You are currently browsing the daily archive for June 30, 2009.
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
