The Wooster Group Invokes Polish Theater Visionary Tadeusz Kantor

REDCAT, CalArts' downtown center for contemporary arts, presents the legendary New York Theater ensemble, The Wooster Group in A PINK CHAIR (In Place of a Fake Antique), April 5 to April 15, 2018.

The Wooster Group's newest piece weaves together live performance, music, and video in an encounter with one of the greatest figures of the 20th century avant-garde theater: the iconic Polish stage director Tadeusz Kantor (1915-1990).

The Group got to know Kantor's works through films and documentaries. They then asked his only daughter, Dorota Krakowska, to join them as dramaturge and guide for A PINK CHAIR. Krakowska was interested in working with the Group on this piece as a way of revisiting her father and his work again.

A PINK CHAIR began with a commission from the Adam Mickiewicz Institute in Poland, which asked The Wooster Group to make a piece in honor of Kantor. It was further developed in a residency last summer at Bard SummerScape Festival, and completed at the Group's theater, The Performing Garage, and will have it's premiere at REDCAT before its New York run at the Performing Garage in April.

The title A PINK CHAIR (In Place of a Fake Antique) comes from one of Kantor's manifestos. It describes a theater that gives the simplest, everyday objects - chairs - hallucinatory power to summon up forgotten history and memory. In A PINK CHAIR, the Group will investigate this theatrical rite of communication with spirits past by exploring Kantor's penultimate production, I Shall Never Return, and through it, Kantor's lifelong obsession with the myth of the return of Odysseus.

Tadeusz Kantor's life and art embody the extremes of the 20th century. Born in the tiny Polish town of Wielopole, he witnessed two world wars and the rise and collapse of communism in Poland. He formed his first theater company - the Underground Independent Theater - in 1942, staging clandestine productions in German-occupied Krakow. In 1955, he formed a Second Company, Cricot 2, and worked with them as a consistent, evolving ensemble for the remainder of his life. Cricot 2 toured outside Poland to great renown in Europe and Asia beginning in the 1960s. Although he was less well known in the United States, Kantor presented four acclaimed productions at LaMaMa between 1979 and 1988. The first, Dead Class, won an Obie.

Kantor's original training was as a painter and throughout his life he remained engaged with international avant-garde movements in the visual arts. He was committed to theater as a total work of art which "embraces and comprehends all modern art and its ideas, themes, and conflicts" (from Tadeusz Kantor, The Milano Lessons I).

Author and theater critic Don Shewey describes A PINK CHAIR as "exquisite in its precision, its layeredness, its deep engagement with the purpose and meaning of theater, and its sheer physical and aural beauty... A watershed piece for The Group."

Directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, A PINK CHAIR features performances by Zbigniew Bzymek, Enver Chakartash, Jim Fletcher, Ari Fliakos, Gareth Hobbs, Erin Mullin, Suzzy Roche, Danusia Trevino, and Kate Valk. Lighting is by Jennifer Tipton and Ryan Seelig; sound and original music by Eric Sluyter and Omar Zubair; musical director: Gareth Hobbs; video and projections: Robert Wuss; additional video by Zbigniew Bzymek and Wladimiro Woyno; costumes by Enver Chakartash; assistant director: Matthew Dipple; stage manager: Erin Mullin; video cueing system development: Andrew Maillet and Wladimiro Woyno; technical director: Jacob Bigelow; and production manager: Bona Lee.

More About Tadeusz Kantor, from an essay by Anna R. Burzynska, assistant professor at the Department of Theater at Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland, and editor of the Didaskalia theater journal, as well as a dramaturge and curator, who has researched the Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor.

"Polish director and artist Tadeusz Kantor's clown-like, death-haunted productions had a transformative effect on American art in the 1980s and '90s when they were performed in New York City. "Returning" is a key concept in Kantor's theater. His biography and art combine contradictions and are simultaneously extremely original and emblematic for the whole 20th century. Born in the tiny Polish Jewish town of Wielopole, he became a renowned artist (his performances were presented all over the world, from New York to Shiraz and Tokyo). He was quintessentially Polish and yet also cosmopolitan. He witnessed two world wars (his father was killed in Auschwitz), the triumph and collapse of communism in Central Europe, the beginning of the avant-garde movement in the interwar years, and the 1960s. He always returned to the places, people, and events that shaped him, believing that development takes place on a spiral rather than a straight line.

