The Transversal Theater Company (TTC) is a nonprofit organization of American and European artists based in Amsterdam. Founded in 2003 by Bryan Reynolds, Lonnie Alcaraz, Douglas-Scott Goheen, and a number of other artists, TTC is an experimental theater company known for creating original performance works that explore charged social, cultural, conceptual, and political realities of today through the combined social-cognitive theory, performance aesthetics, and research methodology known as Transversal Poetics. [1] The products of this praxis (combining theory and practice) or practice research (practice-as-research) approach have been various and far-reaching, including a theory of acting and design aesthetics. [2] TTC has toured productions to festivals and other venues in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, such as to the national theaters of Poland [3] and Romania, Armenia's HIGH FEST, [4] Romania's National Theatre Festival, Sibiu International Performing Arts Festival, [5] and Interferences Festival, [6] the Gdansk International Shakespeare Festival. [7] [8] [9] TTC's core members and contributing artists have included Robert Cohen, [10] [11] Gary Busby, Lonnie Alcaraz, [12] Niels Horeman, David Backovsky, Sky Reynolds, Shira Wolfe, [13] Laila Burane, Christopher Marshall, Saskia Polderman, Luke Cantarella, Alan Terricciano, Christa Mathis, Kayla Emerson, Karyn Lawrence, [14] Amanda McRaven, Michael Hooker, [15] Stan Limburg, Henk Danner, Matthias Quadekker, Babette Holtmann, Mathieu van den Berk, Erik Lint, Alex Hoffman, Sam Kolodezh, Jon McKenzie, Saviana Stănescu, [16] Gosia Lorenz, Emilia Simeonov, Vinnie Olivieri, [17] Sammie Dasia Moore, Jacob Dovan Nguyen, Richard Brestoff, Bob Boross, [18] Oscar Seip, [19] Jessica Dunn, James Intriligator, Jesús López Vargas, [20] and Merle DeWitt III. [21]
Transversal acting is a unique acting technique that emerged during the Transversal Theater Company's initial attempts to combine theory and practice, and continues to develop through ongoing Transversal Acting Workshops that have been taught in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. It takes as its premise that vulnerabilities, surrenders, and slippages can be more productive than control, domination, and regulation. Actors, sets, props, narratives, objects, histories, media, things, ideas, and experiences all form an interrelational dynamism. Instead of privileging experiences, identities, or narratives as the driving forces of performance and interpretation, transversal acting privileges intensity, contact, and creation.
Sibiu is a middle-sized, well-preserved fortified medieval town in central Romania, situated in the historical region of Transylvania. Located some 275 km (171 mi) north-west of Bucharest, the town straddles the Cibin River, a tributary of the Olt River. Now the county seat of the Sibiu County, between 1692 and 1791 and 1849–65 Sibiu was the capital of the Principality of Transylvania. During the Modern era, the Hecht hause in Sibiu served as the seat of the Transylvanian Saxon University.
Saviana Stănescu is a Romanian-American award-winning playwright, ARTivist, and poet based in Ithaca, New York.
Robert Cohen is an American university professor, theatre director, playwright, and drama critic. Now a Claire Trevor Professor emeritus after 50 years teaching at the University of California, Irvine since 1965, he continues to write, and has published many books on theatre, along with articles, dramatic anthologies and many plays, and has conducted advanced teaching residencies in numerous countries and much of the United States. He has been called a Master Teacher by the Voice and Speech Trainers Association, has been praised as a "walking theatre directory and encyclopedia" by his fellow teachers, and has been honored during his career with the Polish Medal of Honor, the Honoris Causa Professor Degree at Babes-Bolyai University in Romania, UCI's Distinguished Professor of Research, and the Career Achievement Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.
Tone Brulin was a Belgian playwright and stage director; drama teacher from Belgium.
Andrei Șerban is a Romanian-American theater director. A major name in twentieth-century theater, he is renowned for his innovative and iconoclastic interpretations and stagings. In 1992 he became Professor of Theater at the Columbia University School of the Arts, a position he resigned from in 2019, citing oppressive pressure in the name of "political correctness" on a level which reminded him of communist Romania.
Bryan Reynolds, Claire Trevor Professor, Distinguished Professor, and Chancellor's Professor at the University of California-Irvine, is an American critical theorist, performance theorist, and Shakespeare scholar who developed the combined sociopolitical theory, performance aesthetics, and research methodology known as transversal poetics. He is also a playwright, director, performer, and cofounder of the Transversal Theater Company, an Amsterdam-based collective of American and European artists, which has produced a number of his works. Reynolds received his bachelor's degree in English Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and his master's and doctoral degrees in English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. He has been a Professor of Drama at the University of California, Irvine since 1998. He has held visiting professorships at the University of London-Drama, the University of Amsterdam-Theater Studies, Utrecht University-Theater Studies, University of Cologne-American Studies, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main-American Studies, University College Utrecht-Arts and Humanities, the University of California, San Diego-Theatre, Literature, Cognitive Science, the American University of Beirut-English, University of Tsukuba-Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Nairobi-Department of Literature, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt-Communications, University of Lorraine-Arts, Sciences, & Business Management, INSEEC Business School -Marketing, Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon, École supérieure des sciences commerciales d'Angers; and he has taught at Deleuze Camp at Schloss Wahn, University of Cologne, Germany, and the Grotowski Institute in Wrocław, Poland, among other academic and performing arts institutions. Reynolds is also a regular contributor to Freeskier Magazine, where he publishes articles from his ongoing research on extreme sports.
