SEEP Vol.28 No.3 Fall 2008

volume 28, no.
3
Fall 2008
SEEP (J.SSN # 1047-0019) is a publication of the Institute for Contemporary
East European Drama and Theatre under the auspices of the Martin E. Segal
Theatre Center. The Institute is at The City University of New York
Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4309. All
subscription requests and submissions should be addressed to Slavic and East
European Performance: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The City University of
New York Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4309.
EDITOR
Daniel Gerould
MANAGING EDITOR
Margaret Araneo
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Christopher Silsby
ASSISTANT EDITOR
Marina Volok
CIRCULATION MANAGER
Jessica Del Vecchio
ADVISORY BOARD
Edwin Wilson, Chair
Marvin Carlson Allen J. Kuharski Martha W Coigney
Stuart Liebman Leo Hecht Laurence Senelick Dasha Krijanskaia
SEEP has a liberal reprinting policy. Publications that desire to reproduce
materials that have appeared in SEEP may do so with the following provisions:
a.) permission to reprint the article must be requested from SEEP in writing
before the fact; b.) credit to SEEP must be given in the reprint; c.) two copies
of the publication in which the reprinted material has appeared must be
furnished to SEEP immediately upon publication.
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Frank Hentschker
DIRECTOR OF ACADEMIC AFFAIRS AND PUBLICATIONS
Daniel Gerould
DIRECTOR OF ADMINISTRATION
Jan Stenzel
Slavic and East European Performance is supported by a generous grant from the
Lucille Lortel Chair in Theatre of the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at The City
University of New York.
Copyright 2008. Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
2
Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 28, No. 3
Editorial Policy
From the Editor
Events
Books Received
IN MEMORIAM
TABLE OF CONTENTS
"J6zef Szajna, 1922-2008"
Daniel Gerould
ARTICLES
"Moshe Yassur: A Life in Theatre"
Beate Hein Bennett
5
6
7
16
18
26
"Memory and Oblivion in Jan Klata's Transfer!" 41
Magadalena Golaczynska
"Stanislavsky's Death: August 7, 1938" 52
Maria Ignatieva
"The Global Scenes Festival: June 21 to 22, 2008" 55
April Donahower
"The 2007 Prague Quadrennial: 61
Eleventh International Exhibition of Scenography and Theatre"
Ana Martinez
REVIEWS
''Alexander Mofrov's Exiles"
Robert Blush
73
3
"From Cracow to Arden: Nina Polan in Helena: The Emigrant 82
Queen at the Kosciuszko Foundation, New York, April 10, 2008"
Margaret Araneo
Contributors 87
4
EDITORIAL POLICY
Manuscripts in the following categories are solicited: articles of no
more than 2,500 words, performance and film reviews, and bibliographies.
Please bear in mind that all submissions must concern themselves with
contemporary materials on Slavic and East European theatre, drama, and
film; with new approaches to older materials in recently published works; or
with new performances of older plays. In other words, we welcome
submissions reviewing innovative performances of Gogo!, but we cannot
use original articles discussing Gogo! as a playwright.
Although we welcome translations of articles and reviews from
foreign publications, we do require copyright release statements. We will also
gladly publish announcements of special events and anything else that may
be of interest to our discipline. All submissions are refereed.
All submissions must be typed double-spaced and carefully
proofread. The Chicago Manual of Sryle should be followed. Transliterations
should follow the Library of Congress system. Articles should be submitted
on computer disk, as \Xford Documents for Windows and a hard copy of the
article should be included. Photographs are recommended for all reviews.
All articles should be sent to the attention of Slavic and East European
Peiformance, c/o Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The City University of New
York Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4309.
Submissions will be evaluated, and authors will be notified after
approximately four weeks.
You may obtain more information about Slavic and East European
Performance by visiting our website at http/ /web.gc.cuny.edu/metsc. E-mail
inquiries may be addressed to SEEP@gc.cuny.edu.
All Journals are available from ProQuest Information and Learning as
abstracts online via ProQuest information service and the
International Index to the Performing Arts.
All Journals are indexed in the MLA International Bibliography and are
members of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.
5
FROM THE EDITOR
The fall issue, SEEP Vol. 28, No. 3, opens with my tribute, IN
MEMORIAM, to J6zef Szajna (1922-2008), one of the most important and
influential of twentieth-century Polish theatre artists. During the late 1960s
and early 1970s in Poland, I was able to see many of Szajna's outstanding
creations, including Death on a Pear Tree and Akropolis, and to have the
opportunity to meet the artist; then later in New York at the Brooklyn
Academy, I attended performances of Replika and Dante.
The first article in the fall issue is Beate Hein Bennett's vivid portrait
of the American-Romanian director and theatre artist, Moshe Yassur, tracing
the stages of a career of many displacements and fresh starts that takes the
protagonist through different theatrical worlds and languages before a
triumphal return to his starting point. Next comes Magdalena Golaczynska's
article on Transfer!, a site-specific performance about the forced migrations
of German and Polish populations at the end of World War II when Breslau
became Wrodaw. A forbidden subject of public discussion during the
communist regime, Transfer! has now been performed in both Poland and
Germany. Maria Ignatieva remembers Stanislavsky's last days on the
seventieth anniversary of his death on August 7. April Donahower, as
dramaturg for Global Scenes in New Haven, tells us about the three Eastern
European plays from Poland, Hungary, and Romania featured at the Global
Scenes Festival. Ana Mar tinez surveys the scenography exhibited at the 2007
Prague Quadrennial, paying particularly attention to complex issues of place
and giving special attention to Russia and Eastern Europe. Alexander
Morfov, already the subject of a recent article in SEEP, is presented by
Robert Blush as the author of Exiles, an exemplary work defining the plight
of Bulgarians in the post-communinst era. The fall issue concludes with
Margaret Araneo's review of Nina Polan's virtuoso performance as the
Polish-American actress Helena Modjeska, in a salon setting at New York's
Kosciuszko Foundation.
6 Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 28, No. 3
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
New York City:
EVENTS
The Czech Center New York and Immigrants' Theatre Project
presented staged readings of two Czech plays in translation at the
Bohemian National Hall:
Dorotka by Magdalena Frydrychova, translated by Michaela
Pnacekova, directed by Andreas Robertz, on June 9.
The Time of the Cherry Smoke by Katerina Rudcenkova, translated by
Heather Benes-McGadie, directed by Cosmin Chivu, on] une 23.
Studio Six performed Russian playwright Victoria Nikiforova's
Hidden Fees* in a translation by the company, directed by Raphael
Schklowsky, at the Cherry Lane Theatre as part of the New York
International Fringe Festival from August 8 to 22.
The Women's Project presented Aliens 1vith Extraordinary Skills by
Romanian playwright Saviana Stanescu, directed by Tea Alagic, at the Julia
Miles Theater from September 22 to October 26.
As part of the Prelude Festival, presented by the Martin E. Segal
Theatre Center, excerpts from Polish plays in translation were given a
staged reading at the Elebash Theatre, CUNY Graduate Center, on
September 27, including:
Sandbox by Michal Walczak, directed by Marcy Arlin, Immigrants'
Theatre Project.
Death of the Squirrel Man by Malgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk,
directed by Lear DeBessonet, Stillpoint Productions.
7
Let's Talk About Life and Death by Krzysztof Bizio, directed by Eric
Ting.
Made in Poland by Przemyslaw Wojcieszek, directed by Jackson
Gay, The Play Company.
Danspace Project hosted Dada von Bzdiilow Theatre (Poland)
performing Factor T., based on the works of Polish philosopher and poet
Stefan Themerson, at St. Mark's Church from October 2 to 4.
Gimpel, the Fool, adapted and directed by Moshe Yassur, based on
the short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, will be produced by the National
Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene at the J ewish Community Center in Manhattan
on Amsterdam Avenue and West 76 Street from November 23 to
December 28.
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
U.S. Regional:
The Long Wharf Theatre and the International Festival of Arts
and Ideas produced staged readings of three Eastern European plays in
New Haven, CT, from June 21 to 22:
Death of the Squirrel Man by Malgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk
(Poland).
Geza-boy by Janos Hay (Hungary).
For a Barbarian Woman by Saviana Stanescu (Romania).
Theatre Novi Most (New Bridge) performed a new bilingual
Russian-English play, Delirium for Two, based on I onesco, at the Red Eye
Theatre in Minneapolis as part of the Minnesota Fringe Festival from July
31 to August 10.
ARTEL (American Russian Theatre Ensemble Laboratory)
presented Explorations on the Bulgakov Theme of Nechistqya Sila (Unclean Forces)
as a part of the Gogol-Mogol Tea Room Per formance Salon at ArtWorks
Theatre in Los Angeles on August 22.
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
International:
Teatr Biuro Podr6zy (Poznan, Poland) presented an outdoor
performance of Macbeth: Who is that Bloodied Man? at the river near the
National Theatre, London, from August 5 to 9.
Edinburgh International Festival:
TR Warszawa (Poland) performed two plays at the King's
Theatre:
Dybbuk, based on S. Ansky's play and Hanna
Krall's short story, adapted and directed by
Krzysztof Warlikowski, from August 9 to 11.
A Polish translation of Sarah Kane's 4.48
Psychosis, translation by Klaudyna Rozhin,
directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna, from August 15 to
17.
East West Theatre Company (Sarajevo, Bosnia and
Herzegovina) presented Class Enemy, based on a play by
Nigel Williams, adapted and directed by Haris Pasovic, at
the Royal Lyceum Theatre from August 20 to 23.
Edinburgh Festival Fringe:
Teau Provisorium and Kompania Teau (Lublin, Poland)
presented Bite the Dust by Tadeusz R6zewicz, directed by
9
Janusz Opryriski and Witold Mazurkiewicz, at the
Universal Arts Theatre from August 1 to 25.
Kompania Doomsday (Bialystok, Poland) presented
Baldanders by Marcin Bartnikowski, directed by Marcin
Bikowski, at the Hill Street Theatre from August 1 to 25.
K3 Theatre (Bialystok, Poland) presented the puppet
performance ... etcetera ... , written, directed, and
performed by Ewa Mojsak, Marta Rau, and Dorota
Grahek, at the Hill Street Theatre from August 1 to 25.
Teatr Wiczy (foruri, Poland) presented Broken Nails,
written and directed by Romuald Wicza-Pokojski, at the
Hill Street Theatre from August 1 to 24, and migrants by
Slawomir Mrozek, directed by Romuald Wicza-Pokojski,
in a van outside Rocket@Demarco Roxy Art House from
August 11 to 17.
Ireneusz Krosny and the One Mime Theatre (Tychy,
Poland) performed Mime for Laughs! at the Hill Street
Theatre from August 1 to 25.
The tenth Bal10scandal International Theatre Festival (Rakvere,
Estonia), July 2 to 5:
10
N099 Teater (fallinn, Estonia) presented CEP by Ene-Liis
Semper, directed by Tiit Ojasoo.
Juha Valkeapaa and Kaja Kann (Estonia/Finland) performed their
play 50 Love!J W.rys to Die, at Rakvere Teater Stage 1.
Anne Juren & Kr66t Juurak (Estonia) presented Look Look at
Rakvere Teater Stage 3.
FILM
New York City:
Film Society of Lincoln Center hosted a series entitled At the
Crossroads: Slovenian Cinema at the Walter Reade Theatre from July 16 to 22.
Director Marko Nabersnik and film writer J oseph Valencic spoke. Films
included:
Do/ina Miru (Valley of Peace), directed by France Stiglic, 1956.
Vesna, directed by Frantisek Cap, 1953.
Pies v De:fju (Dance in the Rain), directed by Bostjan Hladnik, 1961.
Na PapirnatihAvionih (Paper Planes), directed by Matjaz K.lopcic, 1967.
Splav Meduze (Rcift of the Medusa), directed by Karpo Acimovic-
Godina, 1980.
Ko Zaprem Ofi (When I Close MY Eyes), directed by Franci Slak, 1993.
Outszder, directed by Andrej Kosak, 1996.
V Leru (Idle Rtmnini), directed by Janez Burger, 1999.
Sladke Saf!fe (Sweet Dreams), directed by Saso Podgo!Sek, 2001.
Varuh Meje (Guardian of the Frontier'), directed by Maja Weiss, 2002.
Pod JY/enim Oknom (Beneath Her Window), directed by Metod Pevec,
2003.
Rezervni Deli (Spare Parts), directed by Dam jan Kozole, 2003.
Petelin_ji Zajtrk (Rooster's Breakfast), directed by Marko Nabednik, 2007.
11
Anthology Film Archives and the Czech Center of New York
presented a retrospective of the work of Czech New Wave film director
Vojtech Jasny from September 19 to 25. Jasny spoke on opening night. Films
included:
Touha (Desire), 1958.
Pfefjf Jsem Svou Smrt (I Survived Certain Death), 1960.
Az Pfijde Kocour (The Cassandra 1963.
Vfichni Dobfi Roddci (All Afy Good Countrymen), 1968.
W-?Y Havel?, 1991.
Cfatjys, 1999.
Clearview's Ziegfeld Theater and Cinema with the support of
Interfest, Novqye Russkoye Slovo, and the Russian Federation Ministry of Culture
presented the eighth annual Russian Film Week from September 19 to 24.
Films included:
12
Yurjev Den' Dqy), directed by K.irill Serebrenn.ikov, 2008.
Indigo, directed by Roman Prygunov, 2008.
P/emryi (The Captive), directed by AJeksey Uchitel, 2008.
Rozygrysh (The Prank), directed by Andrey K.udinenko, 2008.
ljazhefyi Pesok (J-leary Sand), directed by Anton Barshchevsky, 2008.
Cheryre Vozrasta ljubvi (Four Ages of Love), directed by Sergey
Mokritsky 2008.
Dikqye Pole (Wild Field), directed by Mikhail K.alatozishvili, 2008.
