Joanna Jopek: Grunge. Time for Evil
Joanna Jopek believes that Monika Strzępka and Paweł Demirski’s play Courtney Love (Polski Theater in Wrocław, premiere: 30 XI 2012) is the duo’s darkest and most pessimistic performance to date. The world created on the stage is saturated with an atmosphere of resignation, torpor, and dejection. The reviewer believes that in Courtney Love the perfect theatrical form heretofore developed by Strzępka and Demirski has reached a culmination, and the artists are consciously taking advantage of this, boldly attempting to create a new way of making theater. Like the heroine of the title, they are able to forge destruction, disaster, and failure into a creative and refreshing alternative to the capitalist reality.
A Too-Comfortable Seating Arrangement. Joanna Wichowska speaks with Monika Strzępka and Paweł Demirski
Strzępka and Demirski speak of their latest play, Courtney Love, produced at the Polski Theater in Wrocław. They reveal that they were inspired to make the play by reading Everett True’s book, which showed Kurt Cobain’s wife in a radically different light than that in which she has entered the public consciousness. This was initially a play about Courtney’s fight with the male show business world, but the concept of the performance changed repeatedly. Paweł Demirski reveals that the text is infused with the depressive aspect of his own personality. The artists also say that they were interested in showing the mechanism by which, in rejecting our teenage years and discrediting our old dreams, we involuntarily allow the ruling structures to take over our lives.
Monika Świerkosz: Post-apocalyptic Utopia
In the play Brothers and Sisters (J. Kochanowski Theater in Opole, premiere: 12 I 2013) Maja Kleczewska (script and direction) and Łukasz Chotkowski (script) depict a man living in a world after a total crisis. As in the Tempest they directed in Bydgoszcz, the directors use the Hellinger Constellation method. The author notes that generalizations of certain plot threads and attitudes drawn from Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and Chekov’s Three Sisters (which served as the basis of the script) lead to a false universalization of the human condition.
The Director: An (Un)present(ed) Narrative
A panel organized by the Pauza Foundation for the Development and Promotion of Contemporary Art and the editors of Didaskalia, featuring Joanna Krakowska, Dorota Sajewska, Małgorzata Sugiera, and Weronika Szczawińska. The conversation concerned critical strategies adopted by women in the theater, their “visibility” and function in the public space, the formation of a Polish feminist theater, and attempts to write a history of a “women’s theater.” The moderator of the meeting, Małgorzata Sugiera, summed up by saying that one could not “speak and write [of a women’s theater] as one would a phenomenon without a context, [...] it ought to be seen in the wider networks of social conditions and the pervasive art conventions at a given time.”
Josette Féral: Women’s Voices: Between Nostalgia and Change
Féral analyzes changes in women’s situation in the theater in the context of the evolution of feminist discourse. The author sketches a wide context and history of feminist research and activities in the theater: from various forms of feminist theater and describing the work of the key female theater directors to indicating the influence of feminist research on changes in the bases of theater practice and research. Féral believes that despite the unquestionable growth in women’s participation and activity in the theater, the patriarchal structures within which they are forced to work remain intact.
Agata Adamiecka-Sitek: On Lidia Zamkow: An Academic Fantasia
A lecture to accompany the Zamkow: 2 or 3 Things I Know Nothing about re//mix made by Weronika Szczawińska at komuna//warszawa. Adamiecka spins a very coherent feminist analysis of the work of Lidia Zamkow, entirely based on documentary materials found in archives. The quotes that begin and close the text cast doubt upon the reliability of her interpretation, however.
How to Go Down in History? Monika Kwaśniewska Speaks with Weronika Szczawińska
This conversation’s point of departure is the Zamkow: 2 or 3 Things I Know Nothing about re//mix made by Weronika Szczawińska at komuna//warszawa. Szczawińska gives reasons for the choice of Lidia Zamkow as the protagonist of her play, speaks of her hunt for materials on Zamkow’s work and her various doubts, both in terms of the reliability of the archival sources and the real artistic merit of Zamkow’s plays. With a healthy dose of distance and skepticism, Szczawińska also speaks of her search for her female “precursors” working in the theater.
