Krzysztof Garbaczewski, photo: Jacek Waszkiewicz / Reporter / East News
The legendary stage for the New York theatrical avant-garde, La Mama, hosts new pieces by Poland's prominent performing-arts duo. Director Krzysztof Garbaczewski and playwright Marcin Cecko team up to premiere their latest performances
Following their provocative, award-winning production The Sexual Life of Savages at the Nowy Teatr in Warsaw, Garbaczewski and Cecko tackle a pair of texts from the American author Erik Ehn. Every Man Jack of You opens the Soulographie - Our Genocides series at La Mama, and the play Forgiveness concludes the retrospective of 17 Ehn plays. The American playwright and director is the founder of Arts in the One World, an annual conference gathering artists, scientists and activists fighting for human rights and confronting difficult themes of genocide and forgiveness in their work.
Garbaczewski and Cecko's production of Every Man Jack of You, created in cooperation with actors from the U.S. and Korea, opens the New York series on the 11th of November. The recurring character Jack abandons his first wife, leaving his Oklahoma home for a drunken spree in Las Vegas. He travels against the backdrop of NATO bombings in Bosnia, conflated with the Tulsa race riot of 1921 in Oklahoma. His increasingly dissolute efforts at mindless release fail to drown out the complexity of the political world, pushed into his consciousness by various avatars of Julia Caesar/Caesar’s Palace, or to render him innocent in the context with historical events. His wife, Clair, becomes increasingly politicized and breaks free. Jack attempts to save his crumbling existence as a gambler, haunted by the image of a Serbian woman who hung herself in a forest.
Forgiveness completes the marathon showings on the 18th of November. The play explores living with trauma, through the tangential story of a distressed couple in the Hudson River Valley struggling after their son's accidental death. How is forgiveness worked out in the home if domestic peace is negotiated at the cost of inert deadlock, with authentic expression repressed and growth shut down? How do we move forward in the struggle for historical and cultural reconciliation? What possibilities inhabit the territory between coexistence and reconciliation? In Forgiveness, Ehn traces parallel lines of personal and historical trauma and their vicissitudes, in search of pardon.
Soulographie is a durational performance event, looking at America’s relationships to atrocities and genocides in the U.S. (the Tulsa Race Riot), East Africa (Rwanda and Uganda), and Central America (Guatemala and El Salvador). Performances created for the series aim to create channels of dialogue through art and conversation. The 17 Erik Ehn plays comprising the series have been produced independently throughout the U.S., Poland and Uganda. The plays converge for the series at La MaMa, performed in rotation, with the cycle completed both over the course of a week and as a 24-hour marathon. The cycle includes opportunities to reflect and converse about issues evoked by the plays, and the creation of art and poetics as acts towards social change. Marcin Cecko and Krzysztof Garbaczewski's participation is made possible thanks to the Adam Mickiewicz Institute. Other directors taking part in the series are Tom Dugdale (UC San Marcos), Alison Heimstead (Heart of the Beast), Dan Hurlin (Sarah Lawrence College), Robbie McCauley (Emerson College), Brian Mertes, John Moletress (force/collision), Jubilith Moore (Theatre of Yugen), Kym Moore (Brown University), Rebecca Novick, Emily Mendelsohn, Laurie O’Brien, Raphel Parry (Project X), Mia Rovegno, Alison Russo and Katie Shook.
Krzysztof Garbaczewski is Poland's leading theatre director and set designer of the young generation. Born on the 24th of February, 1983 in Białystok, he is known for his innovative adaptations and elaborate sets. Garbczewski constructs nonlinear structures, employing various media in building an illusory world of visual collage. The effect he is after is never a merely aesthetic one. His eclectic style and abundant use of video projections convey a contemporary sensitivity, shaped by film, television and the Internet, yet he uses the medium of theatre to touch upon existential issues and search for the limits of human experience.
Marcin Cecko is a poet, playwright, photographer, visual artist and performer. Born in 1981 in Warsaw, Cecko has long been working on the intersection of various artistic forms, promoting the idea of interdisciplinary art. He began to cooperate with Krzysztof Garbaczewski in 2009, when they co-wrote the script to the play The Odyssey.
La MaMa is a cultural institution recognised internationally as a seedbed of new work by artists of all nations and cultures. It was founded by Ellen Stewart in 1961, in a tiny basement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and it was dedicated by Stewart to the playwright and all aspects of the theater. It was Ellen who welcomed artists who were underrepresented, underfunded, and often misunderstood, at a time when the perception of what theatre could be was changing rapidly. For artists such as Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, Tom Eyen, Tom O’Horgan, and Philip Glass, La MaMa was their first artistic home. As Ellen toured internationally with her band of artists, she encountered the work of many world artists such as Tadeusz Kantor, Andrei Serban, Kazuo Ohno, The Tokyo Kid Brothers. She succeeded in bringing these artists to America to present their work at La MaMa. Over half a century, La MaMa has shown over 1900 theatre performances from across the entire globe.
It was in 1967 that, thanks to the efforts of Ellen Steward and her New Eastern European Theatre programme, the legend of 20th century theatre, Jerzy Grotowski first came to the United States. His Teatr Laboratorium presented their Książe Niezłomny / Constant Prince which had shattered the New York audience. Two decades later, Tadeusz Kantor was also invited to play at La MaMa, and his theatre Cricot 2 took the Dead Class to the American stage.
In the recent years La MaMa has also hosted some of Poland's leading theatre and performing ensembles. Among La MaMa's recent Polish guests are The Song of the Goat Theatre from Wrocław, the Dada von Bzdulow dance theatre troupe, Wierszalin theatre from Supraśl, the Pogranicze Foundation's theatre from Poland's north-eastern village of Sejny, Provisorium Theatre from Lublin, the Gardzienice theatre and Leszek Mądzik's Scena Plastyczna (Visual Scene) group.
Every Man Jack of You and Forgiveness are staged at La MaMa from the 11th until the 18th of November, 2012. The performances are coproduced by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, in cooperation with the Jan Kochanowski Theatre in Opole, which will host Polish premiere performances of the two plays in 2013.
Editor: SRS
Source: www.soulographie.org, press release, culture.pl