On December 2nd, 2012, in the Fabryka Sztuki (Factory of Art) in Łódź, in cooperation with Teatr Chorea, I and the disembodied Parallel Octave Chorus, and the very-much-embodied Wielki Chór Młodej Chorei (Great Choir of Young Chorea) presented another showing of To Die In Athens: Poland Edition, otherwise known as UMRZEĆ W ATENACH–all in Polish, for the first time. All photos below by Aneta Lukas.

The cast included performers from Warsaw, Łódź, Kraków and Lublin; the chorus included high school students, parents, actors, Fulbrighters, international residents living in Poland, and members of the Łódź community.

In the next picture, the Leaders of the High and Low Choruses attempt to pretend the Antigones of the Antigone Chorus from addressing the citizens of Athens.

More pictures:
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The 20-minute opera “A Game of Hearts,” with music by Douglas Pew and words by yours truly, premiered on November 19th at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater as part of the first American Opera Initiative of the WNO/KC.

The cast of “Game of Hearts” onstage during the reading.

Reviews:

“A Game of Hearts” shows both composer and librettist experimenting with perhaps the greatest technical device of opera: the use of music to elaborate simultaneously different emotions. The ladies in this card game are by turns garrulous, sniping and sentimental. Pew and Weinberg came close to successfully carrying off this most difficult fusion of material, and built to a touching set of verses that had the romantic, French-inflected power of an art song by Gabriel Faure or Cesar Franck.

More reviews and pictures:
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(If you can call November “fall,” which perhaps you cannot.) Two updates:

1) I’m in Baltimore/DC now for the final rehearsals and the premiere, on Monday, November 19th, at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theatre, of the one-act opera “A Game of Hearts,” with music by Douglas Pew and words by your correspondent.

Longtime SOSers know this piece to be one of three twenty-minute operas commissioned by the Kennedy Center / Washington National Opera as part of the first year of the American Opera Initiative.

In the WNO’s rehearsal room for a day of rewrites; photo by Mr. Pew.

Monday’s reading is Sold to the Out, but if you missed it this round, it has also been programmed by Cincinnati’s NANOWorks for the spring of 2013.

Myself and Mr. Pew. Not for nothing do they call it “opera”–it often takes place near big shiny mirrors!

2) Shortly after said operaticness, upon returning to Polska, a very unfinished “pokaz” (showing) of everybody’s favorite Ancient Greek Mash-Up That Wouldn’t Die, To Die In Athens//Umrzeć w Atenach, will be presented (passive voice!) at Fabryka Sztuki (ul. Tymienieckiego 3) in Łódź on Sunday, December 2nd at 5 pm. Free admission. Details and Facebook event here.

If you want to join the Greek chorus, show up from 12-4 to rehearse with us. Chór jest (as always) otwarty dla wszystkich.

Picture from a reading of TDIA/UWA last June at Komuna//Warszawa.

I have a new article online now in Biweekly.pl. It’s about the 2012 Summer Seminars at the Grotowski Institute and Teatr Pieśn Kozła (Song of the Goat Theatre)’s new piece, “Songs of Lear” (Pieśni Leara).

Late September in Wrocław. The old tree in the courtyard of the White Stork Synagogue still has its leaves, but they are turning brown. I’m back in town for the second year of the Summer Seminars, a series of English-language lectures on performance organised by the Open University of Research of the Grotowski Institute. O.U.R. director and Jagiellonian University Professor Dariusz Kosiński will be delivering one week of the lectures. His focus this year is the maverick theatre director Jerzy Grotowski (1933-1999) himself.

Grotowski’s “poor theatre” ideology called for performances without unnecessary trappings; in his later work, some of those trappings included the audience and the theatre itself. In the beginning, he reimagined Polish dramas in conjunction with recent history, such as Wyspiański’s Akropolis set in a concentration camp, through almost nothing but the actors’ bodies. His performers were his instruments, and he manipulated them, through rigorous training and prolonged ensemble work, to his – and their – fame. Later in life, Grotowski’s self-proclaimed departure from theatre and his turn towards ritualistic explorations of song and movement only increased his mystique.

You can read the whole thing here.

I have a new article in CultureSpot LA about the post-Grotowski Polish theatre Studium Teatralne and their current tour in Los Angeles.

Between Oct. 5 and 14, Angelenos interested in the most impressive manifestations of the human body in action should clear their calendars of weightlifting competitions and roller-derby matches and head to the Odyssey Theatre for Studium Teatralne’s Król kier znów na wylocie [The King of Hearts Is Off Again], a visiting spektakl from Warsaw featuring a vigorous physical style of performance.

The King of Hearts… is a metaphoric reenactment of the traumas endured within Poland during WWII. It is adapted from a novel by Hanna Krall, about a Jewish woman in Poland who hides her identity and passes as a German in order to survive the occupation and rescue her husband from a concentration camp. (Krall, who was born in 1937, survived the war in hiding with Polish families; her own family died in Majdanek.) Studium Teatralne’s adaptation combines a time of historic agonies with a performance style that excels in — revels in — displaying physical agony.

You can read the whole thing here, and you can see ST at the Odyssey through Oct. 14.

One reason that Style Over Substance has been a bit silent is that I’ve been blogging a theatre festival (Teatr Chorea’s Retro//Per//Spektywy) in Poland at a different platform I made, called The Fifth Wall. This is going to be–already is, I hope–a place for writing about process (and not only in theater) in a more formal manner.

Singers rehearsing for the “Pieśni Świata” (Songs of the World) concert, during Retro//Per//Spektywy.

Links to the posts from this festival, and thoughts on festival blogging and blogging-as-a-whole, follow:

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[Duplicate post from paroct.com.] If you don’t, Charlotte Mew does! 22 of the 26 shorts from this summer’s ANTHOLOGY II are now up on YouTube and on the Parallel Octave website. (YouTube is best for skipping around–the ParOct page link lets you watch them in the order they appeared in the supermegafilm.) Here’s one to get you started: filmmaker Adhiraj Goel’s stop-motion “Fin de Fete,” based on the poem by Charlotte Mew. This is one of the shorts created through the JHU Auteur 101 class.

And the poem:

Fin de Fête

Sweetheart, for such a day
One mustn’t grudge the score;
Here, then, it’s all to pay,
It’s Good-night at the door.

Good-night and good dreams to you,—
Do you remember the picture-book thieves
Who left two children sleeping in a wood the long night through,
And how the birds came down and covered them with leaves?

So you and I should have slept,—But now,
Oh, what a lonely head!
With just the shadow of a waving bough
In the moonlight over your bed.

- Charlotte Mew

ANTHOLOGY II premiered at the Creative Alliance on August 2nd, 2012; some pictures from the screening are here.