from everyone in gray, foggy Warsaw. Z&P are here for a couple of weeks, for the holidays. Blogging will be…er…minimal.

(Bridge over ul. Solec, near the al. 3 Maja bus stop, in the fog. Christmas Eve morning.)

Here’s a wonderful interview with my wonderful friend, the journalist and editor Sara Inés Calderón, about the website she co-founded and works with, NewsTaco: The Latino Daily. Excerpt follows…

Interviewer: What has been the most rewarding part of creating your own media?

Calderón: What’s truly surprised me with regard to News Taco is that my favorite part of the entire enterprise has been to promote other Latino writers and artists across the country. I thought I would enjoy writing and generating my own content, but what I’ve truly appreciated was being able to meet and work with Latina and Latino writers from New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Arizona, Texas and everywhere in between.

There’s so much talent out there, and as I’ve begun working with all of these talented Latinos, I’ve realized that this is truly one of News Taco’s core values: to be a platform to promote Latinos across the country. Thus, the most rewarding part of generating my own media has been giving a voice to other Latinos who needed a platform and watching them grow as writers and in popularity.

In this past week, I’ve conducted more interviews than any previous week in Poland (or in my life, for that matter). I just wrote a report for my mentor and I was stunned by how many times I had to type the words “Conducted interview with…” I hadn’t realized how many there were. It’s been fantastic being able to speak to so many different collaborators from Oratorium Dance Project. It is a bit disconcerting to have no one to interview today, but I need the time to process the material and get it in shape.

Chorea is preparing to go to Moscow today, to present “Po Ptakach” (After The Birds, their adaptation of Aristophanes) at the Meyerhold center.

Yesterday was the last session of my Polish class at the University of Warsaw’s POLONICUM. It was a great class, and I hope I’m going to stay in contact with the other students. It’s always interesting to have an opportunity to meet other people who are, like you, learning a new language and culture. Some of them were in Poland for work, others for love (married to a Polish man or woman), some for both. They were from the US, Korea, England, Belarus, Israel, and more. We formed a good group, and ended up going out for dinner or drinks quite a few times after class. I feel fortunate to have had their friendship during this period of transition to a new city and new country. I told them all that they were going to have to come to Łódź for the next premiere in March.

Just one week till Z and P arrive for two weeks of Poland-for-the-holidays.

Sunday: Łódź-Warszawa.
Monday: Warszawa-Łódź.
Tuesday: Łódź-Warszawa.
Wednesday: Warszawa-Łódź.
Thursday: Łódź-Warszawa.

(yesterday), I went for obiad and hot spiced wine (it’s getting cold here!) with a friend, and then saw two Scorcese films at Kino Polonia in Łódż: “Po godzinach” (After Hours) and “Takówkarz” (Taxi Driver.) It was a wonderful way to take a day off from theater. I’d never seen After Hours before at all–great New York dark comedy about one man’s crazy late night, and the chain of inter-connected characters he meets–and I’d never seen either film projected on a large screen–and I’d certainly never seen a Scorcese double-bill. His images are so theatrical, so composed. It was glorious. Scorcese was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Łódź film school this Friday, which is why they’re playing all his films. If I could stay today, I could see The Departed and Aviator again, but Warsaw calls. On my way to the train station. Perhaps I should say “I’m shipping off to BostonWarsaw.”

Today I’m in Łódź, tying up some loose ends and finishing some work before heading back to Warsaw tomorrow. The “Oratorium” project I’ve been following all week is now over. It opened Thursday and closed Friday. Due to the large number of collaborators–an entire orchestra and orchestral choir, over a hundred student and adult community singers and dancers, plus the entire CHOREA ensemble–it’s not the sort of piece that is easily remounted elsewhere, or extended. I’m so grateful to have seen both of its appearances.

The energy in yesterday’s performance, Friday, was very different than that at the day before yesterday, Thursday, in part because the space was so drastically oversold. There were probably fifty to seventy people without seats in the main space, who ended up in the overflow balconies. My friends and I–two other Fulbrighters, and one former Fulbrighter who still lives in Poland–were on the highest-up balcony. This meant we had a great bird’s-eye view of the choreography, but that some of the intimacy of the sound and staging wasn’t as present. Seeing the performance from the space itself was an overwhelming emotional experience; seeing it from above was a more distant, dreamlike place.

I’ve decided I want to try to make an oral history of this project–that is, an article conducted entirely from interviews. I’m also working on a shorter rehearsal diary-format article about the week leading up to the two performances, and a shortest-of-all sort of summary review of what actually took place at the event.

I’m very happy to be writing about this subject. I’m always happy to be writing, and always very happy to be writing about Polish theater or Greek choruses, but this particular production is embedded particularly deeply in my heart.

