seep vol.29 no.1 winter 2009

volume 29, no. 1

Winter 2009

SEEP (ISSN # 1047-0019) is a publication of the Institute for Contemporary East European Drama and Theatre under the auspices of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. The Institute is at The City University of New York Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4309. All subscription requests and submissions should be addressed to Slavic and East European Performance: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The City University of New York Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4309.

EDITOR Daniel Gerould

MANAGING EDITOR Margaret Araneo

ASSOCIATE EDITOR Christopher Silsby

ASSISTANT EDITOR Marina Volok

CIRCULATION MANAGER Jessica Del Vecchio

ADVISORY BOARD Edwin Wilson, Chair

Marvin Carlson Allen J. Kuharski Martha W Coigney Stuart Liebman Leo Hecht Laurence Senelick Dasha Krijanskaia

SEEP has a liberal reprinting policy. Publications that desire to reproduce materials that have appeared in SEEP may do so with the following provisions: a.) permission to reprint the article must be requested from SEEP in writing before the fact; b.) credit to SEEP must be given in the reprint; c.) rwo copies of the publication in which the reprinted material has appeared must be furnished to SEEP immediately upon publication.

MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Frank Hentschker

DIRECTOR OF ACADEMIC AFFAIRS AND PUBLICATIONS Daniel Gerould

DIRECTOR OF ADMINISTRATION Jan Stenzel

Slavic and East European Performance is supported by a generous grant from the Lucille Lortel Chair in Theatre of the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at The City University of New York. Copyright 2009. Martin E. Segal T heatre Center.

2 Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 29, No.1

Editorial Policy From the Editor Events Books Received

TABLE OF CONTENTS

"Grotowski, His Laboratory Theatre, and

His Legacy in SEEP: 1981-2009"

ARTICLES

"The Hidden Work of Grotowski's Theatre of Sources" Kermit Dunkelberg

"In a Different Light: Virlana Tkacz" Olena Jennings

"The Theatre of Michal Zadara" Allen ]. Kuharski

PAGES FROM THE PAST"

"The Varpak.hovsky Theatre Dynasty: From Meyerhold's Troupe Through Stalin's Camp to Moscow and Montreal" Mayia Pramatarova

REVIEWS

"Made in Poland at 59E59" Thomas Starky

5 6 7

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19

21

32

40

51

57

3

"Chekhovian Tango, Korean-Style: A Staging of The Seagull in Seoul, Korea" Olga Muratova

"Wajda's Karyn" Leonard Quart

Contributors

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77

83

4 Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 29, No. 1

EDITORIAL POLICY

Manuscripts in the following categories are solicited: articles of no more than 2,500 words, performance and film reviews, and bibliographies. Please bear in mind that all submissions must concern themselves with contemporary materials on Slavic and East European theatre, drama, and film; with new approaches to older materials in recently published works; or with new performances of older plays. In other words, we welcome submissions reviewing innovative performances of Gogo!, but we cannot use original articles discussing Gogo! as a playwright.

Although we welcome translations of articles and reviews from foreign publications, we do require copyright release statements. We will also gladly publish announcements of special events and anything else that may be of interest to our discipline. All submissions are refereed.

All submissions must be typed double-spaced and carefully proofread. The Chicago 1Vlanual of Style should be followed. Transliterations should follow the Library of Congress system. Articles should be submitted on computer disk, as Word Documents for Windows and a hard copy of the article should be included. Photographs are recommended for all reviews. All articles should be sent to the attention of Slavic and East European Peiformance, c/o Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The City University of New York Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4309. Submissions will be evaluated, and authors will be notified after approximately four weeks.

You may obtain more information about Slavic and East European Peiformance by visiting our website at http/ /web.gc.cuny.edu/metsc. E-mail inquiries may be addressed to [email protected].

All Journals are available from ProQuest Information and Learning as abstracts online via ProQuest information service and the

International Index to the Performing Arts. All Journals are indexed in the lviLA International Bibliography and are

members of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.

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FROM THE EDITOR

The winter issue, SEEP Vol. 29, No.1, has as its focus the creative life of the theatre artist. UNESCO-The United ations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization- has designated 2009 as the Year of Grotowski. Now fifty years after the founding of the Polish Laboratory Theatre in Opole and ten years after the death of the master, commemorative events are being held worldwide-in the form of films, panels, workshops, and symposiahonoring Grotowski as a director, teacher, and spiritual leader and celebrating his legacy. We are including a bibliography of all the articles on Grotowski previously published in SEEP, starting with the first year of publication in 1981, and we open the current issue with Kermit Dunkel berg's "The H idden Work of Grotowski's Theatre of Sources," the first of two articles dealing with this least known of the Polish director's major periods.

The next three articles explore the careers of a Ukrainian-American, a Russian, and a Polish theatre artist. Olena Jennings gives an intimate picture of Virlana Tkacz's development as an artist and of the formation of the Yara Arts Group and its many triumphs in New York and abroad. Allen Kuharski investigates the American and Polish education of the young Polish director Michal Zadara whose work speaks to new generations of postcommunist audiences. In PAGES FROM THE PAST, Mayia Pramatarova traces the vicissitudes of Leonid Varpakhovsky's career that took him from Meyerhold's company to the gulag and back to Moscow, with an epilogue in Canada.

The issue concludes with three reviews: Thomas Starky discusses an English-language performance in New York of a contemporary Polish play, Made in Poland; Olga Muratova describes a Korean interpretation of Chekhov's Seagull in Seoul; and Leonard Quart analyzes Andrzej Wajda's film about the Karyn massacre of Polish officers during World War II.


STAGE PRODUCTIONS New York City:

EVENTS

The Royal Court Theatre production of Chekhov's Seagull, directed by Ian Rickson, was presented on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theatre from October 2 to December 21.

Peter Brook's Theatre des Bouffes du Nord (Paris) production of The Grand Inquisitor, based on Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov and adapted by Marie-Helene Estienne, was presented by the Theatre for a New Audience and the New York Theatre Workshop at the latter's theatre space from October 22 to November 30.

Made in Poland: A Festival of New Polish Plays was held at 59E59, from October 22 to November 30:

Theatre of the Eighth Day, The Fifes, based on Secret Police reports about the theatre company berween 1975 and 1983, from October 22 to ovember 9.

The Play Company, Made in Poland by Przemyslaw Wojcieszek, directed by Jackson Gay, from October 29 to November 30.

Immigrants' Theatre Project, rwo one-acts by 11ichal Walczak: Sandbox, directed by Piotr Kruszczyiiski, and The First Time, directed by Marcy Arlin, from November 13 to 30.

A city-wide presentation of the artistic and theatrical work of Tadeusz Kantor included an installation of Dead Class exhibited by the Jewish Museum from November 9 to February 1, the archival flims of his work at La MaMa (shown in the original space where they were first produced in New York) from November 10 to 16, and an international symposium hosted by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center and the Polish Cultural Institute at the CUNY Graduate Center on January 26.

7

Kama Ginkas, director of Moscow's Theatre of a Young Audience, presented readings of two plays-Rothschild's Fiddle and The Theatre of the Watchman Nikita, based on Chekhov short stories-and discussed the issues surrounding the adaptation and staging of literary texts with translator and critic John Freedman, at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center, on November 17.

The Czech National Theatre presented Three Lives by Vlasta Chramostova, directed by Ivan Rajmont, in Czech at the Bohemian National Hall, Czech Center of New York, on November 17.

The Czechoslovak-American (M:arionette) Theatre premiered The Very Sad Story of Ethel & julius, Lovers and Spyes, and about Their Unrymelie End while Sitting in a Small Room at the Correctional Facility in Ossining, NY, written and directed by Vit Horejs, at the Theater for the New City from November 28 to December 14.

Moscow's Nikitsky Gates Theatre (Teatr U Nikitskikh Vorot) brought their production of Singing Mikhoels, about the Russian Jewish actor and director Solomon Mikhoels, directed by Mark Rozovsky to the 11illennium Theatre, Brooklyn, on November 30.

As part of a series titled Prague 1600, the Czech Cultural Center of New York and Untitled Theater Company #61: A Theater of Ideas presented readings of two plays by Edward Einhorn on the history of Jews in Prague. Co/em Stories, directed by the playwright, was read on December 1, and Rudolf II, directed by Henry Akoma, was read on December 15 at the Bohemian National Hall.

The Yara Arts Group presented Still the River Fl01vs: Celebrations of Winter Rituals from the Carpathian Mountains, directed by Virlana Tkacz and designed by Watoku Ueno, with sections of a nativity puppet performance, at La MaMa, from December 26 to 30.

8 Slavic and East European Peiformance Vol. 29, No. 1

The Dialogue Literary Theater presented I Speak 1vith You from Leningrad . . . , based on collected primary sources and works by Olga Berggolts, Anna Akhmatova, and Shostakovich, in remembrance of the sixtyfifth anniversary of the end of the siege of Leningrad, at the Shorefront YMY\X1HA, Brooklyn, on January 25.

STAGE PRODUCTIONS U.S. Regional:

As a part of her residency with the Iowa International Writing Program and Far Away Festival, Romanian playwright Alina Nelega read excerpts of her new play Just Vif!YI. The readings took place on November 10 at Portland Stage Company in Portland, OR, and on November 17 at New York Theatre Workshop.

Moscow's Mossovet Theatre toured the United States and Canada 'W;th its production of Husband, Wife, and Lover, based on Turgenev and Dostoevsky, directed by Yury Yeremin, from November 30 to December 9, at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre (Los Angeles), North Shore Center (Chicago), Tribeca Performing Arts Center (New York), and the Metro Toronto Center.

The Olympia Family Theater presented Korczak's Children by Jeffrey Hatcher, based on the life of Janusz Korczak's work in Polish ghettos during World War II, at the Minnaert Center for the Arts, Olympia, "X'A, from January 16 to February 1.

STAGE PRODUCTIONS International:

The English-language premiere of Vaclav Havel's Leaving was presented by the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, England, from September 19 to December 13. Associated with the production were the seminar, "Vaclav Havel: Playwright & Politician," a marathon of all of Havel's plays, a gala performance held for Havel, and a symposium held at the British Library titled "To the Castle and Back: Vaclav Havel in Conversation with John Tusa" on September 27.

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Moscow Drama Theatre of K. S. Stanislavsky premiered fa Prishel (I Arrived) by Belorussian playwright Nicolai Khalezin, directed by Grigory Kataev, on November 28 on the main stage.

The Nierealne Company (England and Poland) presented Unreal City, a "jazzed performance" of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," using music and text in both English and Polish, created and performed by Krystyna Krotoska, Tanya Munday, Rafal Habel, and Jez Harisson on November 14 at Pod Bialym Bocianem Synagogue in Wrodaw, Poland.

Moscow Dramaturgy Center of Aleksey Kazantsev and Michael Roschin presented Khlam (Trash), written by Mikhail Durnenkov and directed by Marat Gatsalov. Khlam premiered on November 14 at the Begovoy Stage Theatre.

The Polish theatre ensemble Te Art Project (London) presented Witlciewicz's The Mother, directed by Malwina Sworczuk and Agata Szymanska, at the Camden People's Theatre from January 13 to 31.

The Eighteenth Baltic House International Theatre Festival (St. Petersburg, Russia), October 8 to 19, Baltic House Theatre:

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Teatr Rozmaitosci (Warsaw, Poland) presented Giovanni, an adaptation of Moliere's Don Juan and Mozart's Don Giovanni, directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna.

Moscow State Theatre of Nations (Moscow, Russia) presented Karmen, !skhod (Carmen, Exodus) directed by Andrey Zholdak.

State Youth Theatre of Lithuania (Vilnius, Lithuania) presented The Patriots by Petras Vaiciunas, directed by Jonas Vaitkus.

New Riga Theatre (Riga, Latvia) presented Sot!Ja by Tatiana Tolstaya, directed by Alvis Hermanis.

Slavic and East European Peiformance Vol. 29, No. 1

FILM

Alexandrinsky Theatre (St. Petersburg, Russia) presented two adaptations of Gogol's plays: The i'vfarriage, directed by Valery Fokin, and The !vans, directed by Andrey Mogutchy.

Baltic House Theatre (St. Petersburg, Russia) presented Pokhoronite 1'vfenia za Plintusom (Bury Me Behind a Plinth) by Pavel Sanaev, directed by Igor Koniaev.

Theatre of Satire on Vasilievsky Island (St. Petersburg, Russia) presented Russkqye Varenie (Russian Preserves) by Ludmila Ulitskaya, directed by Andrzej Bubien.

New York City:

Brooklyn Public Library hosted a documentary screening of Rossia! Drama Iskusstva v 12 Epizodakh (Russia! Art Drama in 12 Episodes), directed by Nina Zaretskaya, 2007. The documentary was based on the exhibition of Russian Art, which was held at the Guggenheim Museum in 2005.

The Hungarian Film Society presented Delta, a film directed by Kornel Mundrucz6, 2008. Delta won the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) award at the Sixty-First Cannes Film Festival and was screened at the Hungarian Cultural Center on November 12.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Polish Cultural Institute of New York, and the Polish National Film Archive presented a retrospective of thirty-fiYe films entitled, "Truth or Dare: The Films of Andrzej Wajda," from October 17 to November 13 at the Walter Reade Theater.

The Hungarian Cultural Center and the Hungarian Film Society presented Csaba Boll6k's 2007 film Iszka'sjournry (Iszka utazasa), on December 17 at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.

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The Brooklyn Public Library hosted a screening of fifty years of Soviet propaganda animation f!lms from 1920 to 1970, presented by film critic Oleg Sulkin at the Dweck Center on Ferbruary 25.

The Romanian Club at Columbia University in collaboration with the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York presented a special screening of the documentary The Great Colllmunist Bank Robber)', directed by Alcxandru Solomon, February 7 at Columbia University's Lerner Hall.

As a part of its Documentary Fortnight 2009, the Museum of Modern Art presented Neither Memory Nor Magic directed by Hugo Perez, 2007. The film premiered on February 22 at the Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1.

FILM U.S. Regional:

The Chicago D epartment of Cultural Affairs and Mayor's Office for Special Events in collaboration with AMC Theatres presented the FortyFourth Chicago International Film Festival from October 16-29. Films included:

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Crossing Dates (lntalniri lncrucisate) (Romania, 2008), directed by Anca Damian.

Four Nights with Anna (C'{!ery noce zAnnq) (Poland, 2008), directed by Jerzy Skolimowski.

Ka!Jn (Poland, 2007), directed by Andrzej Wajda.

Native Dancer (Baksy) (Kazakhstan, 2008), directed by Gulshat Omarova.

Of Parents and Children (0 rodifich a dltech) (Czech Republic, 2008), directed by Vladimir Michalek.

Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 29, No. 1

Snow (Snijeg) (Bosnia-Herzegovina, 2008), directed by Aida Begic.

The Mermaid (Rusalka) (Russia, 2007), directed by Anna Melikyan.