Gábor Tompa is an internationally renowned Hungarian theater and film director, poet, essayist and teacher. Between 2007 and 2016 he was the Head of Directing at the Theatre and Dance Department of the University of California, San Diego. He is the general and artistic director of the Hungarian Theatre of Cluj since 1990, the theatre is member of the Union of the Theatres of Europe (UTE) since 2008. Founder and artistic director of the Interferences International Theatre Festival in Cluj, Romania. President of the Union of the Theatres of Europe since 2018.
Gdańsk Shakespeare Festival is an international theatre festival devoted to the idea of the Elizabethan theatre, and especially to the works of William Shakespeare. The event was first organized in 1993, on the initiative of Theatrum Gedanense Foundation, which had been created by Professor Jerzy Limon and Władysław Zawistowski, with Charles, Prince of Wales as its patron. Its original name, "Gdańsk Shakespeare Days" was transformed into "Gdańsk Shakespeare Festival" in 1997, during the celebration of Gdańsk's millennium.
The Polish National Ballet is the largest and most influential ballet company in Poland. It continues a ballet heritage, dating to the 17th century.
The Sibiu International Theatre Festival is one of the most important theatre and performing arts festivals in the world, and the third biggest, after the Festival d'Avignon and the Edinburgh International Festival. FITS takes place in the city of Sibiu, Romania, in June every year and lasts for ten days. Founded in 1993 by Constantin Chiriac, the festival programme features renowned names of the international stage, offering spectators a broad range of sections, with guests from around 73 countries per edition, performing approximately 550 events.
East West Theatre Company was established in 2005 in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is a nonprofit cultural institution which produces performing arts programs, publications, films, and music events. It also organizes touring shows, discussions, forums, master-classes and workshops. Important components of its work include a creation of new work and a commitment to international cooperation.
Meeting Ground Theatre Company is an experimental theatre company, based in Nottingham, United Kingdom. The company originates much of its work in Nottingham and tours many of its plays in the East Midlands, but it has also engaged in a number of international collaborations, and a number of its productions have appeared at the Magdalena International Women's Theatre Festival.
Henryk Baranowski was a Polish theatre, opera and film director, actor, stage designer, playwright, screenwriter and poet. He is best known for his starring role in the film Dekalog: One directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski, and also appeared as Rosa's brother Josef in Rosa Luxemburg directed by Margarethe von Trotta and as Napoleon in Pan Tadeusz directed by Andrzej Wajda. He directed over 60 theater and opera productions in Europe, Russia and the US and was the Artistic Director of the Teatr Śląski in Katowice in the mid 2000s. He also directed four "television theatre" productions: ...yes I will Yes, For Phaedra (1998), Saint Witch (2003), and Night is the Mother of Day (2004).
Krzysztof Warlikowski is a Polish theatre director. He is the creator and artistic director of Nowy Teatr in Warsaw.
Cristina Flutur is a Romanian film and theatre actress.
Proton Theatre is an independent company based in Hungary. It was founded in 2009 and is operating according to the production concept shaped by Kornél Mundruczó and Dóra Büki. The virtual artistic group is organized around the director's independent productions.
Tomasz Konina was a Polish theatre and opera director and stage designer.
Maya Arad Yasur is an Israeli playwright. Yasur's works have been produced worldwide, translated to over thirteen languages and are published in Chinese, English, French, German, Hebrew, Russian, Italian and Polish. She is the recipient of the Theatertreffen's Stückemarkt prize 2018. Yasur is known for her knotty and complex form of fractured narratives.
Leokadia Serafinowicz was an artist and promoter of Polish puppet theater and Theater for Young Audiences (TYA). She was a puppeteer, director, scenographer, and a writer of scenarios as well as theater and film adaptations. She served as director and art director at the Teatr Lalki i Aktora "Marcinek" in Poznań from 1960 to 1976, making it one of the most prestigious puppet theaters of its time. She was a co-founder and the first president of ASSITEJ Poland (1981–1982), and an honorary member of UNIMA.
Travis Preston is an American director and theater artist known for his staging of classical and contemporary operas and plays. He is the Executive Artistic Director of CalArts Center for New Performance as well as Dean of the CalArts School of Theater. His notable works include Prometheus Bound, The Master Builder, Al gran sole carico d'amore, Macbeth, the opening gala performance at Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, and King Lear. In 2022, he was named to the Artistic Committee of the Wuzhen Theatre Festival in China.