Here are a couple of Washington Post articles, both by Anne Midgette, about the Washington National Opera and the American Opera Initiative, the project that Douglas Pew and I are writing a new piece for…

One from January:

“…[the] New American Works project, which will roll out in the 2012-13 season. (The season will not be announced until March.) It’s conceived as a three-tiered system: 20-minute commissions from student composers; hour-long works by “emerging” composers; and, eventually, full-length works by American masters. The first student commissions — presented in threes, in concert, at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater — are projected to arrive late this year.

“The sense of laboratory and workshop is something we are going to work hard to develop,” Zambello said. “Of course, you can workshop something to death. But I think opera is such a complex, strange beast. We’re also addressing the question of what is opera today. We’re all grappling with that issue. What is it going to be in 10 years, 20 years?”

Speaking from Vienna, Austria, WNO Music Director Philippe Auguin pointed out the benefits of exposing young composers to the resources of an opera house. Even if the scale of the works is small, he said, the composers have the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra at their disposal.

“If a composer wants to use eight percussion players, he can,” Auguin said. “It’s like offering a painter the full range of all the colors.” He added: “If Stravinsky had not been allowed to use two tuba players in ‘The Rite of Spring,’ he would have never written ‘The Rite of Spring.’ Allowing composers to write something from a larger dimension helps composers to go deeper into what they can bring.”

I don’t *think* Doug is planning to use eight percussion players, but it’s nice to know that, you know, he can think about if if he wants to! There’s also a more recent article from June, which talks about recent leadership changes at the WNO. Via ArtsJournal as usual.

||8ve’s second collaborative film, ANTHOLOGY II, will screen on Thursday, August 2nd at 8 PM, at the Creative Alliance in Baltimore. Details at the Creative Alliance website and the Parallel Octave site. Here’s the trailer, by Melee, based on part of Gertrude Stein’s “Pigeons on the grass alas alas”:

FREE Film Screening: Parallel Octave presents ANTHOLOGY II, A Collaborative Short Film

It’s a music video! It’s a Greek chorus! It’s ANTHOLOGY II. For the second year running, the Baltimore-based chorus Parallel Octave has invited filmmakers to create short films based on recordings of poems. This year’s ANTHOLOGY II will feature animation, stop-motion and live action, both student and professional filmmakers from Los Angeles, Maryland, Minnesota, Utah, and Wisconsin, and the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Yehuda Ha-Levi, T.S. Eliot, and many more. More info here. FREE!

the reading of UMRZEĆ W ATENACH // TO DIE IN ATHENS at Komuna//Warszawa, in Polish, English and German, with a cast of 30 hailing from Cambridge, Berlin, Łódź, Warsaw, Kraków, and more…
went very, very well indeed.

Here is a picture of the full cast in the reading:

(more performance pictures online here).

And one of us in rehearsal in Bemowo, at Aneta’s house:

(more rehearsal pictures online here).

To say that this has been a long time coming is not to say enough. I had thought I would write a longer post about it all, and perhaps I still will, but not today. There is also video, which I am trying to select a good clip from. Soon. In brief, as I have said and will say again, thanks to all of you for not giving up on me or on this. I’m glad this project is a thing that is still happening.

and it’s taken me four years to do it, but I am finally finally finally finally presenting another public reading of the spektakl formerly known as “To Die In Athens,” now with 50% more Polish, and appropriately retitled “Umrzeć w Atenach,” which means the same thing. More info here.

At a friend’s wedding, the summer before the Fulbright started, I remember talking to a couple of people from my high school who expressed surprise that I was “still” working with Greek choruses. To them, I have this response:

So, at any rate, with that in mind, here comes the chorus–again! Here’s the Facebook invite for the event, on Sunday, June 3rd, in Praga at Komuna//Warszawa.

I have also pasted the text of the complete invite below. I would venture that most of you who read this blog are not going to be in Warsaw on Sunday, June 3rd, but it is never too late for those last-minute deals on Terry Pratchett’s Hot Air BalloonLines–is it? Thank you, again, to all of those of you who have already said you will be there in spirit. Your spirits are very welcome, especially since I don’t have to find them housing in Warsaw the weekend before EURO 2012.

Zapraszamy / we invite you
na czytanie / to a reading
spektaklu / of a play
po polsku, angielsku, i niemiecku / in Polish, English, and German
będącego adaptacją starogreckich komedii i dramatów / adapted from the ancient Greek dramas and comedies
Ajschylosa, Sofoklesa, Eurypidesa, i Arystofanesa / of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes

UMRZEĆ W ATENACH
TO DIE IN ATHENS

Projekt Chóru Parallel Octave / a project of the Parallel Octave Chorus

Continue reading →

It’s been a busy couple of weeks, including a conference for all the Warsaw Fulbrighters where we gave presentations from our research or teaching experiences, and a graduation celebration yesterday at the American Ambassador’s house, where we met next year’s group of Polish Fulbrighters heading to the US next year. Both of these events were lots of fun–a great way to round off the Fulbright year. Many of us are heading home in the next couple of weeks.

Here I am during my presentation, “Contemporary Polish Theater Directing Practices,” with fellow Fulbrighters D. Han and S. Willenbrink; our panel also included W. Helmcke.

