Video with texts by Mickiewicz, Słowacki, Gombrowicz, and Józef Czechowicz for dancers/actors to combine movement/acting/voice/music.
Lecture discussion by Prof. Allen J. Kuharski, Department of Theater, Swarthmore College, Philadelphia.
This event will begin with a 50-minute video of the performance in Polish with English subtitles. It will be followed by a lecture and discussion by director and dramaturg Allen Kuharski (UW ’81) that will critically discuss the specific working methods and Polish content of the piece, along with a general discussion of the history, theory, and practices of devised ensemble physical theater in Poland, the United States, and globally.
Video Screening: The opening will be the screening of Part 1 of Withoutlands/Bezkresy, a two-part devised dance theater piece directed by Allen Kuharski as a diploma project with seven MFA students from the newly-established Dance Department of the Karol Szymanowski Academy of Music in Katowice earlier this year. Following a 10-week/150-hour rehearsal process, Withoutlands is the product of a laboratory experiment focused on unifying the expressive use of movement with dramatic poetry, both spoken and sung.
The goal of the work is a balanced hybrid of theater and dance, where there is no meaningful distinction between actor and dancer, or between director and choreographer. The classic Polish dramatic poetry given voice by the performers here replaces the traditional role of music and sound in dance. While rarely attempted in contemporary performance, this expressive combination was a universal practice in the choruses of classical Greek theater.
Bezkresy, the Polish title of Withoutlands, refers to the classic poem Przez kresy by the twentieth-century poet Józef Czechowicz. Czechowicz’s poem, never previously translated into English, provided a keynote for the group’s work, and is repeated twice in Polish in the performance. Lillian Vallee eventually translated the title of Czechowicz’s poem as edgelands, along with Withoutlands as the English title of this piece. The “Polish Suite” of Part 1 is a thematically unified montage of increasingly tragic poetic monologues from major plays by Adam Mickiewicz, Witold Gombrowicz, and Juliusz Słowacki. As with Czechowicz’s poem, the monologues from Słowacki’s Lilla Weneda and Salomea’s Silver Dream have never previously been translated into English or performed for English-speaking audiences. An excerpt from Allen Kuharski’s 1991 English translation of Gombrowicz’s History is also performed here for the first time.
Part 2 of Withoutlands consists of the integral text of Joseph Chaikin and Sam Shepard’s American experimental radio play The War In Heaven, performed in Grzegorz Godlewski’s Polish translation. Originally performed as a one-man show by Chaikin, both live and for radio, this version divides the play between the seven Polish performers and the seven implicit “voices” contained therein. The same themes and questions unify Parts 1 & 2 of Withoutlands, in spite of the apparent distance between the Polish and American contexts.
Lecture Discussion by Allen Kuharski, Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Scholar in Theater at Swarthmore College outside of Philadelphia, where he taught directing, performance theory, and theater history. He is also part of the MFA faculty of the Pig Iron School of Devised Performance in Philadelphia (affiliated with Rowan University in New Jersey), and has taught theater in China since 2021.
He has twice been a Fulbright Scholar in theater to Poland: first studying scenography with Józef Szajna at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts (1981) and second studying the history of Polish Romantic theater and drama at the Institute for Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Arts & Sciences in Warsaw (2017-18). From 1999-2008, he co-founded and co-directed a study-abroad program in Poland for Swarthmore theater and dance students in collaboration with choreographer Jacek Łumiński and Silesian Dance Theatre in Bytom.
He is a widely published authority on contemporary directing theory and practice, as well of Polish theater and drama, in particular the work of Witold Gombrowicz. He is a co-editor of the 14-volume WITOLD GOMBROWICZ: COLLECTED WRITINGS, published by Wydawnictwo Literackie in Kraków.
Kuharski is a 1981 honors graduate of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he majored in set design in the Department of Theatre & Drama and first studied Polish language and literature. Kuharski holds a doctorate from the director-scholar program in Dramatic Art at the University of California at Berkeley, where he wrote the first dissertation in any language devoted to Gombrowicz in the theater.