A scene from Waiting for.., courtesy of Opera Bałtycka, www.baltyckiteatrtanca.pl
The major contemporary dance company, Bałtycki Teatr Tańca started the season with a guest appearance at the 14th International Festival of Dance and Music in Bangkok. The troupe staged two performances from Izadora Weiss "Czekając na…" (Waiting for…) and "Święto wiosny" (The Rite of Spring)
The director of the Baltic Opera, Marek Weiss, comments:
The Bangkok festival is an important encounter between European and Asian cultures. Some of the most renowned dance theatre groups have performed at the event in the past, including the Nederlands Dans Theater. European performers treat the invitation to the Bangkok festival as a great opportunity and a door-opener for further performances in Asian countries, such as China and Japan.
The Bałtycki Teatr Tańca (Baltic Dance Theatre) is the first group from Poland to be invited the Thai festival. The director emphasises that the performances to be staged in Bangkok were selected thoughtfully. They are those pieces of the group that have met with the most enthusiastic reception of the audiences and critics alike. The two shows were recently shown at the dance festival in Bielefeld, where they were presented as part of the Klopsztanga. Poland with no boundaries. Programme of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.
In Bangokok, the group’s performance was awarded with a standing ovation, and it was commented that this was "the best level of artistic performance to be shown at our festival for years".
The performance enjoyed its preview showings at the Zawirowania Dance Festival in Warsaw in June, 2011, as well as a premiere staging at the Interanational Festival of Dance Theatres in Poznań in August, 2011
Izadora Weiss thus explains the motives shown as part of the Waiting for... performance:
Godot – Beckett’s figure which is a parabolic substitute for God in a contemporary world, had become a symbol for an unfulfilled expentancy, unrealised longing, and dreams with no chance for coming true. In our performance we speak about those who wait. We tell about his tension which is borne out of waiting. Each tension tends to complicate relations between people. Being together undergoes constant change. Nothing can be stabel when each monad expects more than it has been given, more than it can fight for in a confrontation with the desires of another monad. But our performance is not a philosophical treatise about the ideas of Leibnitz and Hegel. We use his triad in order to observe how love between two people brings about its own contradiction. They are opposites which create sense-soothing triangles and their multiple variations, through the figures of third parties involved in our relationships. We are interested in the conflict that arises between a feeling that demands fidelity and sexuality, which is restless and always searches for the new. You couldn’t speak about his better through any other medium than dance theatre, where the eternal relations betweemn bodies become pure poetry.
Czekając na.. / Waiting for…
Music: Philip Glass, Antonio Vivaldi, Marin Marais, Kronos Quartet, George Gershwin (Summertime w wykonaniu Janis Joplin)
libretto and choreography: Izadora Weiss
costumes Hanna Szymczak
duration: 40 mins
The company’s statement accompanying information on The Rite of Spring performance is as follows:
The message of the performance is connected to the commonly occurring battle of democratic structures in a globalised society, a battle for the rebuilding of relationships between men and women and a struggle to clear the grounds of the war between the sexes from male shauvinism and violence. Treating a woman as an object of sexual satisfaction and fantasy is still a painful subject. In spite numerous declarations about the equality of the sexes and respect for the weaker sex, we still see many acts of violence and scorn. These are a result not only of the pathological tendencies of given individuals, but also spring from a common consent and a tradition of cultivating false values. Our Rite of Spring is a stron sign of protest against this state of affairs.
Święto wiosny / The Rite of Spring
Music: Igor Strawiński
libretto and choreography: Izadora Weiss
stage design: Hanna Szymczak
light direction: Mirosław Poznański
choreography assistant: Marzena Socha
stage design assistant: Anna Cierpiał
The performance had its premiere at the National Theatre in Warsaw on the 21st of March, 2011
Duration: 35 mins
Waiting for… and The Rite of Spring are also going to be performed for the opening of the season in Gdańsk on the 5th, 6th and 7th of October, 2012
Source: www.baltyckiteatrtanca.pl