The B-side: Anna R. Burzyńska speaks with Jan Klata

A conversation on music in the theater of Jan Klata. The director speaks of his musical education and rituals associated with obtaining and collecting records from the eighties. Then, providing examples from his own plays, such as The Trilogy, Orestes and The Danton Affair, he speaks of the various keys to selecting music for the stage, ways of introducing it in rehearsals, and of the related work with the actors and the choreographer – Maćko Prusak – as well as the function he assigns music in the theater. Moreover, he speaks of performances of his plays for radio theater, and of his projects abroad: X-Wohnungen, and Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat.

Jan Klata: The Canon

Jan Klata writes about the musical fascinations that shaped his musical and theatrical sensitivity and imagination. The text is divided into sub-chapters by musical genres (from classical music, to prog rock, industrial music, reggae, dub, jazz, heavy metal, and even world music) and by names of artists (including David Bowie, Brian Eno, Iggy Pop, and Lech Janerka). In each part the director speaks of how he came across the genre, the artist, record, song, and lists who for him are the most important artists, pieces and albums. The text concludes with a list of music videos that have had the greatest influence on the artist.

The Music Is Never to Blame: Anna R. Burzyńska speaks with Maćko Prusak

Choreographer Maćko Prusak speaks of his work in dramatic theater, and in particular of his work with Jan Klata. Prusak talks about his road from pantomime to dramatic theater, and describes the process of creating choreography for Klata’s theater (he speaks of the role of music and music videos, work with the actors, and the functions these scenes hold in the plays) and of his own sources of inspiration (including Pina Bausch and Alvis Hermanis).

Anna R. Burzyńska: The Trilogy in Minor Scales

The author of the text declares the need to develop theoretical tools for showing the function of music in the theater; a need dictated by Jan Klata in Poland. Burzyńska shows how music is used in Klata’s Trilogy (2009). She identifies the works used in the play and analyzes them in the context of the scenes where they appear. She analyzes the lyrics, takes into account the time the piece was made, and evokes the biography of the performing artist, following the conviction that music in Klata’s work creates “a kind of theatrical hyper-text by which one can (and should) move in all directions.” In light of Burzyńska’s analysis, music in the Trilogy fulfils functions that range from parody, irony, subversion, and aggressive counterpoint, to a gesture of decontextualization.

Alenka Zupančič: The Physics of the Infinite Versus the Metaphysics of the Finite

A chapter from Alenka Zupančič’s The Odd One In. On Comedy. The author draws upon an article by Nathan A. Scott, which combines comedy with the Christian teaching of the Incarnation, only to disagree with his simplified concept of comedy, which serves to make us accept the fact that we are only people, condemned to being imperfect and finite. In Zupančič’s view, comedy is the impasse and contradiction of materiality incarnate. Taking from the ideas of Lacan, his conception of reality as a Möbius Strip, and describing various comic procedures, Zupančič shows how “Ignoring the Real of what has occurred, comedy pretends to show the rupture in the very heart of the reality we know best.” Man is interested in comedy where the human joins with the superhuman.

The Tragedy of Desire, the Comedy of the Drive: Kuba Mikurda and Jakub Momro speak with Alenka Zupančič

Alenka Zupančič responds to focused questions on her concept of comedy in the book The Odd One In. On Comedy. She speaks on the topic of laughter in comedy, and its emancipatory potential. She draws links and relationships between comedy, tragedy and psychoanalysis: she replies to whether the objectification of the Symbolic impasse need be comic, or whether it could also be an experience of the Uncanny [das Unheimliche], and describes the relationship between Lacan’s notion of the Real and her view on comedy and tragedy.

Absolute Comedy: Kuba Mikurda, Jakub Momro and Małgorzata Sugiera in Conversation

A transcription of a discussion between Kuba Mikurda, Jakub Momro and Małgorzata Sugiera on the concept of comedy contained in Alenka Zupančič’s The Odd One In. On Comedy. The interlocutors refer to specific threads in the book (discussing the political, conservative, subversive and ethical dimensions of comedy), while debating its overall significance. They sketch out a philosophical context as the basis of Zupančič’s conception, drawing attention to the book’s innovations, but also its inconsistencies and weaknesses. Apart from presenting Zupančič’s thoughts, the discussion also shows its possible interpretations.

