Arden2 brought 30 theater directors from the United States to Wroclaw, Poland for two weeks, to explore hopes and ideas for the future of American theatre. This is their weblog about the experience.
Here are two other blogs of the Wroclaw experience:
Steven Leigh Morris on the LA Weekly
John Freedman on the Moscow Times
Rachel and I are working on a couple of projects for the continuation of this space, including a mailing list and an interview questionnaire to ask all the participants each year. As soon as we have those activated, I’ll put more information here.
I hope everyone made it back home OK!
- Dara
B and I spent the afternoon at Cathedral Island and the Botanical Garden, and got caught in a rainstorm on the way back. Our jeans are still drying.
Richard Schechner and Krystian Lupa spoke yesterday, but I didn’t see either one of them – some of us made pilgrimages to hear them speak, and also viewed 3 of Schechner’s films at Lalek. Instead, we had Greek food at Akropolis on the Square.
In the evening, we made a brief stop at the Festival Club, for some goodbyes. It was short. The place felt empty without the crowds of US Artists.
Pina Bausch’s entire company was there, sitting in a somber circle in the front room, reflecting on her recent death – B and I only heard the news of this when we got to the Club in the evening. B told me how she was glad we’d been able to see NEFES while Bausch was still alive – reflecting on the piece as the work of a living master.
Those of us who saw the Bausch piece yesterday, instead of two days ago, said that the performance was especially emotional, and the dancers wept at the end. Her death was sudden – we had heard that she was in the hospital, but not that her condition was that serious. Rest in peace, Pina. She is someone who can’t be replaced in our world. We were quiet last night, remembering her.
We are packed. B and K leave in a few hours, and I leave tomorrow morning.
We met in the morning for the US Artists Initiative closing session. Only about 25 of us remain, of a group that once numbered 60 with core participants, guests, and senior leaders. We went around and discussed what we would take away from the experience. Staying in touch and maintaining the community we have built was everyone’s first priority.
I said that I didn’t want the blog to die, and intended to check back in with all participants yearly with a short questionnaire – sort of a ripoff of this Atlantic-reported Harvard psych study. If this works, over the years, we’ll have an accumulated database of people’s responses to these questions over time. We can see what the long-term impact is of this project. I’ll be posting the answers to the Q’s on the blog each June. So this won’t be a daily active blog, but rather a growing archive. We’re also going to maintain an email list.
Some of these questions might be:
- What are you working on right now?
- What is a project you’d like to complete within the next 5 years?
- What, if anything, from the US Artists Initiative experience is meaningful to you right now?
M and M and others are going to help me think of good questions that will hold up over time. I think we should do an initial questionnaire now / this July, and then not do the next one till next June.
If response is good, I’ll also put more detail on our Bios page, and links to our companies / photos. It’d be nice to have this site be a more complete picture of us and our work.
said Richard Schechner.
Amen.
After a couple of hours of scrambling and running errands, we met at Nowy Targ Square for a bus to the production of Krystian Lupa’s THE TEMPTATION OF QUIET VERONICA, based on Robert Musil. My only encounter with Musil before this has been in a seminar on his MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES, an unfinished novel which is far too long for its own good. I did a lot better with the play than I did with the book.
The production took place in the largest warehouse we’ve been in yet, and the acting was very understated and sometimes so quiet you could barely hear them speaking. But the staging was so vivid that we listened to every word. I’m now a card-carrying member of the Lupa acolytes. I haven’t seen something that shook me up so much in a long time. It’s hard to describe, but the production was largely about alienation, sexual alienation, and being trapped in situations with people you don’t love. Good stuff. Great theater.
We returned to the Club again for another round of goodbyes: the 3 J’s and B are all gone, on a train last night at 3 AM, and others are starting to drift away. Those of us who are still here have one last US Artists Initiative goodbye session Tuesday morning.
- Dara
In the morning, we went to a short session at Lalek with the director of Poland’s MALTA festival and NINA, a national audiovisual materials archive. We got swag bags and heard about EU and local funding for the preservation of film and audio cultural materials.
Afterwards, we walked to one of the three Teatrs Polski for a semi-private presentation of Richard Schechner’s HAMLET: THAT IS THE QUESTION, a collaboration with actors from the Shanghai drama school. The piece was entirely presented in a white cube with a white floor, in the round. Live video feed was used to project the actors’ faces so we could see them when they had their backs turned. The production was 95% in Mandarin, but the staging made it possible to follow the narrative anyway.
Of the few English lines, my favorite was Ophelia’s “You’re as good as a chorus, my lord.” It stood out in a way it never has to me before.
After the performance, Schechner answered process questions for us. It’s the second time he has spoken to our group, and his words on directing continue to be some of the most clear and interesting we’ve heard. I didn’t take notes, I wanted to listen to it all: but I remember him talking about levels of discourse in Chinese politics, and commenting on the dramaturgy of removing Fortinbras.
We had a couple of free hours before our next play of the last day.
- Dara
Our session in the morning on writing about experimental work included some discussion of the newspaper crisis and the disappearance of jobs for theatre critics. We also talked a little about new and experimental forms of criticism, the blogging revolution, and the increasing lack of “curated” comment. We bemoaned shrinking word counts. There wasn’t much new for me in this session, but to hear these grievances which I have mostly only read online coming, in person, from respected professionals in the field, made me take them more personally.
