Synetic Scores Again with Shakespeare's Twelfth Night

With all the snow this winter, power outages have been occurring all over the country. The next time you find yourself without power, you might want to call the Synetic Theater troupe to perform their current production Twelfth Night in your area.

The play, set in the Gatsbyesque, 1920s era of silent films and the company's 10th production in its ongoing Silent Shakespeare series, creates enough energy to keep a huge neighborhood or even a good-sized city steeped in power for days.

Director Paata Tsikurishvilli says the linkage between the 1920s and the Shakespeare play was "natural."

"Much like the seminal novel of the period, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Shakespeare's play is a meditation on selfishness and shallowness, a satire at once melancholic and biting," Tsikurishvilli says in his director's notes. "In fact, many of the characters in Fitzgerald's novel seem direct descendants of those in Shakespeare's play - both works are peopled with the idle, indolent, hard-drinking rich, living purely for fun, in the moment, and with apparently nothing better to do than ostentatiously wallow in their private miseries or exact cruel and heartless revenge for grievances, real of imagined."

"Only the play's central character Viola (played brilliantly in the production by Tsikurishvilli's wife Irina) stands out from the rest of these petty aristocrats: a (Charlie Chaplin) Little Tramp-like figure, searching for love, deeply good and completely indestructible," he added.

The use of the 1920s setting also offers the opportunity for the talented cast to demonstrate a new-for-them style of movement based on the iconic dances of the 1920s such as the charleston and the jitterbug.

In short, if you like great theater, spirited dancing, Shakespeare, the 1920s, or early jazz music, you should see this play. But you will have to hurry. There are only 6 performances left this week.

But don't just take our word for it. Here's what the critics are saying:

• "The production is creative, entertaining, and oozing with charm". (The Washintonian)
• "A bouyantly entertaining evening during which, it seems, anything goes." (The Washington Post)
• "Layer after luscious layer." (from The DC Theater Scene) 

Learning The Lindy Locally

Tonight, the Synetic Theater opens Twelfth Night, the latest in its series of Silent Shakespeare productions. Here is an article from The Washington Post explaining how members of the award-winning theater company did clandestine dance research at a local dance emporium in Columbia Heights.

(Koko Lanham) - Irina Tsikurishvili stars in “Twelfth Night” at Synetic Theater, part of the Silent Shakespeare series

To the regular Lindy hoppers at the Jam Cellar dance night in Columbia Heights, the new odd couple was easy to spot. She was 40ish and European — Russian, maybe? — and he was her quick-on-his-feet, much younger partner. That they could dance was obvious, yet they were struggling a bit with a basic rock step.

The mystery couple turned out to be Synetic Theater choreographer Irina Tsikurishvili and actor-dancer Alex Mills, out on the town on a clandestine swing-dance mission to learn the Lindy hop and brush up on their Charleston before staging a 1920s-inspired production of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.”

“People kept telling us, ‘You guys are picking this up so quickly,’ so finally we had to tell them why we were there,” Tsikurishvili recalled.

The results of their reconnaissance trip will be onstage tonight, when Synetic opens the 10th installment of its “Silent Shakespeare” series — ­dance-theater productions that convey stories through movement and music, without any of the Bard’s dialogue. On one hand, the setting feels calculated to capitalize on the “Gatsby” craze, but it’s also a choice that makes artistic sense for the troupe. Irina and her husband, Paata Tsikurishvili, who directs the show, have long been influenced by the aesthetic of silent films — particularly the comedic mime work of Charlie Chaplin — and they knew setting a show in the ’20s would open up new possibilities when it came to choreography.

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