Lidia Zamkow: Fragments of Reviews
Fragments of reviews of the following Lidia Zamkow plays: An Elderly Lady Visits (J. Słowacki Theater in Krakow, premiere: 2 III 1958: Maria Czanerle, “A Cruel Fairy-tale”), Midsummer Night’s Dream (Ludowy Theater in Krakow, premiere: 15 III 1963: Ludwik Flaszen, “A Moralist in Elfland”; Bronisław Mamoń, Shakespeare Live; Konstanty Puzyna, “Unbearable Interpreters"), and The Wedding (J. Słowacki Theater, premiere: 27 III 1969: Elżbieta Wysińska, “A Wedding against Conventions”).
Lidia Zamkow: Interview Fragments
Fragments of the following interviews with Lidia Zamkow: Conversations on Drama: Pretensions and Propositions (a group discussion; 1956), Three Performances (recorded by Elżbieta Morawiec; 1967), I Do Not Acknowledge Theater without Text (in conversation with Krzysztof Miklaszewski; 1971), Art Aims to Provoke (in conversation with Krystyna Starczak; 1972), “Why Are You Really Running…” (in conversation with Barbara Henkel; 1972).
Joanna Krakowska: Meir Ezofowicz, or: The Jews
Joanna Krakowska’s article is an expanded version of her lecture from the People’s Republic: Presentations series, which inaugurated a multimedia project of a new history of Polish theater from 1765 to the present, realized at the Theater Institute in Warsaw. Krakowska provides a wide-angle view of the history of the play Meir Ezofowicz directed by Ida Kamińska. Departing from the popularity of and lively response to the play, Krakowska analyzes the director's work in detail, and gives an overview of the history of the Jewish Theater in which it was presented. She then steps back to analyze how this theater took shape in the reports of the People’s Republic authorities, and how the plays it produced took issue with the imposed or ignored narratives concerning Jews following the war.
Kazimierz Bardzik: The Sellars Lesson
The author of this article recalls Peter Sellars’ contribution to the history of opera. Writing that he is already a classic figure, Bardzik notes that younger directors have begun emulating his strategies and way of thinking. He was one of the first to seek contemporary contexts for famous stories, and has tried to create realistic and internally complex figures. His plays are marked by an original eclecticism, with an analytical approach to musical works. Though the author also cites critical opinions of the director’s most recent work, and calls attention to the unintentional humor in his stagings through an overuse of stage techniques, he appreciates the risks Sellars takes, his self-confidence in sculpting meaning on stage, and his tendency to repeat tried-and-true methods and aesthetics.
Marcin Bogucki: The Myth of the Post-race Society. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni staged by Peter Sellars
Bogucki analyzes Mozart’s Don Giovani as staged by Peter Sellars, from an anthropological and sociological perspective. He stresses Sellars’ roots in the counter-culture, and as a man who believes that opera is primarily a social art, and the one with the greatest effect on contemporary viewers. Bogucki believes that by bringing race issues into his production, Sellars demonstrates that the Enlightenment community central to Mozart’s original opera remains a phantasmagorical undertaking.
Identity, Culture, and Politics of Theater in Europe. Maria M. Delgado speaks with Peter Sellars
This interview oscillates around Peter Sellars's oeuvre as a whole, from his first theatrical inspirations to his most recent projects. The interlocutors address various subjects that appear in the American director's work: racism, migration, nationalism, the multicultural society, the political and economic situation of Europe, and even the issue of healthy food. Sellars speaks of the significance of his projects for American and European culture: “I’m hoping they will bring mutual benefits and continue to inspire both sides. In sum, what is remote should serve to change the significance of what is right next door.”
Thomas Irmer: From the Kingdom of the Dead
Desdemona directed by Peter Sellars (world premiere: 15 V 2011 in Vienna, during Wiener Festwochen) is a musical staging of texts by Toni Morrison – an American Nobel Prize winner, writer, and researcher of “black” literature. The drama evolved based on variants on the theme of a line from Shakespeare, “My mother had a maid call'd Barbara,” testifying to the powerful influence of the black dry-maid on Desdemona. Sellars clashes this theme with the convention of word music.
Paweł Sztarbowski: The Ailments of the Polish Theater
Paweł Sztarbowski puts forward the thesis that “the theater as we know it will probably soon come to an end.” It is threatened by commercialism, which forces directors to abandon artistic experiments and submit to the laws of the market. The author indicates a range of negative phenomena in the work of private institutions, theater schools, journalism, and festival organizations, all the result of new policies toward theaters. Sztarbowski proposes a positive rehabilitation program, using theatrical experiments in repertoires that draw mass audiences.
