Tomasz Kowalski. Forefathers' Eve Unchained
Radosław Rychcik has transposed Forefathers' Eve (Nowy Theater in Poznań, premiere: 22.03.2014) into American history and (pop) culture: the characters and plot lines from the drama have been inscribed into cliches from the American imaginarium, both from films (e.g. the Joker as Guślarz, the figure of Marilyn Monroe, Kubrick's The Shining, Lynch's Twin Peaks, Tarantino's Django), and American politics and history (Kennedy’s assassination, slavery, the Ku-Klux-Klan). In Kowalski's view, however, the play is incoherent (it has a few specifically Polish elements, such as the Great Improvisation performed by Gustaw Holoubek) and uses an excess of associations. This results from the director's ambivalent approach to the text: on the one hand, he stresses his mistrust of Mickiewicz, while on the other he wants to convince the viewer that this is a universal drama.
Monika Kwaśniewska. After the Premiere
In a brief commentary on Radosław Rychcik's Forefathers' Eve (Nowy Theater in Poznań, premiere: 23.03.2014), Kwaśniewska states that the director has managed to read Mickiewicz's work in the context of colonialism. The author appreciates the fact that, in forging compelling analogies between the Polish partition period (as well as the People's Republic) and American slavery, the director avoids universalizing, indicating a potential conflict between the victims of colonialism. Kwaśniewska also appreciates the ambivalence that Rychcik injects into the scenes of revenge.
The Theater's a Professional Liar. Radek Rychcik in conversation with Tomasz Kireńczuk
A conversation devoted to Forefathers' Eve at the Nowy Theater in Poznań (premiere: 22.03.2014). The director explains why he renders the experience of commonality in Mickiewicz's drama from the perspective of the Afro-American struggle for freedom. The conversation also addresses how images from the past are evoked through the media. Rychcik is interested in the media transfer of emotions, and he treats media transmissions as places "inhabited by things from the past." The director also speaks of a need for a "return to theatricality," seen as play: "Perhaps, at present, we should allow ourselves the pure pleasure of being in the theater. The theater is, after all, a place where you become a professional liar, and so it has to keep pretending as though it is the most important thing in the world."
Andrew Friedman. Total Radical Fiction – Ibsen's Saga of Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller
The author examines the work of Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller, and in particular their innovative renderings of Ibsen's dramas. These often multiple-hour performances, including The Doll's House, John Gabriel Borkman or The Wild Duck, turn out to be a major physical exertion for the viewer, because of the aesthetic and meaning. In these adaptations Vinge and Müller chiefly focus on the child characters. They make them the main protagonists and the observers of the world, as well as victims of the social system they are born into. The forcefully exposed physiology and the abundant audience interaction situates the performances in the Ibsen Saga in the movement inspired by the Viennese Actionists. In Vinge and Müller's plays there are also numerous allusions to pop culture (Star Wars, Celine Dion) and the operas of Richard Wagner.
Thomas Irmer. An Enemy of the People in Berlin
Thomas Irmer reviews the play 12-Spartenhaus (The Twelve Fields of Art Theater)byVegard Vinge and Ida Müller (premiere: 4.05.2013, Volksbühne in Berlin). The main theme of the project, frequently alluding to Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, is the audience. The performance ran over thirty consecutive evenings, lasting one hundred hours and counting among the most formally radical undertakings, stretching far beyond the norms of repertory theater (even from the perspective of the avant-garde work of the Volksbühne).
Joseph Roach. An Introduction: History, Memory, and Performance
Roach presents various theses from his book Cities of the Dead, in which he tackles the problem of the three-way relationship between memory, performance, and the substitute. The author examines the principles of reproduction and re-creation of culture and a process that is constantly underway in the life of every society, for which he uses the term "surrogate." Because this process is dependent on collective memory, working selectively and governed by the laws of imagination, total surrogation seldom works out. Roach also introduces the category of "Circum-Atlantic performance," defining the geohistorical location of his investigations of memory as a substitute.
Paweł Sztarbowski. The Community of Euphoria: The Reality-theater of "Solidarity."
Paweł Sztarbowski describes artistic events connected with the strikes against the Socialist powers in Poland. He describes concerts and plays, often improvised and performed in spaces of protest (shipyards, factories). The text also describes numerous artistic and more or less successful plays created in the theater repertoire on the wave of the political and activist society. He devotes particular attention to the audiences, often composed of workers, whose euphoric responses affected the choice of repertoire, but who were also initially embittered with Tadeusz Kantor's play Wielopole, Wielopole, which it believed to run riot over too many sacred cows.
