japanese in 1969. He won the 1972 Naoki Prize for the novel Handcuffed Double Suicide, and that same year won the Kishida Drama Award and Selected New Artist Award for The Adventures of Dogen. He won the Yomiuri Literature Award (Drama Division) for his plays Shimijimi Nippon, Nogi Taisho, and Kobayashi Issa, both the Japan Science Fiction Award and the Yomiuri Literature Award (Novel Division) for KiriKirijin, the Yoshikawa Eiji Literary Prize for Treasury of Disloyal Retainers and Fukkoki, the Tanizaki Prize for Shanghai Moon, the Kikuchi Kan Literary Award for Tokyo Seven Roses, and the Mainichi Art Award and Tsuruya Namboku Drama Award for Taiko Tataite Fue Fuite. In 1984, he founded the Komatsu-za theater troupe dedicated to his work, for which he wrote several plays, many of them-including Makeup, the Blind Master Yabuhara, and Living with My Dad-winning acclaim overseas. In 2005, along with Yukio Ninagawa, he created Shakespeare in Tempo 12, which combined all 37 of Shakespeare's plays into one story.

Tatsuya Fujiwara has, since his theatrical debut at the age of 15 in Modern Noh Plays-Yoroboshi directed by Yukio Ninagawa in London in 1997-starred in plays, films, and television dramas. Many of his screen performances have been seen in Asia, Europe, and America, receiving great critical acclaim. He has received Japan's top awards as Best New Actor and Best Performer. In addition to Modern Noh Plays-Yoroboshi, his stage credits in Ninagawa productions include Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, and Orestes. Other stage work includes Oil, Rope (directed by Hideki Noda), and The Merchant of Venice (directed by Gregory Doran). Films include the lead in Battle Royale (seen in 25 countries), in Death Note (seen in 51 countries), KAIJI and in his latest work, Parade.

Ryo Katsuji was awarded the 2005 Japan Academy Prize, a new artist award, for his performance in the film Aegis. Other film credits include All about Lily Chou-Chou; Hanging Garden; Tokyo Tower - Mom & Me, and Sometimes Dad; and Shonen Merikensack. He has been in hit TV dramas like Tokyo Dogs, the NHK period drama Atsu Hime, and others. His stage credits include Ninagawa's Shibuya kara Toku Hanarete, Kitchen, and Caligula. Other stage works include Inoue Kabuki's Kagerou Touge. His latest film, Surely Someday (directed by Shun Oguri), will be released in the summer of 2010.

Musashi is produced by HoriPro, Inc., the entertainment corporation.

Support provided by Asian Cultural Council, J.C.C. Fund of the Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry of New York, Inc., Mitsubishi International Corporation, Mitsui USA Foundation, Nippon Steel U.S.A., Inc. and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries American, Inc.

****

The Demons (North American Premiere)
From the novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Directed and adapted by Peter Stein
Performed in Italian with English supertitles; 12 hours, with short breaks; and lunch and dinner breaks (of one hour each)

July 10 and 11 from 11 a.m. until 11 p.m.
Governors Island
A ferry departs at 10 a.M. Sharp from the Battery Maritime Building (10 South Street, adjacent to Staten Island Ferry) to Governors Island. See "Transportation" information at the end of this section.
Tickets: $175, 225

In what is certain to be one of the most extraordinary theater events of the year, Lincoln Center Festival 2010 will present a marathon production of Dostoyevsky's prophetic novel, The Demons, staged by Germany's eminent theater and opera director, Peter Stein, for two performances only in an industrial warehouse on Governor's Island, July 10 and 11. The 12-hour marathon (with four intermissions and two breaks for lunch and dinner)-performed by a cast of 26 European actors in Italian (with English supertitles) for an audience of 467 people-will begin at 11 a.m. each day, after audiences take a 10 a.m. ferry to Governors Island. There will be no late seating.