I know you’re not supposed, selon the Ancient Know-It-All Greeks, to call any man happy until he has passed the limit of his days free from pain, but, you know, if you can’t call me happy after last night’s show, I don’t know who you *can* call happy. Read: I’m happy. It was a wonderful show (Chorea’s ORATORIUM) and I am seeing it again tonight. I am even more impressed than I was before with how Polish theaters work with Greek choruses.

But now I’m back in Warsaw for the Fulbright mid-year meeting. Rainy December morning. The fruit-and-vegetable stands, draped with rain covers, have brought out a row of soggy Santas to supplement the produce. I’m in a cafe on Marszalkowska. This evening I’m meeting J and E for the play, back in Łódź.

I must ask Mr. Stevens to lend me his words so that I may say “It was snowing / and it had begun to snow.” Last night in Łódź, after rehearsal, snow stuck on the ground for the first time. I saw the first falling snow Tuesday morning, walking to rehearsal. It begins.

I am in Łódź again, after a very brief period of time in Warsaw. I was lucky enough to be able to observe and assist with rehearsals for a Christmas play at a small American school in Kabaty, Warsaw (a student-written adaptation of “A Christmas Carol,” po angielsku) and to conduct my first-ever-in-Poland Parallel Octave poem-recording session, with a Polish actress friend and an American harp player friend and an American singer friend. Both of these things happened yesterday, and then I came back to Łódź for the last night of rehearsals before opening.

The show, Chorea‘s “Oratorium Dance Project,” that opens tonight, is extremely important. I’ve been in and out of their rehearsals all week and I’m absolutely blown away. As usual, I am writing a longer article so I won’t say too much here, but I will say that it is one of the best physical (and vocal) representation of something resembling the Greek chorus I have ever seen–and certainly one of the largest, with over a hundred singers and dancers, including many children.

If I learn nothing else from how Polish theaters work with choruses, I’ve learned that I need to never do anything without a harmonium again. You know, one of these:

It’s a wonderful instrument for establishing a sonic background for choral work.

Anyone who has had some piano background can mess around on one. See the back panel? You pump that with one hand to provide air while playing with the other.

Yesterday I managed to have lunch with friends from Chorea, in Łódź, and sneak a glimpse at a couple of hours of their rehearsals for the new work premiering Friday. They’re working (con harmonium, of course!) with an enormous choral posse of high schoolers and younger children, dancers and singers. They met in classrooms and cleared the chairs to the sides to sing. It reminded me of doing the same thing, year after year, in SIAW.

The dance rehearsal was being held in an enormous open ballroom-type space, and little kids were running across the stage as fast as they could. What I saw was so joyous. I can’t wait for the whole thing.

After the rehearsal, I checked into the hostel and saw Teatr Cinema’s fantastic “RE// MIX / PINA BAUSCH” show at the Dom Kultury. The performance, which I missed earlier this year in its Warsaw and Gdańsk incarnations, was part of the Łódź Theatrical Meetings. As usual, there was surreal, repeated movement, and humor, including an incredible “niemiecki flamenco” (German flamenco) section where all the actors held enormous pumpkins behind their backs. I love Cinema, and I must finish one of the fifty things I want to write about them soon.

I’m going to have brunch with a friend, a fellow Cali Fulbrighter, in about an hour, in a cafe with glass walls, and then make my way to Dworzec Łódź Kaliska for the 12:40 to Wrocław. The last time I took this train, on this day (Saturday), it was so crowded I had to sit on the pull-down seat in the aisles. Preparing myself for the same thing today.

This evening will be Teatr Pieśń Kozła’s “Lear Oratorio.”

Must. Read. More. Contemporary. Fiction. Adverbially, I recently had the chance to read Kate Christensen’s TROUBLE, borrowing it from a US public library via Kindle-for-Mac. (Christensen’s THE GREAT MAN, a book I discovered in the Denver hotel laundromat, is one of my favorite novels. Ever.) Here, her narrator hates on…well…you’ll see.

“I had nothing to do. I figured I could go into the kitchen and clean up the remnants of dinner, then take a shower, then check on Wendy and make sure she wasn’t on her laptop, being lured to a Burger King by a predatory middle-aged man posing as Zac Efron, and then I could come back to bed and read The New Yorker until I fell asleep. I was so sick of The New Yorker, I couldn’t bear it. I had read just about every issue for the past twenty years, and for a long time now, I had suspected that they recycled their articles and stories and cartoons in five-year loops; the poems were all just rearranged jumbles of the same words over and over: land, sky, light, death, love, cabin, hand, deer, cedar, lake, face, dark, kitchen table, skin, you. It made me want to try my hand at a New Yorker poem myself. How hard could it be?

– Kate Christensen, Trouble.

I particularly appreciate the inclusion of “kitchen table” in that list. You know who you are, poets.