Slavic and East European Peiformance Vol. 28, No. 3
FILM
U.S. Regional:
Laemmle Theatres, Bunyik Entertainment, Hungarian Filmunio and
the Hungarian Consulate of Los Angeles presented the Eighth Hungarian
Film Festival of New Films from October 16 - 23 at the Music Hall in Beverly
Hills, including:
Nines kegyelem (Without Mercy), directed by Ragilyi Elerner, 2006.
A Hit f!YOicadik napja (The Eighth Dqy of the Week),directed by Judit
Elek, 2006.
Opium: Egy elmebeteg nii napldja (Opium: Diary of a Madwoman), directed
by Janos Szasz, 2007.
Do/ina, directed by Zoltan Kamondi, 2007.
Delta, directed by Kornel Mundrucz6, 2008.
Kalandorok (Adventurers), directed by Bela Paczolay, 2008.
Bahrtalo! (Good Luck.0, directed by Robert Lakatos, 2008.
FILM
International:
Latvian Ministry of Culture and International Center of Cinema
presented the 19th International Film Forum, ArsenaLr, in Riga, Latvia from 12
to 21 of September, which featured close to 100 ftlrns in ten categories.
screenings included:
Yar (The Hollow) (Russia, 2007), directed by Marina Razbezhkina.
Vogelfrei (Latvia, 2007), directed by Janis Kalejs, Garis Smits, Janis
PutniQs, Anna Viduleja.
13
14
Vastutuulesaal (Headwind Halt) (Estonia, 2007), directed by Priit
Valkna.
Whisper of Sin (Lithuania, 2007), directed by Jurga Ivanauskaite,
Algimantas Puipa.
S11gisball (Autumn (Estonia, 2007), directed by Veiko Ounpuu.
Dialogos (Estonia, 2008), directed by Olo Pikkov.
Speleju, dancoju (I plqyed, I danced) (Latvia, 2007), directed by Roze
Sticbra.
Mina olin siin (I was here) (Estonia, Finland, 2008), directed by Rene
Vilbre.
Klucis-nepareizais latvietis (Klucis-The Deconstruction of an Artist) (Latvia,
2008), directed by Peteris Krilovs.
Varpas (The (Lithuania, 2007), directed by Audrius Stonys.
Odna (Alone) (Russia, 1931), directed by Leonid Trauberg, Grigori
Kozintsev.
Vratne lahve (Empties) (Czech Republic, U.K., 2007), directed by Jan
Sverak.
fa mifujem, lj mifujef (I Love, You Love) (Slovakia, 1980), directed by
Dusan Hanak.
Vienkarfi pops (The Church Wiff Arrive in the Evening) (Latvia, 2007),
directed by Andis Miziss.
Pora umierac (Time to die) (Poland, 2007), directed by Dorota

CONFERENCES, ETC:
Theatre Laboratory Plavo Pozoriste (Blue Theatre) hosted an
international program titled Two Open Weeks on techniques of self-research and
human-being-centered theatre in Belgrade, Serbia, from July 21 to August 1.
Included in the two weeks were lectures on contemporary Serbian theatre by
director Nenad Colic; a performance by Plavo Pozoriste of Carobnjak tli
Harmonifna kakqfonija (The i ~ r d or Harmonic Cacophof!Y), based on the works
of L. Frank Baum, Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, Hermann Hesse, Oscar Wilde,
and Marina Tsvetaeva; and an intensive workshop, The Dance qf i t1emory.
Regula contra Regulam, directed by Raw Iaiza and Teatro La Madrugada
(Milan, Italy), presented an open session of their performance research in
collaboration with the Grotowski Institute (Wrodaw, Poland) in Brzezinka,
Poland from September 27 to October 5.
Compiled by Christopher Silsby and Marina Volok
15
BOOKS RECEIVED
Braun, Kazimierz. Lisry na Babi/on: Pisma Przypomniane i Odszukane.
Juileuszowa. Poznan-Tarn6w: Tarnowska Fundacja Kultury, Dyrekcja i
Zesp6l Tarnowskiego Teatru: Wydawnictwo Kontekst, 2007. 504 pages.
Contains an introduction by Justyna Hofman-Wisniewska, thirty-four
articles and two plays by Braun, a biographical note, list of productions, list
of publications, appendix, index of names, and 98 illustrations, many in
color.
Dramatica, Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Cluj-Napoca, 1/2007. 226
pages. Includes articles on modern drama and theatre written in Romanian,
French, and English.
Gharavi, Lance, ed. and trans. Western Esotericism in Russian Silver Age Drama
andAieksandr Rose and the Cross. St. Paul, Minnesota: New Grail
Publishing, 2008. 194 pages. Includes a translation of the play, a one-
hundred introduction, and twenty-five pages of notes.
The Impossible Theater/ Das Unmijgfiche Theater-Peiformativiry in the WOrks of
Pawel Althamer, Tadeusz Kantor, Katarzyna Kozyra, Robert Kufmirowski and Artur
Zmijewski. Nurnberg: Verlag Fur Moderne Kunst, 2006. 152 pages. Exhibit
catalog. Text in both German and English. Foreward by Gerald Matt,
director of Kuntshalle, Vienna, and Agnieszka Morawinska, director of
Warsaw. "Tadeusz Kantor," 86-138. Contains numerous
illustrations, many in color.
Larionow, Dominika. Przestrzenie Obrazow Leszka Mqdzika. Lublin:
Towarzystwo Naukowe Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego Jana Pawla
II, 2008. 190 pages. Includes four appendixes; 1) Scenarios for Leszek
seven productions; 2) list of the prouctions of the Visual Stage of
the Catholic University of Lublin; 3) Leszek scenography outside
the Catholic University of Lublin; 4) Leszek scenography from
1967- 70; editorial note; bibliography; summary in English; and seven
photographs.
Shevtsova, Maria. "The Golden Mask Festival 2008." NTQ Reports and
Announcements. NeJV Theatre Quarter!J, Vol. XXIV, Part 3 (August 2008),
294-7.
Such, Jaroslaw and Marek Swica, eds. Tadeusz Kantor: Interior o/ Imagination.
Warsaw-Cracow: a c h ~ t a National Gallery of Art: Centre for the
Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor Cricoteka, 2005. 188 pages.
Exhibit catalog. Contains a bibliography and numerous photographs,
paintings, and drawings, many in color. Includes a CD-Rom, Tadeusz Kantor
Kalendarium (with summarized chronology in English), a c h ~ t a Cricoteka.
Worthen, Hana. "Within and Beyond: Pavel Kohout's Plqy Makbeth and its
Audiences." Gramma: Jottrnal of Theory and Criticism, Vol. 15, 2007
(Shakespeare Worldwide and the Idea of an Audience), 11-32.
17
IN MEMORIAM
JOZEF SZAJNA (1922-2008)
J6zef Szajna was a painter, graphic artist, scene designer, director,
author, and theatre artist, who-along with Jerzy Grotowski and Tadeusz
Kantor--defined Polish Theatre in the second half of the twentieth century.
He survived five years in Nazi extermination and slave-labor camps in Poland
and Germany where he began his career as an artist drawing fellow
prisoners. Both his art and his work in the theatre are expressions of his
experience of the Holocaust, and the last decades of his life Szajna spent
traveling throughout the world with his authorial productions giving testimony
against totalitarianism and barbarism.
1922 13 March born in Rzesz6w.
1939 Drafted in the army and assigned to guard duties against sabotage.
Joins underground unit.
1940 Attempts to flee to Hungary, arrested and handed over to the
Gestapo, imprisoned in Tarnow.
1941 25 July deported to Auschwitz.
1941-42 Works in construction, tailorshop, and transport units.
1942 November, for smuggling food and messages, trans fer red to
punishment detail at Birkenau.
1943 January, assigned to punishment cell in Block 11.
1943 February, sent to infirmary and assigned as cleaner in SS canteen.
1943 August 17-0ctober 11, for escape attempt, incarcerated in "standing"
cell of Block 11 and sentenced to death. Execution order rescinded,
assigned to sorting belongings of murdered Jews.
1944 21 January transferred to Buchenwald concentration camp in
Germany and assigned to stone quarries. Taken to Schonebeck (near
18 Slavic and East European Peiformance Vol. 28, No. 3
J6zef Szajna
19
Magdeburg) to work on airplane parts. Sent to the infirmary during
Allied air raids. Created portraits of fellow prisoners and from
memory twenty sketches of Auschwitz Block 11 (four survive). Paints
street and barracks signs and flower bouquets for an SSman.
1945 11 April, when SS evacuates prisoners, escapes and meets U.S. troops
on 15 April.
1945-47 Spends two years as displaced person at Haaren/Ems in British zone.
194 7 Returns to Poland.
1952- 53 Graduates from Academy of Fine Arts, Cracow, with diploma in
graphic arts and stage design.
1953-55 Designs in Opole at Teatr Ziemi Opolskiej: Fadeyev, The Young Guard
and Musset, Barbarine.
1954--63 Teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts, Cracow. Active as a painter and
visual artist until his death, exhibiting in Poland and throughout the
world. Creates collages, assemblages with found objects, and
mannequins, serving as memories of the past.
1956-63 Designs in Nowa Huta at Teatr Ludowy: Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men;
Werfel,Jacobowski and the Colonel; Camus, State of Siege; Shakespeare, The
Tempest and As You Like It, Aeschylus, Oresteia; Mickiewicz, Forefathers'
Eve.
1958 Designs Brecht, Mother Courage in Warsaw at Teatr Ziemi
Mazowieckiej.
1959 Designs Witkiewicz, Madman and the Nun and Country House in Warsaw
at Teatr Narodowy and Krasinski, Undivine Comecfy in Lodi at Teatr
Nowy.
1963 Designs and co-creates with Jerzy Grotowski Wyspiari.ski,Ak ropolis in
Opole at Teatr Laboratorium.
Dante, Studio Theatre, Warsaw, 197 4
21
Dante, Studio Theatre, Warsaw, 1974
23
1963-66 Manager and Artistic Director of Teatr Ludowy in Nowa Huta where
he designs and directs Gogo!, Inspector General and Cervantes, Don
Quixote.
1964 Teatr Ludowy, designs Sophocles, Antigone and Aeschylus, Seven Against
Thebes and directs Wandurski, Death on a Pear Tree (designed by Daniel
Mr6z), which is also presented in Warsaw and Wrodaw.
1965 Teatr Ludowy, directs and designs Tadeusz Holuj, Empty Field and
Kafka, Castle
1966 Teatr Ludowy, directs and designs Mayakovsky, Afystery-Bouffe.
1967-71 Director and designer at Teatr Stary in Cracow: Witkiewicz, Thry and
The New Deliverance, Mayakovsky, The Bathhouse, and at the Cracow
Opera, Gounod, Faust.
1968-69 Teatr Sla.ski in Katowice, designs and directs O'Casey, The Purple Dust
and Ernest Bryll, Rzecz listopadowa.
1970 Designs Shakespeare, Macbeth at the Playhouse in Sheffield, England.
One-man show at the Venice Biennale: Reminiscences, an installation
commemorating Cracow artists killed at Auschwitz.
1971 Designs, directs, and writes the scenario for Goethe, Faust at Teatr
Polski, Warsaw.
1972 Founding manager and artistic director of art gallery and theatre
center, Teatr Studio, Warsaw. Designs, directs, and writes scenario
for Witkary and designs Gogo!, The Nose; designs and directs Replika
II for the Edinburgh International Festival.
1973 Designs and directs Gulgutiera, which he writes with Maria Czanerle;
designs and directs Replika III for the Nancy World Festival and
Replika IV at Teatr Studio.
1974 Designs, directs, writes scenario for Dante, based on The Divine Comecjy,
for the International Festival in Florence and then at Teatr Studio.
1976 Designs and directs Cervantes.
1977 Designs and directs Mqyakovsfg.
1978 Death on a Pear Tree on tour.
1979 Exhibits at at the Sao Paulo Biennale.
1980 Replika Von tour.
1981 Dante Lives. Resigns from Teatr Studio in protest against imposition of
martial law.
1984 Replika V7 on tour.
1985 Dante the Contemporary on tour.
1986 Replika V7 on tour.
1989 Exhibits at the Sao Paulo Biennale.
1990 Exhibits at the Venice Art Biennale.
1992 Dante on tour.
1993 The Earth, Traces I, Traces II, The Life and Death of Cervantes on tour.
1995 Relics on tour.
1997 Deballages I, II in Rzesz6w at Teatr im. Wandy Siemaszkowej.
2003 Exhibits Our Biographies: 194445, pen and ink drawing at The Last
Expression: Art and Auschwitz at the Brooklyn Academy,
March 7-June 15.
2008 24 June dies in Warsaw.
25
MOSHE YASSUR: A LIFE IN THEATRE
Beate Hein Bennett
The essence of theatre is the paradoxical union of presence and
evanescence. A life in the theatre is lived on the edge of constant
disappearance. As such, it is an indispensable metaphor for life itself-
perceived by the outsider, the observer, the exile, the survivor. Above all, the
art of life lived as a continuous act of invention and re-invention, of
emergencies and ernergences, of appearances and disappearances, became a
necessity in twentieth-century Eastern Europe after World War II for Jews
who survived the killing fields of the Holocaust. In all these respects, Moshe
Yassur, the subject of this biographical essay, exemplifies the wonder of
theatrical metamorphosis in the various manifestations of his life.
Moshe Yassur was born in 1934 as Marcel Simon Stuerrner in Iasi, a
university town and capital of the northeastern Romanian province of
Moldavia, close to the border with Ukraine. His father, of German-Jewish
origin, was a sales representative for the Singer Company and traveled a great
deal. Since his mother's family was for generations dealers of wine and plum
brandy in Raducaneni, a small village (shtet!) about twenty kilometers east of
Iasi, Moshe spent his early childhood among the village folk-the vintners,
coopers, smiths, cobblers, and bakers-in this fertile region of Romania.
