Krakow Pulsed with Life: The Recollections of Marzenna Maria Smoleńska
Waldemar Wasztyl interviews a long-time friend of Krystian Lupa. Speaking of the beginning of their friendship, Smoleńska gives colorful descriptions of student life in the 1960s in Krakow: she paints a picture of a city where intellectual, cultural and social life was in bloom, functioning in opposition to the political system. The interview includes a personal view on the director’s plays and temperament, and a description of his family home.
Krystian Lupa as a Student
This article reconstructs the “individual” path of the artist during his studies. His early choices and manifestoes in the documents quoted by Wasztyl show that Lupa was always an artist functioning outside of the establishment. Wasztyl shows that some fascinations and affinities overlap, leaving their mark, even if they were ultimately discarded. And thus – how a fascination for literature led him to take up painting, how painting led to a fascination for film, and film created an interest in theater.
Fragments from a Manuscript Archive
Fragments of texts by Krystian Lupa, from various phases of his over twenty-year study period. The reprints include: the first chapter of an unfinished, fictional novel inspired by Proust, which Lupa planned to write together with his friends; a loose sketch on the person and acting of Brigitte Bardot; a dramatic scene, where Lupa ponders the relationship between the form and the essence of the thought transmitted through art; and various notes and designs for the staging of his debut in 1976 – Mrożek’s The Slaughterhouse.
The Staging of Dandies and Frumps by Stanisław I. Witkiewicz at the Jelenia Góra Theater as a Suggested Interpretation and a Theatrical Model
Fragments of Piotr Skiba’s diploma project describing his work with Krystian Lupa on the 1978 play in Jelenia Góra, in which he played Tarkwiniusz. This was his first encounter with Lupa, which bore fruit in a long-term friendship and collaboration. The work is divided into two chapters. In the first, Skiba analyzes the basic idea of the text. In the second, quoting fragments of the director’s work, he offers an interpretation of the figures and the consequent tasks of the actor, describing the set, music, costumes, particular scenes, and the relationship Lupa designed with the audience.
Difficulties with the Incest Prohibition
Judith Butler claims that “psychoanalysis as a theory and practice could rejuvenate itself if it were to return to the issue of incest and family ties, and their mutual relationships.” In her opinion. there are forms of incest that are not traumatizing, but which become so through a consciousness of the social disgrace they produce. She sees the term “incest” as too broad, as it excludes all non-normative forms of love and family set-ups.
Carnal Confessions
Butler takes up the issue of the relationship between language, the body, and psychoanalysis, focusing on the act of confession. Her point of departure is the similarity between religious confession and psychoanalysis. Butler draws from Foucault, who saw tools of control and repression in both. She notes, however, that confession is the subject’s act of constituting a private truth in an act of verbalization. Butler also uses the character of Antigone in her analysis.
Death on Your Own Terms. A Panel on Antigone’s Claim by Judith Butler.
Mateusz Borowski, Paweł Dybel, Adam Ostolski, Małgorzata Sugiera and Weronika Szczawińska demonstrate how Butler’s thinking might be inspiring in discussions on contemporary politics, considerations of identity, and analyses of contemporary theater. They show that the author avoids simple intellectual formulae, or placing simplified labels on reality, and is cautious toward a binary understanding of social categories.
Antigone’s Descendents. Theater and Family Relations
A text devoted to family relationships as one of the main themes of the theater. Borowski first describes a scene from Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, in which he reveals the role that the family played in the theater in the traditional, sanctioned model. He shows how drama of the past universalized and naturalized family relationships, excluding everything that did not fit the traditional model. He then analyzes ways of disrupting traditional ways of thinking about the family and identity in contemporary drama.
TRANS-SPHERE. Intimate Discourse in the Public Sphere
A text on the process of transferring interests from fantasy to experience, from the sphere of faith and the intellect to the private one. Drawing from Tadeusz Nyczek’s review of Duniec and Krakowska’s book Soc i sex, examples from journalism (Igor Stakfiszewski and Kinga Dunin’s conversation Bisexuality or Capitalism?), theater (plays by Monika Strzępka and Paweł Demirski, Jan Klata, and Jerzy Grzegorzewski), cinema (Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto, Christian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Jasmila Zbanic’s Grbavica), and referring to concepts from Anthony Giddens’s book The Transformation of Intimacy, the author shows that the transfer of intimacy to public life carries a revolutionary message: equality and emancipation.
