It Begins with the Theatre: Barrie Kosky's Workshop -- "Very much a laboratory": Barrie Kosky and the Gilgul Ensemble 1991-1997 -- "Aesthetic Ideas": Mystery and Meaning in the Early Work of Barrie Kosky -- Something for Everybody? Art, Community, the Unfamiliar, and Barrie Kosky at the Adelaide Festival -- Dramaturgies of Repetition and the Denial of Catharsis: Traumatic Breaking Points in Barrie Kosky's Approach to Character -- When All Else Fails, Sing: Barrie Kosky's The Women of Troy -- Barrie Kosky's Grotesques and the Ecstasy of Theatre -- "Es klang so alt und war doch so neu": Barrie Kosky and Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg -- (Not) Repeating the Past in Barrie Kosky's Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg
This book, the first of its kind, surveys the career of the renowned Australian-German theatre and opera director Barrie Kosky. Its nine chapters provide multidisciplinary analyses of Barrie Kosky's working practices and stage productions, from the beginning of his career in Melbourne to his current roles as Head of the Komische Oper Berlin and as a guest director in international demand. Specialists in theatre studies, opera studies, musical theatre studies, aesthetics, and arts administration offer in-depth accounts of Kosky's unusually wide-ranging engagements with the performing arts - as a director of spoken theatre, operas, musicals, operettas, as an adaptor, a performer, a writer, and an arts manager. Further, this book includes contributions from theatre practitioners with first-hand experience of collaborating with Kosky in the 1990s, who draw on interviews with members of Gilgul, Australia's first Jewish theatre company, to document this formative period in Kosky's career. The book investigates the ways in which Kosky has created transnational theatres, through introducing European themes and theatre techniques to his Australian work or through bringing fresh voices to the national dialogue in Germany's theatre landscape. An appendix contains a timeline and guide to Kosky's productions to date
