Joanna Wichowska: Prospero’s Robes
A review of the play The Tempest directed by Maja Kleczewska (Polski Theater in Bydgoszcz, premiere: 4 II 2012). Wichowska begins by noting that Shakespeare’s plot for The Tempest is, for the artists, a kind of “framework,” from which they culled a few motifs and figures, to construct their own anti-fairy-tale composed of a series of “incidents, micro-activities, psychological facts, and overlapping emotions.” The text also mentions Hellinger’s constellations and the collected dreams of the viewers that accompanied work on the play, calling attention to the ethical risk of using therapeutic methods, and the fact that both ideas are present in Shakespeare’s text.
Hidden. Marta Bryś speaks with Marek Wilkirski
An interview with Marek Wilkirski – a therapist working with the Hellinger constellation method. Wilkirski first presents the method itself: its history, its manner of use, how it works, its principles, the precise course of the constellations, and the roles of the client, the representative, and the therapist. He then speaks about working with Maja Kleczewska and the employees of the Polski Theater in Bydgoszcz on staging The Tempest, based on Shakespeare’s drama. He explains how he was able to arrange the constellations concerning the figures in the drama, and his role in these constellations stripped of their therapeutic aspect.
Acting under Heightened Risk. Marta Bryś speaks with Marta Nieradkiewicz
An interview with Marta Nieradkiewicz concerning her work on the role of Miranda in The Tempest, directed by Maja Kleczewska. Nieradkiewicz mainly concentrates on the issue of Hellinger’s constellations. She speaks of her and other actors’ reactions to the director’s proposed work method with the therapist. She then explains the course of the constellations, their accompanying emotions, the significance they had for the process of building the role, her thoughts on acting, and the relations in the ensemble. She also explains what aspects of the constellations directly entered the sphere of the play, and whether this was worthwhile and effective in her opinion, and a method that could be used in working on other plays.
Olga Katafiasz: …and After the Tempest
An article devoted to post-1989 Shakespearean cinema. The author describes and analyzes four films of the 1990s, the period when the genre made a comeback – Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991), Richard III (1995) by Richard Loncraine, Romeo and Juliet (1996) by Baz Luhrmann, and Titus Andronicus by JulieTaymor – proving that these cannot be considered postmodern films. The author also notes that in the first decade of the 21st century “not a single important film adaptation of a Shakespeare drama was made, apart from Branagh’s As You Like It.” A film which, in her opinion, demonstrates the “exhaustion of the familiar models of adaptation” is Taymor’s The Tempest.
Sue-Ellen Case: Split Britches – Feminists and Lesbians in the Theater
A translation of an article by Sue-Ellen Case. The author describes the history of the Split Britches group against the backdrop of women’s theater. She analyzes their multi-stage creative process and provides a mini-guide to the group’s dramaturgy. She also shows how the image of lesbians has changed in various performances, and the impact that feminist criticism has had on lesbian theater. She presents discussions on the subject of identity and staging strategies identified with lesbians, as well as articles on the issues of pornography, the presentation of sexual acts, and seduction in the theater.
Grzegorz Stępniak: The Discreet Charm of Recollection
A text devoted to the history of the American lesbian/feminist Split Britches performance group. The author lists the group’s most important projects, where the butch/femme relationship forms the axis of their constructions. Part two of the article reviews the group’s latest performance, Lost Lounge (2009). In this self-reflexive play about a romance between two aging female artists, Split Britchesraises the topic of setting memory strategies in motion (theirs and the audience’s), and evokes recollections that seemed to be irrevocably lost.
Mateusz Borowski, Małgorzata Sugiera: Genderless Identity, or: Escaping a Beautiful Dream
An article devoted to transgenderism, which, the authors prove, has yet to receive consent, as it upsets the medical categories of gender and the “shared dogma of hetero- and metrosexual norms, as if only biology could reveal the truth about a person’s identity.” The authors provide a range of examples to show how discourse creates both gender and identity. They then describe and analyze Split Britches’ drama Belle Reprieve, which brings a critical perspective to the heterosexual relationships between the figures in A Streetcar Named Desire – both in Williams’s drama and in Kazan’s film – simultaneously putting forward their own utopia of eternally deferred identity.