Kantor's work with his two companies, the occupation-era Underground Independent Theatre (1942-44) and the Cricot 2 Theatre (1955-91), was both a continuation of the explorations of the avant-garde led by the Bauhaus and Cabaret Voltaire and an anticipation of what is happening today in the "post-dramatic" theater. Kantor was a versatile artist: painter, sculptor, stage designer, and writer; he organized exhibitions and happenings and directed performances. In defiance of the traditions of Polish theater, which emphasized literary text, virtuosic acting skills, and impressive stage design, Kantor presented the crazy, absurdist plays of experimental writer Witkacy (Stanis?aw Ignacy Witkiewicz), as well as his own scores for performance. He solved the eternal dispute between naturalism and abstraction by introducing the idea of the "reality of the lowest rank." According to this principle he filled his stage with simple, everyday, and often damaged objects-a chair, plank, old bathtub, and cartwheel. These were not symbolic props that referred to the outside world but real (although dead) actors, with their own histories and personalities. For his stage performances, he invited not the perfectly spoken, graceful theatrical professionals but his fellow painters, eccentrics, and weirdos, who didn't attempt to disappear behind their roles. His model for the actor was a doll, a tailor's mannequin, and also a soldier, moving in a mechanized way, devoid of expression. He wrote of actors: "They are repeats, replicas, therefore fraudulent, the living dead from birth."

Kantor's theater explored the spatial dimension of memory and the role of theater as a medium serving the awed but essential repetition in the past. Creating theatrical performances was akin to reviving a world captured on old photographic film, or a kind of a spiritual se?ance. The stage turned out to be a place where the dead could speak in their own voices and plead with the audience to remember them-as in a Greek tragedy, Hamlet, or the Polish four-part dramatic work Forefathers' Eve, in which pagan rites allow the participants to talk to their dead ancestors. In Kantor's case, the dead were his family, friends, and the Jews from his hometown killed during the war. His dramas were also peopled with the ghosts of old performances, for the life of the theater is even more fragile than human life.

Kantor himself was a shaman leading this theatrical rite of communication with spirits past. During performances he would sit on an old, damaged, squeaky chair on the side of the stage, as if to emphasize that we are entering the private world of his memory, looking through his album of family photographs alongside him. He was Charon, the old ferryman of Hades, who carried his audience on his boat across the river of oblivion and into the land of the dead.

The Wooster Group is an ensemble of artists who create, produce, present and perform new work for theater. The Group creates its work through a distinctive collaborative process with a focus on experimentation and the synthesis of multiple art forms. The theater work is known for its innovative use of lighting, sound, and video technologies. Under the direction of Elizabeth LeCompte, the Group has remained at the forefront of experimental theater for decades.

The Group's major works include: RUMSTICK ROAD (1977), NAYATT SCHOOL (1978), L.S.D. (...Just The High Points...) (1984), FRANK DELL'S THE TEMPTATION OF ST. ANTONY (1988), BRACE UP! (1991), THE EMPEROR JONES (1993), THE HAIRY APE (1996), HOUSE/LIGHTS (1999), TO YOU, THE BIRDIE! (Phèdre) (2002), POOR THEATER (2004), HAMLET (2007), the 360º video installation THERE IS STILL TIME . . BROTHER (2007), the opera LA DIDONE (2009), VIEUX CARRÉ (2011), EARLY SHAKER SPIRITUALS: A RECORD ALBUM INTERPRETATION (2014), THE ROOM (2016), THE TOWN HALL AFFAIR (2017) and THE B-SIDE: "Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons," A Record Album Interpretation (2017).

The Group's founding members were Spalding Gray (1941-2004), Elizabeth LeCompte, Jim Clayburgh, Ron Vawter (1948-1994), Willem Dafoe, Kate Valk, and Peyton Smith. Wooster Group director Elizabeth LeCompte has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts Distinguished Artists Fellowship for Lifetime Achievement in the American Theater, as well as the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award and the 2016 Dorothy & Lillian Gish Award. Associate director Kate Valk has received the Guggenheim and TCG/Fox Foundation Resident Actor Fellowships, as well as the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Performing Artist Award. The Group and its members have also won nine Obie Awards, six Bessie Awards, and the National Endowment for the Arts Ongoing Ensembles Grant.

The Performing Garage in the Soho neighborhood of lower Manhattan is The Wooster Group's permanent home and performance venue. The Group owns and operates the Garage as a shareholder in the Grand Street Artists Co-op, which was originally established as part of the Fluxus art movement. The Group regularly tours its productions throughout the United States and internationally.

Tickets and info: https://www.redcat.org/event/wooster-group-pink-chair-place-fake-antique

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