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I am deeply moved by their transient existence she informed us but of course

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"I am deeply moved by their transient existence," she informed us, "but of course Pina herself will never disappear..." This particular testifier to the Pina cult has, we learned, put a white hotel pencil with rubber tip, once used by the great lady, into a test-tube which is on display in her home.A Billie-Jean King lookalike with a stutter revealed that words always fail her when she sees Pina, but luckily "to be enveloped in her aurora is enough". Meanwhile, Pina, at the back of the hall, received these tributes with a look of sorrowing cosmic acceptance of her own wondrous gifts and the inexpressible Weltzschmerz attached to them.The Court's contribution was an oasis in this abstract desert. "You English, you're so empirical," declared the French President of the International Association of Theatre Critics, not unadmiringly, after a panel where the practical steps taken to establish reciprocal relationships between foreign theatres were debated by a group including the Court's current artistic director and his last two predecessors.It also emerged that, with this new wave of dramatists, European theatres (like the Vienna Schauspielhaus) will programme work commissioned by the Court even before it has been unveiled in England. "We don't really buy into that ethos," confessed Stephen Daldry. The Court wants the flow to be two-way, which can't happen if foreign houses have wall-to-wall English productions. Nor are they interested in European shopping sprees: their aim is to develop work with foreign writers, not merely import it.Hence the Court's International Residency, run by Elyse Dodgson, an annual school for emergent dramatists and directors from theatrical cultures where there is no institution placing new writing at the centre of its activities.

This year's residency welcomed students from countries as diverse as Uruguay and Estonia. I witnessed some of the 1999 programme, which included two days of workshops with director Katie Mitchell on Martin Crimp's fascinating extreme of stage- directionless postmodernity Attempts On Her Life; a revealing session on the relationship between dramatist and director in which Stephen Daldry and two actors worked cold on a scene cunningly concocted for the occasion by Phyllis Nagy; and an interactive lecture from Stephen Jeffreys on the six types of logic in dramatic construction.Compared to this, the internationalism of the European Theatre Prize looks a bit of a confidence trick, strenuously designed to promote a new glamour-by- association image of Sicily: for "mafia" read "theatre". There was loud applause when one of the foreign judges rose at the award ceremony and said words to the effect that the peacefulness of the surroundings belied Sicily's reputation for violence. He can't have been using his eyes, because the Mayor of Palermo, a spearhead of the anti-mafia campaign, had been obliged to bring six bodyguards to the dinner for Pina Bausch as the result of a recent assassination.The "Taormina Experience" can have positive results. The brilliant, subversively funny Swiss director Christophe Marthaler, who won last year's New Realities prize, found inspiration for his latest piece. He noticed that one of the critics was wearing a name-tag that simply read "Specialist", which sparked off an amusing piece satirising the beleagueredness of experts in these promiscuous, Internet times.

On a composite set of a plane and train, the neurotic clinging to specialisms is visualised as a lot of clinging to, lunging at and twisting round poles and straps on a journey to nowhere.Marthaler repaid the compliment by bringing his piece to Taormina. I think the Royal Court should commission a comic play about the hysteria- inducing soullessness and moral humbug of events like the Premio Europa per il Teatro, and take it back as their contribution to next year's event.. YOU NEED precious little Italian to discern the play beneath Italian composer Castelnuovo-Tedesco's opera Il Mercante di Venezia. It's a trifle harder to spot the inspiration behind his little-known 1962 opera L'Importanze di Esser Franco. When everything else that Oscar Wilde ever did, said, wrote (and, possibly, ate) has been exhumed in the last few years, it is hard to believe that no one has seen fit to mount a revival of this adaptation of The Importance of Being Earnest.

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