Pained Evoked through Association. Tomasz Kireńczuk speaks with Johan Simons
Johan Simons speaks of his performance based on Sarah Kane’s dramas – Cleansed, Crave, and 4.48 Psychosis, claiming that what interests him is the issue of rape “conceived not only as a physical attack with a sexual basis, but also as the transgression of independence and inviolability, both physical and spiritual.” He also speaks of the role of laughter and signification in his stagings, and the idea of transferring Cleansed to a child’s setting and casting a woman for the role of Tinker. He then describes his collaboration with the creator of Robin in Cleansed and with the lead in 4.48 Psychosis – Thomas Schmauser.
Tomasz Kireńczuk: Violence Is in Us
A review of Johan Simons’s play based on Cleansed, Crave, and 4.48 Psychosis (Münchner Kammerspiele, premiere: 21 I 2012). Kireńczuk very precisely describes and analyzes all three parts of the play, simultaneously trying to find the links between them. Writing on Cleansed, he notes the process whereby violence becomes widespread and banal, leading Simons’s play to the conclusion that “we are all Tinkers.” Writing on Crave, he states that the director hid behind the text, less creating the world than revealing its emotional and intellectual stores. In 4.48 Psychosis, finally, “Simons focuses on the situation of the individual trapped in a self-created world of internal oppositions.” This drama also combines all three parts of the play.
Michał Lachman: After Newton, or: British Theater of the Previous Decade
This text by Michał Lachman presents the basic issues in the latest book by an outstanding British drama scholar – Aleks Sierz: Rewriting the Nation. British Theatre Today
(Methuen, London 2011) – not yet translated into Polish. Lachman contrasts the dramaturgy of the 1990s with that of the present, describing the process by which texts are made for the theater, commenting on the high status of dramaturgs and the primacy of the text over the other strata of the play. He also devotes a great deal of space to the subject of dramas, highlighting attributes that almost all the works share, such as the timeliness of the themes they address, the aspect of national identity, and fear (of terrorism). He also sketches the oeuvres of the leading authors, with Mark Ravenhill and David Hare at the forefront. Lachman supplements Sierz’s observations with reference to other sources.
Patrycja Cembrzyńska: Sticky Post-rapture through the Lens of Martin Parr
An article devoted to the photography of Martin Parr, focused on the controversial Last Resort exhibition of 1985, which is recognized as a watershed in British photography. As described by the author, these photographs document “contemporary consumerism, tourism, and omnipresent kitsch,” which the “photographer inscribes […] in a ‘field of revulsion’.” Revulsion is indeed the basic category Cembrzyńska uses to analyze Parr’s works. She ultimately claims: “The discussion on Parr’s work centers on the condition of contemporary culture […], and as such, should also concern art’s participation in the neo-liberal machine, whose waste product is the all-consuming fast-foodites.”
Żelisław Żelisławski: Remobolize. Krzysztof Garbaczewski’s Anti-directorial Strategies
Żelisławski attempts to describe and characterize what he sees as the chief directorial strategies in Krzysztof Garbaczewski’s work. In the author’s opinion, the basic aspect of his theater is a recognition of the place the director occupies vis-a-vis the author of the text, the actors, the medium of the stage, and the audience. Żelisławski notes that one of his strategies in building a performance is creating splintered and fragmentary narratives, aiming to extract the cracks and ruptures from the cultural material, and then to remodel them on stage, so that they are open to new and unexpected cultural associations. The author also delves into the father-figure, who occupies an important place in the director’s work.
