Attack Theatre tours Japan

By William Loeffler
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Wednesday, February 12, 2003

While most of us slept this morning, dreaming of spring, the members of Attack Theatre were dragging themselves through security at Pittsburgh International Airport.

In their luggage: costumes, table legs, yoga mats, video equipment and a cello.

This is what you pack if you're names are Peter Kope and Michele de la Reza and you're embarking on a two-week tour of Japan.

Attack Theatre will perform as guests of Nibroll, a Japanese performance collective. The two companies will premiere a new work, "No-to: Memory Fades," March 1 and 2 at The Seventh Wave Next Dance Festival in Tokyo.

Dance troupe is game for some heavy lifting
A collection of playground equipment, including a seesaw, a slide, and some jungle gym pieces, forms the unlikely set for the twisted dance/rock opera “Games of Steel.”

“We started with the idea of using Archimedes’s simple machines,” says Michele de la Reza, co-artistic director of Pittsburgh-based Attack Theatre, which brings “Games of Steel” to the Cutler Majestic Theatre tonight through Sunday. “Then we gathered our musicians and dancers together to brainstorm. ....

Finesse at play in ‘Games of Steel’
Attack Theatre’s “Games of Steel” has all the makings of gripping multimedia dance theater. The conceit is a kind of post-apocalyptic, punked out “American Gladiator”-type game show with three contestants and a conniving, manipulative host. ...
But while it’s clever, visually striking, and entertaining, the drama is murky and a little messy. The rules of these games are never clear, sapping what should be the piece’s innate “win or lose” tension.