The Vanished Empire (lscheznuvshaia lmperiia) (Russia, 2008), directed by Karen Shakhnazarov.

Tranquility (Nyugalom) (Hungary, 2008), directed by Robert Alfoldi.

Palm Springs International Film Society presented the Twentieth Annual Palm Springs International Film Festival from January 6-19. Films

included:

Forgotten Transports: To Estonia (Zapomenute transporty: Do Estonska) (Czech Republic, 2008), directed by Lukas Pribyl.

The Karamazovs (Karamazovt) (Czech Republic, 2008), directed by Petr Zelenka.

Vtic/av (Czech Republic, 2007), directed by Jiri Vejdelek.

The Gift to Stalin (Podarok Stalinu) (Kazakhstan, 2008), directed by Rustem Abdrashev.

Tulpan (Kazakhstan, 2007), directed by Sergey Dvortsevoy.

Tengri: Blue Heavens (Tengn) (Kyrgyzstan, 2008), directed by Marie Jaoul de Poncheville.

Loss (Nereikalingi zmonis) (Lithuania, 2008), directed by Maris Martinsons.

The Jester (Der Purimspiler') (Poland, 1937), directed by Joseph Green and Jan Jowina-Przybylski.

Tricks (Sztuczkz) (Poland, 2007), directed by Andrzej Jakimowski.

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Hooked (Pescuit Sportiv) (Romania, 2008), directed by Adrian Sitaru.

The Rest Is Silence (Restul e tacere) (Romania, 2007), directed by Nae Caranftl.

uve and Other Crimes (Ljubav i dmgi ifocim) (Serbia, 2007), directed by Stefan Arsenijevic.

The Tour (Turnqa) (Serbia, 2008), directed by Goran Markovic.

Blind Loves (Slepe Ids~) (Slovakia, 2008), directed by Juraj Lehotsky.

FILM International:

CentEast presented the Twelfth International Tallinn Black Nights Film FestiYal from November 13 to December 7, 2008. Films included:

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The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner (Svetat e Go!Jam i Spasenie Dehne Otvryakade) (Bulgaria, 2008), directed by Stephan Komandarev.

Zift (Bulgaria, 2008), directed by Javor Gardev.

Country Teacher (Venkovskj Ucite~ (Czech Republic, 2008), directed by Bohdan Slama.

Q;mpl (Czech Republic, 2007), directed by Tomas Vorel.

Afjosha (Estonia, 2008), directed by Meelis Muhu.

I Wczs Here (Mina Olin Siin) (Estonia, 2008), directed by Rene Vilbre.

Life Without Gabriella Ferri (Eiu ilma Gabriella Ferrita) (Estonia, 2008), directed by Priit Parn, Olga Marchenko.

Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 29, No.1

Rambikramp (Estonia, 2008), directed by Elen Lotman, Katrin Sipelgas.

Taarka (Estonia, 2008), directed by Ain Maeots.

Amateur (Amatieris) (Latvia, 2008), directed by Janis Nords.

The Soviet Story (Latvia, 2008), directed by Edvins Snore.

Three Men and Fish Pond (Par Dzimtenitt) (Latvia, 2008), directed by Laila Pakalnina.

The Bug Trainer (Vabzdziu Dresuotqjas) (Lithuania, 2008), directed by D onatas Ulvydas, Linas Augutis, and Marek Skrobecki.

When I Was a Partizan (Kai as Buvau Partizanas) (Lithuania, 2008), directed by Vytautas V Landsbergis.

Boogie (Romania, 2008), directed by Radu Muntean.

Cinderella 4x4 (Zolushka 4X4) (Russia, 2008), directed by Aleksandr Barshak and Yury Morozov.

Once Upon a 1ime in the Provinces (Odnazhdi v Provincit) (Russia, 2008), directed by Katja Shagalova.

Paper Soldier (Bumazrryi Soldaf) (Russia, 2008), directed by Aleksei German Jr.

Las Meninas (Ukraine, 2008), directed by Ihor Podolchak and Dean Karr.

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CONFERENCES, ETC:

The Jewish Center of Jackson Heights, Queens, hosted a seminar and exhibition "Kiev to Broadway: The Creative Journey of Stage Designer Boris Aronson," with a lecture by set designer Jim Steere on November 16.

As part of the exhibition "The Art and Theatre of Tadeusz Kantor," the Polish Cultural Institute presented ftlms of Kantor's Theatre of Death, including The Dead Class; Wielopole, Wielopole; Let the Artists Die; I Shall Never Return; and Todqy Is A[y Birthdqy, at La MaMa from November 10 to 16.

As part of the inauguration of the Year of Grotowski, the Grotowski Institute hosted an international conference "Grotowski: What Was, What Is. And What Is To Be Done" at the Assembly Hall of the Ossolinski National Institute, Wrodaw, Poland, from January 13 to 15.

The University of Kent, Canterbury, hosted a symposium entitled, "Training for Performance-Tradition and Innovation: Britain/Russia" with Moscow Art Theatre School instructors Natasha Fedorova, Vladimir Sazhin, and OlegTopoloyansky, on January 31.

MROZEK IN DAMASCUS

Although Slawomir Mrozek seems a figure from the past to young Polish audiences, his 1975 play Emigrants has been playing to packed houses in Syria since its opening in October 2008 in an underground air-raid shelter in Damascus. Adapted as AI Muhqjiran by Samer Omran, who plays the intellectual XX to Muhammed al Rashee's proletarian XX, Mrozek's play about two exiles-one political, the other economic-living in a squalid basement apartment in an unnamed Western city seems politically topically and emotionally powerful to Syrian spectators, who experience directly feelings o f alienation and nostalgia in the windowless bunker that serves as the setting of the production.


BOOKS RECEIVED

Brook, Peter. With Grotowski. Theatre Is Just a Form. Ed. Georges Banu and

Grzegorz Ziolkowski with Paul Allain. Wrodaw: The Grotowski Institute,

2009. 118 pages. Includes fourteen short chapters, an Appendix (''A Dialogue

between Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski led by Georges Banu"), From the

Editors, Chronology, Editorial Notes, Index of Names, and a photographic

portrait of Brook and Grotowski.

Carnicke, Sharon Marie. Stanislavsk:J in Focus. An Acting Master for the 1/venry-First

Century. Second Edition. London: Routledge, 2009. 252 pages. Consists of an

introduction, three parts - Transmission, Translation, and Transformation

and an afterword. Includes The System's terminology, Endnotes,

Bibliography, Index, and 20 plates, illustrations, and photographs.

Dacre, Kathy and Paul Fryer, eds. Stanislavski on Stage. Kent: Rose Bruford

College in association with The National Theatre, 2008. 64 pages. In English

and Russian. Russian translation by Anna Shulgat. An exhibition of

photographic material drawn from the archive of The Stanislavski Centre

Rose Bruford College. Contains essays by Paul Fryer, Jean Benedetti, Marie

Christine Autant-Mathieu, Kathy Dacre, Anatoly Smielansky, Laurence

Senelick, Kathie Mitchell, Richard Hornsby, and Declan Donnellan, and many

production photographs.

Ferguson, Marcia. Blanka and Jiri Zizka at the Wilma Theater, 19 79-2000. From the

Underground to the Avenue. Saarbrucken: VDM Verlag Dr. Muller, 2008. 136

pages. Traces the Zizkas' theatrical career from Czechoslovakia to America.

Includes a bibliography.

Luchuk, Olha, ed. In A Different Light. A Bilingual Anthology of Ukrainian

Literature Translated into English by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps as

Performed by Yara Arts Group. Compiled and edited with Foreword and

Notes by Olha Luchuk. Introduction by Natalia Pylypiuk. Lviv: Sribne Slovo

Press, 2008. 790 pages. Includes Virlana Tkacz's introductory essay, "Poetry as

17

Text for Theatre." Contains a wide spectrum of Ukrainian poetry, songs, and

legends, including the complete text of Forest Song by Lesya Ukrainka, as well

as Events ("The Productions Which Generated the Translations'') and

biographical indices, bibliography, general index, 32 color plates and black

and-white photographs of authors and artists.

Rzhevsky, Nicholas. The Modern Russian Theater. A Literary and Cultural History.

Armonk, NY; London: M.E. Sharpe, 2009.319 pages. Contains eight chapters,

extensi,•e notes, a selected bibliography, an index, and many production

photographs.

Suchan, Jaros!aw, ed. Tadeusz Kantor niemoijiwe impossible. Cracow: Bunkier

Sztuki, 2000. 242 pages. A collection of nine essays, in both Polish and

English, published on the occasion of the exhibition at the Center for

Contemporary Art at the Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, June- July 2000. Includes

36 illustrations.

Toporisic, Tomaz, Barbara Skubic, Tina Malic, and Mateja Dermelj. Has the

Future Alreacfy Arrived? Fifty Years of Slovenska Mladinsko Gledaliffe. Ljubljana:

Slovenska mladinsko gledaliSce, 2007. 346 pages. In English. Contains more

than one hundred short essays and interviews by dozens of writers, as well as

extensive documentary material, including The Mladinsko Register from 1955

to 2006, Performances, Important Tours, Awards, The Mladinsko

Management, Actors, Directors, The Mladinsko at the End of 2006, Index,

and hundreds of pictures, drawings, and photographs, many in color.

2009. The Grotowski Year. Wrodaw: The Grotowski Institute, 2009. 48 pages

(unnumbered). Contains information about the many events to be held

worldwide in celebration of the Grotowski Year. Includes many photographs

and illustrations.


GROTOWSKI, HIS LABORATORY THEATRE, AND HIS LEGACY IN SEEP: 1981 TO 2009

Robert Findlay, "Grotowski in 1981." Vol. 1, no. 3 (Fall 1981 ). 11-2.

Addison Bross, "Grotowski's Akropolis on Film." Vol. 3, no. 2 (Spring 1983). 16-8.

Marc Robinson, "Zbigniew Cynkutis 1938-1987." Vol. 7, nos. 2 and 3 (Fall 1987). 42-3.

Jan Kott, "Grotowski or the Limit." Vol. 9, nos. 2 and 3 (Fall, 1989). 20-4.

Robert Findlay, "Grotowski at Fifty-Nine: The Ten-Day Conference at Irvine (August 1992) and the Six-Day Mini-Course at YU (February 1993)." Vol. 13, no. 2 (Summer 1993). 23--30.

A.L. (Alma Law], "Grotowski Visits Moscow" (PAGES FROM THE PAST). Vol. 13, no. 2 (Summer 1993). 35-44.

Allen J. Kuharski, "Jerzy Grotowski's First Lecture at the College de France." Vol. 17, no. 2 (Summer 1997). 16-20.

[Daniel Gerould], IN MEMORIAMJerzy Grotowski (1933-1999). Vol. 19, no. 1 (Spring 1999). 7-8.

Grotowski at Irvine-and Beyond (Special Issue) Vol. 20, no. 2 (Summer 2000):

Robert Cohen, "Introduction." 13-6.

Robert Cohen, "Putting a Tree in a Box." 17-25.

Jairo Cuesta, "On His Way." 26-7.

James Slowiak, "Grotowski: The Teacher." 28-30.

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Holly Holsinger, "Reaching Back." 31-3.

Richard Hornby, "Grotowski's Subjective Drama." 34-42.

Lars Myers, "Postscript in New York: Grotowsk.i after Grotowsk.i." 43- 7.

Janusz Degler, "In Pontedera after Grotowsk.i and About Grotowsk.i." Vol. 22, no. 1 (Winter 2002). 32-9.

Magdalena Hasiuk, ''Jerzy Grotowsk.i's Bright Alley." Vol. 23, no. 1 (Winter 2003). 24-33.

Janusz Degler, "Jerzy Grotowsk.i on the Books of His Youth." Vol. 23, no. 2 (Spring 2003). 40- 8.

Seth Baumrin, "The Grotowsk.i Centre in Wrodaw: Performances at the Headquarters of Paratheatre::>" Vol. 27, no. 1 (Winter 2007). 31-40.

Pablo Pakula, "The British Grotowski Project." Vol. 28, no. 1 (Winter 2008). 39-47.

Kathleen Cioffi, "ZAR and Other Microcultures of 'Grotland.'" Vol. 28, no. 2 (Spring 2008). 20- 9.


THE HIDDEN WORK OF GROTOWSKI'S THEATRE OF SOURCES

Kermit Dun.kelberg

All that sustains belongs to the realm of the hidden.1

Jerzy Grotowski's Theatre of Sources (1976-1982) was the most hidden and closely guarded phase of his work. Grotowski's statements about Theatre of Sources were infrequent and revealed few practical details. D ocumentation was scant. Ronald Grimes published an informative account of the most open phase of Theatre of Sources, but the event he participated in during the summer of 1980 was only the tip of the iceberg: the public face of a very private period of work. Only the barest details have been published regarding another phase of Theatre of Sources: the international

"expeditions."2 But the least-known part of Theatre of Sources was the work carried

out in solitude by a small, dedicated team in the Polish Laboratory's forest base near the village of Brzezinka. This unseen phase of research was the project's most vital component, the hidden source of all of the other Theatre of Sources investigations (and of much of Grotowski's later research).

Public Pronouncements

Grotowski announced his Theatre of Sources project at the International Theatre Institute's '~t of the Beginner" Symposium at Lazienki Park in Warsaw, June 4-5, 1978. This Symposium was part of the much larger First International Theatre Meeting of ITI, which Grotowski had lobbied hard to bring to Poland as a forum to announce the new orientation of his research. The entire conference-underwritten by the Polish Ministry of Art and Culture and the Polish branch of ITI-was "as though for (Grotowski's)

benefit."3 Representatives from over thirty countries participated, from Eastern and Western Europe, Asia, the Caribbean, and the United States. In addition to Grotowski's remarks, Professor Louis P. Mars of Haiti, a psychiatrist and expert on voudoun, laid out some of the theoretical bases for

Theatre of Sources's investigations.4

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Jerzy Grotowski, 1975


Grotowsk.i announced that the three-year Theatre of Sources project would consist of "three principal stages, each lasting a season." The first (1977-1978) would include an "international colloquium devoted to the primordial dramatic phenomenon and to the technique of the sources." This colloquium consisted of the ITI conference itself, followed by a two-day event

for conference VIPs at the castle of Grzegorzewice.S The second phase would consist of closed practice with an international team (actually already in process since 1976), culminating in 1979 with intensive summer work at Brzezinka in a temporary "transcultural village." Further closed work in 1980 would lead to a second "transcultural village," this time including outsiders whose participation would "put to the test the particularities of the project

Theatre of Sources."6 The open session of which Grimes would write was the realization of this second "transcultural village." Theatre of Sources proceeded as conceptualized in advance: with the important addition of the international "expeditions," which were made possible due to a Rockefeller Foundation grant obtained after the announcement of the project in 1978.

