A fraught undertaking. A tightrope walk. A dare.
CHOPIN WITHOUT PIANO, is a radically original theater production that comes to the US from Poland in October for its North American debut. Replacing the piano parts of Fryderyk Chopin’s two piano concertos with penetrating dramatic monologues, the work is staged by Michał Zadara, the most distinguished Polish director-playwright of his generation, and the consummate actress Barbara Wysocka, the founders of the acclaimed Polish theater company CENTRALA. Wysocka is expertly accompanied by The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, who will be led by conductor Bassem Akiki from the Warsaw National Opera. In this transformative work, Wysocka hijacks the piano with her physical, virtuoso performance and proceeds to explore cultural, political, and philosophical tensions of the composer's time that feel strikingly contemporary. Performed in Polish with English supertitles, this new form of concert theater captures the composer as a dynamic living presence within the full force of his music. During CENTRALA’s 2-week residency at Swarthmore College outside Philadelphia, CHOPIN WITHOUT PIANO will premiere on Saturday, October 24, 2015 in Lang Concert Hall on the Swarthmore campus. The production then moves to FringeArts in Philadelphia for four performances, October 28 through 31.
The premiere at Swarthmore College is free and open to the public. Tickets for the dates at FringeArts are $25 and can be purchased at http://www.chopinwithoutpiano.com/. After the performances in the Philadelphia area, the production goes to Boston for five performances November 11 through 14 at Arts Emerson, where Wysocka is accompanied by The Boston Conservatory Orchestra. Major support for the Pennsylvania performances of CHOPIN WITHOUT PIANO has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage with additional support from the William J. Cooper Foundation (Swarthmore College). The project is organized in cooperation with Culture.pl as part of their Campus Project.
CHOPIN WITHOUT PIANO reveals new possibilities for theater and music to intersect in performance. Theater critic Łukasz Drewniak, attending the work's Warsaw premiere at The Warsaw National Opera last December, proclaimed, “CHOPIN WITHOUT PIANO was a revelation. The production turned out to be a dizzying manifesto of artistic freedom. Wysocka and Zadara […] reminded us that Chopin was revolutionary, and, above all, they created a non-hermetic language to talk about the emotions generated by classical music.”
This bold new work is a passionate mediation on Chopin’s life and art. It tells the story of a young composer who writes two piano concertos months before he leaves Poland, furious at the political reality of his situation and suffering the loss of both his family and his country. It also tells the story of our generation – a generation who feels his anguish and his uncertainty as to what will come next. By combining the sensibility and style of a solo theatrical performance combined with imaginative video projections and lucid probing text, CHOPIN WITHOUT PIANO transforms the composer and his music into a visceral and provocative experience on several levels.
"For me, CHOPIN WITHOUT PIANO is a guerrilla piece,” declares Zadara. “It bears the marks of violation or sacrilege. It aims to reinvent the possibility of a dialogue about the event of a concert, about music, Poland, and about culture in the broadest sense.” Zadara goes on to explain, “In his native Poland, Chopin’s legacy has been turned into a paralyzing myth that ignores the fact that he was an artistic revolutionary and innovator,” observes director and co-author Zadara. “To challenge this, we created a piece that is unquestionably still 100% Chopin and simultaneously 100% new music.”
For Zadara, this production provides the return to where his passion for Polish culture and theater took flight. Kuharski points out that “FringeArts is the single best place in the country to witness this production, for several reasons. FringeArts was the first arts venue anywhere in the US to present a CENTRALA theater piece.” In 2009, FringeArts brought CENTRALA to Philadelphia and the US for the first time when it presented Operetta, written by Witold Gombrowicz and directed by Zadara. Operetta was also a collaboration with Swarthmore College and Kuharski. Since then, FringeArts has been seeking an opportunity to bring Zadara and CENTRALA back.