Maria Kobielska. Conflict, Clinch, Impasse.
Maria Kobielska analyzes popular feature films about Martial Law (Popiełuszko. Freedom Is in Us directed by Rafał Wieczyński, Everything I Love by Jacek Borcuch, and Andrzej Wajda's Wałęsa: A Man of Hope), perceiving recognizable memory cliches about this event, and mutually exclusive memory images that serve defined political functions. Kobielska proves the massive influence of politics on how the Martial Law narrative is shaped. Recreating the event in the sphere of cultural memory becomes, she feels, both a medium of memory and authority.
The War Is Not Over. Marta Dzido and Piotr Śliwowski in Conversation with Monika Kwaśniewska
A conversation with Marta Dzido and Piotr Śliwowski – creators of the documentary film Solidarity according to Women, addressing the roles and significance of women in Solidarity. The film is made up of conversations with former opposition activists, archival materials, and contemporary narratives collected by Marta Dzido (the screenwriter and director of the film), describing the film's creation process and commenting on the phenomena depicted. The creators speak of meetings with the film's protagonists, expanding how we look at the biographies of the women with information about their fates in free Poland. The archival research they do is of particular interest, in particular because the rights to use the unique, never-before-seen tapes and photographs delayed the premiere of the performance.
Monika Kwaśniewska. Weakness, Empathy, Care: New Worlds and New Communities according to Grzegorzewski
Analyzing Forefathers' Eve - Improvisations of1987 (Studio Theater in Warsaw), Kwaśniewska hazards the thesis that this is a play "about the role of women in the Polish, male-created, national mythology and in political and social life, in which male culture and male models are in a state of profound crisis." She points out that Grzegorzewski cast his actresses in many male roles, thus creating various images of mothers, caretakers, and seductresses. Interpreting the significance of the Miss Rollison figure, to whom Grzegorzewski entrusted the "Seeing…" text, she draws on a concept of "politicized motherhood." Then referring, in turn, to the potential to transform the national community with the active participation of women in collective life, she evokes Carol Gilligan's ethics of care.
Paweł Schreiber. Impossible Solidarity – Squaring the Circle by Tom Stoppard
Schreiber's text concerns a film based on Tom Stoppard's Squaring the Circle screenplay, whose action takes place during the "Solidarity carnival.” The author examines this manner of seeing issues in Poland and the Poles, by people outside of the country and culture where the events in the film occur. The text analyzes the stereotypical, even phantasmatic image of Eastern Europe seen through the eyes of Western neighbors. This process exemplifies an age-old phenomenon known as "literary colonization."
The Minutes from a Certain Meeting: "The Vent Burst"
A transcript of a meeting of actors from the Polski Theater in Wrocław on 3 September 1980 concerning the creation of a new professional stage artists' union. Postulates are raised to restore the legal and social status enjoyed by the Polish Stage Artists' Union prior to World War II. The basic issue is to redefine the sphere of competencies and duties of a stage director and the theater direction toward the ensemble; an essential issue is the limitation of their authority over the actors. The subject of the clear discrimination between the administrative and artistic functions of the theater is also raised.
Marta Keil. Artist – Curator – Cultural Producer
The author attempts to explain the artist (as well as the intellectual, scholar, and curator) as a cultural producer. What are his/her work models, and how has his/her role changed in cognitive capitalism, based on the production of knowledge? What are the conditions of a cultural producer's work, what methods are used to make decisions, and how do they affect the circulation of art? To this end she analyzes the artist's position and significance in transformations taking place in the performance sphere. While appreciating the gravity of all the changes that have occurred, Keil notes that it is too early to proclaim a "curatorial turn," though the presence of this profession undoubtedly affects the art production process.
Katarzyna Lemańska, Karolina Wycisk. Komuna//warszawa Sends out Instructions: What Is a Theater Remix?
Katarzyna Lemańska and Karolina Wycisk analyze the komuna//warszawa projects created in the RE//MIX series. The authors concentrate on the group's self-referential tendencies. The point of departure for reflecting upon the specifics of the collective, its shifting artistic aims and work method, is an analysis of the komuna//warszawa vs. Mayakovsky project. As the authors note, komuna//warszawa's path of development is closely tied to the various projects, among the most important of which have been Paradise Now? RE//MIX Living Theatre, remixes of dance theater productions, and critical reflection upon Polish and world theater (Grotowski, Kantor, Brecht, and Dario Fo).