Jakub Momro: Hollow Laughter

Jakub Momro recalls the subjects of Zupančič’s earlier works, finding that earlier threads in her thought come together in her latest book on comedy. He then analyzes various issues brought up in The Odd One In. On Comedy, comparing them with the thoughts of the patron of the author’s concept, Lacan, and those of her main opponent, Hegel, as well as the concepts of Bergson, Deleuze, and of Beckett’s Endgame.

Heiner Müller: A Letter to the Director of the Bulgarian Premiere of “Philoktetes” on the stage of the Dramatic Theater in Sofia

Müller states that Dimitri Gotscheff’s staging allowed him to see his own text through new eyes. The playwright mentions the director’s stage solutions: his way of treating the language (“THE WORD BECAME MURDER”) and the structure of the play (“the transition from tragedy to farce” as a moment of entering a new genre – the political animal) and the set design solutions (“he shows the viewers the places of their exile on stage”). He inscribes this analysis into a catastrophic vision, where mythology comments on the history of the totalitarian systems of the 20th century, and his own thoughts on history in general.

 

Joachim Lux: Gotscheff the Veterinarian

A many-year observer of and collaborator with Dimitri Gotscheff describes his work, painting a multifaceted and coherent portrait of the artist. Lux draws the attributes of Gotscheff’s theater from his Bulgarian origins and from his profession as a veterinarian. From this biography he sees, for instance, the source of the director’s fascination for the tension between knowledge of nature and knowledge of society, which is at the root of his literary inspirations and repertoire decisions (Heiner Müller, Gottfried Benn, Bertolt Brecht, Georg Büchner and Antoni Chekov), calling Gotscheff a veterinarian who risks a naturalist view of man’s social constitution in the theater. The text includes a description of Gotscheff’s plays between 1985 and 2006.

Anna R. Burzyńska: Landscape with Actors

A review of the play Room No. 6 at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, directed by Dimitri Gotscheff (2010). “What happens if we don’t read human biographies from beginning till end (…) but we look at them as a landscape of simultaneous events?” the author asks in the opening of the text. The response is a description of Gotscheff’s play. Burzyńska claims that it formally recalls the texts of Heiner Müller, except that Gotscheff’s main interest is in man. The director presents Anton Chekov’s tale by concentrating on the characters; Room Number 6 of the title is a dead class of Chekovian figures, a place where they undergo vivisection.

Avant-garde Regained: Karol Sienkiewicz speaks with Łukasz Ronduda

Karol Sienkiewicz’s conversation with Łukasz Ronduda about his book Polish Art of the 1970s. The Avant-garde. The interview paints a sprawling picture art in the 1970s: the divisions and conflicts between the various groups, galleries and artists, and the artist/authority relationship. Ronduda’s book digs up lesser-known and often overlooked artists and neo-avant-garde formations in an attempt to dislodge art history hierarchies, proving that an understanding of contemporary art, including the critical art of the 1990s, is impossible without a knowledge of these 1970s phenomena. The interlocutors situate the book among other important books on the subject, such as Piotr Piotrowski’s Decade and Luiza Nader’s Conceptualism in the People’s Republic.

 

Exiting the Picture: Marcin Kościelniak speaks with Krzysztof Zarębski

Krzysztof Zarębski speaks of his work from the 1970s, including painting, performance and film. He and the interviewer return to key moments in the shaping of his style, interests, and creative methods, situating them in a broader artistic (e.g. the development of performance art in Poland in the mid 1970s) and cultural context (e.g. the function of the erotic in the People’s Poland). He sees the divergence of his own work from that of the Polish art of the 1990s in its aesthetics.

