Two cardboard coffins, ten pink biscuit wafers, six cans of Harp, a wig, and countless costume changes… . Acclaimed Irish playwright Enda Walsh applies the frenetic antics of farce—an inherently British genre—to an Irish immigrant and his two grown sons. Holed up in their grimy London flat, the trio reenacts a peculiar family story on a daily basis, a bizarrely entertaining routine that has the sons…

Ancient and innovative, profound and joyous, Dhvee (Duality) is an intensive collaboration between the Minneapolis-based Ragamala Dance and the Balinese ensemble Çudamani. While both groups are rooted in traditional forms—Ragamala in classical Southern Indian Bharatanatyam and Çudamani in Balinese music and dance—they’re equally committed to creating contemporary works. Their meeting ground for …

Simultaneously quiet and electrifying, Bolero Variations opens the Walker’s 2009–2010 performing arts season and introduces a singular European artist to American audiences. Raimund Hoghe began creating and performing his own work 20 years ago, after serving throughout the 1980s as dramaturge for Pina Bausch. While Bausch’s visceral choreography and often elaborate sets defined German tanztheater…

How to celebrate the Twin Cities’ burgeoning dance scene? The Walker, with its nearly 40 years of support of local dance, is just one point within a sizable community, but it has played an essential, sometimes catalytic role. It is more than Momentum, the always-popular summer showcase for new voices copresented with the Southern Theater. The Walker also commissions new works from select local…

“Tony,” a child-size puppet with a cherubic doll’s face, a turtle-shell potbelly, and an otherwise spindly body made from odds and ends, is the surprising protagonist in Nami Yamamoto’s a howling flower. Four human performers maneuver around him, their sense of delicate devotion shifting abruptly to more forceful movements. In Convoys, Curfews and Roadblocks, soloist Nora Chipaumire brims with raw energy…

German dramatist Bertolt Brecht viewed most wars as a political panacea for economic downturns and a purposeful division of people by color, religion, language, and geography—a timely perspective in an era defined by the “war on terror,” fears about immigration, and ethnic conflict worldwide. For this reimagining of Brecht and composer Hanns Eisler’s rarely performed music-theater work Roundheads and…

In presenting the world premiere of The Success of Failure (or, The Failure of Success) at the Walker this April, Cynthia Hopkins completes a trilogy of music-theater journeys that have taken this singer/performer/director—and her devoted audiences—farther and farther afield. First there was the earthy, Southern-gothic road tale_ Accidental Nostalgia_ in 2005, whose narrator steals an identity and…

There is singing, dancing, music, theater. There is impassioned oratory (and, possibly, some less charismatic speakers). There are urgent messages of social import, and opportunities for self-improvement. There are groups of locals coming together in a special, even sacred place to feel a sense of belonging, or to open themselves to transformation—spiritually, morally, intellectually. There is ceremony and…

Meredith Monk can chart every bead of inspiration on her new necklace of voice, music, and theater. She points to poet Norman Fischer’s translations of the Psalms, which Monk stitched to her own fascination with the human impulse to “ascend.” She tells of reconnecting with visual artist Ann Hamilton, a past collaborator, after hearing she was creating a tower. What Monk can’t do is say how Songs of…