Says Peter Stein, "My adaptation of The Demons, which has had different versions by Albert Camus, Frank Castorf, Lev Dodin, and Andrzej Wajda, is an almost complete version of Dostoyevsky's masterpiece and all his characters. For this reason, I couldn't accept the time limitation of a typical theatrical show."

The Demons tells the story of a group of political conspirators who, at the urging of their leader, murder one of their own members. The real-life, widely-reported murder of a young student in Moscow by a small cell of revolutionaries in 1869 was the trigger for Dostoyevsky, beginning what would grow into a 900+ page work, also known in the West as The Possessed. He first conceived of this novel, started in 1869, as a pamphlet in which he would say everything he wanted about the effect that the plague the Western-imported ideas of Nihilism was exercising on the moral fiber of Russian society at that time. The "demons" that Dostoevsky described represented a Russia that had lost its moral center.

What emerged was a ferociously funny masterpiece set in pre-Revolutionary Russia, and an eerily prophetic foreshadowing of not only the soulless society that was to be, some 50 years later under Stalin, but also of 21st century terrorism. Stein has said that, in the novel's central character of Stavrogin, the author has depicted someone who suffers from the great malady of our times: indifference, or feeling nothing inside-essentially lack of empathy, which is the gravest danger in our world today.

Peter Stein, who will make his Metropolitan Opera debut when he directs the new production of Boris Godunov at the Met this coming fall, is considered a giant in European theater but his work has only rarely been seen on American stages. He made his American theater debut in 2007 with his staging of the National Theater of Greece production of Sophocles' Elektra at New York's City Center. His American opera debut was The Welsh National Opera production of Verdi's Falstaff at the Brooklyn Academy Of Music in 1989, and he directed Mozart's Don Giovanni at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2004. Stein believes in the primacy of the author's words, and like his contemporary Ariane Mnouchkine, his technique involves intensive collaboration with the actors on interpretation of the text. In recent years, Stein has made his mark staging marathon performances. His 21-hour staging of the complete, uncut Faust (Parts I and II) by Goethe, which premiered at Expo 2000 in Hanover, Germany, was an event of international magnitude.

Stein originated his adaptation and this production of The Demons with a theater company in Turin, but the first performances were at his home in Umbria for a small audience in July 2009. On February 23, 2010, The Demons was awarded the Ubu Award (Italy's equivalent to the Tony Award) for "The Show of the Year," 2009. The Italian press lauded it as the most important and most discussed production that season. The production will tour to Milan, Vienna, Amsterdam, Naples, Ravenna, and Athens before coming to New York, and will continue to tour Europe in the fall.
Peter Stein (born in Berlin, October 1, 1937) established himself at the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, a company he co-founded in 1970 with Bruno Ganz and brought to the forefront of German theater. He first became an assistant director in Munich in 1965, and made his critically acclaimed directing debut with Saved by Edward Bond two years later. Stein has had great success with the plays of Anton Chekhov-The Three Sisters (1984), The Cherry Orchard (1989, 1996) and Uncle Vanya (1996)-always revealing an unexpected comic point of view in these classic tragedies. His adaptation and stagings of Aeschylus' Oresteia in 1980 in Berlin (in German) and in 1994 in Moscow (in Russian) are considered his most important and influential productions. He was theater director of the Salzburg Festival from 1992 to 1997. His production of Goethe's Faust (Parts I and II) was performed over two days at the Hanover Expo 2000, followed by performances in Berlin and Vienna. Stein has lived in Italy for many years, and is married to actress Maddalena Crippa, who is in the cast of The Demons. Stein has won many international prizes, including France's Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres et Chevalier de la Légion D'Honneur.

Governors Island is a 172 acre island in the middle of New York Harbor. The Island is open to the public every Friday, Saturday and Sunday, from June 5-October 10 for picnics, performances, tours, concerts, car-free biking and more, and is reachable via a free ferry that departs from the Battery Maritime Building, adjacent to the Staten Island Ferry in Lower Manhattan.