This idyllic childhood was cut short when the Romanian fascists took
power. By 1939 the fascists had expropriated land owned by Jews, expelling
them from their villages, and confining them to towns where they could be
better controlled by terror. Moshe and his mother moved back to Iasi where
in June 1941 one of the worst pogroms befell the Jewish community. Within
three days Gune 21 to 24) more than twelve thousand Jews were killed in a joint
action of the German and Romanian military and local police.
While his father did not sur vive, Moshe, almost seven years old at the
time, lived by sheer luck, instinct, intelligence, and an innate actor's sensibility
put to an early and extreme test: he played dead among the dead and dying.
When he was discovered by the people who carne to collect the dead and clean
up the place of execution (the police headquarters courtyard in the center of
Iasi), he did not respond when spoken to in Romanian. Not until he was asked
in Yiddish if he wanted to be taken horne did he stir and, denying any need for
Moshe Yassur
27
help, ran home through the dark streets where the street cleaner barrels
overflowed with the lifeless limbs of the dead. At home, a basement room, he
found his mother alive and singing as she wrapped her bloodied head with a
rag, assuring the little boy that it didn't hurt. The absurdity of life and death in
a war zone with multiple fronts and shifting alliances (Romanian Iron Guards
and Legionnaires, German SS troopers and army soldiers, and fmally Soviet
forces) taught the boy something about the paradoxical and tenuous
relationship between life and death, between reality and truth, between
pretense and essence, between gesture and meaning.
Growing up speaking two languages-Yiddish, his mother tongue,
and Romanian, the national language-taught him to distinguish between the
private and the public spheres, between the language of the heart and soul and
the language of dominance and power. An added linguistic irony is that
Yiddish is largely rooted in German which, as a child, he experienced as
another language of threat. Thus language in those dangerous circumstances
became a particularly treacherous and slippery tool of communication; it
could be a source of betrayal, but it could also serve as means to safety.
For Moshe language became a life-long source of fascination and
challenge; he ultimately learned to live and work with six different languages
(Yiddish, Romanian, Hebrew, French, English, and German) plus a smattering
of Russian and Arabic. As a theatre artist, he is a man of the ear. He is, first of
all, attracted by text, by the word spoken on stage: the sound, resonance,
signi fication of layered speech, the consonance or contradiction between
verbal expression and gesture, the possibilities of avoidance and prevarication
that language allows, as well as the potential for deadly attack that lay in the
power of the spoken word.
When spoken, the musical inflections of both Yiddish and Romanian
(albeit very different) cloak even the harshest actions with a soft lilt, while
Hebrew and English lend a sparse directness to subtle motions. A theatrical
text is for Moshe a score of layered codes that become significant only in the
physical speech act-words in themselves mean nothing. What he intuited as
a child about language in times of danger was many years later formulated for
him in his work with Eugene lonesco.
One of Moshe's earliest theatrical experiences came shortly after
Soviet troops occupied l asi in 1944-45, when some Russian-Jewish soldiers
staged a performance in Yiddish for the surviving Jewish population at the
Moshe Yassur, 1963
29
National Theatre of Iasi, an ornate beaux arts edifice and, like the local
university, a high temple of anti-Semitism. To hear Yiddish spoken in the
Romanian National Theatre was a bizarre surprise for an audience of half-alive
Jews who had recently emerged from cellars where they had survived the final
bombardments among a defeated, demoralized Romanian population. The
language of the vanquished was declaimed by the victors in earshot of the
tormentors. Ragged people gathering under the gilded dome of a bygone era
listened to Russian-Jewish soldiers in Soviet uniform singing mamaloshn.
From 1947 until1950 when he immigrated with his mother to Israel,
Moshe (still known then as Marcel Stuermer) established roots as a theatre
artist in Romania. In 1947 as a child actor, he joined the remnants of
Goldfaden's Yiddish theatre, Pomul Verde; the theatre had been re-established
as an open-air theatre on the original site in a garden across the street from the
National Theatre. (A statue of Abraham Goldfaden today overlooks the old
site.) He also became the first Jew to appear on the stage of the venerable
National Theatre of Iasi.
Paradoxically his education in anti-Semitic wartime Romania
prepared him for his theatrical career. During the war after the 1941 pogrom,
life for Jewish children was a mix of hunger and deprivation but, in terms of
schooling, an unexpected boon came when Jewish professors were expelled
from the university. These professors eked out a living as primary and
secondary school teachers in the Jewish schools that were sanctioned by the
Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu. Moshe's love of the Romanian language
and literature was awakened early in elementary school by one of the notable
Jewish authorities of Romanian literature who had been ousted from the
university. Since books were a rarity, the teaching of literature consisted mostly
of classical Romanian poetry being recited by the teacher to the pupils. Thus
when Moshe was invited at age thirteen to take the entrance examination for
acceptance to the newly established youth group at the local Conservatory of
Music and Drama, he prepared a poetry recitation of Eminescu's Third Letter,
a heroic epic from Romanian history. One of the luminaries of Romanian
linguistics and a renowned writer, Michail Sadoveanu was among the
examining panel; after Moshe's recitation he announced in full voice, "Listen
to this Jewish boy speak our (!) Romanian language so beautifully" and kissed
him on the forehead. Moshe was accepted into the conservatory program and
subsequently hired by the National Theatre in Iasi. He was able to observe
Alexander Bardin.i Oeft) and Moshe Yassur (right),
Haifa Municipal Theatre, 1965
some of the most famous Romanian actors who took him under their wings
and toured with the company during the summer months throughout the
country. Thus his earliest theatrical training was twofold: partaking in the
spontaneous exuberance of the revived Yiddish theatre and learning from the
formidable traditions of a national Romanian institution.
In 1950, as Stalinism began to infect Romanian cultural life, Moshe
played at the Pomul Verde the character of Harry Truman (in Yiddish, of
course) in a propagandist sketch depicting the U.S. president as the tool of
31
"evil Wall Street." It was a few months before he and his mother immigrated
to I srael. When he arrived at the immigrants' camp in Israel and stood in the
food line, he heard "Look, here Truman too has to stand in line for food."
Whenever other Iasi immigrants recognized him, Moshe was called "Truman,"
whereas Israeli-born boys, who had little empathy or understanding for the
newcomers who had been sold for hard currency by communist nations, called
him and other holocaust survivors "soap"-a horrific reminder of what had
happened to millions of Jews in the concentration camp ovens.
The next twenty years in Israel (1950-70) were spent .in building an
existence for himself and his mother as well as finding his way through the
complex layers of Israeli culture. Besides learning to navigate in an unfamiliar
and harsh territory, Moshe also learned Hebrew very quickly. However, the
doors to higher education were closed to Moshe (and many other young
people in similar circumstances). His emigration from Romania had taken
place one year before he had finished high school, which he had attended on
a scholarship; in Israel high schools at that time also cost money but there were
no scholarships available. Consequently, he could not obtain a diploma and
continue with university studies, although he did avail himself, as a non-
matriculated student at Hebrew University, of lectures by Martin Buber and
Josef I<.1ausner, authorities on Jewish philosophy, history, and religion.
Despite Moshe's lack of a university degree, the teacher seminary was
open to him since the country needed instructors. At the age of eighteen, he
became a teacher in a one-room school at a new settlement of Yemenite
immigrants. Two years of obligatory military training (1952-54) and active
duty in two wars (1956 Sinai campaign, 1967 Six Day War) added experience
in another kind of theatre. Even with all these roadblocks and interruptions of
national crisis, he gradually built a career in theatre that took him from award-
winning amateur performances to high-level professional institutions where
he worked with some of the most renowned theatre artists who had settled in
Israel or come as guest artists.
After military training, one of Moshe's first theatre involvements in
Israel was as an actor with a Romanian professional group in Ephraim
Kishon's Having Pull in High Places in which he played an old man. The director
of the group was a fan of Michail Sebastian, a contemporary Romanian writer
and playwright. He encouraged Moshe to translate into Hebrew Sebastian's
play A Star Without a Name. Moshe directed the play with an amateur group in
Clown Wanted, by Matei V i ~ n i e c Third Step Theatre, NY
33
Max Frisch's Andorra, New Federal Theatre, 1971- 72
34
Jerusalem; it was invited to an annual festival of amateur theatre and won first
prize. From then on Moshe translated other plays into Hebrew, directed in
various kibbutzim, and in 1961 landed a position as Assistant Director to
Joseph .Milo at the Haifa Municipal Theatre, which was at the time one of the
most vital theatres in Israel and known internationally for its superb repertory
and modern production style.
The 1960s was a time of great theatrical innovation and international
exchange. Paris in particular held a special attraction. Having won a
competition for a scholarship offered by the Ministries of Culture of France
and Israel, Moshe was offered the opportunity to attend the Universite du
Theatre des Nations in Paris where he attached himself to Jean-Marie Serreau,
who championed Eugene Ionesco. Ionesco, a fellow Romanian, became for
Moshe a theatrical model, exposing him to an entirely new theatrical language.
Over the years Moshe has directed a number of Ionesco's plays, notably jacques
or the Submission and the companion piece, The Future Is in the Eggs. He has also
directed The Bald Soprano in three languages (Hebrew, Romanian, and English,
with a Yiddish-language production possibly in the works) and in three
countries (Israel, Romania, and the United States). In addition to his periodic
sojourn in Paris (1962-65), the 1960s were a busy decade for Moshe in Israel;
he was working at the Haifa Municipal Theatre, teaching acting at the premiere
theatre school of Nissan Nativ in Tel Aviv, and forming his own company, the
Miniatron in Jerusalem, where he had the pleasure of Ionesco praising his
production of Jacques or the Submission as among the best he had seen. In 1967
the Six Day War demanded his active duty as a lieutenant.
Being part of a new generation of theatre artists building a new
Hebrew-language theatre in a new country was challenging for Moshe. The
population was very culturally divided and lacked a sense of a theatrical
tradition. There was almost no continuity between the theatrical conditions in
Israel and his theatrical roots in Romania-not even his name had remained
the same.
In 1970 another emigration took Moshe to ew York. Although
barely speaking English, he gained the confidence of Woodie King, Jr., the
producer of the New Federal Theatre, who hired him to direct the Jewish
theatre wing of the multicultural organization located in the Henry Street
Settlement. Moshe directed for the New Federal Theatre, among other pieces,
Max Frisch's Andorra and Aharon Megged's The First Sin, a comedy about
35
Jaques or the Submission, by Eugene Ionesco, directed by Moshe Yassur,
Theatre Eugene Ionesco, Chisinau, Republic of Moldava
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Tangou Final, by Mario Diament, Teatrul Evreiesc de Stat, Bucharest
37
Adam and Eve. He also learned English. Moshe worked not only with the
New Federal Theatre but also with Soho Rep on Mercer Street where he
directed Moliere's The Miser. He worked for the Open Space Theatre
Experiment at St. Mark's and was hired by Jersey City State College as an
adjunct professor for acting and to direct Gombrowicz's lvona, Princess of
Burgundia. New York became his home where he eventually was also given the
opportunity to complete his education at the City University of New York. He
earned a B.A. from Queens College and an M.F.A. from Brooklyn College
some thirty years after the abrupt interruption of his education in Romania.
Becoming attached as an artistic partner to a company is a desirable
boon for a freelance director in New York; thus when A1 D'Andrea, Director
of the Third Step Theatre Company, an off-off-Broadway company, asked him
to become Associate Artistic Director, Moshe accepted enthusiastically. It gave
him the chance to help shape the artistic vision of a company. For four years
(1989-93) when the original partners left for Los Angeles and the theatre was
dissolved, he directed, held workshops, and helped select the repertoire, as well
as launch new playwrights in new play festivals. Under his direction, the U.S.
premiere in 1990 of The Knights of the Roundtable, a timely play of the fall of
communism by Christoph Hein, drew an audience of young East German
students who came often to enjoy a piece of their own recent history. Moshe
also resurrected Ugo Betti's Crime on Goat Island, a chamber tragedy of failed
lives. Another U.S. premiere was Clown Wcmted, an existential doomsday
downerie by Romanian playwright Matei i ~ n i e c
For Moshe the boundaries of theatre are not rigidly divided into
professional and other; to him theatre is a vector into existence, which he
shares wherever he is. Thus he works with professionals, with amateurs, with
children, with the aged regardless of their "theatrical" preparation. He is
interested in eliciting human expression that is rooted in experience and needs
to be communicated-despite or because of the insufficiency of language. To
him, working with a child in a kibbutz, a teenager in the Bronx, a senior citizen
in a summer camp, an amateur in a community theatre, or a professional actor
with ftlm credits, has the same weight-it is the human encounter in the
common endeavor to bring to life an imaginary yet real moment, to create a
temporary community of players in which everyone has a stake.
After more than thirty years in New York and sixty years in the
theatre, much in Moshe's life is coming full circle. Beginning in 2000, Moshe
38
Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 28, No.3
has gone back to Romania to direct. He has been called to the Jewish State
Theatre in Bucharest tO direct several plays in Yiddish from the classic Yiddish
repertoire as well as a contemporary play in Yiddish translation by Mario
Diament, The Book of Ruth. He has also presented his adaptation of Isaac
Bashevis Singer's Gimpl, the Fool. These productions continue to play in
repertoire. In addition he has brought several plays to the Romanian stage: Joe
Orton's What the Butler Saw at Teatrul Mic in Bucharest (still playing to full
houses in its sixth season), The Belle of Amherst about Emily Dickinson as a
co-production of Teatrul Mic and Teatrul Maria Filotti in Braila, where he also
directed an adaptation of Chekhov's short story The Lac!J' Jvith a Little Dog. He
brought Ionesco's The Bald Soprano to Teatrul Dramatic in Galati, a major city
in the Danube Delta.
