READER: IL TEATRO ROSSO
20./21.07.2025
In February, No Hay Banda premiered the full-length piece Il Teatro Rosso by Steven Kazuo Takasugi (music) and Huei Lin (film) in Montreal and now brings it to Europe for the first time. Takasugi’s Sideshow was performed to acclaim at the 2016 Summer Course, and the US composer is finally back in Darmstadt with a major work. His music and Lin’s congenial ‟visual soundtrack” teleport the seven musicians into a velvety-red vaudeville world, inspired by the theater and entertainment culture of the early 20th century.
They merge past and present, Belle Époche and hip glamor, live and recorded, real and virtual, truth and falsity.Observer and observed swap places. We are whisked away into a world that seems both familiar and unfamiliar, full of weird nostalgia. What is real, what is fictitious? What can I know, who can I believe? Welcome to Teatro Rosso, whose distorted hall of mirrors confronts us with questions of the here and now.
Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and CALQ (Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec)
Act I: The Red Theatre
Act II: The Drowning
Sarah Albu (Soprano)
Geneviève Liboiron (Violin)
Émilie Girard-Charest (Violoncello)
Lori Freedman (Bass Clarinet)
Felix Del Tredici (Bass Trombone)
Daniel Áñez (Piano)
Noam Bierstone (Percussion)
Gabriel Dufour-Laperrière (Live Sound)
Jeff D’Ambrosio (Lighting)
No Hay Banda’s co-founders Noam Bierstone (percussion) and Daniel Áñez (piano) on the emergence of Il Teatro Rosso
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Noam Bierstone
In 2016, I was at the performance of Steven Takasugi’s Sideshow in Darmstadt, and some other of the Il Teatro Rosso performers were so as well. We started playing Sideshow, too, invited Steven to Montréal and performed it in 2019, in our third year of No Hay Banda.
From the beginning there was the idea of doing a new project together. The discussion kicked off again during the pandemic. Steven was very interested in seeing what would make it a No Hay Banda project. He visited different places in Montréal, which has this typical early 20th century theatres – all these red theatres, all these velvet seats, that spoke a lot to Steven’s interest.
Since it was the pandemic, the idea was making a movie. We decided to work with the cinematographer Huei Lin, who filmed a lot of our concerts in the past, including Sideshow. Huei and Steve had really nice discussions about their common interests for nostalgia, kitsch and karaoke – and looking at that from a more recent perspective. It basically just grew from there.
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Daniel Añez
In Steven’s music, there is always this shadow of: What is real and what is unreal? Even in Sideshow, it‘s really difficult to discern what is the electroacoustic and what is the live performance – it’s the purpose actually that you can’t really discern.
This happens also in the video of Il Teatro Rosso. Our presences are both live and in the video. Most of the shots that were taken is us performing the piece, with a little unrelated additional material. That shadow, that double performance in Steven’s music is now gonna happen as well with the video.
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Noam Bierstone
It‘s very physically demanding, but on the complete other spectrum of physical reasons than in Sarah Davachi’s Three Unisons which we play in Darmstadt as well. In Il Teatro Rosso, every note is as short as we can play it. We‘re constantly moving, twitching, freezing, jumping and doing faces. It’s two different kinds of sport, I guess.