The Sphere of Real Utopias: Grzegorz Laszuk in Conversation with Katarzyna Lemańska and Karolina Wycisk
A transcript of a conversation held with one of the creators of the independent komuna//warszawa theater, Grzegorz Laszuk. Wycisk and Lemańska ask about organizational issues (financial sources and promotion), ideology (the philosophical aspect of the performances), and artistic approaches (including the Future of Europe project, and the play Terry Pratchett). A great deal of attention is devoted to the RE//MIX project, which was created with other artists, and brought about a change of profile for komuna//warszawa, as well as the newly created Institute of Performance Arts.
Joanna Walaszek. A Phantom in a Cemetery Crypt and a Genius in a Turtleneck
An extensive review of Genius in a Turtleneck, directed by Weronika Szczawińska (Stary Theater in Krakow, premiere: 11.04.2014). The author analyzes the performance in the context of "Swinarski Season" and, by way of an introduction, describes the other plays created during this period. She also points out that watching Genius in a Turtleneck requires an entirely different approach to theater than what we have been accustomed to during the last season at the Stary Theater. Walaszek sees this as an important play, which requires no knowledge about the history of art or Konrad Swinarski.
Paweł Mościcki. Tradition Check. Konrad Swinarski and Theatrical Anachronism
Mościcki defines the ontological status of the figure of Konrad Swinarski in contemporary Polish theater discourse. He traces the correlations that come to mind when we consider theater between Swinarski and Brecht, indicating the similarities and the differences in how they conceived the processes that govern the stage. One of the most important concepts in the article is of the theatrical anachronism (occurring during a performance, where very literal, material contemporaneity clashes with the historicity of classic texts), which Swinarski saw as the source of the secrets of historical truth.
Rafał Kołsut. Nu, pogodi!
A review of Jan Klata's play Polish Thermopylae, based on a drama by Tadeusz Miciński (Polski Theater in Wrocław, premiere: 3.05.2014). Kołsut points out the masterful pacing of the narrative and the director's extensive tampering with the original text, allowing Miciński's words to take on a remarkable modernity. Situating the action (through numerous historical allusions and pop-culture quotations) in 2014, Klata presents the tangled and bloody story of the relations between Poland and Russia over the last two centuries. At the same time, the reviewer sees the play's major strength in the ironic distance it keeps while allowing the topic to remain serious.
Dorota Jarecka. Wysocka: A State of Importance
The reviewer of Barbara Wysocka's play Szapocznikow: A State of Unimportance (Centrala, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and the Polski Theater in Wrocław, premiere: 11.04.2014) calls attention to how much the production is not a biography of Alina Szapocznikow, despite all appearances. The director more concentrates on how the female artist is seen, and why women themselves denigrate the role of representatives of their own gender in the world of art and science. Jarecka also describes what she sees as a key and brilliant stage solution, in which Szapocznikow responds to personal questions concerning her stay in ghettos and camps during the Second World War.
Olga Katafiasz. Bandits and Us
A review of the play The Killers, directed by Michał Zadara (Narodowy Theater in Warsaw, premiere: 8.05.2014). Olga Katafiasz notes that the director does not use The Killers to show the mechanisms of our day. He plays with the incompatibility of the characters, states, and situations, and searches for analogies. The author of the article also points out an interesting strategy used by Zadara, whereby the play does not pause during the breaks, though an illuminated sign informs the audience that the action will not be essential to the plot, and so they can leave their seats. According to the reviewer, however, it is during one of the intermissions that the most interesting fragment of the performance takes place.
Paweł Schreiber. Changing Room
A review of a play by Maja Kleczewska, based on a text by Elfriede Jelinek, Shadows: Eurydice Speaks (IMKA Theater in Warsaw, Polski Theater in Bydgoszcz, Muzyczny Capitol Theater, premiere: 26.03.2014). The minimalist set design by Katarzyna Borkowska depicting Hades is particularly noteworthy; it is based on a cuboid of one-way mirrors, which means that the actors cannot see the audience, only their own reflections. Another phenomenon is the character created by the vocalist of the band Hey, Katarzyna Nosowska, who breaks up the performance with various songs. The greatest drawback of Kleczewska's production is the selection of the consecutive incarnations of Eurydice, which remains no more than a shallow, though skilfully executed satire on contemporary trends. Nonetheless, the general evaluation is a positive one.