However, the most astounding part of Moshe's recent career is his
work with the National Theatre in Iasi. Almost sixty years after his exodus
from Iasi, the town where he was almost killed, he returned tO the National
Theatre to direct Howard Barker's judith and Ionesco's jacques or the Submission
and The Future Is in the Eggs. To work in this city, in this theatre, was a strange
homecoming riddled with complex emotions, but it was also an existential
success. Twice more he was to visit Iasi and the National Theatre on the
occasion of the Goldfaden Festivals; both times a production of Moshe's was
part of the program.2
And now, in the fall of 2008, new work by Moshe continues in
Romania. A project with Maia Morgenstern, Miss Margarzda's Way by Roberto
Athayde, is in preparation, and the formation is underway of a new company,
Teatrul de Camera. In addition, presently in New York he is directing his
adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Gimp/, the Fool, in Singer's original
Yiddish, under the aegis of the National Jewish Theatre Folksbiene. Moshe's
theatrical trajectory from Iasi to New York, his wandering from the remote
village of Raducaneni tO the world metropolis of New York, his emergence
from the dead as a child to a life of vital creativity, is a special stOry of the
twentieth century; it is also a testimony to the wondrous resilience of an artist
who embarked on an art that embodies and defies disappearance. In the words
of Moshe Yassur: "The more different lives I create and liYe in the process of
my theatre work, the more I am aware and connected to my own life."
39
As Moshe's longtime partner and dramaturg on many productions, I have
an insider' s special access to detailed information and a close-up view of
my subject, as well as a by no means impartial view of his traits and
qualities.
NOTES
1 See also Moshe Yassur, "The End of Jassi Theatre," in The jeJJJish Quarter!J, Summer
2000: 59-62 for a more complete history of this event.
2 See also Beare Hein Bennett, "The Avram Goldfaden International Theatre Festival
in Iasi, Romania," in Slavic and East European Peiformance, \'ol. 23, No. 1 (Winter 2003):
12-23.
MEMORY AND OBLIVION IN JAN KLATA'S 7RANSFERJ
Magdalena Golaczynska
The long-term psychological and sociological results of post-war
forced migrations in Central Europe, in particular the loss of one's
homeland, are the subject of the Polish-German theatre project Transfer!,
directed by Jan Klata. A joint production of the Wrodaw Teatr
Wsp6kzesny and the Berlin Hebel-am-Ufer Theatre, Transfer/premiered in
Wrodaw on November 18, 2006 and in Berlin on January 18, 2007. It is
still being performed at both theatres to the applause of audiences and
critics alike.
Dunja Funke and Sebastian Majewski developed the text of
Transfer! through interviews with transferred Germans and Poles. They are
referred to as "Witnesses" by the authors since they experienced firsthand
the events of 1939-47. More than just actors in a documentary play, nine
of the twelve performers in Transfer! are actual Witnesses selected from a
group of seventy forced immigrants after seYeral months of research and
interviews. Klata, Funke, and Majewski made their choices based on the
performers' theatre experience and talent for storytelling. Selected
statements were compiled into a script, which was then authorized by the
participants. (Any additional cuts or amendments introduced during the
staging process also had to be apprmed.)
While the ten Witnesses performing in Transfer! are amateurs, they
are accompanied on stage by three professionals, who portray the leading
protagonists of the Yalta Conference: Churchill (Wieslaw Cichy), Stalin
(alternatively Przemyslaw Bluszcz and Wojciech Ziemianski), and
Roosevelt (Zdzisl aw Kuzniar). These Yalta scenes, written by Jan Klata, are
based on caricatures. The politicians' elaborate statements are interwoven
with the Witnesses' simple testimony, revealing what is often unspoken or
forgotten. The Witnesses regularly repeat the phrases, "I don't know" or " I
don't remember."
The issue of forced migrations and relocations in Central Europe
concerns a large group of people, with every fifth German and tenth
Polish citizen having been forced to leave his or her homeland as a result
of World War II. The Witnesses come from various districts of pre-war
41
Eastern Poland (Vilnius, Podole, and Tarnopol), as well as from regions
formerly part of Eastern and Northern Germany (Silesia and Pomerania).
The most significant testimony, however, comes from more recent
residents of Wrodaw (which the Germans called Breslau). Wrodaw, as a
European metropolis located in a borderland, witnessed all the dramas of
Central Europe, starting with the tragic results of Nazism and anti-
Semitism, and going to the destruction of Festung, the fortified city, and
extending to the almost total replacement of its population. The
consequences of these dramas have marked several generations. As the
capital of Lower Silesia and the largest German city incorporated into
Poland in 1945, Wrodaw became the official showpiece of the so-called
Reclaimed Territories in the Polish People's Republic. An official
propaganda campaign was waged to emphasize the ancient Polish origins
of Wrodaw in the medieval Piast dynasty.
Transfer! seeks to portray the long-term historico-political causes
of the forced migrations and their influence on the present. The
expulsions appear in this context as the result of both World War II and
pre-war National Socialist politics. On stage the Poles recount the fight
against the Germans and Soviets, while the Germans speak about their
families and their attitudes toward Nazism. In Brechtian style, with modest
staging, limited scenery, and few props, the Witnesses, dressed in casual
clothes, are seated upstage on simple office chairs. They rise one by one,
coming to the proscenium to tell the audience their stories. The stage floor
is covered with a thick layer of soil, symbolizing the old and new
homelands. German and Polish inscriptions, forming the titles of
individual scenes, are projected onto a screen located in the background.
The participants speak in the first person about their own experiences,
attempting to overcome, with difficulty, the silence their memories had
been shrouded in for many years.
Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt, along with the Nazis, bear the
brunt of the responsibility for the tragic experiences of the displaced
victims. However, it is only the "Big Three" at the Yalta Conference who
are presented on stage, while Hitler and his followers are only mentioned
in individual stories. The Allied leaders, who are ruthlessly mocked, watch
the whole performance from a scaffold. They are presented as modern pop
stars (Chu, Sta, and Roo), miming along to the dark and ominously
42 Slavic and East European Performance VoL 28, No. 3

Transfer!, directed by Jan I<Jata, text developed by Dunja Funke and Sebastian l\1ajewski,
the \X'rodaw Teatr Wsp6kzesny and the Berlin Hebel-am-Ufer Theatre, 2006- 07
repettttve songs of Joy Division during the interludes to their
conversations. They open their performance with "Day of the Lords," with
the repeated lyrics: "There's no room for the weak."
Transfer! presents fragmented memories where serious matters are
juxtaposed with apparently trivial problems. What we encounter are
random scraps of memory-one of the Witnesses reads her father's letters
from the front; another sings songs and reads out the names of all
residents of her village, which no longer exists; and another speaks about
the toys and paintings left behind by his family when they were displaced.
Past and present coexist as the testimonies are filtered through the
performers' contemporary experiences and observations. The amateur
actors are elderly and have difficulty moving around the stage, sometimes
even forgetting their lines. During t he final scene, they sit down on chairs,
one by one, while photos of them in their youth or childhood are projected
onto the upstage screen.
1
From private memories, two broader collective
memories are formed-one Polish, one German.
German histories are marked by a tension between guilt and
responsibility. While some Germans were without a doubt guilty of
heinous acts, the Witnesses' stories primarily deal with more complex
issues of responsibility, especially regarding what responsibilities the
Witnesses' parents and relatives may have had. Completely different
opinions are presented. For example, Ilse Bode from Berlin says that her
parents "lived in the system and they could not help it. I don't want to hear
that my parents were Nazis."
2
In her short appearances, reminiscent of
cabaret shows, Ilse tries to tame Nazism by mocking it and telling jokes
about Hitler and Goebbels. In contrast, Hanne-Lore Pretzsch, from
Pomerania, remembers the German resistance to Nazism and provides an
example of her uncle Erich, who refused to execute civilians on the
Eastern front. Her uncle was then transferred to a different military unit
on condition that he remain silent about the reasons for his transfer.
Hanne-Lore explains, "As you can see, it was possible to say no. But I don't
know if that was always possible." Both Hanne-Lore and Gunter Linke
mention their parents' opportunism and their silence regarding
concentration camps. The adults did not notice the transports passing by
nor did they answer the difficult questions posed by their children, so they
also must bear some responsibility. Hanne-Lore says, "And yet the Jews
disappeared, and we knew the Jews ... They didn't want to see, but they
must have known; it is impossible that they didn't know. How could so
many people disappear?"
Jews are unequivocally victims, and they are the great absent
heroes of the performance, though they are mentioned both by the
German and Polish participants. The latter remember pogroms and firing
squads in their lost homelands as well as the legal regulations imposed in
order to humiliate Jews. Sometimes Poles are presented heroically in these
testimonies, remembered for providing persecuted Jews with food. On
other occasions, Poles are shown to have refused Jews any assistance.
Zygmunt Sobolewski, who recollects the capture of Jews in his home
village in Ukraine, describes a scene in which two neighbors fight over a
Jewish quilt. "They pull, scream, and curse. One of them was Ukranian,
and the other Polish. I'm sure I saw it, as one of them was my schoolmate's
mother." When these words are spoken, feathers fall from above, as a
symbol of the victims of the Holocaust, who were never buried. Poles
were conscious of exterminations taking place in ghettos: "I knew what
would happen to them and I couldn't understand why. I still can't
understand"
Presented clearly, albeit in a marginal role, the question of Polish
guilt is explored on stage when Gunter Linke, a German, mentions Polish
camps for German civilians. Gunter recounts how his uncle "was captured
by the Polish and put in the camp. He did not survive that." Consequently,
Gunter touches upon a subject that is hardly known in Poland, the
"isolation institutions," established in buildings formerly part of Nazi
concentration camps. Polish discussion of these institutions has been
limited to academic publications. Due to illnesses, starvation, and brutal
treatment of prisoners, the death rate in those camps was very high.3
German participants speak openly about the atrocities of the
Soviet Army toward civilians, which were taboo subjects in the GDR and
in communist Poland. Hanne-Lore Pretzsch describes the crimes
committed by the Soviets- first stealing valuable watches, for which they
had a great liking, and then raping her mother and aunt. "They weren't any
kind of perverts. They were quite 'ordinary' Russians, so to speak. It was
just about screwing, and that went quickly. They would even queue in
order ... Frau komm, Frau komm, and always with their guns ready." This
45
Transfer!, directed by Jan Klata, text developed by Dunja Funke and Sebastian Majewski,
the Wrodaw Teatr Wsp6lczesny and the Berlin Hebel-am-Ufer Theatre, 2006- 07
('<")
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theme is expanded through the Yalta dialogue that follows. When Chu
mentions the issue of collective rapes, Sta tries to find an excuse: " Have
you read anything by Dostoyevsky? You have. So you know how
complicated the Russian soul is. Our Russian soldiers fought heroically all
the way from Stalingrad to the Odra River. If you look at the map, you will
see how long a distance that is. And you want to criticize Russians soldiers?
If after all that they wanted to have some fun with women, so what?" Roo
adds demagogically, "Everybody knows what the Germans did to the
civilians. War is terrible."
The war from the perspectives of children adds another
dimension to Transfer/'s construction of history. Angela Hubricht explains
how, as a little girl, she spent three months in a bunker during the siege of
Festung Breslau. On stage, she is huddled, with her head between her
knees, and for the first time she recollects those terrible experiences. She
says, "One hundred people, dark, crowded, moaning ... No power. No
water. A terrible stink. No windows. Ninety-five degrees Farenheit.
Choking air." However, because her father was an army doctor, her family
was not mistreated by the Nazi defenders of the fortified city.
Similarly, Ilse Bode's memory of her attempt as a child to protect
her limited possessions is truly touching. Fleeing from her home she takes
only one doll with her and hides the rest under her bed so that the Russians
cannot find them. Wartime memories of Polish children debunk the
national myth of an unquestionably heroic fight, instilled by schools and
native patriots. For Andrzej Ursyn Szantyr, a native of what is now
Lithuania, the war was a source of extremely traumatic childhood
experiences. "For me war had been something beautiful and important.
That's how my father taught me. And then the war broke out and it wasn't
beautiful at all. It was tragic. The war changed my life. I don't like talking
about the war. I don't want to."
Amidst the individual testimonies of the witnesses of war, a
shared narrative of displacement and loss unfolds as Poles and Germans
are forced away from their homelands. Fritz Stern,
4
a German Breslauer of
Jewish origin who emigrated from the "polluted" continent to the United
States in 1938 at the age of twelve, explains: "Homeland is like air-we
realize how important it is only when it is lost or polluted. There were
expulsions that were the cause of many deaths." The Witnesses mention
47
briefly their long and often tragic journeys. Karolina Kozak says: "We got
a good wagon .. . my aunt slept on the cow, as there was nowhere else to
sleep and the cow didn't mind, and we were in Broch6w [a railway junction
by Wrodaw] within a week."
Many memories refer to the two years immediately following the
end of the war when Polish and German people often lived under one
roof. This period was permeated for all concerned by a feel ing of
temporariness, since many people anticipated an imminent outbreak of
another world war. In general, however, memories of these years are
positive, and sometimes even idyllic, with the initial mistrust between
neighbors changing very quickly into cooperation and joint celebrations.
Zygmunt Bauman calls transferees, expellees, deportees,
repatriants, expatriates, and refugees twentieth-century "vagabonds."S
Vagabonds begin their journeys because they have been forced to. They
have been spiritually deprived of their origins, while the new spaces
designated for them appear hostile, since wherever they might go, they are
often unwelcome.
The twenty-first century, however, offers a different version of the
traveler. Instead of a vagabond, he or she is closer to what Bauman calls a
"tourist." The tourist is the vagabond's alter ego, since travel is a personal
choice, not a forced action.
In Transfer! Matthias Go ritz is an example of a twenty-first-century
tourist. A writer, Matthias is the only representative of a younger
generation in the performance. He is the grandson of Germans expellees
from the Klaipeda district. He is cosmopolitan, epitomizing life in a
globali7.ed world. Matthias perceives the notion of a "homeland" through
a different lens. "Heimat [homeland] is a word poisoned by history," he
says. "It is connected with loss and with atrocities of war, started by the
Germans."6 As a contemporary tourist, he has the chance to redefine his
home country. Showing the audience the contents of his suitcase (ranging
from his underwear and sneakers to a laptop and the manuscript of his
latest book), Matthias says ironically: "My suitcase is my homeland."
