Ruben Polendo is the Artistic Director of Theater Mitu.
http://www.theatermitu.org/
He's also one of the most inspiring speakers I've met in a while. The kind of guy you'd follow into a burning building or off a bridge because he told you there was a great artistic reason to do so.
He talked about his company, his life, his artistic principles. He's got a lot of life stories (started as a biologist, basically ran away with the circus, has studied theater arts all over the world, spent a long time learning from Peter Brook...)...I want to focus on just a couple of his ideas here.
WHOLE THEATER
...is what he says concerns his theater. By that he means theater that is:
1) Visual
2) Aural
3) Emotional
4) Spiritual (he says this is the one that freaks people out)
5) Intellectual
The best theater, the truest theater, is one that fires all five of these at once.
MITU as LAB
"The Company is a research facility. Our Lab is the rehearsal room. Our paper is our production. Our job is to test what theater DOES."
COLONIALISM and TRAINING
"Where there is food, there's theater. We look at theatrical and performance traditions NOT to colonize and take their FORMS but to FIND HOW THEY TRAIN, and learn from the bodies, soul, mind, spirit at work. TRAINING is how we work and training is how we CREATE."
Polendo says the goal of his company isn't to create good work -- it's to create unignorable work, work that can't be forgotten. "If it bores you, change it."
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