“This is where Brooke O'Harra, artistic director of The Theatre of a Two-headed Calf, excels. Her video-inspired staging... conjures a theatrical universe where characters ripple like pools of water, metamorphosing into the peculiar ether of their freewheeling story.” Village Voice
The Theatre of a Two-headed Calf will explore the 18th-century Chikamatsu play Drum of the Waves of Horikawa. The company’s goal always is to approach texts through their original intent and context, then to observe how their interaction with those texts transforms their own work and their own systems of storytelling. In approaching the Kabuki text, the company would like to resist the 1940s incidental system of codifying every movement and gesture in Kabuki; they do not desire to create a “museum piece.” Nor do they desire to deconstruct or westernize Kabuki. Instead they want to employ their own tools to help them engage the text of Chikamatsu in the spirit of early Kabuki artists (Kabuki mono).