Transfer! raises many difficult issues that have been avoided in
public for many years, but which have been undoubtedly discussed during
many private meetings of friends or relatives. The performance shows
young people, who may not have always wanted to listen to their
grandparents' stories, the importance of the older generation's testimonies.
If the testimonies had been performed by professional actors, the same
level of honesty and integrity might not have been so easily achieved. Some
skepticism, however, sur rounds Transferfs claims to authenticity, because of
accusations that the production creates "a false image of demographic
transformations in the Polish-German borderland," or "a fake mythology
of the 'common fate' of the transferred people."7
While examining the Wrodaw-Berlin project, we must consider
the sociological value of the joint theatre experience for both t he
dramatists and the actors. The work on the performance has become very
important for some of the participants. They stressed that the rehearsals
let them overcome the initial alienation and misunderstandings between
Polish and German Witnesses. The amateurs also treated this project as a
form of therapy, a forum enabling them to "speak out" and "give their
testimony."8 Conflicts, however, have emerged. Recently Gunter Linke
demanded some corrections, both to his stories and to those of some
other participants. As Klata agreed only to modifications to Linke's
testimony, the performer threatened to resign. Consequently, the German
co-producer terminated Linke's contract. A new version of Transfer! was
created, this time with Dietrich Garbrecht from Hamburg.
Jan Klata stresses the importance of Transjerfs exploration of
forced migration, seeing it as a very timely issue. He explains:
I am deeply convinced that it wouldn't take much for the
conditions to emerge in which we may again live in a Europe
where instead of low-fare airlines, people will travel in cattle
wagons. People will have five hours to pack their belongings and
never know their destinations. . . . We are in no position to
comfortably contemplate the end of history. There is no such
thing as t he end of history; history may go mad at any time. By
speaking about the times when history indeed went mad, we might
perhaps vaccinate ourselves against this disease.9
Thus Klata draws our attention to the troubled pasts of all those modern
"tourists," who would certainly prefer to remain free travelers rather than
49
suddenly be turned into "vagabonds," deprived of their homeland and
cultural heritage.
Transfer! is part of a phenomenon that might be described as a
Lower Silesian regionalism, which has undergone a strong revival since
1989. Political and social transformations have had a great impact on the
selection of subjects and methods of interpreting them. Increasingly more
theatre performances, as well as historical and literary publications, lO have
focused on local questions, many relating to uncovering the region's
previously hidden German and Jewish roots. The activities of local
governments draw Lower Silesians' attention to the connection of the past
and present in their local environment, encouraging an ongoing search for
a shared identity. Contemporary directors, actors, and audiences represent
the next generation; they are children or grandchildren of the
"vagabonds," who were forced to inhabit these lands. In contrast, the next
generation tries consciously to put down roots in Wrodaw and other
towns of the region in order to create a new sense of home without
forgetting the past.
Translated by Marcin ~ s i e l
Special thanks to Paul Vickers for his linguistic and critical remarks.
NOTES
1 Projections by Robert Balinski. Stage direction by Mirek Kaczmarek.
2 See Dunja Funke and Sebastian Majewski, Sceny ;altariskie:]. K.lata, Transfer!, non-
published script; the theatre quotations taken from this text.
3 See: Elzbieta Kaszuba in 1-listoria S!qska, Marek Czaplinski, ed. , (Wrodaw:
Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu \X'rodawskiego, 2002): 456-57.
4 Fritz Stern, "Utracona ojczyzna," in Klaus Bachmann and Jerzy Kranz, eds.,
Przeprosii za u:JPdzenie? 0 11ysiedleniu Nientc6w po II wqjnie fwiatowej, (Krak6w:
Znak, 1997), 296.
5 Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization. The Human Consequences, (Cambridge:
Polity / Blackwell Press, 1998).
6 Roman Pawlowski, Tomasz Wysocki, "M6j Transfer," Gazeta W:Jborcza- Wroclmv,
50
13 November 2006.
7 Quoted from www.wteatrw.pl
8 Compare the words of Angela Hubricht, in Michal Kokot, "Na zachodzie
Niemiec o wojnie nie m o w i ~ Cazeta lfYborcza-Wroclaw, 9 February 2007.
9 Pawlowski, Wysocki, op. cit.
10 See, for instance, Norman Davies, Roger Moorhouse, ,'11.icrocosm: Portrait of a
Central European Ciry (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002).
51
STANISLAVSKY'S DEATH: AUGUST 7, 1938
Maria Ignatieva
Stanislavsky had been sick for a long time; he had a heart attack on
the twenty-ninth of October 1928 while on stage playing Vershinin in The Three
Sisters during the celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the Moscow Art
Theatre. Only his determination not to let the audience notice anything
allowed him to finish the performance and to look normal until the curtain
fell. Then he collapsed. For a month afterwards, he was between life and death.
He survived and lived for ten more years. In January of 1938, Stanislavsky
turned seventy-five. However, he realized that the end was near, and on the
nineteenth of the month, he told his nurse Dukhovskaya, "You know, I am
going to die later this year."l
Maria Lilina, his wife and the best student of his System, conspired
with his nurse to hide newspapers from him and warned every visitor not to
tell him the latest theatre news. Theatre had always agitated him. Lilina started
hiding newspapers from her husband after Stanislavsky had typhoid fever in
191 0; a bad review of a Moscow Art Theatre production could simply kill him.
But very often the policy was futile; he was always able to guess the most
important news somehow. For example, Stanislavsky woke up one day in 1936
and told the nurse, " I know that Gorky has just died."2 The obituary had not
yet appeared in the papers.
Between January and August 1938, Stanislavsky did many important
things. After Stalin closed Meyerhold's theatre, he invited the director to work
with him at the Opera Theatre, thus prolonging Meyerhold's life for two years.
Stanislavsky continued to work on Hamlet at the Opera-Dramatic Studio with
a brave student, Irina Rozanova, who volunteered to play the lead. He
corrected the scenes from Romeo and Juliet prepared by the students of the
Studio. He worked on Tartuffe at home and on Rigoletto and Chio-Chio-San at the
Stanislavsky Opera Theatre. ln May of 1938, Meyerhold joined Stanislavsky in
his work on Rigoletto; their conversations about the opera "were sparkling with
fantasy, inspiration."3 Additionally, every free minute Stanislavsky continued to
write his notes on the System. Listening to news on the radio, he was upset that
the Moscow Art Theatre was being praised for its current shows: "In the best
years of the Moscow Art Theatre, we were not complimented as fervently as
52 Slavic and East European Perjor111ance Vol. 28, No. 3
Portrait of Konstantin Stanislavsky by Valentin Serov, 1908
53
now .... Isn't it the sign of the degradation of the art?"4
The summer of 1938 was one of the hottest summers in Moscow in
a decade. ''We have been tortured by this heat,"
5
Lilina wrote to their son Igor.
Furthermore, in early August, Stanislavsky developed a fever of 105 degrees
Farenheit. On the seventh of August, he died of heart failure.
Stanislavsky was buried near Anton Chekhov at the Novodevichy
Cemetery. Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, the co-founder of the Moscow
Art Theatre, spoke at the funeral: "His immortality has begun."6 A month
after Stanislavsky's death, his widow wrote, "How many awful dissertations I
have read about the Stanislavsky System! Their falsely complicated 'scientific'
interpretations will poison actors' interest in Stanislavsky's words!"7 And
although her comment is apt, the living voice of Stanislavsky is heard today.
His powerful belief in theatre and the organic nature of human creativity is
accessible through the books, letters and photographs that he has left us.
NOTES
1 Irina Vinogradskaya , Zhizn' i tvorchestvo KS. Stanis/avskogo: Letopis' v 4-kh t.
1863-1938 (Moskva: Khudozhestvennyi Teatr, 2003), 424.
2 Ibid., 369.
3 Ibid., 587.
4 Ibid., 452.
5 Maria Petrovna Lilina, ed. N. Leont'evsky (i\Ioskva: VTO, 1960), 242.
6 Olga Rad.ishcheva, Stanislavsk:J i Nemirovich-Danchenko. lstoria teatral'nikh otnoshenii:
1917-1938 (Moskva: Artist. Rezhisser. Teatr., 1999), 393.
7 Olga Pyzhova, Zapiski aktri.ry (Moskva: STD, 1989), 328-9.
54 Slavic and East European Perjor111ance Vol. 28, No. 3
THE GLOBAL SCENES FESTIVAL
JUNE 21-22,2008
April Donahower
The Global Scenes Festival of Eastern European plays in translation
was presented the weekend of June 2 ~ 2 2 in the Long Wharf Theatre's Stage
II in New Haven, Connecticut. Each of the three plays- from Poland,
Hungary, and Romania- received a rehearsed staged reading, and each
performance was followed by a talkback between the writer, director, and
actors, and the audience. The festival culminated in a symposium on
contemporary international theatre.
Global Scenes grew out of the desire to renew collaboration between
New Haven's Long Wharf Theatre and the International Festival of Arts &
Ideas. Long Wharf has long championed new work and been interested in
projects that are international in scope. The ideal collaborator for a cross-
border project lies just across town: the International Festival of Arts & Ideas,
a ten-year-old presenter of international, interdisciplinary work ranging
from-to use this year as an example- a sound installation of whirling
speakers called Siren to a panel discussion on Sci-Fi films to Seamus Heaney's
adaptation of Antigone, The Burial at Thebes.
Italian-born Beatrice Basso, Long Wharf Theatre's for mer
Dramaturg and Literary Manager, had nurtured twin desires to bring to New
Haven a reading series of plays from abroad. Arts & Ideas, which was already
using Long 'X'harf's venues for The Burial at Thebes and two other presentations,
was interested in partnering on the project, and Basso began reaching out to
other collaborators. Long Wharf's managing director Joan Channick, who
through her work with Theatre Communications Group had met theatre
artists around the world, introduced her to Malgorzata Semil, a dramaturg,
translator, and critic based in Warsaw. Semil agreed to become a consultant on
the festival and through a TCG-ITI grant traveled to ew Haven to participate
in the festival and symposium. Semil suggested to Basso Polish playwright
Malgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk's The Death of the Squirrel Man, describing it as
indirectly topical but uniquely compelling. Basso and Cathy Edwards, director
of programming at Arts & Ideas, both added the play to the under
consideration list, which would continue taking shape throughout late 2007.
55
Meanwhile, the two other plays that would become part of Global
Scenes were arriving via different avenues. Hungarian writer Janos Hay's play
Geza-bqy had recently received a reading in New York by the Threshold
Theater Company, which was eager to see the play's life continue. The third
play, what was to become Saviana Stanescu's For a Barbarian WOman, wasn't
written yet. Long Wharf's artistic director Gordon Edelstein had worked with
Stanescu in Romarua. Through the festival arose the chance to continue
collaborating.
Though Basso moved to the west coast in February of this year,
preparations continued for the festival she envisioned. The Death of the Squirrel
Man only existed in the original Polish and a German translation, which Ruth
Hein, a friend of Long Wharf's, had translated again into English for
preliminary reading; with the support of PAJ Publications and Zbigniew
Raszewski Theatre Institute in Warsaw, Jadwiga Kosicka produced the first
English translation of it. Joe Roach of the World Performance Project at Yale
agreed to serve as moderator for the symposium, and Arts & Ideas secured
Huzir Sulairnan of Singapore's Checkpoint Theatre and Melanie Joseph of the
Foundry Theatre in New York as panelists in addition to Malgorzata Semil.
While vastly different in style, all three plays presented at Global
Scenes hew to the festival's aim to present work that either speaks to current
conditions in its horne country or represents a noteworthy trend in playwriting
there. In viewing the plays in tandem, larger unifying themes emerged as
well-a deep concern for the well being of the individual against a backdrop
of ideology, history, or anonymity, and the struggle for self-definition in a
rapidly changing world. As Eugene Brogyanyi pointed out in his overview of
Janos Hay's work in the Winter 2006 issue of SEEP, these European
playwrights stand in contrast to their ancestors in their ability to tackle these
issues directly without the same fear of censorship or reprisal.
The Death of the Squirrel Man tells the story of the RAF (Red Army
Faction), also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, a radical terrorist group in
Germany that perpetrated many violent acts from its formation in the late
1960s until the deaths of is three leaders-Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof
(who, having abandoned her children to take up the cause, reputedly
committed suicide on Mother's Day), and Gudrun Ensslin-in 1976-77.
Through bombings, robbery, and kidnappings, the group protested against
what it perceived to be the remains of a fascist state. Malgorzata Sikorska-
56
Slavic and East European Peiformance Vol. 28, No.3
Janos Hay's Geza-bqy, The Global Scenes Festival, June 2008
57
Miszczuk's play, staged by Long Wharf's associate artistic director Eric Ting,
depicts the RAF's exploits and inner workings using a mixture of fact, farce,
and carnivalesque spectacle.
Janos Hay's Giza-bqy follows its tide character, a young man with
autistic tendencies, to his first job at the local quarry; through his loss of
innocence, on and off the job; and following his withdrawal from the life of
the town, back into the safe confines of his mother's kitchen. Geza's clash with
mechanization, which simultaneously scars him and reveals to the community
his heightened insight, is set against the backdrop of a small Hungarian village
beginning to be changed by the encroachment of outside influences. Without
the capacity his neighbors have to interpret these changes, and wounded by his
friends' good but flawed intentions, Geza's struggle to understand them
encompasses a quixotic search for God within the trappings of the modern
world.
In her new play For a Barbarian WOman, directed by Jackson Gay,
Saviana Stanescu also pits old against new, represented in her play by the exiled
poet Ovid and a young Romanian interpreter for NATO named Theo, who
share the shore of the Black Sea. In alternating and sometimes interwoven
scenes, Stanescu- who has lived in New York for nearly a decade but speaks
through this play to the concerns of the country of her birth-portrays Ovid's
writing of the world's most beautiful love poem for the Getae ("barbarian")
woman Tristia and Theo's search, millennia later, for this poem her father
claimed to have found before his suicide. MeanwhjJe, Theo falls in love with
her American boss, awakening a debate on Romania's place on the world stage
as it continues to find itself, post-Ceausescu.
