The best foreign theater companies

Complicité:
Director Simon McBurney (Mnemonic, The Elephant Vanishes) gave his British theater company a French name out of deference to his mentor, movement-theater genius Jacques Lecoq, and yet the group’s stunning combination of physical inventiveness and piercing intellect still catches every audience freshly unawares.

Théâtre du Soleil
Ariane Mnouchkine’s French company may only rend visite once in a great while, but when it does, panoramic pieces like the epic, devastating Le Dernier Caravansérail win her lifelong acolytes.

Rimini Protokoll
The superstar German collective goes documentary theater one better by using nonactors in its “real-life” roles. A tour of its Call Cutta in a Box introduced New York audiences to its sweet trickster sensibility…and a hunger for more.

Societas Raffaello Sanzio
Designer-director Romeo Castellucci’s Italian job specializes in ravishing, operatic images (a steaming horse doused in a shower of milk, a tree making love to a saint) that burrow into the subconscious and lodge there with the durability of nightmare.

Toneelgroep Amsterdam
The director theater purists love to hate (and then love, and then get steamed about again), Ivo van Hove has been blistering the paint off the classics (The Misanthrope, Hedda Gabler) in New York for years. But seeing him at work with his hometown company in the tour of Opening Night showed us just how much we have yet to gain from going Dutch.

Teatr Nowy
After a few years under the same theatrical roof, the bad boys of Polish theater—Krzysztof Warlikowski and Grzegorz Jarzyna—have split up, and so we’re left with a tough call between Jarzyna’s TR Warszawa and Warlikowski’s Teatr Nowy. For bringing us the pitch-perfect, time-expanding Krum, however, the laurel goes to Warlikowski.

Daniel Veronese
This Argentine director, writer and artist has made a career of standing convention on its head, whether in Women Dreamt Horses, a gloriously violent experimental text that came to P.S. 122, or in his cross-gender production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters. Must-si stuff.

Vivarium Studio
Philippe Quesne makes perfect, tiny chamber pieces, like his L’effet du Serge, which turned one lonely fellow’s putterings with a sparkler into a miniature meditation on art and beauty. Sadly, nothing of his since 2004’s Itching of the Wings has been to New York, but we live in hope.