James Slowiak and Jairo Cuesta state that with the announcement of

Theatre of Sources, "Grotowsk.i's agenda was no longer hidden,"7 but if this is true, it is only so in retrospect. Perhaps Grotowsk.i's "agenda" became clear to some of those working closely with him (such as Cuesta, who was involved .in Theatre of Sources from its earliest stages). Certainly Grotowsk.i felt that he had gained new clarity on the nature of his life's work. He noted in 1980 that

Now, given circumstances, it seems a natural time in my life simply to say publicly, "all right, this is my work." It was around 1977 that the occasion presented itself ... I said to myself, "that's the moment,"

[sic] and I found the name Theatre of Sourccs.8

Grotowski's public statements about Theatre of Sources deliberately hide the practical aspects of the work. As Halina Filipowicz has observed, Grotowsk.i was always "among those artists who use an official language to

conceal rather than reveal their ideas."9 At no time since the mid-1960s (when the Theatre of Thirteen Rows, then still in Opole, was in danger of closure by the authorities) was Grotowski's need to conceal his ideas stronger than during Theatre of Sources. Poland's national life had taken to the streets, in the form of the Solidarity strikes of 1980-1981 and the Jaruzelski regime's retaliatory

23

imposition of martial law in December 1981. Political pressures, both direct and indirect, forced Grotowski to move his Theatre of Sources operations to Italy early in 1982 and led to his eventual decision to emigrate permanently. During this most public of times in Poland's political life, Grotowski's work turned increasingly inward.

Grotowski stated that the term "Theatre of Sources" was "simply a

code."10 A code conceals meaning for those outside the circle of intended recipients, yet reveals its meaning to those for whom it is intended (those

Grotowski once referred to, during Paratheatre, as simply "our kind").11 The term "theatre" in Theatre of Sources functioned as code. As Ludwik Flaszen has noted in reference to Para theatre, "Theatre is something that's socially

rooted, something that's legal,"12 and therefore acceptable to the Polish authorities (not to mention the Western funding sources, which included UNESCO, ITI, and the Rockefeller Foundation). But "theatre" was also simply code for Grotowski's main object of study, which was the "primordial dramatic phenomenon." Grotowski employed this term, adapted from Mars, to refer to the process of the doer (the actor or ritual artist) in relation to others. In Theatre of Sources there were performers (doers), but no audience or witnesses, in the sense of people from outside of the working group. It was

"a theatre where only action took place, not acting."13 Theatre of Sources constituted a search for the "origin"-but not in

a chronological or anthropological sense-rather in the sense of an organic impulse born in the body of the doer, here and now (hie et nunc) . Two paths to discovering the "origin" presented themselves: traditional techniques or devised techniques. Jairo Cuesta describes these two paths as the "old traditions" and the traditions nascent:

24

When you put a person who doesn't have a lot of knowledge of traditions ... into the forest, this person begins to deal with intuitions, with his urges, with his dreams, with his energies .... And these energies, these intuitions, these old dreams start to talk to him, guiding him into something .... I think Grotowski was very interested to put his eyes on this kind of process. But at the same time, for him, it was very interesting to put his eyes onto something that was already happening ... how traditions work. For that reason in the Theatre of Sources it was important to put old traditions at the side of traditions

Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 29, No. 1

nascent: traditions that are being born. I think for him it was important to see what the connection between the two of them was. And there

are connections. There are very clear connections.14

Individual Source Techniques

The work with "old traditions" involved traditional practitioners, encountered through the "expeditions," which will be the subject of the second ar ticle in this two-part series. Prior to the "expeditions," an intercultural team undertook individually focused work, primarily at the forest base at Brzezinka, in nature and in solitude. This undocumented phase of Theatre of Sources-the work on traditions nascent-constitutes the hidden source of Grotowski's most hidden period of work.

Theatre of Sources's focus on individual process was a change from the communal emphasis of Paratheatre. Paratheatre had looked backward

toward Grotowski's old theatrical aim of a communal ritual.15 Theatre of Sources pointed toward his future life's work, the study of "Ritual Arts" (Zbigniew Osinski's early designation for the work, which became known as

'~rt as Vehicle") .16 In the earliest phase of Theatre of Sources, the task for each member

of the team was to find a precise technique of awareness in relation to the natural environment. This search for one's own source technique was the primary concern of Theatre of Sources. It demanded a quiet heroism. At a conference on Paratheatre and Theatre of Sources held at the former Polish Laboratory Theatre's rural workspace in Brzezinka, Poland, in 2002, Theatre

of Sources ream member Marek Musial17 described the solitary process that led to the development of individual source techniques. Day after day, month after month, season after season, each team member performed his or her task in stoic solitude, working through thresholds of discomfort and boredom, to discover that

What was attractive at the very beginning, what was on the first level, what drew our attention, ceases to interest us. Something further is deepened: the leaves were green, they've become yellow. Snow comes falling, rain, wind, sun. And we keep coming, regardless of the

25

weather. And here begins something that is very difficult to explain.

Certain things start penetrating one another.18

Their task was to find a way to "be in the beginning"- to be fully present and aware-each through his or her own proposal for an individual source

technique.19 '~ll these [techniques] are quite simple," Grotowski claimed, "and

one of Theatre of Sources's simplest actions is just a certain way of walking which, through rhythms different from the rhythms of life, breaks the kind of

walk that is directed toward an objective."20 The point of departure was often

"a childlike action:•21 T he techniques had no special provenance. They were ordinary, but were refined through endless repetition. Grotowski even claimed

to have seen someone arrive at "something similar" while washing dishes.22 The purpose of these techniques was non-intentional action (i.e., not

walking to get somewhere, but walking to walk). T heatre of Sources was not about learning traditional techniques, but about unlearning one's own "daily, habitual techniques of the body ... as analyzed by Marcel Mauss" in order to

arrive at "a de-conditioning of perception."23 The techniques were then submitted to a very specific method of

verification:

Grotowski never assisted these moments of individual experience. After maybe six months of work, he began to send some witnesses. You needed to take the witness with you, and you needed to do your work. ... [H]e only talked with the witnesses. He didn't talk with the leader of the action. And through the testimonies, he [discovered]

what was working.24

Techniques deemed to be working well might be adapted and worked on by others, as happened with running (developed by Cuesta and others), slow and fast walks (developed by Musial, Stefano Vercelli, and others), and The Motions.


The Motions

One of the most important individual source techniques to emerge from Theatre of Sources was the complex sequence called The l\forions. The Motions originated as a personal source technique developed by

Zbigniew "Teo" Spychalski.2s Spychalski states that:

This exercise was a personal invention and it comes from practical work in nature that I developed . .. . With regard to the inspiration to create The Motions, it would be difficult to assert that it was only a combination, collage or melange of Hatha Yoga, especially the Salute to the Sun. It would be better to speak of a creation inspired by tai chi, which employs a kind of "imaginary yoga," a personal yoga, a yoga of the ignorant, so to speak: yoga of someone who does not really know [yoga]. Thus to evoke yoga or tai chi is [only) a comparison so that people who question on what

it was based can have a point of reference.26

Cuesta elaborates:

Teo was not a yoga student. He was not a tai chi student .... [An] action comes from somewhere. . . . It's very clear that this "somewhere" is your body .. .. When you relate to this physical body-it is your body, but it is [also] something bigger than your body ... something different appears in everyone .... (They] work months and months until something starts to happen. I think for Teo, it was about observing .. . what's going on in you- and reacting to that. The quality of his movements started to be a sor t of tai chi kind of movement, or maybe North American Indian kind of dance, or some kind of yoga positions. Of course they were not yoga, they were not Indian dances, and they were not tai chi. But maybe in the end of the seventies, these kind of techniques were in the air. We didn't want to go to a technique ... . For Grotowski, I think it was very interesting to see someone who was connecting with something very deep in himself .... (Teo's]

27

dance was a dance of integration, like many of the actions of the people in Theatre of Sources. They were actions that we made,

because we needed to understand ourselves.27

Grimes described what I take to be a version of The Motions practiced in 1980 as "a series of movements that I would call 'spiritual

exercises."'28 He presciently sensed them to be "like a generative grammar of the other actions of the Theatre of Sources .. . the kinetic seedbed out

of which other events sprang as offshoots."29 Through a process of transmission which deliberately

incorporated change, The Motions were further refined during Theatre of Sources:

Grotowski later wanted two versions of this practice to exist, wanted mine to remain, [as] it had its specific function, and he did not at all want to destroy it or even influence it too much. [A) second version was created by another working group during the Theatre of the Sources in 1980, in which emerged the elements which relate to ceremonial concepts .. . e.g., four cardinal points, the zenith, etc. . . . My objectives were different .... [We] kept differentiations in our approaches during all the program of

Theatre of Sources.30

The Motions passed through continual refining processes of verification and transmission in Theatre of Sources, and later in Objective Drama and Art as Vehicle.31

The individual source techniques were further tested and verified during the expeditions, through encounters with the landscape and alongside traditional practitioners. To some extent, the opening of the Theatre of Sources to outsiders also functioned as a verification of the techniques. But in contrast to Paratheatre, this opening to the public was neither the fulfillment nor the validation of the techniques developed in closed work. In Paratheatre, the purpose of the preparations was to make ready for a meeting: as in theatre, until the spectator/participants arrived,


the event was incomplete. But in Theatre of Sources, the emphasis was on

"what the human being can do with his own solitude."32 Theatre of Sources represents a watershed in Grotowski's research,

perhaps an even greater watershed than his abandonment of Theatre of Productions for Paratheatre in 1970. The search for the "primordial

dramatic phenomenon" was the beginning of the road to Performer.33

NOT ES

1 Martin Buber, land Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith, 2nd ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958), 24.

2 Robert Findlay, "A Necessary Afterword," in Zbigniew Osinski, CrotoJ1!ski and His Laboratory, trans. and abr. Lillian Valee and Robert Findlay (New York: PAJ, 1986), 171. See also Robert Rozycki, ed., "\X'yprawy Terenowe Teatru Zr6del," excerpted and edited from doctoral dissertation, "Poszukiwania etnologiczne wsp6!czesnej awangardy teatralnej," Leszek Kolankiewicz, Notatnik Teatralfi.J, no. 4 (1992): 142-57; Zbigniew Osinski, "Wyst~py Goscinne Teatru Laboratorium 1959-1984. Kronika Dzialalnosci 1978-1984," Pami~tnik Teatrai'!J 49, no. 1-4 (2000): 627-90; James Slowiak and Jairo Cuesta, Jerzy GrotoJJ;ski, Routledge Performance Practitioners Series, ed. Franc Chamberlain (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 42-4. 3 J6zef Kelera, Crot01vski Wielokrotnie (Wroclaw: Osrodek Badan Tw6rczo5ci Jerzego Grotowskiego i Poszukiwari Teatralno-Kulturowych, 1999), 60. 4 Price Louis Mars, "The Ethnodrama: Dramatic Religion," lntemational Theatre Institute (1978): 47-9.

5 Kelera, 61-3. See also Leszek Kolankiewicz, Wielki i'vfa(y Woz (Gdansk: Wydawnictwo slowo/obraz terytoria, 2001), 258- 60.

6 International Theatre Institute, "Theatre of Sources 1977-80: A Jerzy Grotowski Project," lnternatiot1al Theatre Information (\Vinter 1978): 5.

7 Jairo Cuesta, interview with author, Olsztyn, Poland; Aug. 20-21, 2003.

8 JerZ)' Grotowski, "Theatre of Sources," ed. Lisa Wolford and Richard Schechner, Tbe Groto111ski Sourcebook (London and New York: Routledge, 1997; 1980-1982), 255; see also Jennifer Kumiega, The Theatre of Groto111ski (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), 231.

9 Halina Filipowicz, "\'<'here Is Gurutowski?" TDR 35, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 181- 6, repr. rev. and ed. author in Wolford and Schechner, 403.

10 Grotowski in Wolford and Schechner, 256.

29

11 Jerzy Grotowski, "Holiday: The Day That Is Holy," trans. Boleslaw Taborski, TDR 17, no. 2 (Summer 1973) : 129.

12 Ludwik Flaszen, Paratheafre and Theatre of Sources: Reflections (Lecture, Paratheafre (1969-1978) and Theatre of Sources (1976-1982) International Conference, Wrodaw/Brzezinka, Poland, Sept. 28, 2002).

13 Slowiak and Cuesta, 40.

14 Cuesta, Aug. 21, 2003. 15 Jerzy Grotowski, "Teatr a Rytual," Dialog, no. 8 (1969): 64--74.

16 Zbigniew Osinski, "Grotowski Blazes the Trails: From ObjectiYe Drama to Ritual Arts," TDR 35, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 95-112; repr. as "Grotowski Blazes the Trails: From Objective Drama tO Art as Vehicle," in Wolford and Schechner, 383-401.

17 Musial had been part of the very first Paratheatre group in 1970. He returned to Paratheatre in the mid-1970s and participated in several Special Projects before joining Theatre of Sources. 18 Marek Musial, Paratheatre and Theatre of Sources, Testimonies, Part II (Talk, Para theatre (1969-1978) and Theatre of Sources (19 76-1982) International Conference, Wrodaw/Brzezinka, Poland, Sept. 28, 2002).

19 Jerzy Grotowski, "The Act of the Beginner," !nternational Theatre biformation (1978): 8. 20 Kumiega, 233.

21 Grotowski in Kumiega, 234. 22 Grotowski in Wolford and Schechner, 262.

23 Ibid., 257.

24 Cuesta, Aug. 21, 2003.

25 [(~Jankiewicz, Wielki Na!J Woz, 264, also in Cuesta, Aug. 21, 2003.

26 Teo (Zbigniew) Spychalski, Personal communication with author (electronic), Aug. 30, 2004. 27 Cuesta, Aug. 21, 2003. 28 Ronald L G rimes, "The Theatre of Sources," TDR 35, no. 3 (Fall 1981): 67-74; repr. in Wolford and Schechner, 271-2. 29 Ibid., 272.

30 Spychalski, Aug. 30, 2004.

31 For a description of The Motions as practiced in Objective Drama, see 1.

Wayan Lendra, " Bali and Grotowski: Some parallels in the training process," TDR 35, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 113- 28; repr. in Wolford and Schechner, 310-25.

30 Slavic and East E11ropean Performance Vol. 29, No.1

32 Grotowski in Wolford and Schechner, 259.

33 Jerzy Grotowski, "Performer," Centro Di Lavoro Di Jer:o• Grotowski/Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski, trans. Thomas Richards (Pontedera, Italy: Centro per Sperimentazione e la Ricerca Teatrale, 1988), 36-41; repr. in Wolford and Schechner, 374-8.