The goal for Global Scenes was to bring these Eastern European
playwrights-and the directors and actors of their plays-into contact with
each other and with our audience. \X'ith the ease by which theatre artists can
collaborate across international borders through the use of technology,
comjng together in a room, which is only possible after visas, airfares and
hotels have been secured, is more likely to happen in preparation for a project
on a larger scale. Global Scenes was unique in that the convocation of artists
was intended to create a spark, not a spectacle.
There was, nonetheless, a buzzing in the public spaces inside Long
Wharf Theatre and along the pathways of the food terminal in which it is
housed. Many patrons attended both performances on each of the two festival
58 Slavic and East European Peiformance Vol. 28, No.3
days, and groups broke off to grab a bite to eat in between shows while others
mingled in the lobby of Stage II, picking up threads of conversation that had
begun during the post-show chats. At Brazi's, an Italian restaurant a stone's
throw from the theatre, playwrights Malgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk and
Saviana Stanescu and Oana Radu, deputy director of the Romanian Cultural
Institute (which provided generous support to the festival) got acquainted and
reacquainted over calamari. Creating these mini-communities is nothing new
to Stanescu, who has herself been the coordinator of a number of cross-
border playwright exchanges, and she shared some thoughts about her past
experiences.
One community had formed well before the start of this event-
Pamela Billig and Eugene Brogyanyi's Threshold Theater Company, whose
members read Brogyanyi's translation of J:inos Hay's Giza-boy under Billig's
direction. Threshold- which performs foreign-language works in English
translation-performed a reading of Geza-boy in November 2007 at the
Hungarian Cultural Center in New York and scenes from that play and Frankie
Herner's Old i'IJan in the Martin E. Segal Center's Contemporary Theatre
Abroad series at CUNY in 2005. The company's relationships with the
playwright and the play were great helps in building this festival-on-a-
shoestring-we only wish that all three of the festival's three creative
companies could have shared the full four days at Long Wharf (Threshold,
due to Geza-boy's large cast size and housing restrictions in New Haven,
rehearsed in New York).
In the concluding symposium, a panel discussion about
contemporary international theatre moderated by Joe Roach of the World
Performance Project, the eternal questions of funding and programming
dominated the conversation. Melanie Joseph of the Foundry Theatre, which
seeks to build community around "envelope-pushing" work, lamented a
relative lack of financial support in the United States for the travel of artists
to and from it, noting that often the artists' poorer host countries have to foot
the bill. As the audience joined the conversation, executive director of Arts &
Ideas, Mary Lou Aleskie, welcomed comments that her organization take
bigger risks in programming- what if, for instance, the balance shifted from
primarily western (U.K., in many cases) work to more plays from places
confronting increases in stature and/or conflict, such as China? The intention
of Global Scenes' producers is to continue gathering together artists each
59
summer, focusing each year on a different region. In its inaugural year, the
convocation of these playwrights from Eastern Europe deepened our
connections with them and correlated with the other work that Arts & Ideas
presents. In future seasons, the choice of region will ideally accomplish the
same goal as well as display responsiveness to events on the world's stages. As
we continue to discover how best to create a rewarding dialogue among
visiting artists-and between these artists and our audience-their work will
only become a more potent starting point for an examination of the world we
share.
60 Slavic and East European Peiformance VoL 28, No. 3
THE 2007 PRAGUE QUADRENNIAL:
ELEVENTH INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION OF
SCENOGRAPHY AND THEATRE ARCHITECTURE
Ana Martinez
Prague became the international hub for contemporary theatrical
space during eleven days in June of last year. The eleventh Prague Quadrennial
(PQ 07), the only competitive international exhibition of its kind, was held in
the vast space of the Industrial Palace in the Vystaviste Exhibition Grounds.
This was the center where thousands of visitors gathered to celebrate
scenography, theatre architecture, and the PQ's fortieth anniversary.
Since 1967, the PQ has been held every four years in the Czech
capital and world-renowned scenographers have been part of it, including
Tadeusz Kantor, Salvador Dalf, Ralph Koltai, Ming Cho Lee, and Josef
Svoboda, among others. The idea to host an international exhibition on stage
design and theatre architecture started when Czechoslovakia won the gold
medal in the Biennial of Visual Art in Sao Paulo in 1959 with Frantisek Troster
illustrating the development of Czech and Slovak stage design. After three
consecutive Czech's successes in biennales, Prague received an offer to host an
international exhibition of stage design. Since its premiere in 1967, with
nineteen participant countries, the PQ has grown in magnitude and approach.
The astonishing array of proposals, activities, and events that were part of last
year's PQ proved that it is one of the most influential events that brings into
the foreground how we think, use, design, and document the material aspects
of performance.
Traditionally, the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic
announces the PQ, appoints the Theatre Institute as the organizer, and creates
a council. The PQ council supervises the preparations and addresses the basic
concerns and contents of the event. In 2007, the director of the PQ was
Ondrej Cern}', director of the National Theatre, and the PQ's General
Commissioner was Arnold Aronson of Columbia University. Reflecting
scenography's hybridity, eleven members from different nations and
backgrounds were part of the jury, including personalities such as Richard
Hudson (United Kingdom), stage and costume designer; Monica Raya
(Mexico), architect, scenographer and costume designer; and Mary
61
62
Industrial Palace in the Vystaviste Exhibition Grounds,
2007 Prague Quadrennial
Zimmmerman (U.S.A.), director and writer.
The PQ is structured in three competltlve sections: national
exhibitions, architecture and technology, and student section. In addition to
the exhibition, created by individual national pavilions, and the Scenofest (a
cooperative project among prominent international artists) PQ 07 offered its
participants and visitors activities such as guided tours, workshops,
performances, theatre excursions, conferences, talks, forums, and extra
accompanying exhibitions. While in the previous quadrennials there was a
thematic section that would focus on the work of a particular playwright or
artist, this time the participant countries had the option of choosing their own
theme. Explaining this new curatorial decision, Vaclav Jehlicka, the Minister of
Culture of the Czech Republic, stated that the organizers were able to capture
"the modern mood in the cultural sphere, in which plurality and diversity
rule.''
1
However, this resulted in a double-edge sword. On the one hand, it was
possible to see the most diverse collection of designs and concepts for
different types of work (theatre, opera, dance, puppetry) and, on the other, it
was almost impossible to find points of contact among the participant
countries.
It was very easy for visitors to get lost in the Quadrennial's huge and
fragmented scenario. Besides the choice of using a light pink color for
circulating areas and information signs, the overall layout and composition of
the national exhibits didn't seem to have any aesthetic or compositional
principle other than the functional one of providing a fixed amount of space
for each country to exhibit its work and to create its own interactive space or
installation. On the other hand, the national pavilions, different as they were,
created a sense of a fascinating postmodern collage. Each country had its own
concept and used its own media to exhibit scenographic works. It was,
therefore, tempting spend hour after hour exploring the various artistic
concepts, scenographies, and traces of past performances.
In 2007, the PQ revealed new ways of thinking about the role and
nature of the exhibition, of scenography and of the art of documenting. One
of the most interesting aspects of the entire exhibition was the fact that the
works on display were in many cases attractive pieces of contemporary art.
Scenographers used the most diverse media and an forms to show their work,
including drawings, renderings, stage objects, elements of design process, live
performance, and multimedia. Without doubt, scenography is becoming an
63
64 Slavic and East European Petjormance Vol. 28, No. 3
increasingly open concept that defies any fixed definition.
The participant countries were: Argentina, Australia, Belarus,
Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Canada, Chile, China, Croatia, Cyprus,
Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hong
Kong (China), Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania,
Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Pacific Islands, Peru, Poland,
Portugal, Republic of South Africa, Republic of Korea, Romania, Russia,
Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan,
Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Venezuela. I will discuss
some of the countries participating in the national, architectural, and student
sections. My selection is based on original and challenging concepts with some
emphasis on award winners.
Iceland's pavilion, one of the most captivating environments of the
national exhibition, was created by architect and designer, Gretar Reynisson. It
was a greenhouse, which was a replica of his featured set for The Greenhouse, a
play by Olafur Haukur. The visitor could enter and experience the
transparency and material quality of a greenhouse that appeared to be eroded
by the weather. The exhibition consisted of five suspended multimedia
installations that were part visual documentation and part artistic ar tifacts. The
designs were presented through a mini-video screen showing excerpts of the
actual performances located inside a three-dimensional miniature model of
the actual set.
Portuguese architect, Joao Mendes Ribeiro, designed the most elegant
and well-executed national pavilion. By his simple use of wood in combination
with a series of suspended light bulbs, Mendes Ribeiro highlighted the material
qualities of the pavilion's structure, such as color, weight, texture, and
structural resistance. His scenographic work, exhibited through a series of
photographic and explanatory panels, conveyed original links among
architecture, performance, and object theatre. In a minimalist and expressive
fashion, Ribeiro's work also explored the material aspects of performance as
independent agents. For example, in Portugal's national day (each country had
a day with talks and performances in regard of their work) two performers
appeared with fantastic animal masks making abstract gestures to a ticking
metronome emphasizing plastic and musical features. Portugal's selection of
projects showed a successful transdisciplinary approach reflecting the
country's concept named ''Architecture on Stage."
65
In a room with nothing more than documentary video sequences,
Norway was able to enhance the national exhibition with their site-specific
takes on Hamlet, staged in an "Ice Globe Theatre" in Sweden, and on Adam
Levine's The Lay of Volund, staged in collaboration with the Beaivvas Sami
Theatre in Norway. The designs by Aage Gaup (set designer, snow, and ice-
scenographer) and by Berit Marit Haetta (costume designer) reflected
orway's concept of ''Artica - chilly warmth." Taking advantage of the site's
polar physicality, scenographer, Aage Gaup used ice and snow as the main
structural and visual materials for both pieces. Resembling a relief sculpture
made out of ice, the sets' architectural and scenic elements seemed to have
been carved-out from their frozen landscape. Against a Nordic background,
the rich and warm costumes, such as Hamlet's black-leather suit and Ophelia's
silver and gold overcoat, effectively contrasted or merged with the white and
cold set.
On a similar note of evoking regional and national features but with
a different sensibility, some of Mexico's costume designers, winners of the
gold medal for best theatre costumes, interpreted and used folkloric elements
in a witty and postmodern fashion. For example, Humberto Spindola's
overblown design for the opera Motezuma, created by massive feathers in the
national colors evoking a "penacho," was a smart and satirical design that
questioned Mexican stereotypes based on the Aztec Emperor.
A variety of new and different approaches on stage design illustrated
Lithuania's concept of "The Ever-Changing Landscapes of Theatre."
Proposals varied from sets created for traditional theatre spaces to object-
theatre and puppetry. A special object of interest was Julia Skuratova's human-
like figure created by a unique composition of everyday life objects used in a
new context and therefore endowing them with new meanings. One of
Lithuania's most striking designs was Kotryna Daujotaite's scenography for
Sara Kane's 4.48 Psychosis, which skillfully evoked the play's psychic
claustrophobia. Mirroring Kane's repetitive rhythmic patterns, Daujotaite
materialized a fictional world in which the characters seemed to be trapped by
entirely filling the stage walls with pieces of written paper. In a similar fashion,
by unifying a visual landscape with the recurrent use of a single element,
Slovak scenographer Jan Kudlicka, winner of the gold medal for best use of
technology, created beautiful and hypnotizing video backgrounds such as his
flock of floating blackbirds for Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades. In Slovakia's
66 Slavic and East European Perjorma11ce Vol. 28, No. 3
Nijole Indriiinaite, Music Box, designed by Julija Skuratova,
Vilnius Theatre Lele, 2007 Prague Quadrennial
67
Sara Kane's 4.48 PSJchosis; Design by Kotryna Daujotaite, Kaunas State Drama Theatre,
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Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades, design by Jan Kudlicka, 2007 Prague Quadrennial
..
-
national exhibition, visitors were able to experience in an momate way
Kudlicka's video and sound installations representing on a small scale his
astonishing technological designs, such as a wall of rain and an upside-down
silhouette of Venice.
After much deliberation by the jury, Russia's national thematic display
"Our Chekhov: Twenty Years Later" was awarded with PQ's most prestigious
award, the Golden Triga, for the best presentation of a theme. Russia's
pavilion materialized and symbolized a vivid synthesis of past and present.
Referencing their gold medal twenty years ago in the PQ87 with their thematic
display "Our Chekhov," the curators and designers decided to put on display
models of the designs for Chekhov's works by thirteen contemporary Russian
scenographers. Dmitry Krymov, designer of the exhibition, was able to evoke
and even romanticize the current state of many buildings in Russia in which a
lack of maintenance is apparent. As stated by Viktor Beriozkin, author of the
theme, "It is always cold or rainy in Russia, or else it snows. Or there's a leaking
ceiling so something is constantly dripping from it. Or it falls on you. Some
fluff, for example. More often it is chunks of plaster."
2
Krymov materialized
this concept by flooding the space with a couple of inches of water (visitors
had to wear galoshes) and by leaving exposed lighting fiXtures, cables, painting,
and plaster, and therefore giving the illusion that a long period of time had
passed without any visible signs of repair.
As many visitors agreed, PQ's student section offered an
exceptionally refreshing array of works by the new generation of
scenographers. Occupying both wings of the Industrial Palace it proved how
the PQ is getting younger and how each time it welcomes more challenging,
radical, and innovating scenographic proposals. The Latvian Academy of Art
and Stage Design won the gold medal for the most promising talent in the
student section and scenofest, exemplifying the admirable originality of many
of the student's conceptual approach. Latvian students presented their ideas
and designs inspired by the difficult and challenging theme, "Let's Play
Bulgakov!," based on Mikhail Bulgakov's novel Master and Margarita, featuring
presentations in which they discussed their creative process.