Marcin Kościelniak: Women in Polish Art

A description of Krzysztof Zarębski’s collaboration with Helmut Kajzar. “The meeting of a performer [Zarębski] and a theater director [Kajzar] led to a new and intriguing distribution of meaning and aesthetics in the framework of both disciplines,” Kościelniak writes in the opening. Describing the artists’ collaboration (from 1974-1982) he illuminates – with examples of plays, actions, and happenings – the spheres of mutual artistic influence; he observes either artist’s disavowal of institutions (the gallery and the theater), the blending of art and reality, and the nearing of their work to magical ritual. Mixing numerous statements by the artists with fragments explaining their critical texts, he also indicates their reception – often marked by helplessness and non-comprehension.

Stephen Greenblatt: Fiction and Friction

A chapter from Greenblatt’s book devoted to the issue of the transvestite in the plays of William Shakespeare, and in the Elizabethan theater as such. Greenblatt brings up the manner of seeing gender differences, the individualization of genders, and the hermaphrodite in Shakespeare’s epoch – providing both descriptions of particular cases, and their medical and legal conceptions. He then shows how these subjects are reflected in Shakespeare’s comedies – chiefly in Twelfth Night. As he claims, “Shakespeare (...) was able to use the power of the erotic in the theater” to show emerging identity through the experience of erotic warmth, thus changing friction into fiction. In the finale he also indicates that the transvestite fulfilled a similar role in the Elizabethan theater.

Żelisław Żelisławski: Enough; It Sounds Now Less Sweet Than Once it Sounded

A review of As You Will or Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare, directed by Michał Borczuch at the J. Kochanowski Theater in Opole. The author draws attention to the phrase “as you will” – shifted to the front of the drama’s title – proving that the creators of the play go against the current of the audience’s expectations. In Borczuch’s play the plot constructed of conventional devices “guarantees no support, recognition, understanding or closure,” but becomes a figure of oppression. The play is interesting, but hard to take in: at times it tires and embarrasses with its abundance of predictable solutions.

Beata Guczalska: Oberon, or: The Director

A review of A Midsummer Night’s Dream directed by Monika Pęcikiewicz, produced at the Polski Theater in Wrocław. According to the author of the text, the play presents a post-Freudian vision of sexuality, functioning as a commodity; it also takes up the problem of the nature of the image, which “has started to serve persuasion, propaganda, manipulation to bad faith, and misinformation in place of the testimonial.” The issue that the author finds most compelling, however, concerns the human, personal presence of the actor on stage. The last point she raises deals with the fidelity to Shakespeare’s text, which was rewritten by Bartosz Frąckowiak for the purposes of this play.

Joanna Wichowska: Hunting for Bitches

A review of a play directed by Iga Gańczarczyk, In a Small Manor, based on a drama by Witkacy and produced at the J. Kochanowski Theater in Opole. The author of the text believes that the director and script adapter (Magda Stojowska) reads the drama with solemnity, concentrating on the motif of social conventions and gender stereotypes relating to the necrosis of the world. She shows how these subjects translate into the form of the play and the work of the actors. Wichowska emphasizes both the potential and the risk of the interpretation, claiming that: “In a Small Manor finds itself somewhere in-between the danger of too precisely formulating its conclusions, and the courage to cross into unknown territories.”

Maryla Zielińska: Spasms

A review of Madame Bovary directed by Radosław Rychcik at the Dramatyczny Theater in Warsaw. The point of departure is an observation of the ease with which the performance – which the director calls a “screaming opera” – can be ridiculed, owing to its extreme mode of expression, bordering on caricature. The author of the text analyzes the various decisions and dramaturgical (reducing the novel to extracts of emotion), aesthetic (the combination of expressionist film and Wilson’s theater) and thespian techniques (the actors behave like marionettes, or cadavers) – both understanding their intention, and being irritated by their exaggeration and mannerism.

Monika Żółkoś: Groping the Audience

Monika Żółkoś reviews The Orgy by Pier Paolo Pasolini, directed by Wiktor Rubin at the Wybrzeże Theater in Gdańsk. The main premise of the play is to break down the third wall through aggression, attacks, and various attempts to directly involve the audience in the play. Such a form (though justified by the text and the playwright’s persona) are, according to the reviewer, ultimately ineffective. Both Rubin’s play and the countless like experiments in the history of the theater quickly succumb to convention.