31

IN A DIFFERENT LIGHT: VIRLANA TKACZ

Olena Jennings

In a Different Light is an anthology of translations of Ukrainian poetry and drama done by Virlana Tkacz and American poet Wanda Phipps (see BOOKS RECEIVED, page 17) for performances by the Yara Arts Group, many of which took place at La MaMa Experimental Theatre in New York City. The arrangement of the translations chronicles Yara's performance history. The last section of the book tells the story of how the poetry in the anthology was used in Yara's theatre productions, workshops, and poetry events. Yara often creates theatre pieces from poems strung together to form a narrati,·e, rather than using traditional scripts.

Translations in the anthology include the works of both classic and contemporary authors. There is a special focus on women's poetry. Many of the translations have also been published in literary journals including Agni, Luna, Leviathan, Quarter!J, Nimrod, and Index on Censorship. Most importantly, the translations are meant for the stage. They read like poems in English rather than like translations.

My first experience with Yara was hands-on. When I was a student at Harvard Ukrainian Summer School in 1998, Virlana Tkacz came with other Yara artists to put together a theatre piece using a wealth of Ukrainian poetry and song. The piece grew from theatre exercises and recitation of poems, all with the theme of "the messenger." Eventually, a show was formed that featured Julian Kytasty's performance on the Ukrainian bandura, a harp-like instrument that was haunting as it accentuated the footsteps of the students dressed in black, acting in some way as messengers. The set was designed by Watoku Ueno, a founding member of Yara who works with them to this day.

Virlana Tkacz's path leading to the formation of the Yara Arts Group was eclectic. She began with a love for poetry. Her mother and grandfather both taught poetry in a Ukrainian language school in Newark, New Jersey, where Tkacz was born. Then, she herself went to Harvard Ukrainian Summer School where Professor George Grabowicz inspired her with his love for Ukrainian avant-garde poet Pavlo Tychyna (1891-1967) and Tychyna's work Instead if Sonnets and Octaves.

32 Slavic and East E uropean Peiformance Vol. 29, No. 1

Virlana Tkacz

33

Then Tkacz began to experience the theatre pieces of Polish director Jerzy Grotowski and Romanian director Andrei Serban. She realized almost immediately that the unusual and intense quality of Grotowski's pieces was something that she wanted to recreate.

The first show she saw by Andrei Serban was Trojan WOmen. It was unique in that it went beyond language. The show was performed at the La MaMa theatre. Most of the action took place on the balcony that encircles the theatre. It was a frightening, visceral experience. "It was as if the walls of Troy were up there," Tkacz says. Actors ran through the audience with torches. In the intense atmosphere, an old woman grabbed Tkacz's hand. "For the first time I understood my mother's stories about the war," Tkacz continues. "I understood how direct theatre could be and that it could have a great impact on one's life and one's understanding of the world."

Tkacz attended Bennington College where she majored in literature and theatre. While at Bennington she was able to explore Grotowski's work in detail. Later, Tkacz did her MFA in theatre at Columbia University where she wrote her thesis on Ukrainian avant-garde director Les Kurbas (1887-1937), who had been arrested and then killed by Stalin. Other influences include George Ferencz with whom she worked on fifty shows and theatre director, choreographer, video and installation artist Ping Chong. Her American influences include playwrights Sam Shepard and Eugene O'Neill.

\X'hen she was writing her thesis for the Columbia MFA program, Tkacz met the leading Ukrainian actor and director Yosyp Hirniak (1895- 1989), then living in New York. He told her a lot of stories about Kurbas, with whom he had worked in the 1920s and 1930s. For Tkacz, he was the window into Kurbas's world. Tkacz would see him every day as she rushed through St Mark's Place on her way to La MaMa. One day he passed away. No one told Tkacz about this, but as she was hurrying to tell him about a workshop at Harvard that she was conducting, she realized that his space by the window was empty. The window to Kurbas was closed to her. When La MaMa founder Ellen Stewart asked Virlana what her show would be called, Tkacz opened her mouth, some form of destiny intervened, and she said, "A Light from the East."

The idea of creating the Yara Arts Group was born during rehearsals for A Light From the East, which was staged in November 1990. It drew upon Kurbas's diaries and the memoirs of actors in his company. Tkacz writes in the anthology, "The characters in A Light from the East were actors in Kurbas's


troupes in 1919 who toured the countryside till 1921. During this time they tried staging poetry. I believe this eventually led the group to become a unique experimental theatre .... We decided ... to include the dreams of our own cast members who shared many beliefs with Kurbas's actors. So our play took place in 1919 in Kyiv and 1990 in New York. Each of our actors played themselves and one of Kurbas's actors .... We became a theatre group while rehearsing a play about the formation of a theatre group."

The first poem staged by Yara was "The Sky's Unwashed" by the nineteenth-century Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861), which had also been staged by Les Kurbas in 1919, linking the two troupes. In addition to Les Kurbas and Shevchenko, this first theatre piece performed by Yara also introduced the modern Ukrainian poet Pavlo Tychyna.

The window that was closed to Tkacz by Hirniak's death was opened again on her 1990 trip to Ukraine. Tkacz comments "We were in a yard in Kharkiv with an eighty-year-old actor. There were ruins and garbage around us, but he pointed to a window and said, 'There Tychyna is writing his poems,' and he pointed to another window and said, 'There Kurbas is rehearsing his plays.' It was magical. I felt the cosmic connection that inspired me to bring the show to places where Kurbas performed in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Lviv next summer Ouly-August 1991). I also realized I would have to work with both my company and the local Ukrainian actors."

When Tkacz was first exposed to Tychyna at Harvard Summer School, she didn't understand the impact that his poems would have on her. Tychyna was the first poet that she translated together with Phipps when Tkacz couldn't express the beauty of Tychyna's work to Phipps because the existing translations were inadequate, focusing on rhyme and language when the images should have been the focal point of the poems. Phipps comments on the process of translation in the anthology, " I find it difficult to describe the way Virlana and I work together on translations and how we created A Light from the E ast. To me the way we work is a very organic process. Things constantly evolve, the idea of structure and form is held free-floating almost until the moment before performance, and even after opening night the pieces continue to grow as the actors constantly discover new meanings, shadings, new moments of transformation and enlightenment, within the framework of the previously established structure."

35

'X'hen Tkacz chooses a piece to translate, she does so with an actor in mind. If she can hear the actor speaking in her head, she knows the piece will work. It is not her intention to create a canon of Ukrainian literature in English but to translate only the pieces that are needed for the stage, and thus her translations are meant to be heard. As part of the translating process, Tkacz and Phipps read the poems aloud. Then, they give the poems to their actors. If the actors stumble over any of the words, they know that something needs to be changed.

The translations are essential even beyond the context of her performance. Ukrainian literature isn't a part of world literature because there aren't enough translations that convey the true essence of the poem. The translations serve to bring some of the poems into the spotlight.

Ukrainian language has become central to many of Yara's theatre pieces. This did not happen intentionally. It was Tychyna who inspired the use of the Ukrainian language. During rehearsal, Virlana would read the poem in Ukrainian and the actors would read the poem in English, creating a dialogue that was similar to a mother and daughter talking to each other.

This winter, Yara worked with the winter song singers from a village in the Carpathians K.ryvorivnia. Tkacz has always been interested in folk music and oral tradition. She is looking for pieces that have survived over the ages. The winter song singers carry on the tradition of going house to house in the village to sing songs that impart good wishes for the New Year. They participated in a number of events with the Yara Arts Group that culminated in a performance at La MaMa called Still the River Flows.

Almost ten years after my summer at Harvard, I had another experience with Yara that began with a performance by the winter song singers. The event took place at the Ukrainian Museum in New York City against the backdrop of an exhibition of photographs by Alexander Khantaev of winter rituals in Kryvorivnia. I was in charge of the lights. I watched as audience members were mesmerized by the traditional beaded, colorful costuming and the performance of the singers. As the singers implored, "Is the Master Home?" I was taken with the purity of the ancient songs. Throughout their stay in New York, I was comforted by the textured rhythms of their voices ringing out from silence.

Tkacz's interest in the ancient also led her to the epics of Kyrgyzstan. Her work with the epic about a woman warrior Janyl Myrza was inspired in

37

much the same way as her piece about Kurbas and Tychyna. The Yara artists traveled through the mountains of Kyrgyzstan and saw the places where Janyl had used her skills in archery to kill the neighboring tribesman who invaded her land. In this way,Janyl came alive for the Yara artists. This led to a collaboration between Yara artists and Biskek artists who performed ]af!JI .N[yrza together both at the City of Artists in Bishkek and at La MaMa in New York.

Tkacz feels she is lucky to work with artists such as Kyrgyz actor and director Kenjegul Saltibaldieva. Other artists that Tkacz has worked with include Shona Tucker, Jessica Hecht, Jeff Ricketts, Andrew Colteaux, Yun Jin Kim, Katy Selverstone, Karen Angela Bishop, Cecilia Arana, Tom Lee, Zabryna Guevara, and Meredith Wright. Many of these artists travel with Tkacz to places like Ukraine, Siberia, and Kyrgyzstan before finding their own niche in the theatre world. Often times they return as Yara guest artists for multimedia events. Tkacz feels especially blessed to work in a city like New York where this is possible.

My most recent experience with Yara was with the performance of ]af!JI A{)•rza at La MatVfa for which I served as the stage manager. Again, I was exposed to Yara's unique approach to creating a show. Though Tkacz and Phipps had translated the epic, there was much work to be done to bring it to the stage. Through intense rehearsal during which the actors playfully experimented with scenes and Kyrgyz and American actors communicated with each other through action rather than words, the story of Janyl was brought to life. While the epic was presented mostly in Kyrgyz, the American actor Susan Hyon who playedJanyl conveyed some of the events in English to the audience.

In recent years, Tkacz has received notable awards for her work. In 2007 she was named Honored Artist of Ukraine (Zasluzhenyi artist Ukrainy). She has received Fulbrights both to Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan and an NEA translation fellowship for her work with contemporary Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan.

The story of Tkacz's relationship with theatre is inseparable from the story of Yara's formation. From her first experiences with Serban to her own experimentation in La MaMa's space, Tkacz has created her own style. The publication of her translations In a Different Light is the perfect occasion for celebrating a fruitful career, which I am sure will be full of more exciting cultural collaborations to come.

38 Slavic and East European Peifor!Jlance Vol. 29, No. 1

Cover of In a Different Light, designed by Rostylav Luzhetsky, with Sean Eden and Rebecca Moore

39

THE THEATRE OF MICHAL ZADARAl

Allen J. Kuharski

Polish director Michal Zadara (b. 1976) has enjoyed a meteoric career as a director in Poland since his professional debut in 2004 as co-director with Jan Peszek of Witkacy's The Crazy Locomotive (Szalona fokomo(Ywa; 1923) at Teatr Nowy in Slupsk. His solo professional debut took place later that year with a contemporary adaptation of Stanislaw Wyspiari.ski's symbolist classic The Wedding (Wesele; 1901) at Teatr Stu in Cracow. Zadara had first presented a studio production of his version of Wyspiaii.ski's play with student actors at the Cracow State Drama School (Pari.stwowa Wyzsza Szkola Teatralna w Krakowie) early in 2004, many of whom continued in the professional version later that year. Zadara subsequently directed a similar contemporary adaptation of Juliusz Slowacki's rarely staged romantic history play Father Marek (Ksiq_dz Marek; 1843) at the Stary Teatr in 2005, the first of a series of major productions there. At the center of Zadara's work at the Stary Teatr to date has been a pacifist neo-classical trilogy consisting of Jean Racine's Phedre (Fedra; 2006), Jan Kochanowski's sixteenth-century drama Dismissing the Greek Envoys (Odprawa posl6w greckich; 2007), and his collaboration with playwright Pawel Demirski on a contemporary adaptation of Racine's lphigenie (lfigenia: Nowa tragedia wedlug wers;i Racine'a; 2008).

In January, 2008, Zadara received the prestigious "Passport" Award for theatre, given by the editors of the magazine Poli(Yka, and in April of that year he was the featured artist of the Twenty-Eighth Warsaw Theatre Meetings Festival (Warszawskie Spotkanie Teatralne), the program of which included six of his productions from various theatres around Poland, including the second stage of Warsaw's National Theatre (Teatr Maly). By the end of 2008, Zadara had directed over two-dozen professional productions, including invitations to direct at Berlin's Gorky Theatre and the Habima National Theatre of Israel in Tel Aviv. Zadara's production credits include a remarkable breadth of the Polish classical and modern repertory, alongside plays by major contemporary playwrights both Polish and foreign, original works, and adaptations of various novels, films, and even writings by Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher and chronicler of Chassidism. In 2010, Zadara will make his operatic debut


The poster for the Twenty-Eighth Annual Warsaw Theatre Meetings Festival in 2008, for which Zadara (pictured) was the featured director

41

Jan Peszek (Agamemnon) and Barbara Wysocka (lphigenie) in the world premiere of Michal Zadara and Pawel Demirski's adaptation of Racine's Iphiginie at Stary Teatr, Cracow, 2006

d z o-· N

~ ~ ~ ~ a.: ~ ~ ... ~ ~

lLl """ ~ ·!::l " ~

'-)

N ~

directing Iannis Xenakis's rarely staged Oresteia at Warsaw's ational Opera (Opera arodowa).

Zadara is slated ro make his American professional debut at the 2009 Philadelphia Live Arts Festival with his 2007 production of Witold Gombrowicz's Operetta (Operetka; 1966/1969) from Wrodaw's Teatr Muzyczny Capitol, with a score by the renowned Polish jazz musician Leszek Mozdi:er. A symposium on his work and on the production is planned at Swarthmore College in conjunction with the Philadelphia performances of Operetta in September 2009.

The U nited States

When I first met Michal Zadara, he was eighteen years old, just arrived in the U.S., sporting a head of long dark blond hair, and taking his first theatre class at Swarthmore College. He was slim, serious, quiet, and planned to srudy political science and philosophy. My first impression was of little common ground between my theatrical work in Poland and this polite and well-spoken young man. When I mentioned the names of Witkacy, Witold Gombrowicz, or Jerzy Grotowski, Zadara had heard of some of them, but knew nothing of their work. He was a highly educated and well-traveled young Pole who was completely ignorant of the Polish theatrical and literary canon. Perhaps more precisely, he was a child of the European Union of the mid-1990s, carrying a Polish passport.

Zadara's European and American formations are unusual. He was educated in American schools in Frankfurt-am-Main and Vienna while his parents worked abroad in the 1980s and 1990s. Zadara grew up fluent in Polish, French, German, and English. While Polish was his first language, before returning to Poland in 2000 his formal education had been primarily American in content, and quite elite in character. This education, however, did not include any travel to the United States before the start of his university srudies at Swarthmore. His informal cultural education before university was German and Austrian. Polish was the language of his family life and of summer holidays spent in Poland.