The Gender of the Performer
A critical analysis of the issue of gender relations in the theater and writings of Jerzy Grotowski. The authors put forward the thesis that this artist aimed to universalize the male experience and the exclusion of women. They cite a text by Richard Schechner, who openly wrote of Grotowski’s sexism, and then recall the Performer exhibition at Zachęta, where fragments of Grotowski’s filmed plays were juxtaposed with bits of contemporary performances. In the key part of the text, the authors perform a gender analysis of a description of The Constant Prince, thus proving the text’s basic thesis.
Beaten to Death – The Ethic of Constancy in Grotowski and Lacan
Iwanczewska applies Lacanian categories to Jerzy Grotowski’s The Constant Prince. She tries to show how the figure of martyrdom and the act of victimhood establish a community “commemorating” acts of the individual. The author perceives an analogy between the total act of Ryszard Cieślak and the act of Antigone – both involve displaying a picture of one’s sacrifice, which in itself, as an act of annihilation, is undepictable. This sacrifice indicates a law without content, causing a guarantee of the rebirth of a collective being coming through an individual being.
Grotowski-speak
A review of the play Grotowski – An Attempt to Turn Back, directed by Tomasz Rodowicz, produced at the Chorea Theater Association (premiere: 13 August 2010). The play’s point of departure is the attempt to confront young actors with texts of Grotowski: the fragments they select serve less to tell of an encounter with Grotowski than of themselves. Rodowicz recalls his meetings with Grotowski, to form a counterpoint of sorts for them. Kornaś reads the play in the context of the present discussion on Grotowski’s legacy; he appreciates the fact that the director “did not intend to inscribe the work into any kind of ceremony, purposefully going beyond the framework of the Grotowski Year.”
The Center of You. Merce Cunningham, or: Notes on Thinking with Your Body
The author describes the various stages of Merce Cunninhgam’s education; citing the artist’s statements, critical texts on his choreographers, and examining particular plays, he presents Cunningham’s philosophy and dance technique. This is based on combining the act of thinking with physical action, striving for freedom through discarding the automatic and the schematized, combining structure with randomness and chance, and inviting the viewer to take part in the play. Comparing him with Jerzy Grotowski, the author claims: “Cunningham reduces ‘dancing’ like Grotowski reduces ‘acting’ – both become the simplest ‘doing’.”
Torso: There Are no Fixed Coordinates in Space
A reprint of an interview with Merce Cunningham from The Dancer and the Dance. The choreographer indicates the differences between his dance and more traditional forms, like classical ballet or modern dance, emphasizing the expanded possibilities arising from changed ways of thinking about time and space (which he derives from a quote by Albert Einstein: “In space there are no fixed coordinates”). Using the choreography of Torso as his basis, he shows how Cunningham combines the mathematical precision of dance and choreography with the random to achieve an effect of “constant changeability.”
A Farewell to Merce Cunningham in Paris
A description of events organized at the Theatre de la Ville in Paris in tribute to Merce Cunningham following his death. The author focuses on: Nearly Ninety by the Merce Cunningham Company, Cedric Andrieux – a solo performance by an ex-dancer of the MCC, and Boris Charmatz’s 50'; she extracts the elements of the plays that resemble Cunningham’s style and work method.
The Triumph of Evil. A Midsummer Night’s Eve by Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle.
The author examines a Max Reinhardt film of 1935 which she feels is unjustly overlooked. She compares the film with an earlier theatrical adaptation, indicates the complexity of the adaptation of Shakespeare, and searches for creative ties to the major artistic phenomena of the period. She also points out the complexity and aesthetic ambiguity of the work’s shape, which, in her opinion, allows us to read Reinhardt’s film as a response to fascism. Her analysis proposes including Reinhardt’s film among the great Shakespearean films.
The Black Brain of Warlikowski
A review of The End by Krzysztof Warlikowski, performed at the Nowy Theater in Warsaw (premiere: 30 September 2010). In Fazan’s interpretation, this play is a labyrinth, a trap, and a prison, in which the narrative, plot and scene complications are subjected to the precise and perfidious logic of a dream. The author traces the various layers of the production: she examines the characters and their mutual relationships, analyzes the multi-leveled, fragmented visual layer, and indicates the literary references and self-reference.