Here’s my abstract for the paper:

This presentation will broadly characterize some elements of contemporary Polish theater directing practices. Case studies will include Warsaw’s Chór Kobiet (Chorus of Women), Teatr Cinema Michałowice, and Łódź’s Teatr Chorea–one of the group of Polish theaters with a historic connection to director Jerzy Grotowski. These theaters will be examined with regard to their rehearsal processes, ensemble work, improvisation, use of text, and use of theatrical forms resembling Greek choruses. The conclusion will reflect on how some Polish theater directing practices might be applicable or useful to practitioners outside Poland.

The proceedings of our conference are going to be published this summer, so I won’t quote the paper any further here.

After the graduation ceremony (and receiving diplomas) at the Ambassador’s house on Friday, we then headed back to the Fulbright Commission’s offices on Nowy Świat for our end-of-year meeting. There was a great surprise for those of us renewing; we were able to sign and turn in our renewal paperwork at that time. It felt very good to see the paperwork for next year’s grant. As one of the other Fulbrighters was saying, in the offices, “This isn’t the end; this is just the beginning of the beginning.”

It’s been a fantastic year here in Poland, and it’s not over yet. These last weeks have been full of culminations and much-welcome houseguests and visitors and exhibitions and performances as the year wraps up. (Somewhere in the middle of all this, Chorea’s Bachantki also performed two more times, in Łódź, and I got to sing in the choir again.)

In addition, I’m presenting a sort of performance myself, another reading, on June 3rd, which will be a real culmination for me–my first time directing something public in Poland, after so much time spent analyzing the work here. About which more, very shortly.

I have a new article online in the latest issue of Biweekly.pl. It’s about the “Teatr nie jest produktem…” protests that occurred during the March Warsaw Theatre Meetings, concurrently with the visits of a group of playwrights from USC.

Here’s the first paragraph:

In March, just before the spring 2012 Warszawskie Spotkania Teatralne (The Warsaw Theatre Meetings, hereafter referred to as the WST), a group of Polish theatre artists, critics and scholars organises a public letter of protest. They’re enraged by recent actions of the local government of Lower Silesia, the region including Wrocław, Legnica and Wałbrzych – specifically, a short-lived effort to institute a business manager who would be able to overrule decisions made by artistic directors of theatres. Some recent cuts to state funding for theatre are also a concern. The protest slogan: “Teatr nie jest firmą/nie jest produktem, widz nie jest klientem.” (The theatre is not a corporation or a commodity – spectators are not customers). “TEATR NIE JEST PRODUKTEM” buttons appear on the backpacks of the festival-goers.

You can read the whole thing here.

This article, which I didn’t write until a month or so after the events, is a good example of why I’ve been having such a hard time blogging lately. While these events were going on, it seemed to me that it might be a good idea to write a blog post about them–that people would want to hear about them. I didn’t do it.

But then, in talking with the Biweekly editor, the idea for this piece came up. As a result, I got to write something longer and better, with photos and with some very serious and helpful editing from Polish theatre experts, than I ever would have done over here. That was good.

But there are other equally interesting series of events that have taken place recently, that I’ve been part of, that I’ve never written anything about — blog or proper article. That’s not so good.

One thing I am doing is keeping an enormous Word document sort of journal, which I write in as if it was a blog, without publishing it online. Then when these articles come up, I can go back to it. It’s quite long now. I am hoping it will be long enough for something longer than an article in the future. (Recently, when I left my laptop in the Nowy Wspaniały Świat cafe, this document was what I was kicking myself the most for losing. I retrieved the laptop about an hour later.)

It seems a good time, as Poland enters this holiday week, to say over here what I’ve already said on Facebook:

(1) the Fulbright Commission granted me a renewal, which means a second year of funding to stay in Poland, live in Łódź, and keep working with Teatr Chorea from fall 2012-summer 2013, and;

(2) fellow 2011-2012 Poland Fulbrighter Douglas Pew and I have been selected for one of the three inaugural 20-minute opera commissions in the first year of the Washington National Opera / Kennedy Center’s American Opera Initiative.

The short opera we’re going to write will premiere, along with the other two, on November 19, 2012 at the Terrace Theater at the Kennedy Center in DC. I will post more details up here when I have them.

These people have opera glasses, because they are at the opera.

I am very grateful for both these things. I’ve been very fortunate, and I couldn’t have done any of this without a great deal of support from other people. I want to say thank you, here and always, to everyone who’s helped me to get to this point. The only appropriate response seems to be this Belle and Sebastian song, “Dirty Dream Number Two,” with these opening lyrics:

I’m lucky I can open the door and I can walk down the street;
I’m lucky I’ve got no place to go, and so I follow my feet…

It’s always reminded me more than a little of “Tangled Up In Blue.” You never know when good things are going to happen, or bad things, or things, at all. You just have to go for the ride, and there’s no knowing how long it’s going to last. Thanks for coming along with me–for today, tomorrow, we’ll be back in trouble again.

two poems, both alike in…theater.

“To Maria,” online in the spring issue of Foothill.

“An Actor’s Life For Me,” in the winter paper issue of the Hopkins Review, which you can read by clicking here. The word “sounds” in the second stanza should not be on its own line, but rather, appended to the one above it. But who’s counting?

Most of you have seen most of this before, but it is nice to have these out in the world; both of them, especially the second one, have been too long a time in the braincubator.

ON TIME

Fly, envious Time, till thou run out thy race;
Call on the lazy leaden-stepping hours,
Whose speed is but the heavy plummet’s pace;
And glut thyself with what thy womb devours,
Which is no more then what is false and vain,
And merely mortal dross;
So little is our loss,
So little is thy gain…

– John Milton

(Those are just the opening lines; the whole thing is here.)