Transportation
Audience members should plan on arriving no later than 9:45 a.m. to board the free 10 a.m. ferry to Governors Island. This is the only way to get to the performance. There is no late seating. The Warehouse is a 20-25 minute walk from the ferry landing. Golf carts will be available for those requiring assistance. There will be free return ferry service to Manhattan each night at the conclusion of the performance. Detailed ferry information, as well as directions to Governors Island ferry terminal, will be provided to all ticket holders and will also be available at www.LincolnCenterFestival.org

The Demons - Related Event
July 12, 6 p.m.
Kaplan Penthouse
Free
Italian with English supertitles

A Reading of Selected Chapters of
I Promessi Sposi by Alessandro Manzoni
Dramatic reading by Massimiliano Finazzer Flory
Caterina Demetz, piano

Considered one of the masterpieces of Italian literature, the 19th-century I Promessi Sposi ("The Bethrothed") written by Alessandro Manzoni is the first Italian historical novel and is among the best-known works in the Italian language The sweeping novel-of war, plague and intrigue, with its lovers Renzo and Lucia at the center-is brought to vivid life in this dramatic reading of key chapters adapted by essayist/director/actor Flory. The reading is accompanied by music of Bach, Beethoven, Prokofiev and Schubert.

The Demons is a co-production of Tieffe Teatro Milano and Wallenstein Betriebs GmbH Berlin in collaboration with Napoli Teatro Festival.

The Lincoln Center Festival 2010 presentation of The Demons is made possible in part by the Italian Cultural Institute.

***

COMPLICITE
A Disappearing Number (N.Y. Premiere)
Conceived and directed by Simon McBurney
Devised by The Company
Original Music by Nitin Sawhney
Design Michael Levine
Lighting Paul Anderson
Sound Christopher Shutt
Projection Sven Ortel
Costume Christina Cunningham

110 minutes; no intermission

July 15 at 8 p.m.; July 16 at 8 p.m.; July 17 at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.; July 18 at 3 p.m.
David H. Koch Theater, Broadway at 63rd Street
Tickets: $35, 55, 75, 100

British theater company Complicite, celebrated for creating emotion-laden, mind-expanding shows from abstract concepts, returns to Lincoln Center Festival for its fourth visit with the New York premiere of its award-winning production, A Disappearing Number. Inspired by the true story of the unusual friendship between two of the 20th century's most remarkable pure mathematicians-Cambridge University don G.H. (Godfrey Harold) Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan, a young Brahmin genius-A Disappearing Number interweaves their tale with a fictional contemporary love story between a present-day university lecturer and her American-Asian partner.

Past, present, and future occur simultaneously onstage as A Disappearing Number explores such themes as the beauty of science, our quest for meaning and knowledge, who we are and how we connect to one another-and ultimately, what is permanent and what disappears forever.

The story of Hardy and Ramanujan is one of the most beautiful, yet heartbreaking mathematical collaborations of all time. Their story began before the first World War, when Ramanujan, then an impoverished clerk in Madras, appealed by mail for support to a number of mathematicians abroad. One of them was Hardy, who at first thought the letter and pages of mathematical formulae enclosed were some kind of practical joke. Along with others at Cambridge, he eventually made it possible for the young Indian to come to England. From 1913 until Ramanujan's untimely death in 1920 (when he was 32 years old), these two unlikely collaborators engaged in a unique and complex intellectual partnership that has had lasting ramifications for those working in string theory and other complex mathematical topics.

Conceived and directed by Simon McBurney, A Disappearing Number received rave reviews in London, and won three of London's major theater awards, including the 2008 Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play, the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Play (2007), and The Critics' Circle Theatre Award for Best New Play (2007). Complicite performed A Disappearing Number in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in September, 2008.

Founded in 1983 by Simon McBurney, Annabel Arden, and Marcello Magni, Complicite is an ensemble of performers and collaborators, led by artistic director McBurney. Complicite's work has ranged from original work to theatrical adaptations and revivals of classic texts.