Ewa Fita. Cinema's New Life
A review of the play The Other Woman, directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna (TR Warsaw, premiere: 24, 25.04.2014) inspired by a film by John Cassavetes. The action takes place on two levels – "real life" interferes with theater life on stage. Jarzyna gives some of his characters the names of the actors playing them, which additionally blurs the boundary between the fiction and the reality. According to Fita, these strategies allow the director to expand the interpretive layer and, by the same token, to create a performance not only about the passing of time, but also about the theater, which, in the capitalist era, has to struggle to hold its position, just as people do.
Karolina Obszyńska. Ideology on the Offensive
A review of the play The Gates of Paradise directed by Paweł Passini (Wrocław Współczesny Theater, premiere: 22.02.2014). Passini pairs Andrzejewski's prose with Marcel Schwob's The Children's Crusade, presenting the bystander's point of view. The director subtly, but pointedly shows the erotic dimension of history. According to Obszyńska, the play draws an analogy between the situation presented in Andrzejewski's prose and Poland's socio-political situation. Passini does not, however, introduce any clear references to the present in the text – these can be found strictly in the costumes and the set design, which the reviewer interprets as a symbolic foyer of heaven.
Klaudia Laś. An Invented Story
A review of Sebastian Majewski's monodrama created with Lidia Duda – The Question of Victory(Narodowy Stary Theater in Krakow, premiere: 27.03.2014). A member of the Polish Communist Party and later dignitary of the Polish United Workers' Party, concealed behind a mask of consecutive figures, draws viewers into the tangled web of recent history. The incoherent and episodic narrative she spins based on associations prompts us to reflect upon whether or not it is objectively possible to call anyone a hero. Laś points out the major impact of this minimalist production, and how its effect changed when it was transferred from the building on Józefa Street (where the premiere was held) to the cellars of the Stary Theater (where the play is presently performed).
Jakub Kłeczek. The Art of Choosing
A review of the play/game Hedge Knights by Machina Ex, whose mechanics are based on the physical activity of the viewers/players (a play presented 11-13.04.2014 in the framework of the Play Instinct! festival). The task before the audience recalls an LARP (Live Action Role-Playing), where set roles are incarnated according to the requirements of the convention and the game system in order to develop a non-linear story. The viewers of Hedge Knights have to perform set tasks and solve problems inspired by point’n’click video games to push the action forward. The relationships between the protagonists, the particular attributes of the characters, and the course of the scenes are shaped in the decision-making process by audience and actors both.
Thomas Irmer. The Third Revival as the Ultimate Proof of a Classic
A review of the minimalist opera Einstein on the Beach by Robert Wilson and Philip Glass of 1976, resurrected during this year's MaerzMusik Festival in Berlin. Irmer points out the inevitable differences between the two stagings (resulting from necessary changes in cast), but also stresses the remarkable vitality of the work in spite of the thirty-eight years that have passed since its premiere. The reviewer compares the stage solutions in Einstein with the later productions by Wilson, proposing the thesis that this avant-garde opera holds the essence of his directorial style.
Friederike Felbeck. Attention: This Video Contains Fragments of Caligula
A review of the play Caligula directed by Krzysztof Garbaczewski (Schauspiel Stuttgart, premiere: 15.03.2014). His interpretations of the text by Albert Camus and the figure of the protagonist were affected by the decision to cast actress Astrid Meyerfeldt as Caligula. In her rendition, the Emperor is sober and sublime to an extent which, in the critic's opinion, might give viewers a sense of horror. The performance takes the form of a live film. Another important part is played by the rap performed live by Mereia (one of the few characters capable of revolt) based on the anarchist writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. All of these tactics make Garbaczewski's play primarily a formal experiment, a spectacular show of the capabilities of contemporary theater.
Natalia Jakubowa. In the Ruins of History
Natalia Jakubowa analyzes two opera stagings by Dmitri Chernyakov: The Tsar Bride by Rimski-Korsakov at the Staatsoper in Berlin (premiere: 3.10.2013) and Borodin's Prince Igor at New York's Metropolitan Opera (premiere: 6.02.2014). In the former case, the author mainly focuses on the skillful transposition of Russia of the times of the oprichnina into our contemporary times of media hyper-reality. In the fragment devoted to Prince Igor the critic concentrates on the director's innovative interpretive and staging techniques (e.g. portraying the whole Kipchak act as a hallucination of a heavily wounded military leader). She also analyzes the opera's finale, which she believes the composer purposefully left unfinished. Flying in the face of previous productions, Chernyakov shows the protagonist as humbled, defeated, and with a pained conscience.
