Re-Reading Grotowski
A special issue of TDR: The Drama Review on Jerzy Grotowski
Guest-Edited by Kris Salata & Lisa Wolford Wylam
MIT Press Journals, May 2008
Publication was made possible, in part, through a grant from
the Polish Cultural Institute in New York.

This important issue of TDR: The Drama Review includes previously unpublished material by Jerzy Grotowski, plus articles on theatre companies and artists who preceded and have followed in the footsteps of the great Polish theatre artist.

Grotowski viewed the first translated text, Reply to Stanislavsky, as one of his most important. In it he systematically addresses matters of continuity between the line of theatrical research initiated by Stanislavsky and his own. The second text by Grotowski, On the Genesis of Apocalypsis, is one of several texts that Grotowski wished to be included in a revised and expanded edition of Towards a Poor Theatre.

Zbigniew Osinski, considered to be the most significant Polish scholar of Grotowski's work, has written about a critical influence of the aesthetics, vision, and ethos of Reduta – Poland’s first laboratory theatre founded by Juliusz Osterwa, on Grotowski and his Laboratory Theatre in The Heritage of the Reduta Theatre in Grotowski and the Laboratory Theatre.. This material fills a crucial gap not only in Grotowski studies but in theatre studies more generally, as at present English-language readers lack access to any information about Reduta and its founder. The issue also features a translation of Acta Gnosis by Antonio Attisani, an article on non-representational acting from Grotowski to Thomas Richards by Grotowski translator Kris Salata, and articles by Mario Biagini, Kris Salata and Lisa Wolford Wylam.

Cunningham, Grotowski, and Beckett have several things in common; small means, intense work, rigorous discipline, absolute precision. Also, almost as a condition, they are theatres for an elite – Peter Brook

The Polish Cultural Institute

congratulates

KRZYSZTOF WARLIKOWSKI

on receiving the

2008 VILLAGE VOICE OBIE AWARD

for his direction of

KRUM by Hanoch Levin

presented by TR WARSZAWA at BAM’s 25th NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL

The Village Voice 53rd annual Obie awards were awarded Monday, May 19, 2008 during a ceremony at Webster Hall in New York. On behalf of Krzysztof Warlikowski, who is in dress rehearsals for the revival of his 2006 production of Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride at the Paris National Opera, the award was accepted by Monika Fabijanska, Director of the Polish Cultural Institute in New York, which co-presented “Krum” in New York. Krzysztof Warlikowski sent the following special letter to the OBIE jury and New York audience, which was read by Ms Fabijanska at the ceremony.

“I would like to thank you wholeheartedly for this prestigious award. I wish to thank the jury, I thank Joe Melillo, who invited us to BAM’s Next Wave Festival twice, I thank my wonderful and gifted actors for their dedication, and the Polish Cultural Institute in New York who helped make it happen, I thank all the people I worked with because without their help I would not have been able to achieve anything.

But my most heartfelt thanks go to the New York audience, who so enthusiastically received both Krum and The Dybbuk. Nowhere else have I met an audience so concentrated on the text, so vividly reacting to it, and so emotional in their response.
I am extremely happy that our work has been received so positively in America, a country which – since my first trip to New York five years ago – has fascinated me so greatly. My latest production in Warsaw, Angels in America, was developed as a result of this fascination and is my most personal work to date. Let us hope that this award is a good harbinger for things to come in my future projects with the New York City Opera.

Many, many thanks again.”

Krzysztof Warlikowski, May 19, 2008

The Village Voice Obie Awards were created soon after the inception of the publication in 1955 to publicly acknowledge and encourage the growing Off Broadway theater movement. The Obies were purposely structured with informal categories, to recognize those persons and productions worthy of distinction each theater season. Traditionally there are no advance nominations. The Obie Awards are an important part of the Village Voice’s long history of championing Off Broadway and – since 1964 – Off-Off Broadway productions. The Obie represents Off-Broadway’s highest honor, and has an astounding history and range, with a roster of extraordinary past recipients from such superstars as Meryl Streep, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, and Denzel Washington to the incredibly talented people who are known only to the special inside world of New York off-Broadway theater.
Previous Polish winners of the Obie Awards have been Tadeusz Kantor for his production of The Dead Class at La MaMa E.T.C. (1980) and Elzbieta Czyzewska for her role in Crowbar by Mac Wellman, a site-specific project by Anne Hamburger's En Garde Arts company (1990).

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YALE DRAMA’S

THEATER

HONORS GOMBROWICZ

One of the most important fruits of the “Gombrowicz Autum” is the recent publication of the winter 2004 edition of Theater, a periodical of the Yale School of Drama and Yale Repertory Theatre (Volume 34, Number 3). The issue is devoted primarily to “Witold Gombrowicz’s Century”. It presents several scholarly essays, numerous photographs, a theatrical adaptation of a short story by Gombrowicz, excerpts from his Polish Memories, and much more. The issue, prepared in an intitiative paralleling the October International Gombrowicz Conference at Yale, does not duplicate the Conference papers. It was produced in cooperation with Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the Polish Cultural Institute.

In an introductory piece, the editor of Theater, Tom Sellar, writes: “The standard American repertory has so many blind spots when it comes to other national literary traditions that it’s easy to stop noticing them, let alone challenge or counter them. But at a moment in history when the United States stands in unprecedented political and cultural isolation, any project expanding cultural boundaries has an added vitality. […] The next century of American theater artists would do well to build on Gombrowicz’s contention that, in a tormenting world where everyone is lying, to contradict, even on little things, is the supreme necessity of art today “.

For more information visit the journal’s web site at www.yale.edu/drama/publications/theater.

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