By.JACKIE MCGLONE photograph.pascal sanchez

BRIAN McMaster’s international festival programme this year provides a rich medium in which artists from every discipline are expressing themselves through innovative and creative work and crossing into new media.

A film director blossoms into a theatre director. An architect cross-fertilises with a choreographer. The world’s leading avant-garde dancer blooms as an actor in a radio play on stage. A ballet superstar flowers sensationally as a postmodern dancer. A German composer turned director is so inspired by an enigmatic American writer’s intellectual text he cross-pollinates it into a musical-cum-theatrical spectacular.

It’s the blurring of distinctions between all these art forms that intrigues McMaster. "They are ideal themes for a festival which takes in all the performing arts," he insists, adding that worldwide he has discovered artists revelling in experimenting in different media from those in which they originally made their reputations. In a changing world, he believes, it’s how the arts will adapt and survive.

So the guru of modern dance, Merce Cunningham, finds his feet as an actor in the premiere of John Cage’s radio play, Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Erik Satie: An Alphabet, while Mikhail Baryshnikov revives the revolutionary works of postmodern dance, with the help of film and video.

Many performers and directors, though, have always worked across the disciplines, as Canadian writer-director Francois Girard, who directs the Montreal-based The‰tre de Quat’Sous’ brilliant one-man piece, Novecento, points out.

"I think it’s a very British tradition. I see your directors moving from film to television to theatre and I admire that very much." He started as a video artist. "I just grew up in that environment," shrugs the 38-year-old. In the early 1980s, he would happily switch from dance to visual arts to music theatre.

Nevertheless, the director of such acclaimed arthouse films as The Red Violin and Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould found himself becoming more and more focused on moviemaking. Indeed, he’s currently in Morocco filming his first big-budget epic, The Magician’s Wife, with Kate Winslet, Geoffrey Rush and Dominic West.

During breaks from filming, he’s been rehearsing actor Tom McCamus in the English-language version of Alessandro Baricco’s Novecento, which has its European premiere in Edinburgh. Pierre Lebeau, the Michael Gambonesque actor, who created the monologue on stage in The‰tre De Quat’Sous’ tiny Montreal space, will play one performance only in French.

The actual act of shooting a movie, or staging a play, or putting together a museum installation is nothing in itself, declares Girard. What matters to him is how he communicates with audiences. "It’s amazing how lazy we get always working in film," he says. "You stop questioning your ways, your assumptions and your instincts, so working in theatre, for me, is a good way to put myself at risk, to question the way I do things, as well as the why.

"As an artist you need to confront yourself with different aspects of storytelling. It was perfect for me to be able to make my first theatre piece with a one-man show. It means I could keep it simple and really reach the essential elements of theatre because I am both attracted and seduced by the idea of someone sitting on a stage telling a very good story for 95 minutes."

For Lebeau, an actor with an impressive track record in film, television and theatre (everything from Ibsen to Wedekind), the process of his collaboration with Girard has been like no other in his theatrical experience. "It was a lot like working in the cinema," he says, lighting up a cigarette after the piece’s final performance in Montreal, where the audience received it ecstatically.

"When I arrived the set was already built, so we worked for only 10 days. I learned my lines, sat down and Francois directed me just like on a film set. My costume, the sound, the lighting, were all worked out in advance. It was weird, but wonderful - just like making one long, continuous sequence shot in a movie. I have never made theatre like this ever before, perhaps I never will again."

This intertwining of imagery and disciplines is also explored in Heiner Goebbels’ Theatre Vidy-Laussane production, Hashirigaki (Japanese for "the action of talking while walking"). The 48-year-old composer directed the piece, which combines his own music with traditional Japanese and that of Beach Boy Brian Wilson.

This playful, funny work was inspired by Gertrude Stein’s 1925 text, The Making of Americans. Throughout his career, Goebbels says he’s felt connected to contemporary experience - to visual art and movies as well as pop and ethnic music. "I always want to reflect them all in my work. But the message in itself is less important than the fact of offering it to the audience."

Novecento, Royal Lyceum Theatre, Grindlay Street (0131-473 2000), 7.30pm, tomorrow, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday; 2.30pm, Saturday. Hashirigaki, King’s Theatre, Leven Street (0131-473 2000), 7.30pm, August 25-26

Source: Scotland on Sunday