Complicite at Lincoln Center
Complicite debuted at Lincoln Center Festival 96 with the U.S. premiere of The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol, based on a story by John Berger. The company returned to the festival in 1998 with The Street of Crocodiles based on the life and work of Bruno Schultz and again in 2004 with The Elephant Vanishes (co-produced with Setagaya Public Theatre, Tokyo), based on the short stories of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. In 2000, Lincoln Center's Great Performers series commissioned the company to create The Noise of Time. The Noise of Time, a multi-media dramatic work, was conceived and directed by Simon McBurney with the assistance of his musicologist brother, Gerard McBurney, and created in collaboration with the Emerson String Quartet. The piece was an evocation of the life of Dmitri Shostakovich, interweaving film, letters, and other materials with the performance of his last string quartet (No. 15) by the Emersons.

Other U.S. appearances by Complicite include Strange Poetry with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in the Walt Disney Concert Hall (2004); the off-Broadway production of Mnemonic at the John Jay College Theater (2001); and the Broadway production of The Chairs (1998), which received six Tony nominations.

Co-founder of Complicite, Simon McBurney has written, directed and acted in more than 30 productions for the company. Most recently Simon directed Endgame, in which he also performed. Other recent work includes Shun-Kin, for which he was the first non-Japanese director to receive the Yomiuri Theatre Awards Grand Prize; Measure for Measure; A Minute Too Late; The Elephant Vanishes; Pet Shop Boys meet Eisenstein (Trafalgar Square); and Strange Poetry (with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in the Walt Disney Concert Hall). Other directing credits include The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (with Al Pacino in New York) and Lenny Henry's So Much Things To Say. As an actor he has performed extensively in feature films including Body of Lies, The Duchess, The Last King of Scotland, Friends With Money and The Golden Compass. He is the recipient of the 2008 Berlin Academy of Arts Konrad Wolf Prize for outstanding multi-disciplinary artists. In the 2008-09 season, McBurney directed a Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's All My Sons with an all-star cast featuring John Lithgow, Diane Wiest, Patrick Wilson, and Katie Holmes.

A Disappearing Number is co-produced by Complicite, barbicanbite07, Wiener Festwochen, Holland Festival and Ruhrfestspiele, in association with Theatre Royal Plymouth

Major support for the Lincoln Center Festival 2010 presentation of A Disappearing Number is provided by Jennie and Richard DeScherer.

Support provided by Isilon Systems.

TONEELGROEP AMSTERDAM
Teorema (North America premiere)
Adapted and directed by Ivo van Hove
After the film and novel by Pier Paolo Pasolini
Performed by Toneelgroep Amsterdam
Music performed by Bl!ndman [new strings]

Performed in Dutch with English supertitles; 1 hour, 40 minutes, no intermission

July 15 at 7 p.m.; July 16 at 7 p.m.; July 17 at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m.; July 18 at 3 p.m.; and
July 19 at 7 p.m.
Governors Island
A ferry departs to Governors Island one hour before the curtain for each performance from the Battery Maritime Building (10 South Street, adjacent to the Staten Island Ferry). See "Transportation" on the next page.
Tickets: $40, 65

Lincoln Center Festival 2010 will present the first North American performances of Teorema, an adaptation of Pier Paolo Pasolini's shocking and ambiguous novel and film, adapted and directed by renowned and controversial director Ivo van Hove.

Pasolini's original story, which he made into a film in 1968 with Terence Stamp, Anne Wiazemsky, and Silvana Mangano, follows a mysterious stranger who visits an upper-class family and seduces everyone in the household in turn-mother, father, daughter, son, and maid-opening up a world of repressed desires and emotions. After he leaves, as suddenly and enigmatically as he came, a crisis ensues. No one is able to fill the sudden and gaping void left by his absence, and each turns to increasingly aberrant forms of behavior-all except the maid, who returns to her village and begins performing miracles.

