Introducing A Polish Theater Cookbook
Dara Weinberg reports from rehearsal rooms and interviews with directors in Poland; how US artists can modify or adapt Polish techniques for their own kitchens.
Theater is important to people in Poland the way food is important to people in Italy.
Artistic expression in Poland is about more than artistic expression. Poetry, music, and writings from exiles, from Mickiewicz to Miłosz, helped to preserve Polish language and identity during years—centuries—of war and oppressive regimes. As in other states in the region—such as in Estonia, where the "Singing Revolution," a nationwide protest through traditional vocal music, ended the Soviet era—in Poland, the arts have historically had a role in politics.
The third Polish Republic will be twenty-five years old in 2014. The culture is no longer under active threat of being wiped out. But Polish actors and directors still go to their rehearsal rooms, to their theaters, as if their lives depended on it.
They take great pride in what they do.
This cultural pride is more important than the red herring of state funding. Great Polish theater has scraped its way into existence from stateless, state-in-exile, or state-straightened circumstances. European Union coffers can't take credit for the Polish theater tradition.
To this end, after two years hanging around Polish theaters, this series, A Polish Theater Cookbook, is my ongoing attempt to describe what happens in those rehearsals—and to suggest a few modifications for our own use.
For those of us who admire their work and would like to borrow from it, this is good news. We don't have Europesque state funding. But US practitioners have a chance of cooking theater as the Poles do without any change in our execrable funding situation or in the value which is generally placed by our culture on the arts in general and theater in particular.
The cookbook metaphor has helped me to explain this both to myself and to others. You don't have to move to Italy to cook a good bowl of pasta. You can make Italian-style pasta with the ingredients you have at hand. All that is necessary is a recipe.
And a different attitude in the kitchen.
To this end, after two years hanging around Polish theaters, this series, A Polish Theater Cookbook, is my ongoing attempt to describe what happens in those rehearsals—and to suggest a few modifications for our own use.
One caveat before I begin: I am not concerned with painstakingly documenting every single thing that Polish artists do in their theaters. Plenty of academics, from Poland, the UK, and elsewhere, are working on that. I am interested in that project, and have sometimes contributed to it. But this is a cookbook. Cookbooks don't have to have academic credentials, or any pretense of comprehensiveness.
I am going to indulge in personal digressions, make changes, omit things, and be selective—I will mostly focus on the recipes that I would want to cook myself. The Polish language does not have articles ("a," "the"), but I have deliberately called this "a" and not "the" Polish theater cookbook.
To balance my own bias, I am going to alternate my descriptions of Polish theater, in this series, with interviews with Polish artists.
All that being said, in my avowedly biased opinion, the broadest general principle differentiating Polish theater cooking from ours is that Polish artists take more risks in the kitchen.
Here are a few examples. I don't mean to say that every production in every theater always does all of these things. But I have seen each of these things happen on multiple occasions.
1) No rehearsal schedule to speak of. A schedule which changes so often as to not permit any advance planning. Maybe you don't know what the day off will be, or when it will be.
2) No rehearsal breaks whatsoever—or, there may be a break, but there is no agreed-upon notification of if there will be a break and, if so, how long it will be.
3) No agreed-upon end point; no expected limit on the number of hours you can rehearse in a day.
4) Directors frequently give readings of lines and movement to performers.
5) Directors sometimes conduct performers live during performances.
6) Directors often perform in their own shows.
7) The text is treated as a point of departure, not a sacred object.
8) Copyrighted material is sometimes used without permission (though not nearly as often as it used to be, or as much as is often perceived by outsiders).
I've tried some, but not all, of these techniques, myself. Some of them are too weird for me, and I will never try them. (I will say whether or not I have attempted something myself, when I describe a recipe.)
But I believe I am a better director because I have learned to incorporate a few elements of Polish-style cooking into my rehearsals.
Theater tastes different in Poland, in the way in which pizza in Palermo or Pisa tastes different from a frozen Trader Joe's pizza incarnated in the microwave. I have nothing against Trader Joe's—I love it. But it is not the same thing.
In Poland, they are making theater from scratch. Whether or not we intend to do this ourselves, I think it is useful—as an exercise—to imagine it.
I am a ravenous reader of cookbooks but a very lazy cook. I have never done everything that Nigella and Nigel tell me I should do to the duck. But when I am defrosting the 500th boneless skinless chicken breast in the last 501 days, I think about those books, and I cook a little differently. Different spices, different timing, a longer marinade, more heat. Something.
Usually, I just make up my own recipe. I'm a director, after all, and I hate it when people tell me what to do.
Do teatru! (To the theater!)
5 years ago
Dara Weinberg
COMMENTED:
Dear Kathleen, I agree that examining the history of work in a culture or nation, when examining things like rehearsal structures and scheduling, is i
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