In the spirit of end-of-year spring-cleaning, and general updates, once 2012 has worn into 2013, I will be back in Poland from January till June, based in the wonderful world of Łódź, studying Teatr Chorea and the Greek chorus in Polish theater on the second half of the second year of this Fulbright grant. Here’s a view of Łódź’s ul. Piotrkowska:

Details, subject to change: In January, I will be working on a new community-based, interview-based script called “W Tym Mieście//In This Place,” with the Kraków Jewish Community Center; in Feb-March, another version of “Umrzeć w Atenach//To Die In Athens”; and in April/May, a script about mysterious grandparents called “End of the Line,” in cooperation with the Central Contemporary Eastern European Theatre Initiative. Throughout, I will also be very avidly observing Teatr Chorea’s ongoing actions, including a new choral adaptation of the myth of Gilgamesh, to premiere with the Łódź Philharmonic in April.

Do teatru! (To the theater!) The entrance to Fabryka Sztuki, the Factory of Art, where Chorea is resident:

The hallway that leads to Teatr Chorea’s rehearsal rooms and offices:

If that seems like a lot, it is, but you wouldn’t want to have six months in Poland without doing a lot of theater. Neither would you want to verge upon the New Year without reading Thomas Hardy’s wondrously gloomy The Darkling Thrush, and thinking about the Century–or the Year–‘s “corpse outleant.”

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

You can and should read the whole thing here. You also can and should, I hope, have the happiest of New Years possible.

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.

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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:

1) Washington Post

“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.

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