\X'hen we first met, Zadara had not yet considered the possibility of an artistic career. We eventually discussed the political role of theatre, particularly in Poland, and about the connections between philosophy and the work of playwrights such as Witkacy or Gombrowicz. I talked with him about

43

my own background in scenography and directing, why the Polish theatre was important to me as an American, and about how the liberal arts education Swarthmore offered could be useful to an artist. Zadara went on to complete degrees in both theatre and political science. His work as a directing and design student culminated with a remarkable 1999 production of Witkacy's The Water Hen (Kurka wodna; 1921).

The paradox of Zadara's introduction to Polish theatre, and Polish culture in general, was that it began in the United States. His first contact with figures such as J6zef Szajna, Jerzy Grotowski, Tadeusz Kantor, Leszek Ma.dzik, Wlodzimierz Staniewski, Jan Kott, and Andrzej Wajda took place alongside American students in my classes in performance theory and theatre history. In individual tutorials and as a research assistant with me, he became familiar with the plays of the Polish romantics, Witkacy, Gombrowicz, and Tadeusz R6zewicz. Zadara returned to Poland for a year's leave from Swarthmore in 1996-1997, and began taking classes in the directing program at the Warsaw Theatre Academy (Akademia Teatralna w Warszawie). I assumed I had lost a student. To my surprise, Zadara returned to Swarthmore to continue his directorial studies with me after his time in 'X'arsaw and a stint studying oceanography on a sailing ship on the Atlantic Ocean (which also proved highly formative on his later work in theatre). In part, he realized it was too soon to narrow the focus of his studies to that of conservatory training. He missed the breadth and variety of an American liberal arts university. But he also felt estranged from the emphasis of the teaching in Warsaw, in particular the school's lack of engagement with those aspects of Polish theatre that had attracted him in the first place.

Nevertheless, he returned to Philadelphia clearly fascinated by Warsaw and his immersion in Polish cultural life. He had seen Krystian Lupa's production of Thomas Bernhard's Ritter, Dene, Voss (Rodzenstwo) at Cracow's Stary Teatr, and later smartly directed an excerpt from the same play in my directing workshop. Lupa's production clearly struck several nerves in Zadara: here was an Austrian play produced through the lens of a Polish director, as well as a director who was also his own scenographer. The character of Ludwig, inspired by Wittgenstein, also appealed to Zadara's philosophical bent. For Zadara at this point, Swarthmore provided a theatrical asylum and a crucible. His studies in the United States also allowed a critical distance from Poland. He first confronted the question of making his work comprehensible


to collaborators and audiences that were not Polish. As a result, he began developing a set of critical and practical skills that were not specific to Polish material, but that would later inform his work in Poland. These extended to the study of political philosophy and Jewish studies beyond his practical and academic work in theatre.

Zadara's theatrical studies at Swarthmore were largely the same as his fellow American students. He was introduced to the American avant-garde through the work of Robert Wilson, Joseph Chaikin, the Living Theatre, Mabou Mines, Anne Bogart, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Among his professors at Swarthmore was Roger Babb, an actor in Chaikin's second company, The Winter Project. Zadara's studies were also broadly comparative. His preparation for the Cracow production of Racine's Phedre included revisiting his original study of the play with me at Swarthmore. He completed my seminar on Ariane Mnouchkine and the Theatre du Solei! and participated in acting workshops lead by the Burkinabe actor Sotigui Kouyate, a long-time member of the Peter Brook Company in Paris. Jacek Luminski and Silesian Dance Theatre (Sl~ski Teatr Tanca) made their Swarthmore debut in Zadara's last year of studies in 1999. Zadara today works regularly with choreographer Tomasz Wygoda, whom he first encountered as a member of Lumiriski's company at Swarthmore.

Alongside his formal studies of theatre, Zadara was one of the leaders of a popular student cabaret that featured mixed programs of original poetry, music, film, dance, and theatre. The cabaret provided a testing ground for his goal of creating a popular theatre, with an open, playful, and unpredictable approach to its audience. The echoes of these student cabarets can be found throughout Zadara's work in Poland, in productions as varied as his stage adaptation at Teatr Wsp6lczesny in Szczecin of Billy Wilder's film Some Like It Hot (Na Gorqco; 2006), Dismissing the Greek Envq)'s, or the Polish premiere of Russian playwright Ivan Vyrypaev's recent play Genesis 2 (Wrodaw, Teatr Wsp6tczesny; 2007). The youthful contemporary party atmosphere of Zadara's The Wedding or the environmental staging of his 2006 Wrodaw production of R6zewicz's The Card Index (.!Vzrtoteka; 1961) are largescale, repeatable versions of these small-scale, ephemeral cabaret events at Swarthmore.

Zadara stayed in the United States for a year after receiving his diploma, and was invited by Anne Bogart to attend the conservatory directing

45

program she leads at Columbia University in New York City. He decided against attending Columbia and instead returned to Poland, where he eventually began studies in the directing program at PWST in Cracow, with Krystian Lupa and .Mikolaj Grabowski among his professors. Zadara's studies of scenography at Swarthmore lead to his first professional work in Poland at TR-Warszawa as Malgorzata Szcz~sniak's design assistant for Krzysztof Warlikowski's production of Euripides' The Bacchae (Bachantk1) in 2001.

We will never know what Zadara's work would look like today if he had accepted Bogart's invitation and pursued an American training and directing career. His taste in American playwriting is eclectic, ranging from Eugene O'Neill and T. S. Elliot to Eric Bogosian. Zadara's life, however, made him no more obvious a fit into the American theatre than into the Polish. In each context, he began with one foot in and one foot out of the culture.

Poland In just a few years, Michal Zadara has created an unusual body of

work that encompasses the full breadth of the Polish theatrical canon, from Jan Kochanowski to first productions of contemporary plays. H e has spoken of "the Polish question" that hovers over his work, motivating both his choice and his interpretation of the plays he has directed. At times, a Polish dimension is added where least expected (Some Like It Hot, his adaptation of Ferenc Molnar's novel The Paul Street Bqys). Zadara nevertheless rigorously rejects any notion of Polish cultural exceptionalism or hermeticism. He approaches a work by Kochanowski, Slowacki, or Wyspianski as he would a play by Racine, Bi.ichner, or Yeats, and sees these plays first as specific dramaturgical constructs in ways not limited to the Polish context or tradition. Zadara considers his production of Dismissing the Creek Envqys, for example, primarily as a sequel to his earlier production of Racine's Phedre. Most importantly, Zadara searches as well for the most appropriate ways to make these plays relevant to a contemporary audience.

Zadara is a theatrical cosmopolitan, a disciple of contemporary Austrian and German theatre no less than the product of his American education or his training in Cracow. His directorial lens is a self-consciously German one: post-Brechtian and post-dramatic, with the Volksbi.ihne director Frank Castor£ as his patron saint. Zadara's attraction to German designers such as Magdalena Musial and Thomas Harzem is an expression of this

46 Slattic and East European Performance Vol. 29, No.1

.;:.. -.J

Anna Magnat as the title character in Racine's Phedre, directed by l'vfichal Zadara at Stary Teatr, Cracow, 2006

orientation. Yet this all remains the means to the end of reanimating Polish works suffering no less from over-familiarity (The Wedding, The Card Index) than theatrical neglect (Dismissing the Greek Envoys, Father Marek).

Zadara's theatre marks a conscious break from the Polish alternative theatre of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. In spite of his original attraction to the work of Polish auteur directors with independent companies such as Grotowski, Kantor, or M~dzik, he has pursued a career in the state repertory theatre system where Lupa, Warlikowski, and Jarzyna have also based their work.

The theatre of Michal Zadara marks the third stage in a new selfdeftrution in Polish theatre that began in the 1980s. The foundation of this movement is the work of Krystian Lupa, who moved away from both Polish drama and the historic innovations of earlier Polish directorial auteurs. Lupa nevertheless demonstrated the significance of a contemporary Polish theatrical lens in his treatment of Austrian writers such as Musil, Bloch, and Bernhard, as well others such as Bulgakov or Nietzsche. The subsequent work of directors such as Jarzyna and Warlikowski in a different way began to look to the West, not only moving away from Polish playwrights but also developing a contemporary theatrical style that was akin to new work in Paris, Brussels, or Berlin. Zadara has spoken of the emergence of a new cultural zone characterized by the increasing hybridization of Polish and German/ Austrian influences. The ongoing work of Lupa or Warlikowski can be seen as part of this process.

Zadara today raises his version of "the Polish question": how to stage and understand anew the Polish repertory as part of a larger European theatrical culture, liberated from the history of foreign oppression, the defensive postures of nationalism, as well as the temptations of assimilation into a larger globalized cultural landscape. His revisionist productions of the Romantic and nco-Romantic repertory are perhaps best understood as a continuation of the earlier work of Konrad Swinarski (a child of a PolishGerman family in Polish Silesia and Brecht's most significant Polish protege), but still as removed from Swinarski as Castorf is from Brecht or Heiner Muller. If there is a common denominator in the work of Lupa, Warlikowski, and Zadara, it is their shared interest in philosophy. Zadara's "Polish question" is ultimately ontological or phenomenological in nature, not a revival of Mickiewicz's Romantic nationalism. In this, he also echoes Gombrowicz.

48 Slavic and E ast European Performance Vol. 29, No. 1

Zadara's work seeks to answer the question of how and why to stage plays such as Dismissing the Greek Envqys or Father Marek today-plays that occupy a place in the dramatic/literary canon and yet come without any coherent theatrical provenance. On the other hand, from Wyspiaiiski to Kantor, there is no shortage of examples of Polish theatre feeling haunted and burdened by its own past. A remarkable thing about Zadara's handling of the Polish classics, much less of contemporary work, is how clearly it is haunted by Poland's history, but at the same time not by the country's theatrical history. Zadara has no scores to settle with past Polish theatre. His deceptively simple mission is first and foremost to make meaningful work for the Polish audience of the twenty-first century, to present Kochanowski's Dismissing the Greek E nvqys in contemporary dialogue with Pawel D emirski's contemporary history play f¥'tll{sa (2005).

Zadara is a visually and spatially minded director. He is an unapologetic theatrical formalist, though in a manner distinct from the bravura imagistic work of Szajna, Kantor, or M~dzik. Like these older Polish auteurs, however, he poses fundamental questions of theatrical representation, moving away from psychology and conventional dramatic narrative. Like Witkacy before him, he is on a philosophical as well as an aesthetic/formal quest, and each production is a laboratory experiment in search of a new theatrical possibility for director, actor, and audience alike.

Musical logic in theatrical performance has become as great a formal imperative for Zadara as narrative or image, as reflected in his work with composers such as D ominik Strycharski or Leszek Mozdzer. His understanding of Kochanowski is at once musical and theatrical, rather than as an Aristotelian neo-classical drama. This approach reveals a dramaturgical line in Polish drama from Kochanowski's Dismissing the Greek Envqys through Mickiewicz and Slowacki to Wyspiaiiski and eventually to R6zewicz's The Card Index-it also suggests the possibility of reading back through these works from the perspective of the contemporary post-dramatic theatre that R6zewicz anticipated in his play. This series of texts reveals a recurring pattern of rhythmically and thematically driven dramaturgy, with an emphasis on poetic exuberance that explores the boundaries between soliloquy and aria, rhetoric and ritual incantation, white noise and ambience, chorus and soloist, cacophony and silence. This is a dramaturgy structured around harmonies and dissonances, around the juxtaposition of the exalted, the cruel, and the banal.

49

This inner logic is the true legacy of Kochanowski's Dismissing the Greek Envqys, not the play's neo-classical surface.

As notable as Zadara's productions have proven in Poland, their potential appeal and impact are certainly not limited to the Polish audience. His work provides an important opening to share and test the work of Kochanowski, Slowacki, or Wyspianski abroad. No previous director has come better prepared to speak on behalf of these playwrights to foreign audiences-particularly English-speaking audiences in London, New York, and Los Angeles-whether the production is Dismissing the Creek Em•qys or Gombrowicz's Operetta.

NOTES

I This is an expanded and updated version of the article "Nowe Wyzwolenie Michala Zadary" originally published as the keynote essay for the program of the Warsaw Theatre Meetings Festival in April 2008.


THE VARPAKHOVSKY THEATRE DYNASTY: FROM MEYERHOLD'S TROUPE THROUGH STALIN'S CAMP

TO MOSCOW AND MONTREAL

Mayia Pramatarova

On his desk there always were: a rulerj a compass, color pencils and an eraserj and also his jaz1orite timer. Here, space and time were calculated

David Borovsky

The one-hundred-year anniversary of the Russian director Leonid Varpakhovsky (1908-1976) is an appropriate moment to celebrate an indomitable artist who survived the repressive years of the Stalin regime. No matter what tragedy befell him, he would never stop his work in theatre. Following Meyerhold's theatrical theory and practice, Varpakhovsky created his own distinct stage aesthetics. He developed a theory that he used to produce marvelous performances, and he left a body of important work in the art of directing and the metaphysics of theatre.

The Method

Varpakhovsky worked on developing what later became The Method at the Meyerhold Theatre (GosTIM). He served as a scientific secretary to Meyerhold for three years at the Scientific Research Laboratory (NIL), studying Meyerhold's performances and developing methods for their graphical recording. These methods included sound, stage movement, and timing recordings. Varpakhovsky's point of view was that "until we learn how to record the performance graphically on paper, we will never be able to study and recreate the performance itself. T heatre will be more scientific and less amateur once we know how to record it."l

Varpakhovsky based his work on a descriptive method developed by Vasily Vasilievich Glebov at the Moscow Art Theatre in the 1930s, a "chess technique," and N. Ivanov's graphing system, among other

methods.2 His first practical work in this field entailed recording the pauses and syncopation of the highs and lows in the stage speech. For example, all the pauses in the speech of the actors in the performance of The Lac!J of the

51

Camellias on April10, 1934 were written down as an oscilogram. "The result was no longer the plain Dumas text, but the Dumas text as performed by

the actress Zinaida Raikh, staged by Meyerhold."3 The stage movement was registered dynamically and subseguently synchronized with the recording of sound. On February 22, 1936, with the assistance of VTO Research Laboratory, and using the methods developed at NIL, he recorded

Vakhtangov's Princess Turandot. 4

His research resulted in a method that looked at the spectacle as a condensed whole. The performance consisted of different elements, which were to be recorded separately by specific means. However, according to Varpakhovsky, the graphic version of the whole performance could be as simple as musical notation. Analysis of such a recording could then lead to a generative aesthetic system.