Tomasz Kowalski: The Potential Hidden in the Country
Tomasz Kowalski describes the Wielkopolska: Revolutions project, developed on the initiative of Agata Siwiak, and carried out from April to December of 2012. The project involved artists working with the inhabitants of small towns in Wielkopolska. It aimed to explore the creative potential slumbering people living far from the city centers, and regions generally ignored by artists and cultural consumers. Kowalski believes that, apart from the artistic and aesthetic results, the project released energy latent in these local communities, which will be indispensable in creating more, independent projects.
Katarzyna Fazan: Faithlessness – The Weakness of the Sacred and the Passion in Post-metaphysical Theater
Katarzyna Fazan describes plays dealing with contemporary spirituality created specially for this year’ Divine Comedy Festival in Krakow (5-13 XII 2012), grouped under the title Faithlessness. Analyzing plays by Ivan Viripayev, Radosław Rychcik, Wiktor Rubin, Piotr Ratajczak, and Michał Zadara, she states that each artist defined the act of speaking about spirituality and religious issues in the theater in a different way. Zadara’s idea was particularly effective, importing ideas of religion from the West, which allowed him to distance himself from the Polish contexts of the discussion on religiousness in the sphere of a Catholic country.
Katarzyna Lemańska: Everybody Lies
Philoctetes directed by Barbara Wysocka (premiere: 30 XI 2012 at the Polski Theater in Wrocław) is the study of the three figures presented, based on the example of the titular protagonist, Odysseus, and Neoptolemus. The Polish premiere of Sophocles’s drama is a classical, simple staging, shorn of the multimedia elements and elaborate set designs that have characterized Wysocka’s theater to date. The tragedy of Philoctetes is enacted on an island-ramp, and commented upon by a one-person chorus. Wysocka does not contemporize the ancient text, she only problematizes the tragic conflict: “Wysocka demonstrates with a deus ex machina that in our depraved world even god is not above theological, political, and social discourses.”
An Absurdist Farewell: Katarzyna Lemańska Speaks with Barbara Wysocka
An interview on Barbara Wysoka’s most recent play, Philoctetes, staged at the Polski Theater in Wrocław (premiere: 30 XI 2012). In this performance Wysocka once again tackles the relationship between the individual and the collective, as in such productions as Anhelli, Caspar, Lenz, Gentle, Woyzeck, and in Jesus Christ Our Savior – Michał Zadara’s most recent project, in which Wysocka plays the main role. The director analyzes the socio-political foundation of the project, and describes the stages of working on the play.
Paweł Schreiber: Operetta AD 2012
A review of the play The Bat, directed by Kornél Mudnruczó at TR Warsaw (premiere: 20 IX 2012). In Schreiber’s view, the director plays quite subversively with various genres, including some from outside theater proper. He also clashes the story of a death with Johann Strauss’s Revenge of the Bat in an original fashion. Though this subversion and ability to confound and upset the expectations of the viewer initially fascinate, over time the author feels that they become formulaic and little more than a juggling of bourgeois and operetta clichés.
Marta Uszyńska: We Play Till We Drop
Amateurs directed by Ewelina Marcinak at the Wybrzeże Theater in Gdańsk (premiere: 24 XI 2012) culls the feminist side of Elfriede Jelinek’s text. Six protagonists are enmeshed in pathological bonds where no communication is possible. The physicality exposed through their costumes “reveals” the truth of the characters’ feelings. The director uses the clothing to problematize the issues of omnipresent violence and manipulation, in male/female relationships, in families, and between the generations.
Dorota Jarząbek-Wasyl: A Quartet for Z.
A review of the play The Queen’s Peacock directed by Paweł Świątek, produced at the Stary Theater in Krakow (premiere: 27 X 2012). The director chiefly concentrates on the language of Dorota Masłowska’s novel, to which she subordinates the action, set design, and characters. The actors’ technical ability extracts the rhetoric from Masłowska’s text, showing the figures to be appropriated by various ideologies, caricatures assembled from social clichés and cultural formulae. Masłowska aims her critical blade not only at the protagonists, but at the audience as well.
