Poland

Jamie Gahlon, Senior Creative Producer of HowlRound, reports on a trip she took in fall 2016 to explore, deepen, and build partnerships with theatremakers and organizations in Eastern Europe.

Brian Hashimoto travels to Poland and reports on the 2016 Malta Festival.

Minna Vallaste writes about a piece she created about dementia using ideas from Kantor’s Theatre of Death.

Playwright and actor Natalie Osborne distinguishes spectacle from special effects and advocates for spectacle with minimalist staging.

Scholar Cole Matson explores the influence of the Reduta Theatre in Poland on Jerzy Grotowski and the Polish experimental theatre tradition.

Jennifer Johnson, of The Charlestown Working Theater, who has trained with Double Edge Theatre, interviews Stacy Klein, Founding Artistic Director of Double Edge about the evolution of Double Edge’s training method.

Scholar Magda Romanska presents an overview of contemporary women directors in Poland.

In this installation of the Polish Theater series, Agnieszka Jakimiak talks about the experimental work of Weronika Szczawińska: ever-changing, consistently challenging, and rewarding.

Iulia Popovici shares the work of Monika Strzępka and Paweł Demirski, a couple who make challenging and exciting work often based on political events happening in Poland.

Marta Keil presents an overview of the Polish theatre, tracing movements within a new political theatre, addressing the pressure of the market and the openness to artistic experimentation.

Joanna Wojciechowska explores the work of two theatre companies originally founded by students, now as leaders in Polish experimental theatre, making exciting work in Poland and abroad.

Many Polish theaters seek to explore Poland's diverse heritage or to connect with other cultures in Europe, but lack immediate access to a large multiethnic pool of actors. Despite the obstacle of recent history, many contemporary Polish theaters present and honor different forms of diversity onstage.

One of the stereotypes about the post-Grotowski Polish ensemble theaters is that their processes are rigidly closed and their rehearsal rooms are treated like devotional spaces. There is often a way through a more closed door, but you may have to put on your sweatpants.

The last two posts of this series have documented the kinds of rehearsal scheduling and breaks that some of the Polish post-Grotowski theaters use. However, in addition to this normal set of practices, on rare occasions, some theaters rehearse without taking any breaks at all.

This period of shared, relaxed time puts the performers in harmony with the theater, the rehearsal, and their fellow actors. It's like musicians tuning in the same room together. When I participated in this pre-rehearsal hangout, despite my initial antsiness, and not knowing what to do with this unstructured time, I found that my mind grew calmer. The flexible start was a moment of meditation before a strenuous activity: a deep breath before the dive.

Our US union regulations and laws require us to take breaks of a certain time, at a certain time. But nothing requires us to take *exactly* and *only* 5 minutes every hour or 10 minutes every 90. Why not, as an experiment, give them more? Why not make one break longer, and looser? An ongoing series of reports from rehearsal rooms and interviews with theater people in Poland; how US artists can modify or adapt Polish techniques for their own rehearsal kitchens.

Yes, some rehearsals (not all, mind you) are paid, and have to be regulated, legally, as work. But why did we decide, as US practitioners, that theater rehearsals fell so wholly into the realm of work and were so utterly unlike things such as parties or play? Why did we push rehearsals all the way to one end of the work-play spectrum? How did we become afraid of rehearsing without a stopwatch?

We need to spend a little time talking about the Julia Child of Polish theater—Jerzy Grotowski—before we can get on to the contemporary companies which have emerged from this figure's work, and their rehearsal practices. So—who was Jerzy Grotowski? If you've ever seen the film "My Dinner with Andre", you've heard of the experiments of this compelling, controversial, sham-or-shaman theater director.