I went to hear Suzuki speak in the afternoon. Again, the process of translating from Japanese to Polish to English made this session slow, but from what he did say, it was possible to learn that he thinks of himself as sort of a conservationist and a classicist. He’s not exactly imitating classical Japanese theatrical forms, but he is trying to instill them into contemporary theater.
My favorite moment was when an audience member asked him to comment on his Japanese and European cultural influences, and his response was, “This is not a Japanese ELECTRA. This is a Suzuki ELECTRA.”
Some of us mentioned afterwards that we wished someone had asked how he feels about the prevalence of his movement training in theater programs.
J and I ate enormous ice cream cones on the steps of the Opera before Pina Bausch’s NEFES. Given how sweet the entire work turned out to be, this may have been unnecessary. S says that heterosexuality is Pina’s subject matter, and she’s right. It was three hours of beautiful women dancing lovingly with men. Some of the movement was so playful and so light that it made our hearts bounce on the mural-encrusted roof, but after three hours, I was yearning for someone to stick their face in a gutter of broken glass.
The image that has stayed with me from that performance is a man running upstage into a puddle of water none of us knew was there. Her work has a lovely element of surprise.
The US Artists Initiative “closing party” (even though many of us are still here) was characterized by rather angular, Expressionistic, un-Pina-like drunken thrashing around to the music of Michael Jackson. I wouldn’t have woken up the next morning if not for B.
- Dara
Here is what’s on the menu today:
- US Artists Initiative Session – Writing about Experimental Work.
- Screenings of Suzuki and Bausch films and a public conversation with Suzuki.
- Pina Bausch’s three-hour-long piece, NEFES. Anticipation for this is even higher than for the Brook.
- An “All-Festival Dinner And Party,” which happens every night anyway, except it’s on the schedule.
I blog to you from the hallway, where the wireless signal is strongest. I’m going to do some much-needed yoga before I go to breakfast.
- Dara
In the third theatrical marathon since my time in Wroclaw, last night I saw Tadashi Suzuki’s production of ELECTRA for the first time, Song of the Goat’s production of MACBETH for the second time, and assorted acts on the rooftop of the Renoma mall.
The ELECTRA was classic Suzuki. He’s famous in the US and internationally for being part of this kind of Suzuki/Viewpoints movement-work dogma popularized by Anne Bogart and the Siti company. It’s all about control and precision. It was a very beautiful and melodramatic staging of Electra, set in a mental hospital, with everyone in wheelchairs. To my mind, his chorus is a little too controlled, but in every other way, his work is brilliant.
The MACBETH, in round two, only confirmed for me my desire to work with SOTG, and with their more spontaneous and exuberant choruses.
G and I were a little zonked after the first two and pulled out of the Renoma acts early to go to the Festival Club. I met D and A, the co-editors of a new English-language journal called Polish Theatre Perspectives, which is published by the Grotowski Institute and which will have its first issue out in October. We talked until we couldn’t breathe the smoke any more. I am really going to miss all these people, and I’ve started telling them that every time I see them. I always get prematurely sentimental.
I walked back to the Square, having been here for two weeks, thinking of my Rynek apartment as home.
This brings me to yesterday, the day about which Mark posted. I woke early to go to the flea market, where I bought some old German postcards of Wroclaw when it was Breslau.
Our morning’s session, on presenting international theatre in the United States was, as Mark says, really vivid and inspiring – and David gave us a lot to think about. The factoid that shook me up the most was that the entire US government – federal, state, and local combined – spends less $ on the arts than the entire city of Berlin.
In the afternoon, I played three hands of Crazy 8’s with M’s daughter H. She won 2 out of 3. I then caught part of the public conversation with Ludwig Flaszen.* Here is what he said before I had to leave. It was in response to the question, “How did you play devil’s advocate to Grotowski? What was that role?”
Flaszen: “I didn’t write any reviews for the viewers. I wrote what I wrote, and it was always addressed to the artists. It was always an analysis of what an artist did, and what he should have done, working on a given thing. And when I found myself next to Grotowski, I was a critic – directing my message directly to the artist. At that time I had no theatrical ambitions as a practitioner, so as to enter into a symbiotic relationship to the artist, to influence him, to help him in what he, in fact and in truth, wants. Because discovering what the artist really knows is a complex process.
Grotowski started with staging theater that was highly intellectual. I’d say it was theater that was far from biology, far from the body as a vessel. It is a fact that to a certain extent, he was under the influence of Meyerhold. He’d build certain structures, even pantomimes. But in actual fact, what Grotowski was aiming at reached its acme with Cieslak** -this was beautifully expounded yesterday.***
I don’t want to say that I am the one who gave birth to Grotowski, but I would find it a great pleasure if that were the truth! Yet I helped him in finding his creative need, his (I missed this part). Because in that time, existentialism was fashionable, was called authenticity. And then, as a critic, I called it existential psychoanalysis. I wanted to be that little Sartre to that huge Grotowski.”
I then had to leave and run to the third of the three Teatrs Polski to catch the Suzuki ELECTRA.
- Dara
* Founder, with Grotowski, of the Polish Laboratory Theatre, and Grotowski’s earliest significant collaborator.
** Grotowski’s leading actor at the Polish Laboratory Theatre.
*** Peter Brook spoke extensively about Cieslak yesterday.
