SITI Company celebrates 15 years of contemporary theater with international flair

Ellen Lauren, Stephen Webber of SITI 	 
 	 

The SITI Company is celebrating its 15th anniversary season on the Skidmore College campus with a new production, open training demonstrations, and student theater showings.

SITI Company is an ensemble-based theater company founded in 1992 by Anne Bogart and Tadashi Suzuki and currently led by Bogart. From the start, SITI Company has been devoted to redefining and revitalizing contemporary theater in the U.S. while emphasizing international cultural exchange and collaboration. 

Sixty-two students are participating in the four-week program through Aug. 18 at Skidmore. More than a third are from outside the U.S., from such countries as the Netherlands, Denmark, Singapore, Finland, Australia, Canada, and Spain.

This summer’s main production is Radio Macbeth, to be presented at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Aug. 10. Radio Macbeth represents the company’s latest adventure with Shakespeare, and it follows the formula of Radio Play, SITI’s staging of Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds. “We are approaching Radio Macbeth through a very special lens,” noted Bogart. The play had its debut performance last February at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University.

Other performances this summer include theater training demonstrations at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Friday, Aug. 17, and student theater showings at 2 p.m. Thursday and Friday, Aug. 16 and 17. All performances will be staged in Bernhard Theater on the Skidmore campus. Admission to all SITI events is free.

Originally envisioned as a summer institute in Saratoga Springs, SITI Company has expanded to become a year-round company based in New York City with a summer season in Saratoga Springs. Founder Anne Bogart has enjoyed the upstate environment from the beginning. “I was in love with Saratoga Springs as a place and came here that first year with Suzuki and the company. Skidmore was a good match for us,” she said. The company has returned every summer since.

This summer’s workshop is devoted to researching a forthcoming play titled The Brain Project. Inspired by breakthroughs in neuroscience, The Brain Project is based on discoveries around neuroplasticity, mirror neurons, and the connections involving body, brain, memory, and emotions. The play will be devised using the structure and aesthetics of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film Katzelmacher. Composition work this summer involves using these ideas and creating stage moments that address the subject of the brain and human interaction.

A high point of the SITI Company’s summer workshops has been “the international quality of the participations,” said Bogart. “It’s very exciting when people from different countries come here and work collaboratively. I hope to achieve that again and do more performing with international artists” in the years ahead, she added.