The Life

In the 1920s, Varpakhovsky studied at the Moscow Conservatory and worked as a silent film accompanist. In the beginning of the 1930s, he studied at Moscow State University and worked on three productions as a stage designer at local theatres. In the summer of 1933, he started collaborating with Vsevolod Meyerhold at his Meyerhold Theatre, and in 1935 he left it. On the night of his first recording of the performance at Vakhtangov's Theatre Studio in 1936, Leonid Varpakhovsky was arrested on a pretext of ties to Trotskyism and was exiled to Kazakhstan. There, in the city of Alma-Ata, he started working at a local theatre. However, he was arrested again during the rehearsals period of A Servant of Two Masters in 1937. This time Varpakhovsky was sentenced to ten years in a labor camp for "counterrevolutionary activity." In September 1940, he was transferred to a camp in Kolyma, where he was used in general works and later in so-called prisoners' cultural brigades. His

first production with the cultural brigades was The Imaginary Invalid by Moliere.s In Kolyma, Varpakhovsky created many productions, including plays

by Maxim Gorky, Jerome K. Jerome, Alexander Ostrovsky, and Carlo Goldoni. One of his most important works during this period was Verdi's La Traviata in 1945, the first opera in Kolyma, which was acclaimed as a "joyful

event."6 It was staged at the venue built by prisoners, some of whom later were

52 Slavic and East European Petjom1ance Vol. 29, No. 1

Leonid Varpakhovsky

incorporated into a production staff. Among the staff were the famous painter and stage designer Leonid Vegener; the artist associated with the "World of

Art" group, Vasily Shuhaev; and the Parisian fashion designer Vera Shuhaeva.7 The singer Ida S. Ziskin, who performed Violetta, became

Varpakhovsky's second wife. They had both lost their first spouses in prison.

Their camp love is described in one of the Kofyflla Tales. 8

Varpakhovsky's term of exile ended in 1948; however, fearing further repressions, he stayed in Kolyma until Stalin's death in 1953. After his exile, he was not allowed to enter thirty-nine sites in the Soviet Union, including his native Moscow. Nevertheless, he broke this order and seeded in Tbilisi, Georgia,

53

where he was able to stage Chekhov's The Seagull (1953) and Bulgakov's The Dt!J'S of the Turbins (1954) at the Griboedov Theatre.

After Tiblisi, Varpakhovsky worked successfully in theatres of Kiev, Kharkov, and Leningrad, until eventually he was allowed to return to Moscow in 1956. In 1957, he was exonerated and became an artistic director at the Ermolova Theatre. According to contemporaries, his staging of the play Gleb Kosmachev (1960) by Mikhail Shatrov exhibited a strong anti-Stalinist spirit. It was a production exquisite both as an overall form and as the work of an actor, and predictably caused a theatrical and political scandal.

After 1957, Varpakhovsky distanced himself from any officially

sanctioned governmental posts in the theatre.9 During the last years of his life, he suffered from severe depression. According to his son Fyodor, Varpakhovsky feared imprisonment until the end of his life.

Over the course of his life, in Moscow alone, Varpakhovsky staged more than twenty performances at the Maly, Ermolova, Moscow Art, and Stanislavsky theatres. In 1968, with David Borovsky (1934-2006) as designer, Varpakhovsky staged The Lower Depths by Gorky at the Army Theatre in Sofia, Bulgaria. The stage design for this play created an abstract image of a shelter with bunk beds. In the first act, the stage environment was structured around a low horizontal line, reminiscent of the interior of a gulag barrack. In the second act, it became a narrow symbolic structure stretched in a vertical direction, depicting a space outside. "Deep analysis of the characters and their life" was

the main rhroughline of the play.10 This was his only work outside of the Soviet Union, and yet it was

nevertheless behind the Iron Curtain. David Borovsky, who was mainly connected with the Moscow Taganka Theatre, worked with Varpakhovsky for many years after the 1960s. Together, they developed a theatre aesthetic that was at the same time ascetic and metaphorical. Their works continued the tradition of the Russian avant-garde and Meyerhold. Leonid Varpakhovsky considered himself a true follower of Meyerhold's method, combining extreme theatricality and stylization. However, he did not feel free to extend himself far beyond the limits of psychological realism, which was the dominant aesthetic form in the Soviet Union at the time.

Varpakhovsky generalized his experience in the fundamental book, Observations, Ana!Jsis, Experience. The defining principle of Varpakhovsky's method was the dynamic visual structure of the whole performance, which was


to evolve along with the development of the plot and characters. Varpakhovsky always insisted that rehearsals should start only after the performance's visual structure had been established.

The second most important element of his method was music. Following Meyerhold's tradition, Varpakhovsky perceived music as one of the key components of a performance. The general score itself was built according to musical laws. In Lermontov's Masquerade, staged at the Moscow Maly Theatre (1962), Varpakhovsky used Prokofiev's Pushkin Waltzes, which he discovered in the state archives. The great twentieth- century composer Igor Stravinsky, who

saw Masquerade, noted its "great musicaliry."11

Varapkhovky's Theatre in Montreal

Varpakhovsky's daughter Anna was born in Kolyma's city of Magadan. She studied acting at the Schukin School of the Vakhtangov Theatre

in Moscow. In 1971, she started performing at the Stanislavsky Theatre,12 and during the twenry-three years that followed, she built a rich repertory of both classical and modern roles.

In 1994, in a wave of Eastern European emigration to North America, she moved to Canada. The following year in Montreal, with her brother Gregory Ziskin, she founded a Russian theatre named after her father.

Rehearsals were, and are still today, held at Anna's house, which has a small stage. Actors still come from as far away as N ew York and Moscow and live on the premises during rehearsals. Costumes are made at a special workshop in Montreal, and the scenery is made in Canada from drawings and models produced in Moscow. The preparation of a performance regularly takes four to six months, with an extra month devoted to rehearsals. After that, the play is performed at venues in Canada, the U.S., Russia, and Europe. To a certain extent, the Varpakhovsky Theatre is similar to a traveling theatre with a level of quality that would be available for a modern theatre, such as the best stage design, access to great theatre venues, and high-grade equipment. On other occasions, the Canadian troupe travels to countries once part of the Soviet Union, where they reinforce themselves with local actors and designers at the theatres connected with the name of Leonid Varpakhovsky. In 2006, Anna directed at the Magadan Theatre, where her father had worked as a prisoner. As of 2008, the Varpakhovsky Theatre has opened two productions in Kiev with notable

55

success. The first production was an adaptation of Ivan Menchell ' s The Cemetery Club. The second was Uncle's Dream by Dostoevsky that builds upon the production of the same play that had opened the Montreal Theatre (director

Gregory Ziskin, stage designer David Borovsky) in 1995.13

The author wishes to express deep gratitude to Andrey Varpakhovsky for helpful discussion and corrections.

NOT ES

1 Leonid Varpakhovsky, Nabliudenia, Anali-;v Opyt [Observations, Analysis, Experience) (Moscow: VTO Publishing, 1978), 160.

2 Vasily Vasilievich Glebov (1891-1943) was an assistant stage manager. Starting in 1933, he worked at the Moscow Art Theatre. In addition to his assistant stage manager duties, he took notes on how some of the productions were staged, such as The Storm, Moliere, and The Three Sisters among others.

3 Leonid Varpakhovsky, 173.

4 Ibid., 167.

5 Ida Varpakhovsky, "Iz Vospominanyi Kolymskoi Traviaty" (From Memoirs of Kolyma's Traviata], in Teatr GULACa: T/ospominaniia i Ocherki, ed. M. M. Korallov (Moscow: Memorial Publishing, 1995), 69.

6 Boris Melnikov, "Opera v Magadane" (Opera in Magadan], Sovetskaya Ko!Jma (Magadan), March 31, 1945. 7 BezAntrakia [No Intermission), directed by Gabna Dolmatovskaya (Moscow: Institut Kinoiskussrva, 2007).

8 Varlam Shalamov, "Ivan Fyoderovich" in Ko!Jn1Skie Rasskazy [Kolyma Tales] (Moscow: U-Factoria, 2004), 1: 25~5.

9 David Borovsky, Ubegayushchee Prostranstvo [Escaping Space] (Moscow: EKSMO, 2006), 48.

10 Lilia Ivancheva, "Zavesite se vdigat" [Lifting the Curtain), Srednoshkolsko Zname (Sofia), Oct. 1, 1968.

11 Dolmatovskaya, BezAntrakta.

12 According to his daughter Anna Varpakhovsky the last time Leonid Varpakhovsky appeared on stage at the Stanislavsky Theatre was during opening night of The Rainmaktr by N. Richard Nash in 1972.

13 Olga Donee, Aktrissa Anna Varpakhovs~: "Ne Zhizn, a Sploshnoi Samolet" (Actress Anna Varpakhovsky: "Not a life, but perpetual flight'1, lif!estia (Kiev), Nov. 20, 2008.

56 Slavic and East Europea/1 Perjorma11ce Vol. 29, No. 1

MADE IN POLAND AT 59E59

Thomas E dmund Starky

One of the emerging young talents of contemporary Polish theatre and ftlm, director and screenwriter Przemyslaw Wojcieszek, had his American theatrical debut with the U.S. production by The Play Company of his play Made in Poland, which ran from October 29 to November 30 2008 at 59E59 in New York City. Directed by Jackson Gay and based on a translation by Alissa Valles, the American interpretation of Wojcieszek's play added a further twist to the thematics of post-Communist Poland's entry into "globalization" and its effects on a provincial ground zero. The play was first performed under the English title in Poland at the end of 2004, the year of its accession to the European Union. The EU expansion was ratified in a national referendum by the Polish people, who otherwise were largely left out of deliberations over concrete policy reforms membership would entail.l The performance by American actOrs of Made in Poland allowed one to reconsider and re-imagine a figure to come of the "people" that could serve as an alternative to the contemporary form of globalization in which often the "people" seem to be missing.2 This renewed international figure of the people would have to be sought outside of the globalized commercialization evoked by the "Made in . . . " label, in which people's production is erased in the large scale sale and circulation of fetishized commodities, or as Marx famously noted in the first volume of Capital, relationships among people were being replaced in the capitalist marketplace by relationships among things.

Wojcieszek's play takes place in a generic public housing project where rows of rectangular apartment towers erected by the former system grow increasingly dilapidated. These monotonous postwar working class districts-which were designed within many Eastern bloc countries as cheap mass-produced copies of the utopian modernist International Style associated with ClAM (International Congress of Modern Architecture)-today conjure drab images of stasis when coupled with the poverty and lack of upward mobility of those living within their concrete walls. The play opens with the teenage revolutionary Bogus (played by Kit Williamson) smashing up parked cars and phone booths with a crowbar in a parking lot while shouting an impromptu manifesto. Ola Maslik is resourceful with the set design for an indoor performance, depending in large part on the audience's imagination to recreate the various locations where the original Polish production took place

57

partially outdoors amid real apartment blocks with the actor playing Bogus smashing up a car in a local parking lot.3 The corrugated tin set provides a frame for the proceedings with a replica of the tail end of a vehicle built in along with cramped living quarters, so many black holes that neo-liberal capital only enters to extract surplus value through low wages.

More implicitly however, Bogus is attacking symbols of unequal class-determined mobility. While smashing up a Lincoln Town Car (which it turns out belongs to local gangsters who later return to shake down Bogus for twenty thousand zlotys for the damage) and the infrastructure of telecommunications, he declares war on "everything", by which one could perhaps infer the diffuse networked powers of globalized capitalism that seem to be everywhere and nowhere at once. The parking lot attendant Emil Qonathan Clem), whom Bogus will befriend and whose sister Monika (Natalia Zvereva) he becomes interested in, is a cripple bound to a wheelchair, paid subsistence wages to watch over the paraphernalia of a mobility he himself may never attain. In Wojcieszek's original script and in Valles's earlier translation,4 the object of Bogus's fury is a Lexus, and by extension perhaps, the Friedmanesque flat world whose inhabitants are torn between traditional olive trees and their desire for Lexuses. The gangsters who have "obtained their Lexus" are an especially witty critique of the desires instilled by globalization.s The change to a Lincoln Town Car plays up the protagonist's anti-American mind-set but may lose some of the edge implied by Wojcieszek's critique, considering that this is a Ford vehicle, a somewhat unlikely object of rage for a working class protagonist who might rather take issue with the recent shift in Poland toward the de-industrialized post-Fordist paradigm of flexible labor.6 Bogus could be seen as attacking both provincial stasis and the dynamism of the financial and communication flows of late capitalism that pervade postmodern city centers possessing access to the necessary infrastructure while intensifying poverty in outlaying unconnected zones such as his own. The fusion enacted by Maslik's set- in which the symbol of speed, an automobile, is melded with the set frame meant to evoke an apartment tower block, the whole bearing the crowbar attack-supports Bogus's double-edged critique.

Having rejected the "Lexus" and the fast track to "prosperity" and "growth"- two fetishized terms in the discourse surrounding globalization which mask the degree to which increases in average income often mean that the rich have gotten richer while the wages of the poor have stagnated or fallen- Wojcieszek's protagonist is left to sort through Poland's traditions.

59

Made in Poland, by Przemyslaw Wojcieszek, clirected by Jackson Gay, The Play Company, 59E59

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Made in Poland, by Przemyslaw Wojcieszek, directed by Jackson Gay, The Play Company, 59E59

61

Two ghosts emerge, the ghost of Catholicism and the ghost of Marx. In seeking out a partner for his revolutionary struggle, Bogus visits his alcoholic former schoolteacher Viktor (played by Rob Campbell), an exCommunist casualty of the transition. A symbol of the exhaustion of utopian energies which his young counterpart possesses in abundance, Viktor responds to Bogus's entreaties by offering the inexperienced rebel tea and advising him, to the latter's disappointment, to find a job. Religion has also become largely irrelevant as evidenced by Bogus's interactions with Father Edmund (Ed Vassallo), the local priest who is regularly mocked by the inhabitants of the apartment blocks. Bogus quits the church in an early scene, having tattooed "FUCK OFF" on his forehead in a sign of defiance. The only relevant authority figure turns out to be the singer and pop culture icon Krzysztof Krawczyk- a favorite of Bogus's mother Irena (played with dignity and humor by Karen Young)-posters of whom decorate the stage and whose spectral image is beamed against a back wall as the play's surrealist ending builds to a crescendo evoking a sort of Plato's cave for Poland's new media society. In the period of globalization in which peoples of the world form cognitive maps of surrounding reality through popular images, neither Communist nor Catholic ideology can speak to the masses as authentically as the cultural hybridization evoked by Krawczyk, whose deeply Polish musical style, to which could be added many other more exotic-including far Eastern-influences figures at several moments in Bart Fasbender's sound design. One such moment that celebrates the hybrid character of the singer's work occurs when Irena comes across an old album Krawczyk made in Bulgaria and concludes, "I've never heard Krawczyk in Bulgarian. It must be ... Beautiful!" The solution to the aporia between Marx and the Church also turns out to be a hybrid, as Bogus surmounts his crisis of identity by finally declaring, "I know who I am now ... a young Catholic from the working class!"

Following this hybrid Marxian ghost in keeping with the utopian energies in play in the performance, perhaps cultural hybridization can symbolize a new Internationalism to come in which the fetishized difference captured in the "Made in ... " label attached to commodities can lose its fetish character revealing the people (the producers) underneath. This defetishized people could then enter the global stage not just as commodity producers, but as historical protagonists in the constitution of a more legitimate form of globalization that does not simply call upon them as national peoples to ratify its expansions. This would be a form that avoids the reified national difference


0. \.).)

