location, Poland

see what I see

Inside, the light switches are large, the size of Post-It notes. One room is red and one is green. The kitchen is narrow. The windows stretch from floor to ceiling. Something about every object, every dimension is different. I can’t forget that I am here.

Outside, there is graffiti on the walls of tall buildings, and a tram stop round the corner, covered in trees. Behind the tram stop is a towering wide building with the crowned eagle on the front. The sky is dark, very dark. As you ride the tram towards Market Square, you start passing one extraordinary building after another. And once you get out and walk, you forget that cars ever existed. It’s a square made for people. Some of the alleys behind the main square, it feels like you have to turn sideways to walk through them. There are cars, but they navigate with great difficulty. Hundreds and hundreds of people are everywhere you look.

Every day, it is warm and sunny, and every night, rain comes torrentially and suddenly. You can see the clouds moving.

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Poland, theater

in brief,

Yesterday, I ran around Wroclaw, going to and from my housing and the Institute so many times that I finally drummed it into my head how to get from one to the other. If you keep turning around to look at the architecture, you get lost a lot. I got lost a lot.

The Market Square is very large and linear on the outside, but on the inside, is a convoluted mass of alleys. Little shops spring up behind every corner. When people try to give you directions from one place to another, they stand up and move in several different directions, like the Turtle in Logo.

Today, I stayed in and finished my presentation, and had a chance to answer email for the first time since getting here. One last breath before it all starts. Tomorrow, the conference begins.

I have new blog posts up on the USAI site – you can see the schedule of events there too, and a list of all the participants in the US Artists Initiative.

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metablog, Poland, theater

US Artist Initiative weblog launched

Last night, I started a new blog with Rachel for the US Artist Initiative project, the program through which I’m here in Poland at the The World As A Place Of Truth festival.

I’ll be writing posts about the theatrical / Grotowski experiences of the trip there, rather than here. I’ll try to link to this page when I have a new post there, but I’m hoping to write there every day. All the 30 participating US directors and theatre artists will also be able to post there, once they arrive, so it should be a good place to get different perspectives on the trip.

Here it is: US Artist Initiative Weblog – Grotowski Year 2009

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Poland

Good morning, Poland

I wake up at noon, slept out from the travel, and there are men playing one-on-one soccer in the field outside the window. I have nothing to do today except walk around the square and the streets.

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Judaism, location

to remind us of days long ago

Sitting in a Wroclaw cafe with Rachel, writing on laptops, it’s easy to forget where I am. The room is dark, full of couples, lit only by a few lamps and a taper on each table. I fall into the rhythm of thinking about theater and ignore history for a moment. I let my gaze narrow to my screen.

But then a woman comes to our table and lights her tea light off of our taper. She holds the wick in the flame until there are two flames. And I can’t speak. I think of the myth of Hanukkah and the Maccabees. I try to tell Rachel the story. “The oil,” I say, “the oil lasted, they lit all the lights from just the one light. The light in the Temple didn’t go out.”

I can’t tell the story. She knows what I mean, though. About survival.

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Judaism, location

this is what it looks like:

Poland. I feel like I’ve seen it before. The buildings are weary but the business signs are shiny and new. The reds and yellows and blues of commercial signs sparkle over an exhausted history of one occupation after another. Alleys that seem like they must have known death, which lead to cafes full of candlelit windows. Graffiti is delicately scrawled on the stones. There is rain in the air. People are laughing. The trees are so bright. I feel like I can see all of the different histories around me, centuries of war reflected in the glass tram windows. Kings and constitutions and bishops. I stare hopelessly at everyone who walks past me, wondering.

The train runs alongside the river, greened over with trees, and I can’t stop looking at all of these faces. The Lithuanians, Belorussians, Poles, Czechs, Jews, Catholics, Protestants. The Russians and the Ukrainians. I just want to watch them and be silent. I want them not to know who I am.

It is enough to be here and look.

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Judaism, location

The past present

Since I left O’Hare last evening at 5 pm, people have been speaking to me in Polish all day, as if they expect me to understand.

I spent the entire plane flight reading the Cambridge Concise History of Poland, and learning more about the contested boundaries and ethnic divisions of this region of the world. I knew the country had been divided many times, but not this many. My head is multiplying with ten-year-old queens and Hapsburg alliances and tripartite divisions, the liberum veto and the Warsaw Pact.

I have spent most of my life thinking of Poland primarily as the site of the second World War. Poland was like a dreidel of history. A Great Disaster Happened Here. Three brothers came to the United States in the thirties, escaping the war and continuing my family. One spin, and everyone they left behind was lost.

But now that war, that trauma, is contextualized in a history of wars before and wars after, scramblings between dukes and kings and countries. The country was divided so many times it looks like a pie chart.

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int'l theater, theater, travel

to the airport

And so, it’s time to travel again – this time with a better suitcase. I think the so-called wisdom of age is only about equipment. I am not any wiser, but I have more tools.

Yesterday was a day of packing and errands and scenes from John Lennon’s music and discovering that the poets are a bunch of unreliable narrators all over again. It is possible to do so many things quickly in Chicago, but sometimes quickly is not well – like my decision to buy an alarm clock that turns out to beep every hour, on the hour. I don’t think I can take it with me. The other people on my ten-hour flight would have something to say about it.

There’s no more time. Maybe that’s what the clock is trying to tell me.

I have just emailed people to let them know that I am traveling, today, to Wroclaw, Poland, to participate as one of the US directors in the US Artists’ Initiative as part of the Grotowski Year 2009. This will involve attending performances in the World As A Place of Truth festival, going to workshops, and learning a lot more about director Jerzy Grotowski’s work and influence. I am one of about 30 US directors who have been invited to participate in this initiative, and to observe. It’s such a great honor for me to have been included with this group of people.

My grandfather left Poland in the 30s to come here, and I am going back – the first of our family to return since then. Those who left, survived, and those who stayed, did not. I will be trying to remember that story while I am traveling, too.

My flight is nonstop Chicago to Warsaw. C is driving me to the airport this afternoon, during which time we’re going to talk Indy Convergence some more – I will have an opportunity to give a short presentation on my work and my affiliated theater company.

I will be trying to blog live from the conference. My cell phone will not work at all, starting today, until I return around July 4th, but I will have some access to email.

There is a window of Chicago directions left on this screen from last night. It’s always funny when you wake up and see maps from yesterday. It reminds me of seeing the Thomas Guide to Los Angeles’s freeways, or some other guidebook to a place I don’t live any more. I close the window.

Here’s to making a new map.

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art, self-blogerential, style

A. square

I have taken some time, the past couple of weeks, to rest before a major undertaking. I feel much better. The most reassuring outcome of this rest (grantspeak! stop!) is that when images of dancing people or objects pop into my head, as they do all day long, I no longer feel compelled to suppress them. This makes me and the dancing people less irritable.

I was in a CVS about a month ago, before taking this time which I have now taken, and I imagined some people bobbing up and down the aisles, and it made me so furious with my imagination. “What is the point of having these ideas?” I would ask myself, sometimes out loud.

I am now content to enjoy them again without asking why. There is no point – the point is the process. The point is the style, as we know. No one asks the red square why it is a red square. I know this, but I had forgotten. Or it had been obscured from me.

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