Joanna Jopek: Medium or Territory. Media in Krzysztof Garbaczewski’s Work
This article’s point of departure is the opposed categories of maps and territories, which allows Jopek to grasp the transition which she sees as key to understanding the “mediagenic” quality of Krzysztof Garbaczewski’s theater: “the new perspectives it has opened, the intellectual challenges it has set before the viewer, and – finally – the need to change in assimilated paradigms and categories that it has provoked.” The author notes the multifaceted and extravagant use of media forms in Garbaczewski’s plays, which put them in the spotlight, and even calls his theater “post-media.” She then analyzes the methods and aims of the media forms used by the director, ultimately arriving at the conclusion that The Sexual Life of Savages marks out a territory which – given its lack of clear borders – could be an excellent critical tool in researching reality.
Agata Siwiak: “When I get depressed, I read the story I told you about myself, and somehow it gives me strength.”
A review of the play Landed in Młynska 1 by the Ósmego Dnia Theater. Siwiak first describes how the theater troupe and the convicts of the Poznań jail on Młyńska Street came to collaborate, the process by which the script came about from the prisoners’ tales, combined with Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, and the work on the play. Only later does she proceed to describe the performance and explain the prisoners’ stories to the reader. In the latter part of the article, Siwiak writes about political theater, stressing the uniqueness of the Ósmego Dnia performance as compared to like initiatives in Poland. In sum, she states that watching Landed in Młynska 1 is an anthropological experience.
Paweł Schreiber: Dances of Revolution
A review of Jan Klata’s two most recent plays: Coprophagy, or: Loathed but Indispensable at the Stary Theater in Krakow (premiere: 1 X 2011) and The Cut-throats at the Schauspielhaus in Bochum (premiere: 3 III 2012). Schreiber begins his text by recalling Klata’s image as a rebel, a label from which – in his opinion – the director is trying to escape. The author defines the Krakow play as a “study on righteous indignity and its consequences.” The Cut-throats at Schauspielhaus Bochum continues the same theme, though it is “calmer, more deeply contemplated, and better than Coprophagy.” Addressing the topic of rebellion in both plays, Klata examines it – as in previous plays – from a sober, satirical perspective, but adds an oppressive, metaphysical angle, in which gestures of revolt lose significance. To conclude, Schreiber says that Klata’s most recent plays constitute a distinct movement in Polish theater.
Agata Łuksza: The Economy, Idiot!
A review of Mercantile Contracts based on a play by Elfriede Jelinek, directed by Paweł Miśkiewicz (Dramatyczny Theater in Warsaw, premiere: 3 III 2012). Łuksza first explains Jelinek’s “economic opera” and its attempt to expose the global financial system, comparing it to the documentary film by Charles Ferguson on the same topic, Inside Job (2010). Only after establishing this context does Łuksza describe and analyze three sequences in the play of varying emotional shades, but with the same calm tone of absurdity, with special attention to the pointed political and critical implications of the whole.
Katarzyna Lemańska: The Melancholy We Deserve
A review of the play Who Killed Alona Ivanovna? – the directorial debut of the twenty-year-old Michał Kmiecik (Dramatyczny Theater in Warsaw, premiere: 25 II 2012). Although the title alludes to Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment, Kmiecik’s text is full of direct references to performances by the Strzępka/Demirski duo, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, and the latest news. “Kmiecik’s rewriting of Dostoyevsky’s novel is no more than a pretext to expose the mechanisms governing the theater, politics, the economy, history, education, or social life in general,” the author concludes.
Aleksandra Kamińska: Recession-era Comedy
A review of Anna Augustynowicz’s latest play at the Współczesny Theater in Szczecin: A Small Family Business, based on the Alan Ayckbourn comedy, translated by Małgorzata Semil (premiere: 11 II 2012). In the reviewer’s opinion, the play finds the director analyzing the disintegration of family ties and the degradation of moral values under the capitalist system, treating the titular family business as a model for the contemporary society.