The students' overall willingness to take risks was evident at the very
entrance of a striking and moving installation by the Estonian Academy of Arts
(Scenography). Through their concept "Reanimography," whose objective was
to comment on the process of puppet animation, the Estonian students and
teachers created a scenography made out of a tiny puppet (resembling Punch
or Pulchinella), lying on a real hospital bed, against a black background, with a
monitor showing images of "flashbacks and heartbeats." One could not but
feel a weird mix of empathy, helplessness, and anguish on seeing the puppet's
realistic and tiny prosthetic body connected to many IVs as if providing him
with an artificial life. The symbolism achieved by the combination of scales,
objects, and media evoked a posthuman world in which the boundaries among
art, life, and death faded away.
Finally, although the PQ 07's jury argued that from the architecture
section, they could not find a project that "was both singularly arresting and
comprehensively or persuasively enough presented"3 and therefore didn't
award the gold medal for best theatre architecture, Spain received an Honorary
Diploma for "its originality and the spirit manifesto calling attention to
theatres at risk."4 It was motivating and inspiring to come across a socially and
politically involved project that made us think about the value of past theatre's
architectures and about their fragility under current economical and marketing
interests. Spain's team presented the chilling case of the burned Circa Apolo
Theatre. In 2004, the Vilanova Town Council asked this group of architects
(Ramon Ivars, Antoni Ramon, and Joaquim Roy) for an evaluation of the place
and arrived at the conclusion that, unlike the cold and impersonal architectural
styles of new theatres, this was a valuable historical place with a unique
synthesis of decoration and spatial layout. One month later the theatre
"accidentally" went up in flames. Obviously, it was not considered as a
profitable option.
Spain's proposal of creating an Observatory for Theatres at Risk, "a
collecting point for information on theatre spaces under threat,"S is a direct
call to any society interested in preserving historical and material traces of
theatre as a cultural event. Sites of memory, such as the Circa Apolo Theatre
and many other theatres at risk of destruction, are spaces that offer an infinite
number of architectural, scenographic, and spatial possibilities for new
performances. Although the PQ jury couldn't find a new theatre proposal
worthy of the award, past architectures certainly came into the foreground as
symbols of theatre's importance as a place and as cultural phenomena. For the
eleventh time, the PQ was indeed an observatory for provocative and
challenging proposals that looked into the visual and material realms of
theatre's past, present, and future.
71
NOTES
1 Lucie Cepcova, et al., Prague Quadrennia/2001, 9.
2 Ibid., 192.
3 http:/ /www.pq.cz/en/pq-awards.html
4
Ibid.
5 Cepcova, 224.
WORK CITED
Cepcova, Lucie, Danela Paifzkova, Ondiej Svoboda, editors. Prague Quadrennia/2007,
Prague: Arts Institute- Theatre Institute Prague, 2007.
72 Slavic and East E uropean Performance Vol. 28, No. 3
ALEXANDER MORFOV'S EXILES
Robert Blush
More than any other work in twenty-first century Bulgarian drama,
Alexander Morfov's Exiles has become a theatrical rarity, something that
appeals unanimously to the wider public and critics alike. The play has been
showered with popular and critical awards, including best director, best actor
in a leading role, and technical accomplishment. The critics have agreed that
Bulgaria has not produced a more successful production in over ten years.
What explains this? With Exiles, Morfov exploits the legend of the
revolutionary uprising against the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s in order to
present a bitter yet credible commentary on contemporary Bulgarian life.
Disillusioned by the greed and rampant consumerism that have overwhelmed
Bulgaria in the last fifteen years, Morfov attempts to convey the absurdity of
the contemporary Bulgarian capitalist paradigm. The legendary context of the
play strikes a deep national chord, and Morfov's ability to engage the audience
creates powerful resultS. The play's overwhelming nationalist pathos has driven
the show to popular success, but it has blinded many to its satirical and cynical
reflection of modern-day Bulgarian ideology. Although the audience members
cannot help but sense the underlying criticism that Exiles attempts to express,
most are too influenced by the rousing patriotism of a failed revolution to
grasp the grotesque accuracy of Morfov's social commentary.
In 1994 Morfov became the central director of the Bulgarian
National Theatre. I His productions of Enchanted Night (1994), A Midsummer
Nights Dream (1995), and The Tempest (1996) endeared him to the public. His
ability to make Shakespeare, Beckett, Gorky, and others contemporary struck
the Bulgarian populace with awe. The resounding laughter heard at Morfov's
performances bespeaks his powerful skill in gauging his public, who clearly
consider him one of the few artists with his finger on the pulse of Bulgarian
life. Later, he was promoted to Artistic Director. His audiences, however, had
already regarded Morfov as a national icon. As Artistic Director of the
National Theatre, Morfov was thrust into the moribund reality of Bulgarian
politics and economics. The inefficient bureaucracy of state subsidized
theatre, the mediocrity of his peers and colleagues, and their rush for "easy
money" were all factors motivating his decision to leave his homeland.2
73
Although he returned to direct an adaptation of Don Juan for the 2006-07
season several months after the premiere of Exiles, in 2004, Morfov left for
Russia.
His motivation for leaving Bulgaria was explicitly revealed to the
public through several interviews published in the months following the
premiere of Exiles. He was extremely disappointed in his motherland and the
new life that the changes had brought about-a life built on the contemporary
"religion of mediocrity."3 According to Morfov, the Bulgarians prefer to watch
reality television and listen to pop music than to engage in intellectual
conversation. He was aggravated by the fact that acquisition of wealth was
now the primary ambition for the majority of the people, and he commented
more than once that people had forgotten how to enjoy their lives. For Morfov,
capitalism had brought about a new life that left little room for a shared,
enthusiastic exploration of art, philosophy, and life. In a post-production
interview, he summed up his vision for Exiles:
It's been a long time since Bulgarians have had ideas for
which they were willing to die. Nor do they have ideas for
which they must live! It's not just about prolonging the
human race; it's not just about consuming, eating,
defecating.
4
His production Exiles and his self-imposed exile combined to create a harsh
criticism of his homeland.
Based on the 1884 novel Unwanted, Unloved (Nemili Nedragz) by Ivan
Vazov, the "patriarch of Bulgarian literature," and several other texts, Exiles
presents the lives of several poor expatriates who have left Bulgaria in order
to help organize and stage an uprising. The play is set across the Danube, in
the town of Braila, Romania, just out of reach of the Ottoman powers. We
witness nostalgia for " home," dreams of independence, bouts of drinking,
scheming, betrayals, and the ultimate failure of the revolutionaries. We shiver
through the frigid winters that they experience with neither money nor heat;
we sense their hunger, their relief, and their euphoria when they are in the
company of their compatriots; and we understand their desire for a homeland
as they sit on the banks of the Danube looking across the river, where their
families are living under Ottoman oppression. From the first moments of the
74
-..J
Vl
Exiles, directed by Alexander Morfov, Bulgarian National Theatre
Exiles, directed by Alexander Morfov, Bulgarian National Theatre
77
play we begin to empathize with these men-we connect to them through the
inherent sadness of their plight, through the common heritage they share with
the Bulgarian audience, and through the humor that Morfov has included,
which effectively bridges the gap between contemporary and historical.
Morfov' s efficacy in rendering contemporary the play's context is evident in
one of the first scenes, which is set on the north bank of the Danube. He
utilizes the National Theatre's tremendous machinery as two giant, black walls
magically come together from the wings. On this improvised "riverbank," the
men scrawl graffiti with white chalk: "Long Live Bulgaria!"and "Freedom or
Death!," battle cries of the movement, appear adjacent to "Fuck Off, Sultan!"
(in English) and "Only Levski!," a contemporary slogan for Levski Spartak,
one of Bulgaria's most popular Soccer teams. It is also an allusion to Vassil
Levski, the most remembered revolutionary of the epoch portrayed in the
play. The underlying style of Morfov's theatre is to enter the audience's
personal space through celebratory humor, and the actors take up this task
with enthusiasm. Soccer balls are kicked back and forth, and, with acrobatic
skill, actors stand on each other's shoulders to write even higher on the wall.
All this is done to contemporary music that adds excitement and connectivity
for the audience.
Meta-theatrical comedy and the theme of money also provide
contemporary relevance. In order to raise money to assassinate the Sultan, the
group of penniless exiles decides to stage a theatrical spectacle for local
residents. Their performance is particularly hilarious since the theme is
revolution. Our view is from backstage; a battle is raging out of our view,
upstage of a curtain. The blundering men appear to us "backstage," grab fake
appendages, blood, and swords, and then disappear "onstage" again.
Completely entrenched in the theme of the performance, one character is
explicitly reminded with a gesture to the audience, "This is [only] theatre!"
After savoring the success of their play, the group of misfits
discovers that a large number of tickets were sold on credit to the expatriate
Bulgarian population. Morfov makes it clear that "Bulgarian" and "credit" are
not two concepts that should be lightly mixed, and the group quickly realizes
that they'll never see a penny. More important is the fact that the exiles drink
away the remainder of the money while celebrating their play's victory. The
men excitedly recall the party, infecting the audience with their euphoric sense
of community, at which point Morfov makes his most biting statement. One
of the more sensible men realizes their mistake and exclaims, "We are not a
people, we are carrion!"5 Morfov artfully transitions this extremely
uncomfortable moment into cries of ''Long live Bulgaria!" and manipulates
the audience by means of patriotic pathos, effectively decreasing their anxiety
and disappointment in the men who have failed to succeed in their simple,
noble goal.
Money again underlies a later scene of singing, drinking, clowning,
and humor. Morfov creates a moving image of disaster and disarray when an
earthquake strikes Braila. The National Theatre's complex stage machinery is
used again to move multiple sections of the stage both vertically and
horizontally. Tables and chairs in the local pub fall asunder, the owner of the
pub is killed, and his passing is quickly mourned by two of the exiles. When
they come across the dead man's savings, one of them exclaims, " I knew [he]
wouldn't leave us out in the cold when he died," while pocketing the money.
Moments later we fmd them in a chic hotel, drinking champagne and shouting,
"Long live Bulgaria!" hoping they won't have to pay the bill.
The audience laughs uncomfortably as they see the inevitable. Once
the ill acquired gain disappears, the fun will certainly be over. Penniless, the
men go back to the cold streets, where they disband for the winter. As the
young protagonist of the play is left alone to fend for himself, we share his
realization that the brotherhood of compatriots depends on easy money. He
leaves home and country for the ideals of revolution, and his first winter
abroad forces him to confront the contradiction between idealism and reality.
On the verge of suicide, he reflects, "It could be that only death will give sense
to our lives."
Who will take action for Bulgaria? Through stunning imagery,
Morfov recalls the capture and execution of Vassil Levski, the legendary
martyr of the revolution. Levski's execution, in contrast to pitiful choices
made by the play's characters, provides a moving reminder of the failed
uprising. Morfov stresses that this failure continues to the present. He
dedicates this production to all the expatriate Bulgarian youth, who "cry
nightly for their homeland."6 "The difference," says Morfov, "is that they
don't dream-like the exiles-[for Bulgaria's freedom.] And maybe (today]
there's nothing from which to free her, except perhaps herself!"
7
The final
image of Exiles comes at the Braila station, where the men are departing for
Belgrade to help with the Serbian rebellion against the Sultan. Through this
79
80
final tableau, Morfov suggests that the exiles are still waiting today to depart
and take action to free their homeland.
For most of the audience, the final exclamations of "Long Live
Bulgaria" drown out Morfov's call to action with nationalist fervor. Violeta
Decheva, a prominent Bulgarian theatre critic, praised highly the first
production of Exiles, but she suggested that Morfov's intended message
would not be heard; she foresaw that "drunken patriotism" would overpower
critical vision.8 Even Morfov admitted his shock and disappointment at the
audience's reaction after he witnessed an auditorium of five hundred teenagers
resonate with the cries of "Long Live Bulgaria!"9 Exiles is currently a staple
production in the repertory of the Bulgarian National Theatre.
NOTES
1 For more on Morfov, see Mayia Pramatarova, Morfov: Bulgarian Director
on Russian Soil," in Slavic and East European Peiformance 27:2 (Spring 2007): 39-48.
2 Albena Atanasova, "Sasho Morfov: i hush sam by!," in Standart, 42:39 (Oct 22, 2004):
24.
3 Vania Shekerova, ''Alexander Morfov Loshoto momche na Bulgarskia Teatur," in
Eva 73: 68-72.
4 Atanasova, 24.
5 A well-known stanza from an 1875 poem by Petko Slaveikov.
6 Since the changes, more than a million Bulgarians have expatriated.
7 Elena Krusteva, "Hushovete na XXI Vek," in Kultura Oct. 23, 2004: 41.
8 Violeta Decheva, "Hushove mezhdu kritikata i santimenta," in Kultura (Oct. 29,
2004): 4.
9 Vesselina Gioleva, "Bremeto na Bulgarina e negovoto nedovolstvo," in Sedem: II, 45
(82). Nov. 10-16, 2004: 16.
81
FROM CRACOW TO ARDEN
NINA POLAN IN HELENA: THE EJWIGRANTQUEEN AT THE
KOSCIUSZKO FOUNDATION, NEW YORK, APRIL 10, 2008
Margaret K. Araneo
The Oxford English Dictionary defines an emigrant as "one who
removes from his [sic] own land to settle (permanently) in another," while an
immigrant is identified as "a person who migrates into a country as a
settler."
1
Since each immigrant is by definition also an emigrant (and vice
versa), what are the implications of choosing one term over the other when
characterizing an individual who has uprooted his or her life from one
cultural context to another? In what direction is the lens to be focused-on
what is left behind or on what is approached?
The complexity of the emigrant-immigrant experience was at the
core of Nina Polan's portrayal of Helena Modj eska in the one-woman show
Helena: The Emigrant Queen, by Kazimierz Braun, presented at the
Kosciuszko Foundation in New York City on April10, 2008.
