Fringe Benefits at the Lit Moon World Festival

“I like to think we’re building bridges between floating islands,” artistic director John Blondell says of his annual Lit Moon World Theater Festival, which opens its third season today at Santa Barbara’s Center Stage Theater.

Soft-spoken, intellectual and much given to corny jokes, the 40-year-old Blondell takes his role as impresario seriously and grows impassioned when speaking of his commitment to bring wider exposure to those “floating islands”--a metaphor coined by Eugenio Barba of Denmark’s Odin Teatret to describe a breed of independent, experimental theater companies that have sprung up in isolation in obscure parts of the world.

“I want to introduce audiences here to these small companies who, despite their cultural differences, share a fundamental goal to explore aesthetic processes outside the mainstream,” he says.

Takes one to know one. Since 1992, Blondell’s own Lit Moon Theatre Company has emerged as the premier “fringe” theater group on the Central Coast, applying nontraditional elements of dance, movement, music and visual arts to the company’s original stage adaptations of classical literature. Lit Moon’s signature presentational style is highly physical and visual, employing carefully crafted images, masks and original scores as much as language to tell a story. “The focus of this kind of theater work is in bodies,” Blondell explains, “creating resonance through physical form, movement and meaningful images.”

In an ambitious effort to foster international connections among performing arts groups with similar interests and methods, Blondell expanded his efforts in 1998 to create the Lit Moon World Theater Festival, which showcases performing artists with international reputations whose work is little-known in the United States.

Past World Theater Festival invitees have included the Bulgarian Troupe Theatre Credo, which astonished audiences with sheer dexterity and inventiveness in transforming everyday objects into imaginative props in an adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat.” Last year, Hungarian dancer and choreographer Eva Magyar and her company, the Shamans, presented “Armine,” a soul-searching evocation of changing life in Eastern Europe.

Blondell was so impressed with Magyar’s work that he commissioned her to create an original piece for his Lit Moon company. The result is the festival opener, “Eating, Drinking and Telling Lies,” a dance theater piece inspired by Anton Chekhov’s “The Three Sisters.”

At a recent rehearsal, Magyar guided her four co-performers through the intricacies of her unique synthesis of abstract movement and folk dance. The work uses an archetypal Chekhovian image--a meal taken in silent, stultifying boredom--as a launch pad for explosions of lively choreography as the characters’ repressed passions and desires take flight.

“I used Chekhov because he spoke of longing for another place,” Magyar says. “It was very important to him to encourage people to change their life if they are not satisfied.”

As with so many experimental performers, Magyar’s work defies easy classification. But that’s fine with her.

“I’m often asked, ‘Is it dance? Is it theater?’ ” she says with a laugh. “But the audience never asks ‘What’s this?’ They understand a lot--not through words, through feeling. And I don’t want them to think about what to call it.”

Different Training Presents Challenges

Though both Magyar and Lit Moon share an interest in movement-based storytelling, differences in traditions and training inevitably present challenges in meshing their styles. As a much sought-after artist in residence, Magyar is used to this process.

“I work the same way in Hungary or England or Scotland or America. I always pay attention to the personalities of the people I work with. I look at their environment. My work already says so many things about me, so I try to combine. I often build choreography out of what [the performers] say about their experience. I try to make the collaboration a conversation, almost a confessional--like a 5 a.m. talk when you’re too tired to be anything but honest.”

Collaboration is one of Blondell’s key objectives for the festival. “Besides helping Lit Moon to grow artistically,” he says, “I was interested in setting up situations where new work could be created--collaborations where we could learn about other people from around the world, and they could learn more about us, and potentially create opportunities for Lit Moon to travel and show our work to other parts of the world.”

In a reciprocal act of cultural crosspollination, Blondell cast Magyar as Princess Katherine of France in Lit Moon’s production of Shakespeare’s “Henry V,” the second entry in the World Theater Festival. The selection of a play is something of a departure for Lit Moon, which has previously adapted works of nontheatrical literature, including Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” tales, Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita,” Florentine Carlo Collodi’s “The Adventures of Pinocchio” and the company’s other entry in this year’s festival, Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman.”

Theatre Fabrik Completes Lineup

Completing the festival lineup will be representatives from Theatre Fabrik of Potsdam, Germany, and Do-Theatre of St. Petersburg, Russia, which bring outrageous styles of body-oriented theater to their joint production of “Hopeless Games,” a wordless, sardonic comedy set in a derelict train station.

Blondell conceived the idea for the Lit Moon Festival in 1996 while attending the annual Edinburgh Fringe Festival, a sprawling, open-invitation offshoot of the renowned Edinburgh Arts Festival that features from 400 to 500 companies performing in 180 alternative venues.

“I was particularly struck by the Eastern European work, companies from Russia, Bulgaria, Poland, etc.,” Blondell says. “By virtue of their origins in parts of the world where there is so much difficulty just in living, these works take on a great communal and cultural and spiritual purpose. They are trying to say something very significant about their lives.”

That’s not to say these pieces are all deadly serious and grave, Blondell hastens to add. “They can be very funny,” he says, “but the comic is tied to the serious, and there’s a rich, varied expressiveness [that goes with] the cultural differences born out of dire political circumstances. These pieces have a kind of yearning--trying to tap something greater, something beyond their physical circumstances. That’s what makes them so potent.”

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* Lit Moon World Theater Festival, Center Stage Theater, 751 Paseo Nuevo (corner of Chapala and De La Guerra streets), Santa Barbara, today through May 21. Individual performances, $15 to $18; Sunday two-play/dinner packages, $35. For performance schedules and reservations, call (805) 963-0408.