According to Jorge Luis Borges, Abulgualid Mohammed Ibn Ahmed Ibn Mohammahd Ibn Rushd, better known as Averroes, was thinking—something like one thousand years ago, more or less—about a difficult question concerning Aristotle's Poetics. As you probably know, Averroes was a specialist on Aristotle, mainly on the Poetics. As a matter of fact, Western civilization had lost this book and had rediscovered it only through the mediation of Arab philosophers. Averroes did not know about theatre. Because of the Muslim taboo on representation, he had never seen a theatrical performance. At least, Borges, in his short story The Quest of Averroes, imagines our philosopher wondering about two incomprehensible words he had found in Aristotle, namely “tragedy” and “comedy.” A nice problem, since Aristotle's Poetics is nothing else but a complex definition of those two words, or at least of the first of them.

Studio Scarabee was founded in 1965 when Adri Boon, a painter, presented a series of happening-related art performances at the Hague Art Circle. Since then, the activities of the Dutch group have been characterized by an extensive investigation of the possibilities in mixing different mediums. As a brochure of the Studio points out, Scarabee seeks to practice a form of total theatre in the tradition of Schlemmer and Moholy-Nagy, using techniques resembling those employed by Josef Svoboda. Havana JoJo, Scarabee's latest work, which was presented at The New Theatre Festival in Baltimore, incorporates many of the techniques and themes developed by the studio over the years. Popular culture is the basic source of the subject matter; elements of shock, violence and sado-masochism are parodied; transvestism is displayed (in the form of a fire-eating female impersonator); camp humor abounds; dadaist and surrealist principles of association between the elements are strong.

The premiere of Hamlet at the Vakhtangov Theatre in Moscow on May 19, 1932, marked Nikolai Akimov's debut as a director. A talented Leningrad artist, the young Akimov had already attracted considerable attention in theatrical circles with his unconventional setting for Tartuffe in 1929, featuring the unscrewed joints of an enormous exhaust pipe, and his striking design in 1931 for Schiller's Intrigue and Love, which made use of a huge, shiny silver disk set on stage at a sharp angle to suggest the top of large sphere.

With his production of Hamlet, Akimov was determined to sweep away once and for all the pall of gloomy symbolism cast by earlier interpretations. His most immediate targets were the 1911 Gordon Craig production and the one at the Second Moscow Art Theatre in 1924, with Mikhail Chekhov both directing and playing the title role. “A sickly degenerate,” is the way Aklmov dismissed Chekhov's Hamlet.

Alan Finneran, the director of Soon 3, came from San Francisco to the festival with a new piece called Black Water Echo. Finneran refers to the piece as a “task activated performance landscape.” He means that the performance consists primarily of a series of precise tasks, the performance of which alters the space (or landscape) of the piece, thereby dictating a new series of tasks that will further alter the landscape, dictating yet another series of tasks, and so on. By the end, the landscape has been radically changed and the audience has witnessed an entire biography of that change.

The basic landscape of Black Water Echo is a twenty foot square, marked on the floor with a covering of dark plastic. As the audience enters, the square is nearly empty: along its edges are arranged a series of objects that will be used throughout the performance.