Dorota Jarząbek-Wasyl: Atrium spraw Bizońskich
A review of a staging of Cyprian Norwid’s drama The Actor, directed by Michał Zadara (Narodowy Theater, premiere: 4 III 2012). Jarząbek explains the issues in the drama, and then describes Zadara’s directorial strategies. Though he appreciates the decision to stage this rather unpopular text intact, he criticizes both the attempts to contemporize it – “The social stratification of the protagonists is recomposed, though in a way that is offhand, inconsistent, and illegible in its intentions” – and the shift in tone from the text to the stage: “What Norwid conceived in grave seriousness has turned into farce.”
Maria Prussak: Zadara Reads Norwid
Another text devoted to The Actor by Cyprian Norwid, directed by Michał Zadara. Maria Prussak notes that Zadara’s play is chiefly based on an insightful reading of the text, for which the director has sought contemporary equivalents. Nonetheless, Zadara sees the world as quite similar to the one Norwid described 150 years ago. Norwid’s text and Zadara’s play are linked by irony and sarcasm – except that the performance uses “harsher tactics, because the play’s protagonists have long discarded the conventions that tempered the responses of the play’s protagonists.”
Aleksandra Wiśniewska: Being in Politics
A review of the komuna//warszawa play entitled Sierakowski (premiere: 19 XI 2011). According to Wiśniewska, the hypothetical scripts for the future life of the creator of Krytyka Polityczna created for the play serve to formulate a series of accusations against the Polish radical left, the most important of which is their lack of real involvement in political life. This play is a remarkably bold and responsible statement by komuna//warszawa, in which people of the same alleged community refuse to pat each other on the back.
Marta Michalak: Marvelous and Practical
A review of the play Winter Tales, based on Andersen’s fairy tales, directed by Iga Gańczarczyk (Polski Theater in Bydgoszcz, premiere: 13 I 2012). The author notes that, although the director used a recent translation, and the play “reifies the archetypal situation of telling fairy stories,” the performance is equally centered on drama and dance. Dominika Knapik, who created the choreography, “leads the young viewer from the signifying to the abstract, or from the abstract to the signifier, sometimes even from word to gesture or from gesture to word.” According to Michalak, the effect is remarkable, in that this coming-of-age tale also becomes a tale of non-fulfillment and the inevitable passing of time.
Magdalena Talar: Oneiric Building Blocks
The latest premiere by Paweł Passini, The Dictionary of the Khazars. Children of Dreams (J. Kochanowski Theater in Opole, premiere: 11 II 2012), is a new incarnation of total theater. Milorad Pavić’s proto-hypertext has been adapted for the theater with impressive verve. The author analyzes the performance in the context of para-textuality (following Gerard Genette’s concept), and also as a road drama of sorts – following a guide, the viewer discovers the various nooks of the Opole theater. The mosaic of scenes painted before his/her eyes follow the logic of a dream. The viewer decides what (s)he really sees.
Monika Świerkosz: Komornicka “from the Cubes of Recollections and Knowledge”
A review of the play Komornicka. A Seeming Biography directed by Bartek Frąckowiak (HOBO Art Foundation in Warsaw, co-producers: Scena Prapremier InVitro in Lublin, Polski Theater in Bydgoszcz, Lublin premiere: 24 II 2012, Bydgoszcz premiere: 9 III 2012). This play devoted to the figure of Maria Komornicka metamorphosed into Piotr Włast traces various narratives of her life, written by the protagonist herself, her relatives, and by scholars of her life and literature. Added to this diverse monologue spoken by Anita Sokołowska are fragments of the director’s narration, which become the play’s second protagonist. Świerkosz states that the play reveals the superficiality and fragmentary nature of every biography and problematizes the category of truth.
Monika Żółkoś: Adam or Eve
The author analyzes Kuba Kowalski’s play Foreign Bodies, based on Julia Holewińska’s controversial drama (Wybrzeże Theater in Gdańsk, premiere: 17 II 2012). Through binary oppositions, such as private/public, the director reveals the gender code of “Solidarity” and the problematic weave of two concepts: fatherland and gender. Presenting a symbolic biography of the Other, a transsexual, a political oppositionist and woman in one body, the trap of the body and stereotypes is revealed through almost caricature portrayals.