Made in Poland, by Przemyslaw Wojcieszek, directed by Jackson Gay, The Play Company, 59E59

which derailed earlier utopian attempts at Internationalism. The Play Company and its American actors engaging in a performance of contemporary Poland's realities have evoked the possibility of such a defetishization and succeeded in putting on an engaging introduction for the American audience of a promising talent of Polish stage and cinema.

NOTES

1 Beate Sissenich has recently argued that the 2004 EU enlargement process was driven

by bureaucratic and political elites and that "society has been strangely absent from EU social policy transfer in Poland and Hungary" (181). Beate Sissenich, Building States

without Sociery: European Union Enlargement and the Transfer of EU Social Policy to Poland and Hungary (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2007). 2 The economist Dani Rodrik has outlined the structural reasons for the disappearance

of the people in processes of globalization by articulating what he calls "The Political Trilemma of the Global Economy" in which the "nation-state system, deep economic

integration, and democracy" are shown to be " mutually incompatible." "Feasible Globalizations" in Globalization, What's New? (New York: Columbia, 2005), 196--213. 3 Roman Pawlowski in his introduction to Wojcieszek's play in his anthology of

contemporary Polish drama describes the Legnica performance, where one night in December 2004 the actor Eryk Lubos began demolishing a vehicle, causing some

inhabitants of the nearby apartment blocks to phone the police. "Made in Legnica" in Made in Poland (Cracow: Korporacja Ha!Art & Horyzont, 2006), 400. 4 I thank Linda Chapman of New York Theatre Workshop for the text of Alissa Valles' translation, portions of which were read at an evening with the author at the Martin E .

Segal Theatre on June 7, 2007. 5 Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the olive tree (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999). Wojcieszek likely would have been aware before writing his play of Friedman's

book which was translated into Polish in 2001 or at least had the general outline of the argument from reviews in the press following the publication of the Polish translation. Thomas L. Friedman, LeX11s i drzewo oliwne. Zro'{!'miei globalizaq{ (Poznan: Dom

Wydawniczy Rebis, 2001). 6 For recent changes in labor in Poland from an anthropologist's perspective see

Elizabeth C. Dunn, Privatizing Poland· baf?y food, big business, and the remaking of labor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).


CHEKHOVIAN TANGO, KOREAN-STYLE: A STAGING OF 7HE SEAGULL IN SEOUL, KOREA

Olga Muratova

The 2008 production of The Seagull performed in Korean at the Sundol Theatre, Seoul, South Korea, was a visual presentation of an actionpacked Asian interpretation of what some might say is an actionjree Russian drama. Out of many possible approaches to The Seagull, Sang-Sik Nam, a professor at the Department of T heatre at Kyonggi University and the production's director, seemed to focus on two: paying tribute to Treplev, an unappreciated and unsung poet, and showing the destructive force of uncontrolled passions and desires.

During the pre-show, all eleven actors were already on stage and in character while a recording of an accordion being played in a minor key looped over the sound system. (This later became the leading instrument in the tango leitmotif of the first three acts.) The accordion underscoring the European origin of the text was juxtaposed to the white make-up worn by all the actors, which suggested an Asian tradition. The bridge between these two traditions was the hospital setting-specifically, a mental institution, which was indicated by a number of primitive yet troubling drawings that hung from two strings across the left side of the stage. The mental hospital shifted the focus of the performance to the world of emotions. However, if the troubling emotions at play in The Seagull are mainly depicted in the text linguistically, this Korean production materialized them through intense onstage action. The white pajamas worn by every actor, except for Masha (Hyo Jin Kim), spoke of the tragedy of individuals who are under the pressure to conform to established rules. Specific accessories were added to the characters' costumes to individualize them. They provided the audience with insight into the characters' inner worlds, using signs to universalize the drama tis personae.

The artificial world of the play was established through the use of a two dimensional, sterile-white outline of a cardboard house with the black holes for a door and a window. Sorin (Tae Gong Gang) sat in solitude, stage left, resting on his walking cane. Opposite Sorin, nine actors sat in a line. One mysterious character, the Observer Qoo Hee Kim), who never uttered a word during the performance, watched over the proceedings while leaning against a

65

column. Appearing vulnerable and marginalized from society, all eleven actors were barefooted.

A prologue, presented as a dumb show, followed the pre-show. Chekhov's text was first translated into the language of gestures, masks, and dance. In the prologue, Kostya (Byung-Joo Park) was led to the front of the stage where he sat cross-legged on a chair. Next to the chair stood a small desk upon which a writer's notebook was laid. Kostya, absorbed by the notebook's yellow pages, leafed through them, reading them attentively. Meanwhile, a mini-parade of all the characters appeared on stage to a catchy tango (composed by Serom Kim specifically for the production). The heartbreaking chords of the tango, as well as the deliberate contrast between Kostya's stasis and the other characters' bubbling action established the frame of a memory play. With Kostya already dead, the performance, initiated by the Observer, was going to be given in his honor.

T he tango pageant presented the characters through Kostya's eyes. Nina (Hee Yong Shin) held a naked, rubber baby doll that she pressed tightly to her bosom until the start of Act IV It was a metaphor for what ultimately destroyed Kostya's hope of ever winning her love. Masha wore a black dress adhering to Chekhov's stage directions, but also to place her in sharp contrast to the crowd in hospital whites. Polina (Nam Hwa Kim) wore a pink cotton kerchief around her head and a small Korean drum on a string around her neck. Invoking the traditions of p'ansori, a theatricalized, often satirical, musical story of love performed to a drum rhythm, she beat her drum while moving rhythmically around the stage-a somewhat comical take on a love story. Shamrayev (Tae Yong Choi) wore a gardener's vest over his pajamas and a pair of white stylish gloves. His vest and his wife's proletarian kerchief pointed to their status as house help, but Shamrayev's gloves also suggested his refined taste as a theatre and opera connoisseur. Dorn (Kyung Soo Park), with his long hair styled in slick ponytail, wore a black bowtie around his neck and a gluedon smile on his face.

Nam not only made every character wear a specific ornament or article of clothing, but also gave them individual mO\'ements, or gestures, that they presented to the audience during the prologue and repeated mechanically when not directly involved in downstage action. This perpetual, out-ofspotlight, complicated ballet served as an allegory of the life that existed

67

around Kostya, but which he never managed to incorporate into his own existence.

At the end of the pageant, Arkaclina (Young Hee Do) tangoed in, wearing scandalously red pumps with stiletto heels and a loud-colored shawl with tassels that clashed with her hospital clothes. As a final touch, her hair was extravagandy styled and her face made up with heavy eye and lip make-up. Her costume, like camouflage, attempted to hide her age, as did her taking on a younger lover and paying no attention to her own son.

The "tango parade" was finished by Trigorin (Sung Woo J ung), who sported dark sunglasses and a black jacket over his pajamas. As soon as every character was introduced, they all engaged in an intense dance of passion and uncontrolled sensuality.

After the spectacular tango, Chekhov's Act I began. Kostya's decadent play was performed by Nina in the set's window, while all other characters, except for the Observer and Kostya, who nervously lip-synched the lines she was delivering, sat at a long table with their backs to Nina, using knives and forks in rhythmically synchronized, dance-like movements. Eating was clearly much more important to them than anything Kostya had written or Nina had rehearsed. Basic necessities easily won over artistic creativity, and egotistical self-absorption quickly extinguished any altruistic intent. The person most absorbed in herself and paying the least amount of attention to Kostya's decadent play was Arkadina, whose shameless flirting with Trigorin during Nina's performance led Kostya to interrupt Nina's monologue midsentence.

Chekhov's dialogue between Kostya and Nina from Act I reveals the distance between them: Kostya is madly in love with Nina while she simply enjoys his company as a friend. Nam emphasized this emotional gap by placing the two at opposite ends of the stage most of the time and almost never having them face each other while they converse. The Kostya-Nina exchange of Act I was brutally interrupted by a very physical scene in which Trigorin chases Arkadina across the stage as a prelude to an unleashing of their animal fervor. Playing with a long piece of bright-red cloth to symbolize their raw passions and untamed desires, the actors took turns wrapping each other in the cloth, pulling at its ends in a tug-of-war of sexual power, and turning it into a twisted lasso used to draw each other close in a tight embrace.

Kostya could not stand the sight of his mother acting so


The Seagull, directed by Sang-Sik Nam, Sundol Theatre, Seoul, South Korea ..._]

promiscuously and left, while Nina remained glued to her spot, watching the love games. As Arkadina was seething from Nina's unwelcome presence, Trigorin used his red-cloth to seduce the girl. Resolute, however, Arkadina foiled his attempt. The tango resumed and Polina and D orn appeared on stage, as the spotlight shifted to their version of the love dance that absorbed their dialogue in Act I.

Following the tango scene, the spotlight caught Kostya's silhouette out of the darkness. The yellow light hugged the young poet lying on the floor center-stage, smoking a cigarette. The actors not involved in the scene imitated seagull cries from their chairs. Meanwhile, Trigorin mimicked a seagull hunting for its prey. He circled the stage until ftnally noticing Kostya. Swooping over the much smaller Kostya, he pirtned him to the floor. Then he grabbed his victim by the hair and violently dragged him across the stage to a bucket of water. Kostya never resisted as Trigorin plunged his head in the bucket, holding it there to demonstrate his absolute superiority as a writer, lover, and object of Arkadina's attention. Trigorin's smile never left his face, not even when he pulled Kostya's head from the water and, making sure that his opponent was destroyed, emptied another bucket full of scraps and pieces of paper onto his listless body, burying him almost completely under words, words, words. The symbolic duel was won: Kostya was crushed while Trigorin celebrated his unconditional victory.

As the lights went down, the seagull cries continued in the darkness. When the lights came up, Trigorin and Dorn, two playboys with predatory natures and malicious smiles, were fishing. Their rods were aimed at the center of the stage, where Nina, Polina, and Arkadina were gathered, while Masha wandered close by carrying a bottle of wine. The three women in the center were easy catch for the Trigorins and Dorns of this world, the women preferring the men's raptorial personality to the more humble and timid one of the Kostyas and Shamrayevs. Masha, who never joined the group of lusting females, remained the only woman who found Kostya appealing. T he tango started anew, and Dorn engaged Polina, his catch of the day, in a dance of love and desire. He whirled her around until she was dizzy and collapsed. Never noticing her fall, Dorn grabbed Trigorin and continued his narcissistic and egotistical tango until an ear-splitting gunshot tore the melody in half.

Everybody froze, forming a tableau. There were four shots, and after each the actors re-arranged themselves slightly. After the last shot, the light

73

turned blue and Kosrya appeared from the cardboard house, carrying a gun and a sack. He threw the sack to Nina's feet, aimed his gun at it, and fired, killing the seagull concealed inside. His actions frightened Nina, making her clutch the baby doll and press it even closer to her bosom. Dissatisfied with Nina's reaction and her rejection of his offering of love, he then aimed the gun at his own throat. More seagull cries were heard, while Trigorin grabbed Nina and propelled her to the front of the stage, away from Kostya. Alas, the playboy writer found the idea for a future story: a girl, who lives on the lake, like a seagull, is destroyed by a passerby for no reason whatsoever. In a gesture of cheap eroticism, wetting his fingers with saliva, Trigorin wrote this idea for his story in the air, while Nina watched in fascination.

Act III started with Nina rolling on the floor, suffering from the pain of her unfortunate loYe for Trigorin. Another shot was heard, and Kosrya came downstage to have his bandages changed-not by his mother, who never seemed willing to even approach her son, but by Dorn, who, in lieu of compassion, displayed every sentiment of a researcher dissecting a frog. Instead of the bandages, rolls of coarse white toilet paper were used, functioning later as parry streamers that everybody threw at Nina while she was writhing in pain on the floor. Enjoying other people's suffering, it seems, is yet another characteristic of a cruel world that has no place for sensitive poets.

The tango started again, and Trigorin, imitating a bullfighter in a bloody corrida, used the red cloth from Act I to lure Nina center-stage and ignite strong passions in her. The Nina-Trigorin dance, however, was interrupted by Arkadina, who threw her lover on the floor in a fit of rage, first whipping and then choking him with the cloth until he crawled back to her feet.

In Act IV, the comic components disappeared without a trace, and tragedy proper started its rule and reign. The music in the last act was replaced by the sound of wind. At the start of the act, ina's rubber doll was hanging from its neck in the center of the stage. The macabre spectacle hinted at r ina's dead baby, conceived by Trigorin, and at Masha's neglected and abandoned child for whom she readily sacrificed her love for Kostya. Nina sang a rune while standing in the window frame of the cardboard house. This time, her audience faced her and clapped its hands rhythmically to follow her song. She was singing not in the theatre, but in a brothel (known in Korea as "a house of


enterntainment.") Nina's personal tragedy was too big and her talent was not big enough for Melpomene, but she managed to fit the parr of a hetaera perfectly. Nina finished her song, and Medvedenko (Young Chan Park) and Dorn threw a bunch of banknotes at her. Trigorin did not throw money, but ominously swung the hanged baby instead.

Nina, now visibly pregnant and with a cut lip, slowly walked to the left of the stage. By that time, Kostya had taken the Observer's place near the column and was watching the proceedings with interest. Polina arranged the things on Kostya's writing desk, and he took his place behind it, sitting again cross-legged on his chair. Pouring a glass of vodka for Kostya, Polina tried to coax him into paying attention to her daughter. Masha, who had quietly materialized behind Kostya's back, was standing very close but never touched him. Kostya focused on his glass of vodka, ignoring Masha. The young woman's gestures were starred but never finished, her hands left to hang lifelessly in mid air. Never noticing Masha's agony, Kostya finished reading the yellow pages of his notebook and tore them into little pieces.

Arkadina and Trigorin arrived and, after the commotion of greetings, e,·erybody moved behind the cardboard house and started a game of cards in the rosy light of the window frame. Kostya was left alone downstage, where he remained engrossed in his writing. Once Trigorin won the game and the noises of approval reached Kostya, he slowly poured a glass of vodka over his head, unable to endure yet another victory of his arch-nemesis.

Nina rose from her chair and wrapped her shawl around her shoulders. When she faced the audience a moment later, she was no longer pregnant, but her lip was still bloody and swollen. When she walked into Kostya's study, he was pleasantly surprised and started fussing around her, offering his help with the shawl and pouring her a glass of ,·odka. ~'hen Nina, wearing a frozen mask of anguish, told him about her un-extinguished love for Trigorin, Kostya spilled her drink and his joy faded. As the rosy light changed into blue almost imperceptibly, Kost:ya choked on his own cry of desperation;

ina ran out through the doorway. Kostya's eyes followed ina as she left accompanied only by the sound of the wind.