Katarzyna Fazan: Nathan the Wise Man: Religious Conflicts in the Land of Marvels and Sentiments
Describing the staging of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's drama produced by Natalia Korczakowska at the Narodowy Theater (premiere: 10 XI 2012), Katarzyna Fazan recalls the discussions that have run through numerous epochs concerning this drama and its fate on stage. Korczakowska could, in Fazan's opinion, enter a critical dialogue with the idea of the coexistence of three religions presented in Nathan. Any serious socio-cultural diagnosis is, this this play, veiled by a cloyingly naïve form. Despite the atmosphere of seriousness, asceticism, and the stress on the actors' interpretation of the texts, Korczakowska extracts an optimistic hope in the Enlightenment, and bypasses or even undermines the drama's historical and contemporary subjects.
Tobiasz Papuczys: Lear from the Spirit of Music
The brick Hall on Purkyniego Street in Wrocław hosts the latest play by Pieśni Kozła Theater, Lear's Songs (premiere: 28 IX 2012). The director, Grzegorz Bral, plays the role of a narrator-conductor, who “gives the collective song the form of a play, directing its progress, but also disrupting the dramaturgy.” The tragic story of Lear and Cordelia is told in the songs, upon which is built the performance's entire dramaturgy. As the review's title suggests, and as Nietzsche suggested, “tragedy has a musical structure.”
Joanna Targoń: Tempest in a Bucket of Water
William Shakespeare's Tempest staged at the Polski Theater in Warsaw by Dan Jemmet (premiere: 24 XI 2012) is based, according to the reviewer, on a single interpretive idea. This involves showing the inhabitants of the island as contemporary human castaways – mechanical puppets in the second-rate theater created by Prospero. Placing Shakespeare's drama in the realistic, even naturalistic convention of a dysfunctional family of beggars with a father who is a myth-monger and second-rate magician performing cheap tricks, leads, in Targoń's opinion, nowhere.
Weronika Łucyk: Singing the Void
Reviewing Agnieszka Olsten's play Miki Mister DJ, based on the drama by Mateusz Pakuła (Miejski Theater in Gdynia, premiere: 13 X 2012), the author points out that Pakuła's text is an open drama. It is formally composed of a series of loosely connected scenes, interweaving places of action, and appearing and disappearing protagonists, providing many stage opportunities. Olsten's decision to have the text sung by the actors gives the play the form of a modern electronic music concert. This strategy emphasizes the essence of Pakuła's drama, in which the colorful and musical language of the protagonists clashes with their emotional void.
Michał Lachman: THE THEATRIFICATION OF FACTS – Remarks on the Literalness of the Verbatim Theater
The author describes one of the most interesting groups in the tradition of British documentary theater: Tricycle. This theater has been working for years with reporters, and the plays they stage use exclusively authentic materials collected through conversations, interviews, and archival research. The group's performances are both educational and interventional. An asset of Tricycle is their ability to show facts taken from the life of an average Londoner in the context of world conflicts and ethnic clashes. They knowledgeably provoke discussion as well, revealing the facade of theoretically objective facts.
Joanna Wichowska: We Are Not Us
Describing Oliver Frljić's play I Hate the Truth, which won the special jury award and the audience award at this year's BITEF Festival, the author creates a synthetic outline of the director's work. Frljić's plays are an attempt to bring the countries of the former Yugoslavia to terms with their hidden and unspoken sins. Wichowska also sees the socio-therapeutic dimension of the performance she describes. Frljić deals with problems that have interested him for years, such as the historical archive, the influence of family micro-narratives on the national macro-narrative, the relationship between individual and collective memory and various manipulations of memory. He makes the protagonists of the play his family and himself.
Research, Discovery, Ibsen: Thomas Irmer Speaks with Heiner Goebbels
Heiner Goebbels characterizes his theater as the renewal of forms of telling, presenting, and reading a text, and the search for ever-new ways of staging it. He speaks of his plays, claiming that their point of departure was questioning how to go beyond the forms which have thus far existed in theater. This is why the majority of his plays have aimed to achieve a new level of audience participation through the absence of traditional theater elements (such as actors). He assigns a great deal of importance to music. His also brings this way of thinking to his lessons at the Institute of Applied Theatrology in Gissen.
