Willem Dafoe has unveiled his first lineup as the artistic director of the theater department of the Italian arts organization Venice Biennale, the foundation that oversees the Venice Film Festival, under the theme “Theater is body – Body is theater.”
His program for the 53rd International Theater Festival in Venice, running May 31-June 15, includes Davide Iodice’s Pinocchio, starring performers with Down syndrome, autistic spectrum disorder, Williams syndrome and Asperger syndrome, as well as “a performance experiment” with Dafoe himself and actress Simonetta Solder (A Beautiful Imperfection, Succession) in homage to late director Richard Foreman.
“My intention is ultimately just to bring beautiful theater to the selection. But it’s a particular kind of theater that is very close to the actor,” Dafoe tells THR. “I’m an actor, so I see things very much in actors’ terms. The body of the actor, the poetry of the theater, and ritual are the three elements that were part of the criteria for what I was looking for.”
His tribute performance is dear to his heart. “Richard Foreman’s work was one of my favorite theater experiences as an audience. I also worked with him twice, and he was wonderful,” Dafoe shares. “He was always full of contradictions, very intellectually alive, and he made beautiful theater, very enigmatic, not always clear to follow, but always deeply pleasurable. It had those elements I talked about.”
Audiences can expect the unexpected. “I wanted to do a little performance that’s like an experiment that I did with him before he died,” Dafoe explains. “We made a recording of it. He put all these phrases on index cards, hundreds of them, and the phrases were phrases that had been in his head and a mix of things. They weren’t full sentences. They were thoughts. They were fragments. We’d shuffle them and then divide them up between him and myself, and then we would read them back and forth.”
The result? “What was interesting was that sometimes a dialog would take place,” the star recalls. “Sometimes that happened because of the words’ connection. Sometimes, that happened because of a rhythmical connection. Sometimes, it didn’t happen at all. It was interesting. It was sort of pure, and it was a beautiful experiment to do.”
The recording will also make a cameo. “Richard passed away but this recording exists. We’ll play a little bit of that at the beginning of this experiment, and then an actress and I will basically do what Richard and I did – take the phrases, shuffle them like cards, she’ll take half, I’ll take half. We’ll go back and forth,” Dafoe tells THR. “Then once we do that, we’ll shuffle it again. We’ll go back and forth. Of course, out of that randomness, some concreteness happens, some kind of connection happens, and that’s a beautiful thing to watch. And we’ll do it a third time in Italian. So I call it an experiment to kind of check expectations.”
Dafoe didn’t know Solder before, but knew he needed a performance partner. “I put feelers out, and a friend of mine suggested a bunch of actresses, and I met with her, and she was the one that I responded to,” he recalls. “She spent some time in the theater world of New York, so we had some connection there. She speaks very good English, and she also translates often. And she’s a really good actress.”
The new take on Pinocchio that he will bring to Venice also touched Dafoe deeply. “Davide Iodice is quite extraordinary in his commitment to what he does, and he works with, for lack of a better word, non-traditional communities making theater,” the star explains. “He also has a theater school for children, and in this particular piece, he’s working with people with special needs. They aren’t your typical performers. They have various challenges, various things that challenge them in the performance. So when they perform, what they do is so essential, so concentrated, so pure.”
It also made Dafoe think. “The subtitle for the show is What Is a Person? Or: What Makes a Human Being? I was very moved by it because it really engaged me in that question,” he says. “What qualifies you as a human being? What is the thing that’s special about each one of us, and how is that manifested or not manifested? And that’s why I was so engaged, and the performers were fantastic.”
The play also created a sense of togetherness. “In this particular performance, it was beautiful to see how the audience came towards that production so deeply,” Dafoe recalls. “It felt like we were all one community, and we were all together with the performance. It was a beautiful evening in the theater, and I hope to see it again, and I have no doubt it’ll be just as beautiful.”
In case you wonder if and what kind of hopes or expectations Dafoe has for audience reactions to his first Biennale theater festival, the star doesn’t want to lose his focus by trying to predict too much. “I’ve got to trust myself. They gave me this appointment because they wanted to see what I would bring, and that’s what I concentrate on,” he tells THR. “Of course, I hope that the audience loves it. I hope it’s something that gives them a lot. But I think you get in trouble sometimes when you try to anticipate the effect of something. All you can do is trust the source and then hope that people will come to it.”