Dream. Factory
A review of the play Death Star by Krzysztof Garbaczewski at the Dramatyczny Theater in Wałbrzych (premiere: 26 September 2010). Jopek begins this text with a description of the film The Making of Star Wars, made a year after the premiere of the first part. In the author’s opinion, the film, which showed the filming technique of A New Hope, was a basic inspiration for Garbaczewski. Jopek describes how he uses the space of the former Zorza Cinema, where the play is being performed, the processes of construction and dismantling the film image that take place in the play, and the script that gives the impression of a “the making of” product.
Someone Else’s Class
A review of a staging of Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class directed by Ondrej Spišák at the Na Woli Theater in Warsaw (premiere: 16 October 2010). Schreiber claims that the Nike-award-winning text is, contrary to popular opinion, “neither difficult, nor important, nor particularly successful.” Through the illustrativeness of its acting and stereotyped characters, and its unintentional comedic effect, the staging emphasizes the weakest aspects of the play, and succeeds in undermining the few moving fragments. Schreiber is most powerfully struck by the fact that Polish crimes against Jews are depicted on stage as something that has no bearing on the viewer.
Lethal Sale
A review of the play Kasimir and Karoline, based on Ödön von Horváth’s drama, directed by Jan Klata (Polski Theater in Wrocław, premiere: 23 October 2010). Kwaśniewska describes the performance in detail, noting that: “Klata has brilliantly extracted all the parallels that might be found between the reality Horváth describes and contemporary Poland, showing the repetition of certain formulae. At the same time, in the cracks between the tight dramatic construction he has inserted some very Polish content, which – though it at times seems to depart from the main plot – in reality puts this stage interpretation into perspective.”
The Unforgettable
A review of two plays directed by Barbara Wysocka: Heiner Müller’s Volokolomsk Highway (Polski Theater in Wrocław, premiere: 30 September 2010) and A Gentle Creature, based on a short story by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Polski Theater in Bydgoszcz, premiere: 6 November 2010). Żelisławski notes that the two plays are linked by Wysocka’s style of staging, to create condensed audio-visual landscapes, and the complex linguistic material of the works that clash with their images on stage. Insofar as Wysocka performs an analysis of things and images belonging to the collective memory in Volokolomsk Highway, in A Gentle Creature she deals with individual memory.
Jakub Papuczys: Staring into the Dark
A review of the play Twilight of the Gods directed by Maja Kleczewska (Jan Kochanowski Theater, premiere: 6 November 2010). In spite of the play’s interesting construction (read by Papuszys in the context of Visconti’s film, from which Kleczewska took the script) and its complex and thoughtful interpretations that incline the viewer to mistrust the aesthetic cliches, and its sometimes astonishing scenes and extraordinarily complex comparisons and analogies, Papuczys states that Kleczewska was unable to avoid simplifications and formulae.
Viewing Up Close: A Quarter Century of the “Poza” Videotheater of Lothe and Lachmann
This text encapsulates the twenty-five-year output of Videotheater director and poet Piotr Lachmann and actress Jolanta Lothe. The author describes the special form of the plays they have created, exploring the mutual relationships between live action and video. Mancewicz traces the transformations in Videotheater through the development of media technology and the significance of technology in social life, indicating inspirations from old theater conventions. The text also explores the themes of various plays, focusing on issues of transformation, loss, memory, identity, and death. To conclude, he analyzes the most recent Videotheater production, entitled Clash (premiere: 5 May 2010).
Not about Everything
A report on the Body/Mind Warsaw dance theater festival (23 September – 2 October 2010). The title of the text is also the title of the festival’s most interesting performance (in the author’s view), in which Daniel Linehan put forward his personal art manifesto. Królica states that this title could have inspired the organizers to more precisely formulate the festival’s theme. This year’s festival was devoted to plays that turned the audience member into a witness: the author analyzes Field Works – Hotel by the Deepblue group, Your Girl by Chiara Bersani and Matteo Ramponi, Spatial Theory by Bill Shannon, and two productions by Compagnie Marie Chouinard, to prove that the organizer’s “key” was sometimes less than adequate.
The Polish Dance Platform
A report on the Polish Dance Platform, which took place in Poznań from 7-10 October 2010. During this year’s festival, the author states that an evolution is observable in Polish dance. There were plays by young directors of twenty to thirty years old (such as Tomasz Bazan, or the Harakiri Farmers group), and productions by the Polish pioneers of contemporary dance (such as Dada von Bzdülöw and Iwona Olszowska). In Mrozek’s opinion, this year’s event was successful, though he does note the shortage of artists dealing with social and political issues.