Marcin Bogucki. Aliens at the Opera
A review of two opera performances created as part of Project "P" at the Wielki Theater – National Opera: Triumph over the Sun and Solaris, both directed by Krzysztof Garbaczewski (premiere: 26.04.2014). The former is variations on the theme of the Futurist opera of 1913 with scenography and costumes designed by Kazimir Malevich. The second part of the series, focused on the progeric painter Leon Botha, uses the artist's illness as a metaphor for the contemporary world of hyperactive and intensified experience. While the author of the review appreciates the allusions to avant-garde artists and the attempts to inscribe the revolutionary potential of modernism into postmodern ideas, he believes that, contrary to Garbaczewski's intentions, the play is too elitist and hermetic.
Tomasz Kireńczuk. A Mozartian Doll's House
A review of the opera Don Giovanni directed by Pippo Delbono (Wielki Theater in Poznań, premiere: 22.04.2014). The author notes that Delbono is among the most important artists in today's experimental theater. The originality of his productions derives, to a large extent, from the director's presence on the stage. This time, however, the director does not appear, though he does inaugurate the play with a monolog from off stage. Comparing Don Giovanni to Delbono's previous work, Kireńczuk concludes that the director is breaking from the theatrical aesthetic he has built up over the years, while the play itself is strongly evocative of Giorgio Strehler's theater.
Joanna Jopek. Eros and Massacre
An article on a performance by Angélika Liddell, All the Sky above the Earth (The Wendy Syndrome), presented during Berlin Day at the 49th Counterpoint Review of Small Form Theater in Szczecin. Jopek notes that the island which is the scene of the action joins three space-time spheres: Never-Never Land, the island of Peter Pan, a utopian space of eternal youth, recollections of a journey to Shanghai which evoked longing in Liddell for a lost time of youth, and Utøya, an island where Anders Breivik shot sixty-nine (mainly young) people on 22 July 2011. Jopek perceives niggling contradictions and dependencies between these spaces and the associations they evoke around the theme of youth – whether eternal or irreversibly cut short. She also notes that the play is both a pointed critique of bourgeois society and its ethical principles and a self-effacing denigration of the figure of the narcissist performer.
Tomasz Kowalski. Filling in the Contours
Tomasz Kowalski reviews the play Western Society by the Gob Squad, performed in the framework of the Poznań You Are #Not Indifferent to Me series. The project's point of departure is an attempt to recreate (with a few audience members) a short film shot during an undefined family reunion karaoke party. Although the film the artists found on YouTube had a record number of views, very little happens; the artists see it as emblematic of contemporary culture and take it as a point of departure for reflecting upon themes of alienation, solitude, and blocking out major problems. Kowalski opines that the risk of blatant moralizing and banality raised in tackling this subject is avoided through the event's consistent structure, based on play.
Agata Dąbek. The Dramatic Work as an Event
A review of W.B. Worthen's book Drama: Between Poetry and Performance (Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford 2010). Agata Dąbek contextualizes the book in the discussion on the role of the dramatic text in contemporary Polish theater. "Worthen proposes a reading of texts for theater that allows us to step outside the frame of the present discussion on dramaturgy, questioning its very foundations." The author raises doubts concerning the dichotomic relationship between literature and theater, while "exposing the dialectical tension between the literary identity and the performative text for the theater suggests an interesting way of combining the two aspects."
Piotr Dobrowolski. The Heirs to Derrida
A review of Anna Burzyńska's book Deconstruction, Politics, and the Performative (Universitas, 2013). This publication is the fruit of Burzyńska's many years of studying Jacques Derrida's theories and how they work. Dobrowolski is full of admiration for the author and her ability to explain the philosopher's ideas in a simple, logical, and precise fashion, and for her placement of deconstruction in the context of humanists contemporary to Derrida – Jon McKenzie and Erika Fischer-Lichte. The reviewer believes that this book is a splendid compendium of knowledge on the French philosopher.
Dobrochna Ratajczakowa. After the Traces
A review of the book Ritual Sources of the Theater byWłodzimierz Szturc (PWST Publishers, 2013). Ratajczakowa notes that the researcher approaches the titular issue from less an anthropological perspective than a phenomenological one, which is a novelty in theater studies. The reviewer stresses the profundity of Szturc's observations, calling to life a new branch of study – an archeology of the humanities, researching the imagination of its depiction, rooted in ancient meanings, images, and processes, and pertaining to archetypes which decide upon the continuity of the human species. |