Marta Gąsowska: Wierszalin Horror Picture Show
A review of the play Anatomy of a Dog at Wierszalin Theater directed by Piotr Tomaszuk (premiere: 15 X 2011), based on Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog. Gąsowska notes that “this latest play […] will be a major surprise for the regular viewer of this stage.” The director has combined comedy and the grotesque with a cheap horror aesthetic. The author also notes that the artists changed the main subject of the novella for the play, focusing on the social ostracism of homosexuality.
Małgorzata Dziewulska: Culture, Stupid. Artur Żmijewski’s Media Performances
Dziewulska’s text focuses on the media debate around Artur Żmijewski’s Mass at the Dramatyczny Theater in Warsaw (premiere: 29 X 2012). The author begins with the media fuss that preceded the premiere, wondering if this spectacle was opposed to or part of the idea of the project. In her opinion, Mass is less a performance than an idea, as it fulfils its task in the very information provided. Dziewulska then contrasts the contradictory statements of the director and the reviewers on the intended and real participation of the viewers, and cites often curious reports from the debate at the theater that preceded the premiere. Finally, she considers the varied status of the word inŻmijewski’s Mass and the holy mass as such, and the intentions of Żmijewski’s art that is “exhausted with the impotence of art.”
Tadeusz Kornaś: Between Liturgy, Concert and Theater. Part 2
The author concentrates on the symposium taking place in Brixen devoted to the liturgical drama of the East and West, entitled Ludus Passionis, prepared by the Węgajty Theater School. The performances are very carefully described and contextualized. Questions on the dividing line between prayer and theater emerge from the theatrification of a Palm Sunday procession, based on a particular musical recording and an evangelical narration.
Thomas Irmer: The “Outsider” Project
An article devoted to Heinrich von Kleist. The point of departure is the problematic question of whether Kleist can be regarded as a third classic figure in German literature, alongside Goethe and Schiller. Irmer next outlines the artist’s biography, stressing that he was an accidental poet, given that his noble origins caused him to have gaps in his education, and thus his path to being a writer required enormous determination. He then describes the reception of von Kleist’s work in Germany in the changing political context, and the most important stagings of his dramas in the German theaters.
Anka Herbut: Feedback
A review of the play Eugene Onegin, directed by Alvis Hermanis (Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, Berlin, premiere: 25 XI 2011). The author notes that Hermanis’s basic dramaturgical decision is a gesture of constant performing the story based on Pushkin’s epic, based on its artistic and private experience, the external authorial commentary, and the cultural contexts that appear while reading the text. Hermanis seeks to point out how cultural discourses, literature, and visual schemata affect the social roles we enact.
A Few Little Subjects. Marta Michalak speaks with Mikołaj Mikołajczyk
Mikołaj Mikołajczyk speaks of the beginnings of his solo work. He explains the emotional source of the Triptych that came about at the time: Waiting, I Want to Watch the World with You and Plaisir d’amour: “These plays emerged like self-therapy, though the third part is both self-therapy and medicine I apply.” He also goes back to the origins of his creative path, when he met and worked with Henryk Tomaszewski, who encouraged him to learn dance (from pantomime, through dance theater, to classical ballet). He also speaks of the root of his choreographic work in drama theater, both for plays, where he handles movement (in Everything Tomorrow, or: Liberated Dolls)made entirely by himself and the actors, and for the opera.
Anna Królica: A Dictionary of Ann Van den Broek
Anna Królica has created a “dictionary” of Belgian choreographer Ann Van den Broek’s artistic vocabulary. Królica believes the key words to be: death, body in isolation, WArd/waRD, sexuality (from nudity to undressing), and rhythm. The author uses these issues to examine the artist’s plays: I solo ment, Q61, Co(te)lette, We Solo Men, and Ohm. Contemporary dance researchers believe Van den Broek to be an heir to the arts movement of the 1980s in Belgium, i.e. the “Flemish wave,” and to the German tradition of Tanztheater. Królica, however, stresses the unique, individual, and autobiographical nature of the Belgian artist’s projects.
