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.

but recovering from the Great Thanksgivingstravaganza 2011 took awhile. Ahem. Back to normal, or something like it. This weekend, I’m going to return to Łódź and Wrocław, to see (1) Teatr Cinema’s “RE// MIX / PINA BAUSCH” show, their latest piece, a tribute to the dance-theater directographer Pina Bausch, as part of the Łódź Theatrical Meetings; (2) Teatr Pieśń Kozła’s “Lear Oratorio,” THEIR latest piece, based on, of course, King Lear. It will be an intense 1-2 punch of travel, but at least going to Łódź first breaks up the journey a bit.

“I never told the students I was sick (although some of them figured it out). However, being sick, I was unable to be anyone other than my unadorned self in the classroom. It became easy to admit that I didn’t have all the answers, and I felt a new compassion both for people caught up in the legal system and for students facing struggles in their own lives. Sitting in a chair, speaking in such a weak voice that students sometimes had to ask me to repeat myself, I received the highest teaching evaluations in my twenty years on the job. And yet, I had to let it all go. When you are as chronically ill as I am, you have to make some very hard choices. Ironically, people may think you’re giving up, when in fact you are simply giving in to the reality of your new life.”

– Toni Bernhard, from her book How To Be Sick. Her blog, “Turning Straw into Gold,” on the Psychology Today website, discusses Buddhism and chronic illness.

Here’s an excerpt from an article I wrote about the two Małgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk readings coming up in Los Angeles on 11/29 and 12/1:

“Sikorska-Miszczuk bases the world of her plays, in part, on the Polish town of Jedwabne, which has had its deeply upsetting history — the Poles attacked the Jews of the town during the Nazi invasion — extensively publicized and explored in Jan Gross’ book Neighbors, Tadeusz Slobodzianek’s play Nasza Klasa (Our Class), and the reporting of Anna Bikont (mentioned below), among many others.

With so many other writers searching for factual accounts relating to Jedwabne, Sikorska-Miszczuk’s work takes a different tack: it makes frequent use of surrealism, breaking the fourth wall, self-referentiality, and acerbic irony…”

You can read the entire article here, and find more information about the 11/29 reading on Ghost Road’s website.