The light shifted to the now drunk crowd of card players in the window. There was another ear-splitting gunshot, and Dorn ventured to investigate. But before he could reach the door, Sorin wheeled in Kostya's limp, shirtless, body. The yellow light of the projector enveloped the actor's

75

torso-a glow reflecting off his skin, creating an almost religious effect. Sorin poured a bucketful of red paint over Kostya's lifeless form. The last sound heard in the dimming lights was that of drunken laughter coming from the window:

Chekhov has been widely staged in Korea since 1922 when his dramas first appeared in translation from Japanese. Without changing the substance of Chekhov's drama, Nam took certain liberties with the play's form; however, those liberties were so organically and effortlessly intertwined with the original architecture of the play that they seemed indigenous. As unorthodox as Nam's production of The Seagull was, it captured the Chekhovian spirit that constitutes the essence of the play.


WAJDA'S KA TYN

Leonard Quart

Poland has produced a host of world-class directors-Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Zanussi, Agnieszka H olland, Roman Polanski, and arguably, its greatest-Andrzej Wajda, the director of such politically and historically charged masterworks as Kana/, Ashes and Diamonds, Man of Marble. In the last decade and a half, Wajda, has continued into his eighties making films, but few of them have been distributed commercially in the United States. The best of them was Pan Tadeusz (1999), an artistic and boxoffice success in Poland, based on Adam Mickiewicz's (the Polish Romantic poet and playwright) nineteenth-century epic poem.

His most recent film, Katyn, the first in five years, depicted the Katyn massacre, what Wajda calls the "unhealed wound" in his country's history. It was a huge hit in Poland, received a screening at the Tribeca Film Festival in the spring of 2008, and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language film for 2007. The 1940 Katyn massacre was a result of the 1939 secret non-aggression pact signed by Hitler and Stalin, and just one of WWII's countless atrocities. After the pact was signed, the Red Army took nearly 18,000 Polish officers as prisoners and occupied all of the Polish eastern provinces. Among the POWs there were a dozen generals, and a majority of the POWs were officers of the reserve, most of whom came from the intelligentsia.

The systematic murder by the N.K.V.D. of 15,000 members of the Polish officers corps under Stalin's orders (Wajda's own father, Jakub, being one of them) had stood for decades as the Poles' secret cross to bear. The Katyn graves were discovered in April 1943 only when the German army moved east. The Soviet authorities then denied the German charges, claiming the Nazis executed the Polish POWs. During the years when the Communists governed Poland, the subject of the massacre was off limits, silence on Katyn was expected, and the advocates of publicizing the real truth were persecuted and severely punished. It wasn't until 1989 when the Communists lost control of Poland that the truth of Katyn was revealed. In 1990 the U.S.S.R. authorities, after years of treating the charges as a defamation of the heroic anti-fascist struggle, finally admitted for the first time that the Soviet N.K.V.D. had committed the crime.

77

Andrzej Wajda


It rook a director of Wajda's moral courage and his commitment ro portraying Polish history and mythology to make a fum of this nature. Karyn is an unsentimental work, more interested in carefully detailing the execution of the officers, and its ramifications on the families that they left behind, than with entering the consciousness of its many characters. As shown in the fllm, the event was a national trauma that affected families all across the country waiting anxiously to learn who had died. Several scenes center on Polish crowds gathering in the city's streets to listen as the names of the victims are read.

For the predominantly Polish-American audience I saw it with (an invitational screening sponsored by the Polish Cultural Institute), the film provided a powerful shock of recognition and clearly spoke to them in a profoundly personal way. So when the film concluded, and the theatre lights went on, I saw tears streaming down many of the audience members' faces.

Karyn is based on the Andrzej Mularczyk novel Post Mortem, which utilizes the letters and diaries of real-life victims-unearthed when the Nazis first came across the mass graves. It contains a number of crisscrossing story lines that shift from the mortal plight of the Polish officers held by the Russians to their families back in Nazi-occupied Cracow. Few of the characters are given much individuation. What the characters almost all share is facing the moral dilemma of either keeping silent or asserting the truth of what happened to their loved ones in Katyn, which in turn would mean confronting imprisonment or worse. And not one of them can escape the anguish of inhabiting a nation that suppresses the horrific truth and continues perpetuating a life lie.

One of the few developed characters is the sharply observant Lt. Jerzy (Andrzej Chyra), who is one of the few officers that survived Katyn, but at the cost of his own soul. H e falsely testifies that Katyn was a Nazi atrocity and discovers he can't live with his guilt-ultimately committing suicide.

There are two characters that tend to behave without fear or constraint, and boldly and self-destructively challenge the Soviet's version of Katyn. They are awkwardly introduced into the narrative, with bare back stories to explain their appearance, and both are then destroyed by the Polish Communists. One of them, the blond, fiercely self-righteous Agnieszka (Magdalena Cielecka), is a veteran of the Warsaw Uprising, and uncompromising in her hatred of the Soviets and their Polish surrogateschoosing the side of "the murdered not the murderers." She is also

79

alienated from her art school director sister, who though without illusions about the Communists has joined the Party-utterly pessimistic about the future of a free Poland. The other, a young handsome partisan, Tadeusz (Antoni Pawlicki), who spent the war in the forests, acts with such foolhardy courage that he is quickly destroyed without even getting to experience fully his chance at first love. Wajda admires their courage, but implicitly we sense there is something quixotic and self-destructive in their behavior- that they are indulging in a Polish specialty-grand and noble gestures without much practical grasp of consequence.

The imprisoned Polish officers and their waiting wives behave in an exemplary manner. The wives display undivided loyalty and commitment to their husbands, and the men are stoical and brave. A key strand of the film follows Anna (Maja Ostaszewska), whose story parallels that of Wajda's mother. It is 1939 when Anna arrives at the eastern border of Poland in search of her husband Andrzej (Artur Zmijewski), a Polish officer who resists her pleas to run away with her, choosing to adhere to his military pledge and stay with his cavalry regiment.

One of the film's flaws is that almost all the Polish characters are given little dimension beyond heroic idealism and forbearance. And Wajda's portrait of Polish daily life during the occupation and right after the war is oddly sanitized-the women are all handsome and well-dressed, as if squalor and hunger were not the lot of Poles during that period. And if Wajda barely explores the Polish characters here, his Nazi and Soviet oppressors are almost indistinguishable cardboard cutouts of pure villainy, except for one Russian army officer who saves Anna and her daughter from deportation.

Ka!Jn is less an artistic triumph than a powerful recreation of a historical event that skillfully (fluid editing and a dark, poignant score by Krzysztof Penderecki which avoids overwhelming the action) brings to light an indelible, harrowing, and murderous moment in Poland's history. Since Wajda allows us little emotional identification with the film's characters, it's the massacre that takes central stage and grants Ka!Jn its tragic stature.

In fact, the most memorable and striking part of the ftlm are its last fifteen minutes where the Polish officers are transported to be methodically murdered by stone-faced Russian troops. They are all shot in the back of the head- leaving the floors and walls stained with blood. Archival footage from German and Soviet propaganda ftlms and newsreels are also intercut


to convey the immensity and viciousness of the massacre. The camera in that sequence pans over rows upon rows of corpses that stretch across the enormous pit where they have been buried and now exhumed. And we see forensic investigators examine the dried out bodies of the officers still clutching rosaries when they died.

\X'ajda wanted the film to show "the lie" of Katyn for the first time on the screen, and to provide a catharsis for Poles, because in his words, "we have finally shown the truth." If nothing else, the film clearly succeeded in doing just that.

82 Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 29, o. 1

CONTRIBUTORS

KERMIT DUNKELBERG received his Ph.D. 1n Performance Studies from New York University in 2008. This article draws on research for his doctoral dissertation, "Grotowski and North American Theatre: Translation, Transmission, Dissemination." He has published articles and rev1ews in The Drama Revie111, American Theatre, Theatre Forum, and Theatre Journal.

OLENA JENNINGS completed her M.F.A. at Columbia University and her M.A. at the University of Alberta. Her feature articles and book reviews can be found on KGB Bar Lit. Her translations from the Ukrainian have been published in Poetry International, Poetry International Web, and Chelsea. She recently completed her novel, Temporary Shelter, and is at work on a new novel, The Scent of Skin.

ALLEN J. KUHARSKI is chair of the Department of Theatre at Swarthmore College. His articles, reviews, and translations have been widely published in the U.S., Great Britain, Poland, France, and the Netherlands. He is a co-editor of the sixteen-volume collected works of Polish playwright Witold Gombrowicz being published by Wydawnictwo Literackie in Cracow.

OLGA MURATOVA teaches Russian Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. She is currently working on her doctorate dissertation in the D epartment of Comparative Literature, Graduate Center, CUNY She is a regular contributor to SEEP.

MAYIA PRAMATAROVA holds a Ph.D. from the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts (GITIS), writes as an American Correspondent for L!K (Sofia, Bulgaria) and The Stage (Moscow), is an observer for post.scriptum.ru and an associate at the Davis Center, Harvard University. She teaches at the National Theatre Academy (Sofia). She has been advisor at the Bulgarian Cultural Insti tute (Moscow) and dramaturg at the National Theatre (Sofia).

83

LEONARD QUART is Professor Emeritus of Cinema Studies at the College of Staten Island and at the CUNY Graduate Center, a Contributing Editor of Cineaste, and author of innumerable reviews and essays on film. Major publications include the third edition of American Film and Socie!J Since 1945 (Praeger, 2001) and How the War was Remembered· Hol!Jwood and Vietnam (Praeger, 1988), both co-authored with Albert Auster, and The Films of Mike Leigh for Cambridge University Press (2000), co-authored with Raymond Carney.

TH01f.AS EDMUND ST ARKY teaches Polish in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University, where he is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS). His doctoral dissertation considers critical responses to globalization in post-1989 Polish literature, theatre, visual art, and fum.


Photo Credits

Virlana Tkacz Vitaliy Horbonos

Cover of In a Dffftrent Light Watoku Ueno

Still the River Flows Alexander Khantaev

Warsaw Theatre Meetings FestivalPoster Design by Studio TEMEPROWKA

!phi genie Ryszard Kornecki

Phedra Ryszard Kornecki

Leonid Varpakhovsky Mayia Primatarova

Made in Po/amd Carol Rosegg

The Seagull

Courtesy of the Sundol Theatre

85

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This publication produced in collaboration with the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York and Bucharest.


Please make payments in US dollars payable to : Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY

Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10016·4309 Visit our website at: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: [email protected] or 212·817·1868


Buenos Aires in Translation Translated and Edited by jean Graham-Jones

BAiT epitomizes true international theatrical collaboration, bringing together four of the most important contemporary playwrights from Buenos Aires and pairing them with four cutting-edge US-based directors and their ensembles.

Plays include: Women Dreamt Horses by Daniel Veronese; A Kingdom, A Country or a Wasteland, In the Snow by Lola Arias; Ex-Antwone by Federico Leon; Panic by Rafael Spregelburd. BAiT is a Performance Space 122

Production, an initiative of Salon Volcan, with the support of Institute Cervantes and the Consulate General of Argentina in NewYork.


Four Works for the Theatre by Hugo Claus Translated and Edited by David Willinger

Hugo Claus is the foremost contemporary writer of Dutch language theatre, poetry, and prose. Flemish by birth and upbringing, Claus is the author of some ninety plays, novels, and collections of poetry. He is renowned as an enfant terrible of the arts throughout Europe. From the time he was affiliated with the international art group, COBRA, to his liaison with pornographic film star Silvia Kristel, to the celebration of his novel, The Sorrow of Belgium, Claus has careened through a career that is both scandal-ridden and formidable. Claus takes on all the taboos of his times.

Price USSts.oo plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)

Please make payments in US dollars payable to: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulat ion Manager, Mart in E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY

Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NYtoo16-4309 Visit our website at: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/ mestc/ Contact: [email protected] or 212-817-1868


The Heirs of Moliere Translated and Edited by Marvin Carlson

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This volume contains four representative French comedies of the period from the death of Moliere to the French Revolution : The Absent-Minded Lover by Jean-Fran<:ois Regnard, The Conceited Count by Philippe Nericault Destouches, The Fashionable Prejudice by Pierre Nivelle de Ia Chaussee, and The Friend of the Laws by Jean-Louis Laya.

Translated in a poetic form that seeks to capture the wit and spirit of the originals, these four plays suggest something of the range of the Moliere inheritance, from comedy of charac-ter through the highly popular sentimental comedy of the

mid-eighteenth century, to comedy that employs the Moliere tradition for more contemporary political end s.

Pixerecourt: Four Melodramas Translated and Edited by Daniel Gerould & Marvin Carlson

This volume contains four of Pixerecourt's most important melodramas: The Ruins of Babylon or ]afar and Zaida, The Dog of Montargis or The Forest of Bondy, Christopher Columbus or The Discovery of the New World, and Alice or The Scottish Gravediggers, as well as Charles Nodier's "Introduction" to the 1843 Collected Edition of Pixerecourt's plays and the two theoretical essays by the playwright, "Melodrama," and "Final Reflections on Melodrama."

Pixerecourt furnished the Theatre of Marvels with its most stunning effects, and brought the classic situations of fairground comedy up-to-date. He determined the structure of a popular theatre which was to last through the 19th century. Hannah Winter, The Theatre of Marvels

Price US$2o.oo each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)

Please make payments in US dollars payab le to: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY

Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10016·4309 Visit our website at: http: / f web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: [email protected] or 212·817-1868


Four Plays From North Africa Translated and edited by Marvin Carlson

This volume contains four modern plays from the Maghreb: Abdelkader Alloula's The Veil and Fatima Gallaire's House of Wives, both Algerian, julila Baccar's Araberlin from Tunisia, and Tayeb Saddiki's The Folies Berbers from Morocco.

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As the rich tradition of modern Arabic theatre has recently begun to be recognized by the Western theatre community, an important area within that tradition is still under-represented in existing anthologies and scholarship. That is the drama from the Northwest of Africa, the region known in Arabic as the Maghreb.

The Arab Oedipus Edited by Marvin Carlson

This volume contains four plays based on the Oedipus legend by four leading dramatists of the Arab world. Tawfiq Al-Hakim's King Oedipus, Ali Ahmed Bakathir's The Tragedy of Oedipus, Ali Salim's The Comedy of Oedipus and Walid lkhlasi's Oedipus as well as Al-Hakim's preface to his Oedipus on the subject of Arabic tragedy, a preface on translating Bakathir by Dalia Basiouny, and a general introduction by the editor.

An awareness of the rich tradition of modern Arabic theatre has only recently begun to be felt by the Western theatre community, and we hope that this collection will contribute to that growing awareness.

THE ARAB OEDIPUS

fOUII P'LAYI

Price US$2o.oo each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)

Please make payments in US dollars payable to: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY

Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10016·4309 Visit ou r website at: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: [email protected] or 212·817·1868