For this spectacular production, staged in an industrial warehouse on Governors Island, Ivo van Hove-known for his unremitting works of theatrical stagecraft-and the Toneelgroep Amsterdam theater group create an unnervingly powerful adaptation, within Jan Versveyweld's cold, spare set (echoing Pasolini's desert motif), that includes a scarily effective score, with music by Beethoven, Webern, and Eric Sleichim, performed live by the Bl!ndman [new strings].

Ivo van Hove began his career as a stage director in 1981, and since 2001 has been general director of Toneelgroep Amsterdam. His productions have been performed at Edinburgh International Festival, Venice Biennale, Holland Festival, Theater der Welt, Wiener Festwochen, and in Lisbon, Paris, Verona, Hanover, Porto, and Cairo. For Flemish Opera Antwerp, he staged Berg's Lulu and Wagner's Ring cycle; for Dutch National Opera Amsterdam, The Makropoulos Case and Iolanta; for Joop Van Den Ende Productions, the musical Rent; for Toneelgroep Amsterdam, Angels in America, the marathon Roman Tragedies (Shakespeare's dramas Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra), and Opening Night, based on John Cassavetes' film, a co-production with NTGent that traveled to the Brooklyn Academy Of Music last fall. This season, he directs Luchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers, the Antonioni Project after Michelangelo Antonioni's scenarios, and Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers. Van Hove's work has received numerous awards, including two Obies for best director of an off-Broadway production (New York Theatre Workshop's More Stately Mansions and Hedda Gabler).

Toneelgroep Amsterdam, Holland's leading theater company and the official municipal theater company of Amsterdam, is based in Stadsschouwburg Amsterdam. With an annual average of five new plays and a total of 300 performances, the company works with guest directors RoBert Woodruff, Krzysztof Warilikowski, Johan Simons and Thomas Ostermeier, and performs on stages in Germany, the United States, France, Russia, Switzerland, Austria, and Belgium. The company has performed at the festivals RuhrTriennale, Wiener Festwochen, and Festival d'Avignon.

Governors Island is a 172 acre island in the middle of New York Harbor. The Island is open to the public every Friday, Saturday and Sunday, from June 5-October 10 for picnics, performances, tours, concerts, car-free biking and more, and is reachable via a free ferry that departs from the Battery Maritime Building, adjacent to the Staten Island Ferry in Lower Manhattan.

Transportation
For the 7 p.m. performances on Monday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, audience members should plan to arrive no later than 5:45 p.m. to board a 6 p.m. ferry to Governors Island from the Battery Maritime Building in Lower Manhattan. For the 2 p.m. matinee on Saturday, audience members should plan to arrive at the ferry terminal no later than 12:45 for the 1 p.m. ferry. For the 3 p.m. matinee on Sunday, audience members should plan to arrive no later than 1:45 p.m. to board the 2 p.m. ferry. Return ferry transportation to Manhattan will be provided at the conclusion of the performance. The Warehouse is a 20-25 minute walk from the ferry landing. There is no late seating for this production. Golf carts will be available for those requiring assistance. On Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, it is possible to take earlier public ferries to Governors Island to enjoy the park. Detailed ferry information, as well as directions to Governors Island ferry terminal, will be provided to all ticket holders and will also be available at www.LincolnCenterFestival.org.