Life Two Hundred Years from Now
A review of two plays by Frank Castorf performed at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin: Lenz’s Soldiers (premiere: 25 February 2010) and Nach Moskau! Nach Moskau! based on Chekov’s Three Sisters and Peasants (which premiered during the International Chekov Festival in Moscow: 25 May 2010; Berlin premiere: 16 September 2010). The author sees them as heralds of Castorf’s return to form as a director. She analyzes the interaction of the acting, musical, and set design in the performance, while showing the mechanisms that rule the world Castorf depicts (people starving for food, material goods and deeper meaning – and people who exploit this hunger to work their way up the social ladder), and its theatrical dynamic (plays with convention and the audience’s expectations).
After the Moscow Premiere
Reviewing Frank Castorf’s Three Sisters, Irmer notes that the director carries on a debate with his precursors – chiefly with Constantin Stanislavski. In evaluating the play, however, the author states that its strongest point – a critique of the revolutionary movement of Marx and Engels – is predictable, anachronistic, and double-edged.
Obsession
A review of the play Bruno Schulz: The Messiah directed by Michał Zadara at the Schauspielhaus in Vienna (premiere: 9 October 2010). The author writes on both the play and the script by Małgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk, read in the context of other texts: Kafka’s The Trial, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Różewicz’s The Card Catalogue and a short story by Borges, The Secret Miracle. The review is generally negative, as Krzywicka-Kaindel claims that: “In this intelligently constructed and brilliantly orchestrated attempt (...) it is Schulz, unfortunately, who gets lost.”
Part Five. Bruno Schulz’s The Messiah: A Performance of Absence
This text co-written by the director of Bruno Schulz: The Messiah (Schauspielhaus Wien, world premiere: 9 October 2010), is devoted to Schulz’s missing work, The Messiah. The authors draw from the text of The Book, which was allegedly a part of the missing novel, and view The Messiah as a cultural performance of absence. In their view, it is: “Hope, Memory, and Longing which grow in every episode, branching out, containing numberless opportunities, and yet remaining unattainable.” In their concept, The Messiah is therefore a “postulate, a task.” “It demands that we believe in it – then it begins to exist.”
An Experimental Lohengrin
A review of Lohengrin by Richard Wagner, directed by Hans Neuenfels, whose premiere took place on 25 July 2010 during the Richard Wagner Festspiele in Bayreuth. The author goes over the plot of the opera and its staging, marking the director’s changes and modernizations. She also describes the fairly restrained response of Wagner enthusiasts to this experimental approach. Łada appreciates the work, writing that: “Hans Neuenfels has stripped Lohengrin of its fairy-tale atmosphere, stuffing it inside a laboratory, but has by no means made it more shallow. One definite virtue of this staging is how it sparks the viewer’s interest, making him/her follow the action, be it with delight or with disgust.”
The Magic of Theater in 19th-century Painting. From Jacques-Louis David to Adolph Appia
Stożek describes the Dalla scena al dipinto. La magia del teatro nella pittura dell’Ottocento exhibition in the space of Italy’s largest modern art museum, the Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (Mart), from 6 February to 23 May 2010. He juxtaposes it with a 2004 exhibition, La Danza delle Avanguardie. In either case, the subject was a presentation of the transformation of the painter/artist, from the role of the “interpreter” of the drama to one of a fully-fledged creator of experimental theater. The author interprets selected pictures in the context of their relevant staging and acting, and the social relationships between the viewer and the actor, the stage and the audience.
The Same Old Dionysus
A review of Alexis Solomos’s book Saint Bacchus. The Unknown Years of Greek Theater 300 B.C.E.-1600 C.E. Bielawski traces and scrupulously points out all the philological and historical errors made by Solomos; at the same time, he is delighted by the passion and involvement shown in the work, a rarity in “hard” academic publications. He sees the book as a kind of manifesto disputing any kind of theoretical order, the desire to maintain a “Greek” point of view on the history of theater, from a more anthropological than a historical perspective of continuity. In spite of a number of reservations, Bielawski considers the book mandatory reading, though he encourages caution and a critical eye.