Anna R. Burzyńska: Chaosmos
With Europeras 1&2, based on a score by John Cage (premiere: 17 VIII 2012 in the Jahrhunderthalle in Bochum), Heiner Goebbels launched the latest edition of the Ruhrtriennale Festival in 2012, for the first time as a curator. The director not only commemorated the 100th anniversary of the composer's birth, but also successfully carried out his “making music with stage devices” project. The play was not performed in the opera building, but in the post-industrial space of the Jahrhunderthalle, where Goebbels presented thirty-two sets of decorations and costumes – from set designs inspired by the Baroque maw of Leviathan, designed by Burnacini, to sketches by Appia, and Constructivist arrangements that were a good match for the topography of the Jahrhunderthalle.
Grzegorz Stępniak: Whatever Happened to Vera Stark?
The drama By The Way, Meet Vera Stark by Lynn Nottage is a fictional tale about the first dark-skinned actress. The play, with Sanaa Lathan in the title role, was directed by Jo Bonney at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles (premiere: 26 IX 2012). The detailed description of the play and an analysis of the drama bring us to the conclusion that the artists limited themselves to the presentation of a humorous historio-political tale. What is missing is the meta-theatrical games with history and its implications for race that we are accustomed to finding in Nottage's texts.
Antoine Pickels: ANTI: On Gender, Nature, and Children
The author begins this report from the ANTI Festival held in Kuopio, Finland with a brief description of the concept of live art – the strategy of creating a common space for joining many types of contemporary art. It is precisely this artistic form that considerably shaped the image of the festival. Apart from the theme of working for children and the issue of gender, Pickels found the nature stream of the festival particularly interesting. Artists ordinarily working in public spaces and interacting with urbanity of various definitions now had to create works expressing their relationship to nature, and perform them in the forest, unplugged.
Julia Hoczyk: Japan: Dialogues and Transpositions
A report from the 19th edition of the International Crossroads Action Art Encounters, during which Polish-Japanese dance theater was performed for the third time in the history of the festival. The image of Japan that emerged was quite varied, though there were points in common, linking tradition with modernity and nature with technology. The pairing of Polish and foreign productions allowed the organizers to create a meta-cultural space – a field for artistic experiments and shaping a unique alphabet of movement.
Tadeusz Kornaś: Theater in Search of Truth (2)
In the second part (Part One was published in issue 112) of his report from the Wrocław World as the Place of Truth Festival, Tadeusz Kornaś analyzes a play by Alvis Hermanis: Latvian Love. The director designed fourteen scenes that were not connected by plots, and whose overriding theme was various arranged meetings between men and women. All the stories have the same aesthetic framework: realistic acting, hyper-realistic characterization, an allusive set design, and the grotesque. Kornaś opines that all the episodes create a coherent whole. On the one hand, they present daily interactions as marked by a dominant sense of unfulfilment, and longing for another person. On the other, they form a suggestive and very wide portrait of Latvian society.
Dorota Jarząbek-Wasyl: In the Kingdom of Foreign Beauty
The author describes the best performances during the 2nd International Festival of the Theater of Forms (17-24 XI 2012) organized across the Małopolska Voivodeship. The motif that connected the foreign performances hosted in Krakow was the opera. In this musical-operatic edition of the festival "the presence of people was secondary - sometimes dispensable, sometimes painfully ambiguous.”
Nicola Savarese: The Myth of the Orient
The first part (Part Two will be published in the next issue) of a translated text by Nicola Savarese, hailing from his award-winning book Teatro e spettaccolo fra Oriente e Occidente [Theater and Plays – Between the Orient and the Occident]. The author lists the most important conceptualizations of the myth of the Orient, whether astronomical, geographical, artistic, or anthropological, thus demonstrating how capacious the concept truly is. He analyzes the image of cultural relations between East and West, which have an enormous impact on theater, because, as he writes, unlike literature and painting, which have stayed true to their respective spheres, in theater the "academic discoveries of Orientalists" in Asiatic theaters have had the greatest significance.
Anna R. Burzyńska: The Tangles of the Web
Agnieszka Jelewska's book, Sensorium: Essays on Art and Technology (Naukowe UAM Publishers, Poznań 2012), is a collection of around thirty sketches linked by a network of discourses. The author investigates various methodologies and research theories (Philip Auslander, Henry Jenkins, Steve Dixon) and the relationships between science, art, philosophy, and technology. The reviewer stresses that Jelewska's aim is not to locate a "common denominator and synthesis" for the quoted and summarized theories, but quite the contrary: "in accordance with the notion of the Internet, to build a polyphonic, heterogeneous discourse.”
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