Wanda Świątkowska: The Weight of the Angel

A review of Anhella. Calling out directed by Jarosław Fret at Wrocław’s ZAR Theater. The performance is the third part of a triptych which also includes Overture and Cesarean Section. The reviewer describes and interprets the play in detail, admiring it greatly. She places it in the context of the previous parts (pointing out how they complement one another), analyzing its aesthetics (the combination of songs, Słowacki’s poetry and the look of the piece) as well as the interpretation of Juliusz Słowacki’s work it offers (shifting historical drama into the drama of an individual).

Dorota Semenowicz: The Lamp Burns So Darkly

Part two of a report on the readings in the Słowacki. The Complete Dramas series organized at the Theater Institute in Warsaw (part one was in “Didaskalia” 95). The text describes readings directed by Paweł Goźliński, Natalia Korczakowska, Michał Zadar, Barbara Wysocka, Sebastian Majewski, and Paweł Passini, along with Dariusz Kosiński, Małgorzata Głuchowska and Weronika Szczawińska. The author notes two tendencies in reading Słowacki’s dramas: the lingering on the subject of history and tradition, and the exhibition of the emotionality and fragmentariness of the bard’s work, through which he emerges as a uniting, critical, ironic, and open author.

Magdalena Gałkowska: In-between

A review of Elektra by Richard Strauss, directed by Willy Decker. The text opens with some reflections on how Warsaw’s National Opera is shifting toward modernity. Afterward the author, speaking of the notable influence of Freud’s psycho-analysis in the work, makes it a key to reading the play. In Gałkowska’s opinion the main motif of the play is the threshold – the sphere “in-between,” where the grief-stricken Elektra finds herself. Describing and analyzing the theatrical techniques used in the performance, the reviewer appreciates their simplicity, which belies the splendidly inventive stage details.

Piotr Olkusz: The Cabinet of Doctor Janáček

A review of Katia Kabanowa by Leoš Janáček, directed by David Alden at the National Opera in Warsaw. The author informs the reader on the figures of the composer and the director, and considers the significance this premiere might have for the National Opera and for the Polish reception of Janáček’s work. Analyzing the staging, he notes that the director has abandoned the social and psychological aspects of the piece, preferring to compose suggestive images stylized on expressionist film, which produces the interpretation of the work.

Joanna Biernacka: Game Called

A review of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame directed by Krystian Lupa for the Teatro de la Abadía in Madrid. The reviewer describes the circumstances that led actor and theater director José Luis Gómez to invite Lupa to collaborate. Lupa remains faithful to the dramatic text, while introducing small, but extremely significant changes (placing a woman in the role of Clov, placing Hamm’s parents in glass catafalques instead of garbage cans, adding a silent epilogue). Biernacka’s analysis shows the play as a process of checking the contents inscribed in the drama. Summing up, she states: “In Beckett, Lupa has found a partner whose splendid vision of the world that is paradoxically akin to his own.”

Krystian Lupa’s “Endgame” by Spanish Reviewers

Fragments from two Spanish reviews of Endgame directed by Krystian Lupa. Both Javier Vallejo in Always Is Too Late and Marcos Ordóńez in his review entitled Endgame: Something’s Going Down a Separate Track emphasize the originality of this staging of Beckett. According to the first author this comes from the “humanization” of the figures of the mother and father, and the particular sublimity of the play. According to the second, it is from the realism of the performance. Both state, however, that the play is monotonous and less refined than Lupa’s Polish performances.

Łukasz Grabuś: Breaking Your Tongue against a Wall

A review of The Idiot Savant directed by Richard Foreman – a co-production of The Ontological-Hysteric Theater and The Public Theater in New York. the play to be the director’s final production. The reviewer thus sketches a portrait of this artist, trying to indicate the characteristic aspects of his theater. Grabuś compares Foreman to a dodecaphonic composer, with reference to the objects, gestures and modes of behavior in his range of instruments, and compares his “stage menagerie” and means of using it to the works of Jerzy Grzegorzewski and Tadeusz Kantor.