Emotion in a Precise structure. Julia Hoczyk Speaks with Ann van den Broek
A dancer and choreographer working in Holland and in Belgium – Ann van den Broek – speaks of her artistic evolution: from being a dancer in New York, Amsterdam, and Belgium, to becoming a choreographer of her own group – WArd/waRD. She also answers questions concerning the plays Co(te)lette, We Solo Men, Q61, FF+Rew, I solo ment. The conversation also contains a catalogue of the recurring building blocks and themes in her work, such as repetition, lack of touch, nudity, gender, the conflict between the individual and society, death, and mourning.
Łukasz Grabuś: Two Giewonts
Reviewing two performances of Halka (Krakow Opera, dir.: Waldemar Zawodziński, prem.: 16, 18 XII 2011; National Opera in Warsaw, dir.: Natalia Korczakowska, prem.: 23 XII 2011), Grabuś notes the competing claims of new and original readings of this “national” opera that accompanied the premieres. These expectations engender the following remark: “the two presentations turned out to be tediously similar. The directors were unable to bring to life a situation that would justify resuscitating this well-known story, or even interest us in it. Instead, they put forward a more (Korczakowska) or less (Zawodziński) attractive series of images on stage.”
Jakub Papuczys: Still a Staging, or a Performance?
Reviewing a book recently published in Poland, Patric Pavis’s The Contemporary Staging (Naukowe PWN Publishers, Warsaw 2011), the author turns his eye to its synthesizing, textbook aspect. Presenting many concepts and categories that have cropped up in the artistic and theatrical discourse over the past few years, Pavis remains concise, clear, and comprehensive. The critic is doubtful concerning another aspect of the book, however, wherein Pavis sketches out his private theater research project. His proposal to analyze contemporary performances via the term mise-en-perf is, in Papuczys’s opinion, fraught with analytic imprecision and replicates a concept long ago put forward by Erika Fischer-Lichte and Hans Thies-Lehman.
Agnieszka Jelewska: Classification and Experience
A review of Artur Duda’s book Live Performance as a Medium and a Medial Object (Copernicus University Publishers, Toruń 2011). Jelewska describes the structure and subject of the book, which agrees with the performing studies movement. She sees the book’s asset in its capacious optic, allowing the author to grasp very diverse phenomena (soccer matches, concerts, television programs, theater) in one methodological framework. Nonetheless, Jelewska also notes the numerous imprecisions in the in the work, and the selective and cursory treatment of both the methodology applied and the phenomena described.
Ewa Partyga: Facts and Narratives
A review of Agnieszka Wanicka’s book The Dramas and Comedies of Warsaw’s Theaters 1868-1880 (UJ Publishers, Krakow 2011). Though this period has already been surveyed several times, Partyga feels Wanicka has managed to “show the familiar in an utterly new light.” This success is due to the author’s refusal to look at the Warsaw stage through the lens of the achievements of the “Krakow School.” Wanicka’s basic premise is to research the old theater from its own perspective, to avoid evaluating it from today’s point of view. An asset of the book is its combination of in-depth source work with open subjectivity and visual descriptions based on film montage.
Katarzyna Lemańska: Dance as a Polish Product
Anna Królica’s Art to Discover. A Sketch on Polish Dance is a historical outline of Polish contemporary dance. The author focuses on a few issues: the genealogy and various phases of dance in Poland, and the characteristics of contemporary dance since the 1990s. The reviewer stresses: “the abbreviated form suggests that some of the argument has been copiously pruned. Królica forgoes in-depth analysis, and only gestures at selected phenomena.” In spite of these reservations, Królica’s book plays an important role – it popularizes (new) Polish dance. |