“I’m a big fan of Michał Zadara,” says FringeArts President and Producing Artistic Director Nick Stuccio. “He’s a young, bright voice in international theater. He’s a rule breaker who takes epic risks. In CHOPIN WITHOUT PIANO, he is rendering these classical concertos through the sieve of his physical theater practice and creating something brand new.”
Producer Barbara Milewski is a professor at the Swarthmore College Department of Music and Dance. She is fascinated by how CHOPIN WITHOUT PIANO forces audiences to re-evaluate the legendary composer. "Chopin has a reputation as a composer of virtuosic piano music, and that has kind of put him in a restrictive box,” says Milewski “It may be a stretch to convince classical audiences otherwise, but I think when they hear his orchestral writing exposed in this way, they may be surprised to learn that what has historically been understood as compositional shortcomings may actually be revealed as intentional delicacy and individual formal experimentation. They’ll have a chance to hear the concertos with new insight.”
Lost Pianos
A parallel effort with CHOPIN WITHOUT PIANO, Lost Pianos are ten unwanted but still working baby grand pianos (boldly stenciled with the words CHOPIN WITHOUT PIANO) that are being displayed in highly visible public spaces on the Swarthmore College campus and around in-town Philadelphia neighborhoods. By taking an artifact associated with parlors and concert halls and abandoning these objects outdoors the producers wish passersby to ask: Why are they here? What is their history? Where do they belong in our lives today? Are they objects of alienation or community?
According to Milewski, “The pianos are a provocation to help us think more deeply about the sustaining value of music, and the tradition of live classical performance. Reactions to these pianos thus far are a powerful indication, an argument even, that we are not yet ready to part with what these pianos represent: the tradition of music making in our homes, in our lives, and in our communities.”
Milewski adds, “The piano symbolizes our culture's connection to live music like nothing else, in large part because unlike any other instrument we encounter in our daily lives, this one is so very hard to ignore, or to discard. As Swarthmore students worry about the wastefulness of decent pianos being destroyed by the elements, they must also confront the fact that they are also complicit in the piano's declining presence in our lives. Perhaps these particular lost pianos are a gentle reminder of that deep, ever more urgent human need for balance.”
Chopin bez fortepianu. Trailer from Centrala Teatr on Vimeo.
Event schedule
Interactive Panel Discussions – 25th and 31st October 2015
Continuing the conversations around CHOPIN WITHOUT PIANO as a work for theater and as a musical experience, the public is invited to attend two important roundtable discussions. See details below.
CHOPIN WITHOUT PIANO – North American Premiere
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE
8pm Saturday 24th October 2015
Lang Concert Hall, Swarthmore College
500 College Ave., Swarthmore, PA 19081
Free and Open to the public without advance reservation.
Chopin's Voice: Chopin's Music in Performance
3pm Sunday 25th October 2015
Lang Concert Hall, Swarthmore College
Participants: Michał Zadara, Barbara Wysocka and Bassem Akiki with Jeffrey Kallberg (University of Pennsylvania) and David Kasunic (Occidental College)
Moderator: Barbara Milewski (Swarthmore College)
PHILADELPHIA
8pm Wednesday 28th to Friday 30th October 2015
2pm Saturday 31st October 2015
FringeArts
140 N. Columbus Blvd. (at Race St.), Philadelphia, PA 19106
$25 / $15 for Students and anyone 25-and under
http://fringearts.com/event/chopin-without-piano-3/2015-10-28/
Chopin's Body: Chopin as Theater
Saturday 31st October, 4:15 pm (immediately following the 2 pm performance)
FringeArts - 140 N. Columbus Blvd. (at Race St.), Philadelphia
Participants: Michał Zadara, Barbara Wysocka and Bassem Akiki with Tom Sellar (Yale School of Drama) and Tamara Trojanowska (University of Toronto)
Moderator: Allen Kuharski (Swarthmore College)
NOTE: After the performances in the Philadelphia area, the production goes to Boston for five performances November 11 through 14 at Arts Emerson, where Wysocka is accompanied by The Boston Conservatory Orchestra. For details, visit https://artsemerson.org/