Exclusive Livestream Project ERA SCHAEFFERA Premieres On HowlRound.com

The Los Angeles-based Ghost Road Company and bi-continental Warsaw Bauhaus Foundation present an international collaboration in which experimental performing artists in Los Angeles and Poland respond creatively (and simultaneously) to the legacy of maverick Polish composer, musicologist, and graphic artist Bogusław Schaeffer with their own original works of dance, film, and theater.

"Sharing space and experience through live theater generates a sense of community, which is now strictly limited," notes producer Joanna Klass.

Now artists under the restraint of Covid isolation are invited to forge an international collaboration, sharing space and time across oceans and borders. This 90 minute live stream from Warsaw and Los Angeles will consist of simultaneous performances being mixed live by the theater director as a veritable DJ.

The FREE event will be accessible through HowlRound Theatre Commons: howlround.com

In Warsaw, under the auspices of AUREAPORTA­­-a foundation whose mission is to disseminate the legacy and preserve the archives of Boguslaw Schaeffer's work-well-known actors and musicians Włodek Pawlik, Michał Urbaniak, Marcin Wyrostek will perform Schaeffer's work Era Schaeffera, while Los Angeles-based actors Peter Mark, Anthony Nikolchev, Paul Outlaw, Iza Miko and Jessica Emmanuel will interpret excerpts from his play A Multimedia Affair, adapted by the project's director Maciej Sobociński, performing in situ at REDCAT-CALARTS theatre. Noted Los Angeles choreographers Heidi Duckler, Laurie Sefton and Micaela Taylor are each creating dance films shot in unique outdoor locations in which company members perform short works inspired by or accompanied by Schaeffer's music.

Boguslaw Schaeffer (1929-2019) was the most successful playwright among composers and one of the hardest working composers among playwrights. His artistic language and formal concerns in both music and drama put him squarely in the small but vital international group of artists exploring the boundary between music, theater, and the visual arts going back to the European and American avant-garde of the 1930s. As a composer, Schaeffer could be called a conceptual artist, in the vein of Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage.

Schaeffer's musical process inspired his ways of constructing theatre pieces- and vice-versa. His plays on the page resemble the graphic musical notation he invented for his compositions; they exist both as play "scores" and as witty visual graphic art.
Schaeffer's work stretches the boundaries between music and text, acting and musicianship. His unconventional, interdisciplinary style is kept alive now both performances of his compositions and plays, and also, with support from AUREAPORTA, by annually commissioning contemporary theater and dance artists to create new work inspired by Schaeffer's inventive, questing spirit.

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