2
Staged on the
second floor of the Foundation's elegant town house on East 65 Street, the
play takes place in the parlor of the nineteenth-century Polish-American
actress Helena Modjeska. Her belongings collected in various boxes,
furniture covered with sheets, Modjeska, at the end of her career, prepares
to leave her estate (named Arden, after Shakespeare's mother's name and
the forest) in Anaheim, California, after declaring bankruptcy. Taking a seat
upstage at a small table, she lights one last cigarette and recalls a life, which
began in Poland in 1840 and ended in the United States in 1909;3 it was a
life marked by fame and obscurity, love and lust, ambition and loss.
Modjeska's narrative spans nearly seventy years and across two
continents. Born Helena Opid (later adopting the surname Modrzejewska)
in Cracow, Austrian-occupied Poland, she was raised by her mother, who
provided her daughter a lower-middle-class life by operating a small cafe.
Helena began her theatrical career as an amateur actress on stage in the
provinces. Eventually she would make her way to Russian-ruled Warsaw
where she would become a renowned actress and a member of the Polish
National Theatre. After birthing two illegitimate children, burying one of
them, and suffering the constant scorn and gossip of jealous artists within
82 Slavic and East E uropean Peiformance Vol. 28, No. 3
Photograph of Helena Modjeska
83
84
Nina Polan as Helena Modjeska in "Helena: The E migrant Queen,
by Kazirnierz Braun, at the Kosciuszko Foundation, April 10, 2008
the Polish theatre community, she decided at the age of thirty-six to move
to the United States with her husband and reinvent herself as an American
actress, eventually touring North America and Europe with enormous
success.
Kazimierz Braun's play focuses primarily on the final thirty-three
years of Modjeska's life, when she, according to Braun, became "an
emigre." Braun's decision to examine Modjeska's life through the lens of
emigration (a decision reflected in the play's title) is to draw attention away
from Modjeska's process of assimilation and integration into U.S. culture
and to direct it instead toward the complex mantle Helena brought with her
when she first arrived in California-a collection of experiences filled with
an array of men, artistic challenges, and political struggles that she carried
with her as she crisscrossed the continent.
Nina Polan as Modjeska captures the interplay of emigrant past
and immigrant present (there and here) that Braun's script explores. Though
Polan is always physically alone on stage, her use of gesture and interaction
with recorded voiceovers introduces the audience to the influential people
(mostly men whom she has loved or who have loved her) in her life. From
the start we understand how Modjeska's ambition is connected to her
experience managing the domineering men in her life-whether it was her
first manager (and father of her children), who we learn raped her before
she eventually settled into a complex domestic situation with him, to her
one true Jove who she chose to forgo in pursuit of her career. These men
haunt her present and are all in one way or another with her as she packs up
her things and prepares to leave her home for the last time. Similarly, the
complexity of the Polish political context she left behind shadows her life
in the United States. She does not hide her political positions and uses her
status and freedom in the United States to voice her views on the partition
of Poland by Austria, Prussia, and Russia and particularly the oppression
that resulted from Russian occupation.
While the undeniable fire and intensity in Modj eska is made more
and more apparent through the collection of stories from her past, Polan
also allows the audience to see Modjeska's fragility, something which has
often gone unexplored. The Modjeska most know is the one captured in the
many portraits painted of her throughout her career-a statuesque woman,
with vibrant auburn hair, sensually posed. Polan's Modjeska, however, is
85
much older, her body slower, her voice weaker. She is a woman sometimes
grasping to remember details, who seems confused by all she has to do, but
who, despite her gradual decline, presses on.
Helena: The Emigrant Queen was presented by The Polish Theatre
Institute in the U.S.A., Inc. The organization is committed to producing Polish
cultural projects throughout the United States and internationally. Polan who
currently serves as the Artistic Director of the Institute has her own emigrant
experience. Born in Poland as Janina Katelbach, Polan moved to England as a
child. She built a solid theatrical career for herself in the U.K.-graduating
from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and performing in the West End
as well as in British regional theatres. Eventually, she traveled west to the
United States and played in such venues as La MaMa, Seattle Rep, the New
Orleans Playhouse, and the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival.
The town house of the Kosciuszko Foundation served as a more-
than-appropriate space for a piece dedicated to the Polish experience of
emigration. The Foundation's mission statement explains the organization's
dedication "to promoting and strengthening understanding and friendship
between the peoples of Poland and the United States." This idea of exchange
between Polish and American cultures is at the center of Modjeska's journey.
Through this modest production, which allowed for an intimate engagement
with the intricacies of Modjeska's life, the emigrant experience came into full
view. The complex transnational journey that so many Poles still embark upon
can be seen concentrated in the life of one extraordinary woman-a woman
who can be said to have influenced the theatrical history of two nations.
NOTES
1
Oxford English Dictionary (online).
2 The original English tide of Braun's play is Emigre Queen.
3 2009 marks the one-hundredth anniversary of Helena Modjeska's death and is being
recognized in various events internationally. The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center will
host a symposium on Modjeska in spring 2009.
CONTRIBUTORS
MARGARET ARANEO has been the Managing Editor of Slavic and East
European Peiformance since 2005. She teaches in the Drama Department of
New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and conducts theatre-related
workshops at The Cooper Union. She holds a B.A. from Johns Hopkins
University, an M.F.A. from Carnegie Mellon University, and is a Ph.D.
candidate in Theatre at the Graduate Center of the City University of New
York.
BEATE HEIN BENNETT, Ph.D. was born and raised in Germany, and
resides in New York City. Besides having been a teacher, she is a freelance
dramaturg and translator.
ROBERT BLUSH has spent several years practicing and studying theatre in
the Czech Republic and Bulgaria. He is pursuing a Ph.D. in Theatre Studies at
the University of Colorado Boulder, where he lives with his wife and daughter.
APRIL DONAHOWER is dramarurg and literary manager at Long Wharf
Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut. She has served as dramaturg for
productions at Geva Theatre Center, Studio Arena, Roundhouse Theater, and
others and is collaborating on a new adaptation of Ernst Toller's Hinkemann.
MAGDALENA GOLACZYNSKA holds a doctorate in theatre from
Wrodaw University, where she serves as a lecturer. In 2002 she published
Mozaika wspolczesnoici. Teatr alterna!Jwtry w Polsce po roku 1989 (Mosaic of
Contemporaneity. The Alternative Theatre in Poland Since 1989) and in 2007
Wroclawski teatr niezale'{ny (The Independent Theatre in Wrodaw ). She writes
articles on contemporary theatre, focusing on site-specific performances and
local groups.
MARIA IGNATIEVA is Associate Professor, Department of Theatre, The
Ohio State University, Lima campus, and previously Assistant Professor at the
Moscow Art Theatre School-Studio. She is author of over fifty publications
on Russian theatre, including most recently the chapters ''A Little Orchestra of
Hope" and "Oleg Tabakov at the Moscow Art Theatre" in the anthology, The
87
Changing Scene: Theatre and Performance in Eastern Europe (The Scarecrow Press,
2008). Her book Stanislavsk:J and Female Actors will be published this fall.
ANA MARTiNEZ is an architect (Universidad Anahuac, Mexico City) and
holds an M.A. in Scenography from Central Saint Martins College of Art and
Design (London, U.K.). She is a Ph.D. student in the Theatre Program at the
Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her fields of research
are site-specific performance, theatre architecture, and scenography.
Photo Credits
Dante and Witkao
August Grodzicki. Polish Theatre Directors. Warsaw: Interpress Publishers, 1979.
Moshe Yassur
Courtesy of Moshe Yassur.
Transfer!
,
The Wrodaw Teatr Wsp6lczesny and the Berlin Hebel-am-Ufer Theatre.
Geza-boy
Global Scenes Festival.
Lucie Cepcova, Danela Pai'izkova, Ondrej Svoboda, editors. Prague Quadrennial
2007, Prague: Arts Institute-Theatre Institute Prague, 2007.
Exiles
Bulgarian National Theatre Archives.
Helena Modjeska
Helena Modjeska. Memories and Impressions rf Helena Moc!Jeska: An Autobiograpf?y.
New York: The Macmillan Company, 1910.
Nina Polan
Polish Theatre Institute in the U.S.A.
88 Slavic and East European Peiforntance Vol. 28, No. 3
Correction: In the Spring 2008 issue of SEEP, the author of "The Croatian
Centre of ITI's Third Annual Showcase Croatia: October 17- 21, 2007''
incorrectly credited Sasa AnoCic with helping to establish the Exit Theatre.
The founder of Exit Theatre is Matko Raguz, who is also its Artistic Director.
89
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Witkiewicz: Seven Plavs
Translated and Edited by Daniel Gerould
Witkiewicz
SEVEN PLAYS
This volume contains seven of
Witkiewicz's most important
plays: The Pragmatists, Tumor
Brainiowicz, Gyuba/ Wahazar,
The Anonymous Work, The Cut-
tlefish, Dainty Shapes and Hairy
Apes, and The Beelzebub
Sonata, as well as two of his the-
oretical essays, "Theoretical
Introduction" and "A Few Words
About the Role of the Actor in the
Theatre of Pure Form."
Witkiewicz ... takes up and continues the vein of dream and
grotesque fantasy exemplified by the late Strindberg or by
Wedekind; his ideas are closely paralleled by those of the surre-
alists and Anton in Artaud which culminated in the masterpieces
of the dramatists of the Absurd . ... It is high time that this major
playwright should become better known in the English-speaking
world. Martin Esslin
Price US$2o.oo plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Please make payments in US dollars payable to : Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
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roMANIA After 2000
Edited by Saviana Stanescu and Daniel Gerould.
Translation editors: Saviana Stanescu and Ruth Margraff.
This volume represents the first
anthology of new Romanian
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lifll!ilfl States and introduces American
readers to compelling play-
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resonant issues of a post-totali-
tarian society on its way toward
democracy and a new European
identity. includes the plays:
Stop The Tempo by Gianina
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by Bogdan Georgescu, Vitamins
by Vera I on, Romania 21 by
~ t e f n Peca and Waxing West by Saviana Stanescu.
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Buenos Aires in Translation
Translated and Edited by Jean Graham-Jones
BAiT epitomizes true international theatrical collabora-
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Plays include: Women Dreamt Horses by Daniel
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Four Works for the Theatre by Hugo Claus
Translated and Edited by David Willinger
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language theatre, poetry, and prose. Flemish by birth and
upbringing, Claus is the author of some ninety plays, nov-
els, and collections of poetry. He is renowned as an enfant
terrible of the arts throughout Europe. From t he time he
was affiliated with the international art group, COBRA, to
his liaison with pornographic film star Silvia Kristel, to the
celebration of his novel, The Sorrow of Belgium, Claus has
careened through a career that is both scandal-ridden
and formidable. Claus takes on all the taboos of his times.
Price US51s.oo plus shipping (53 within the USA, 56 international)
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Marti n E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY
Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY100164309
Visit our website at: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 2128171868
The Heirs of Moliere
Translated and Edited by Marvin Carlson
+ ....... , ......... ., ...... _

+
h o
,. ... (. '
This volume contains four representative French comedies of
the period from the death of Moliere to the French Revolution:
The Absent-Minded Lover by Regnard, The Con-
ceited Count by Philippe Nericault Destouches, The Fashion-
able Prejudice by Pierre Nivelle de la Chaussee, and The Friend
of the Laws by Jean-Louis Laya.
Translated in a poetic form that seeks to capture the wit and
spirit of the originals, these four plays suggest something of
the range of the Moliere inheritance, from comedy of charac-
ter through the highly popular sentimental comedy of the
mid-eighteenth century, to comedy that employs the Moliere tradition for more con-
temporary political ends.
Pixerecourt: Four Melodramas
Translated and Edited by Daniel Gerould & Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four of Pixerecourt's most important
melodramas: The Ruins of Babylon or }afar and Zaida, The
Dog of Montargis or The Forest of Bondy, Christopher Colum-
bus or The Discovery of the New World, and Alice or The Scot-
tish Gravediggers, as well as Charles Nodier's
"Introduction" to the 1843 Collected Edition of Pixerecourt's
plays and the two theoretical essays by the playwright,
"Melodrama," and "Final Reflections on Melodrama."
Pixerecourt furnished the Theatre of Marvels with its most
stunning effects, and brought the classic situations of fair-
ground comedy up-to-date. He determined the structure of
a popular theatre which was to last through the 19th centu-
ry. Hannah Winter, The Theatre of Marvels
Price US$2o.oo each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Pl ease make payments in US dollars payable to: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NYtoo16-4309
Vi sit our website at: http:/ /web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-8171868
Four Ploys From North Africa
Translated and edited by Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four modern plays from the
Maghreb: Abdelkader Alloula's The Veil and Fatima
Gallaire's House of Wives, both Algerian, )ulila Baccar's
Araber/in from Tunisia, and Tayeb Saddiki's The Folies Ber-
bers from Morocco.
As the rich tradition of modern Arabic theatre has recently
begun to be recognized by the Western theatre community,
an important area within that tradition is still under-repre-
sented in existing anthologies and scholarship. That is the
drama from the Northwest of Africa, the region known in
Arabic as the Maghreb.
The Arab Oedipus
Edited by Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four plays based on the Oedipus leg-
end by four leading dramatists of the Arab world. Tawfiq
Al-Hakim's King Oedipus, Ali Ahmed Bakathir's The
Tragedy of Oedipus, Ali Salim's The Comedy of Oedipus
and Walid lkhlasi's Oedipus as well as Al-Hakim's preface
to his Oedipus on the subject of Arabic tragedy, a preface
on translating Bakathir by Dalia Basiouny, and a general
introduction by the editor.
An awareness of the rich tradition of modern Arabic the-
atre has only recently begun to be felt by the Western the-
atre community, and we hope that this collection will con-
tribute to that growing awareness.
THE ARAB OEDIPUS
Price US$2o.oo each plus shipping {$3 within the USA, $6 international)
Please make payments in US dollars payable to :Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulat ion Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY
Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10016-4309
Visit our website at: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868

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volume 28, no.

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