REZO GABRIADZE'S TBILISI MUNICIPAL THEATRE STUDIO
The Battle of Stalingrad
Conceived, designed and directed by Rezo Gabriadze

Performed in Russian with English supertitles; 90 minutes; no intermission

July 20 at 7 p.m.; July 21 at 6 and 9 p.m.; July 22 at 6 and 9 p.m.; July 23 at 7 p.m.; July 24 at 3 and 7 p.m.; July 25 at 3 and 7 p.m.
Clark Studio Theater, Rose Building, 165 West 65th Street, 7th floor
Tickets: $50, 60

Lincoln Center Festival 2010 welcomes the return of Rezo Gabriadze and his acclaimed puppet-theater troupe from the Republic of Georgia, Tbilisi Municipal Theatre Studio, with the elegiac The Battle of Stalingrad, one of his signature works. Gabriadze is a master of stage magic celebrated for his works of fantasy and wit that are filled with beautiful, elliptical melancholy. His company made its New York debut at Lincoln Center Festival 2002 with The Battle of Stalingrad and The Autumn of My Springtime, and Gabriadze returned to the Festival in 2004 with his play, Forbidden Christmas, or the Doctor and the Patient, starring Mikhail Baryshnikov as a man who tries to turn himself into a car.

The Battle of Stalingrad, told in miniature and understatement while dramatizing the 900-day Nazi siege of Stalingrad, is a poignant blend of puppetry, art, cinema, poetry, and drama. Performed to a soundtrack created by Gabriadze, The Battle of Stalingrad-part personal reflection, part political commentary on recent events, part universal lament over the destruction and absurdities of war-tells the story of the city's near destruction during World War II. "Beautiful, poignant, and lingering,"
The New York Times said of Gabriadze's work during Festival 2002: "Writ terribly small, with the delicacy of lacework, The Battle of Stalingrad compels the audience to unusual concentration."

Besides designing, constructing, and directing his works of puppet theater at the Tbilisi Municipal Theatre Studio, the tiny puppet theater which Gabriadze founded in 1981, this 74-year-old artist has been a writer, a sculptor, graphic artist, a journalist, a theater and film director, a builder, and a forester. Gabriadze's exhibits have been shown in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Lausanne, Rome, Paris, Berlin, and other cities. He was a participant in Munich's From Eisenstein to Tarkovsky exhibit. His paintings, graphics, and sculpture pieces are found in numerous state and private collections in the United States, Russia, Germany, Israel, Japan, and France. For his film work, Rezo Gabriadze has won the Grand Prize of the International Moscow Film Festival and the Nike Prize, among others. His other prizes include the Tsarscoselsakay, Golden Sofit, Golden Mask, and the Triumph, the so-called Russian Nobel Prize.

His native Georgia is the small country in the Caucasus Mountains that even in the darkest Soviet times was known for endowing its inhabitants with a strong visual sensibility and vivid sense of humor. In an interview in a St. Petersburg theater journal Gabriadze said, "I am sustained by the tiniest, the most miniscule details-pauses between words, music, silence, the wind and random glances." These are also the ingredients of his unique art.

The Lincoln Center Festival 2010 presentation of The Battle of Stalingard is made possible in part by a generous grant from the Trust for Mutual Understanding.

TICKETS
Tickets for Lincoln Center Festival 2010 are on sale now via CenterCharge 212-721-6500, online at www.LincolnCenterFestival.org, and at the Avery Fisher Hall and Alice Tully Hall Box Offices, 65th Street and Broadway.

PHONE NUMBERS/CONTACT INFORMATION
CenterCharge: 212-721-6500
Lincoln Center's website: www.LincolnCenter.org (general); www.LincolnCenterFestival.org (Festival)
Lincoln Center Customer Service: 212-875-5456

VENUE LOCATIONS
Alice Tully Hall, 65th Street and Broadway, Lincoln Center
Avery Fisher Hall, 65th Street and Broadway, Lincoln Center
Clark Studio Theater, the Rose Building, 165 W. 65th Street, 7th floor
Governors Island*, via free ferry, Battery Maritime Building located at 10 South Street, adjacent to the Staten Island Ferry in Lower Manhattan
David H. Koch Theater, Broadway at 63rd Street, Lincoln Center
Gerald W. Lynch Theater, John Jay College, Amsterdam Avenue between 58th and 59th Streets
Rose Theater, Frederick P. Rose Hall, Home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, 60th Street and Broadway