Jarosław Wójtowicz: Outside of a Joint Europe

A review of Transgression Day at the 45th Counterpoint Review of Small Forms for the Stage in Szczecin. The day was made up of two parts: the first presented “small forms”: Dark Matter by Kate McIntosh (the morning presentation in Szczecin), Big Heap/Mountain. Proposition 2: Reconstriction by Miet Warlop, and the non-competition Timebank by Grotest Maru and Gimme Shelter by Tanzinitiative; and the second featured Dritte Generation / Third Generation directed by Yael Ronen and Ein Chor irrt sich gewaltig by René Pollesch. The reviewer states that the plays presented were conservative and devoid of ideas. To his mind the most interesting event was Ronen’s play – a German-Israeli-Palestinian co-production that took up the subject of post-memory and war trauma to oppose easy unification between nations, so often based on hollow gestures.

Olga Katafiasz: Our History and Others’

A review of the 35th Krakow Theatrical Reminiscences festival. The author comments on all the festival events – more often in a spirit of disappointment than delight. Comparing the Rimini Protokoll film of Wallenstein’s Election Campaign shown at the festival with the live performance Karl Marx: Das Kapital, Volume I, she rates the later as less successful. Writing on the film Fear and the play La Rabbia by Pippo Delbono – which she calls rough drafts – she says they are fairly disappointing for Polish viewers familiar with the Italian director’s work. The festival’s successes included the unpretentious and moving monodrama by Wojtek Ziemilski entitled A Small Narrative and Alvis Hermanis’s masterpiece Sound of Silence.

Julia Hoczyk: Body-burning

An account of the 5th Spring Festival in Poznan (18-21 May 2010). After a brief introduction on the event, aimed toward reinterpretations of The Rite of Spring by Stravinski/Nizhinski, the reviewer concentrates on the most interesting performance, in her view: Sacre – The Rite of Spring by Raimund Hoghe. A detailed description of the staging leads her to the following conclusion: “In spite of the minimalism in choreography, The Rite of Spring by Raimund Hoghe gives the impression of saturation and fullness through overlapping orders of significance – carnal, homo-erotic, sensual and sacral – inscribing the relation between men into the myth of Christian sacrifice.”

Justyna Rodzińska-Nair: Kalarippajattu

An article describing an Indian martial art – kalarippajattu – which is little known in Poland. The author summarizes the history of kalarippajattu, indicating its place and significance for the national culture of India. In the following part, she describes in detail the various styles (northern, central and southern) indicating the similarities and differences between them. Describing today’s practice of kalarippajattu, the author cites various aspects of education, space and time of practicing, analyzing their significance in detail, and the philosophy behind them. The final part of the text tackles the possibility of applying the techniques and philosophy of this Indian martial art to the education of actors, both in the East and in the West.   

Anna Bajor-Ciciliati: The Lady of Fruit. A Portrait with Banana

Few are aware that the woman with the basket of fruit on her head which is used as the logo for an American foodstuffs company was inspired by the figure of Carmen Miranda – a Brazilian vocalist and film star. Bajor-Ciciliati’s text outlines the stages of Carmen Miranda’s career (from radio to film and musicals, from Brazil to the USA), analyzing the lyrics of the songs she sang, her choreography, and costumes – all of which went to make up the conscious and consistently created image Carmen made. The author shows the political entanglements of the artist’s career in Hollywood, emphasizing the artist’s independence, which makes her emerge as a conscious pioneer of camp, through her self-creation as an artifact.

Tadeusz Kornaś: Hamlet and the Mystic

A review of two books devoted to the creators of the Reduta – The Reduta as a Mystical Mirror of the World by Lucyna Muszyńska and The Prince. Juliusz Osterwa’s Hamlet by Wanda Świątkowska. Kornaś places them at two methodological, technical and stylistic extremes. Despite his positive review of Muszyńska’s book, he accuses her of lacking proportion in explaining the contexts and inspiration she cites. As for Wanda Świątkowska’s book, Kornaś is astonished by the interpretive and literary talents of the author, stating that Świątkowska’s book is perhaps the fullest description of the “thoughts, views, aspirations and dreams” of the creators of the Reduta.