Anna Karasiska tr WarszaWa CREDITS director Anna Karasiska - - PDF document

Anna Karasińska

karasińska the fantasia tr WarszaWa

CREDITS

director

Anna Karasińska

dramaturgy

Magdalena Rydzewska, Jacek Telenga

set design and costumes

Paula Grocholska

choreography

Magda Ptasznik

light design

Szymon Kluz

cast

Agata Buzek, Dobromir Dymecki, Rafał Maćkowiak, Maria Maj, Zofja Wichłacz, Adam Woronowicz

karasińska the fantasia tr WarszaWa

FROM THE DIRECTOR / PERFORMANCE DESCRIPTION

While working on the spectacle, we focused on this particular activity of our imagination which allows us to understand what others feel. It also enables us to connect with them and to look at them in difgerent situations without judging. It also enables us to see their point of view. Let’s say we organized a meeting of a certain number of people who wouldn’t meet otherwise, or wouldn’t notice meeting one another even if they met. It’s hard to say they are theatre characters or fjctional people. They appear at the contact point between the viewers’ and actors’ imaginations; they interact with each other; accompany each

• ther and disappear. The spectacle also features

the process of taking on the roles by actors. We hope that in this meeting a certain sense of intimacy and joy arises and that the mechanism

• f unselfjsh perception of others can be “taken

from the theater’ by the viewers.

anna KarasińsKa

karasińska the fantasia tr WarszaWa

The Fantasia is a play with imagination.

Witold mrozek, gazeta Wyborcza

karasińska the fantasia tr WarszaWa

PERFORMANCE NOTE

the man on the bus grabbing the handrail before me; the person who packed your box of raisins in a faraway country; a man who dived into a river in chinese Xi’an. What do they have in common? they’re all characters in the Fantasia, yet none of them appear on stage. they exist solely in the minds

• f the director, the actors and the audience.

Anna Karasińska is among the most original voices to have emerged in polish theatre in recent years. she is a graduate of the Łódź Film school’s direction department and, like many

• f her post-theatre1 contemporaries, Karasińska has emerged

from a background other than theatre-making, embarking

• n a multi-channelled exploration of the phenomena of

the theatre itself, playing on conventions and audience expectations in surprising ways. don’t expect roles or elaborate productions. the events play out on an empty stage with the bare minimum of a set. the actors don’t pretend they are not actors; they speak directly to the audience, breaking the wall between the stage and the house. post-theatre eschews the illusion of the stage in favour of ‘performative situations’. post-theatre emerges in opposition to a traditional theatre dominated by the literary text, illusion and the separation of stage and audience. its practitioners, unlike the theatrical revolutionaries of the 1960s, have opted to remain inside the theatre building and create new situations within its walls. they dismantle the hierarchy governing the

1 Term originated by Polish critic Tomasz Plata describing Karasińska as one of

directors who ‘are fatigue with the theatre establishment is their starting point – yet their final goal is always theatre itself, often reduced to its simplest forms and shown shorn of adornment’.

karasińska the fantasia tr WarszaWa

actor–audience relationship to create an a more immediate and spontaneous theatrical experience, one which occurs only

• nce: here and now.

such was the case with Karasińska’s debut play Ewelina’s Crying (2015), in which well-known actors from the tr Warszawa played drama students attempting to perform the roles of these same artists. What resulted was a story about

• ur complex identities, which comprise numerous, often

contradictory, narratives. in her second production, called The Second Performance (polski theatre, poznań 2016) the actors play various types of viewers, efgectively turning a mirror toward the audience. and in the solo performance Birthday (Komuna Warszawa, 2016) Karasińska appears on stage in person, while a monologue about her insecurities associated with public appearance plays from the speakers. The Fantasia (tr Warszawa, 2017) is the fjnal installment in Karasińska’s series of meta-performances. she hides

• ut somewhere in the auditorium, from where she issues

instructions to the six actors on stage. the actors have no set roles and the director responds to the events playing out on

• stage. how does this unique agreement form between the

audience and the theatre, allowing actors to create real-time worlds on the stage? how are we convinced of the reality of the performance? are there limits to our imagination? are there things that are inconceivable in the theatre?

roman paWŁoWsKi head of programming department, tr Warszawa

karasińska the fantasia tr WarszaWa

karasińska the fantasia tr WarszaWa

AUTHORS

Anna Karasińska stage director, attended the Władysław strzemiński academy

• f Fine arts in Łódź and the Faculty of philosophy at the

university of Łódź, graduated from the Faculty of direction at the leon schiller national higher school of Film, television and theatre in Łódź. her student short fjlms, features and documentaries were shown at several dozen festivals around the world, many winning international prizes. she made her theatre debut with her original production of Ewelina’s Crying, staged in 2015 at tr Warszawa as part of the tr territory (teren tr) project. in 2016 for Ewelina’s Crying, anna Karasińska won the Kazimierz Krzanowski promotional award at the 51st KontrapunKt small theatre Form

• Festival. in 2016 Karasińska directed the Second Production

at the teatr polski in poznań, followed that same year by Birthday staged as part of the micro-theatre at Komuna/ /

• Warszawa. in 2017 she also directed her another original

play in tr Warszawa – The Fantasia that was shown at dublin theatre Festival in 2018. in 2018 she directed 2118. Karasińska at the nowy teatr in Warsaw.

karasińska the fantasia tr WarszaWa

karasińska the fantasia tr WarszaWa

PRESS REVIEWS

The Fantasia is a play with imagination. simple play with a sophisticated simplicity, incredibly funny, and at times profoundly moving. the abstract play Fantasia is the return to tr Warszawa of anna Karasińska, author of the hit production of Ewelina’s Crying. yes, with Karasińska’s personality terms such as “abstract” and “hit production” can actually be used in the same sentence. as the title suggests, The Fantasia is a play with imagination. the director is present, though invisible. she is heard on the loudspeakers, live, addressing the audience directly. her words paint imaginary scenes actors, called out by name by the director, pick up on the go. the lab- like minimalism of performance is united here with the humour of semisilent stand-up comedy. The Fantasia could not work so spectacularly without its brilliant

• actors. the cast includes agata Buzek playing, among other

characters, a woman not ashamed to dance to her favourite song, dobromir dymecki as, among others, a polar bear in Krupówki street, as well as the great newcomer to stage acting, Zofja Wichłacz, known for e.g. Warsaw ’ 44 [dir. Jan Komasa] and Afterimages [dir. Andrzej Wajda]. returning from the previous production are maria maj, adam Woronowicz, and rafał maćkowiak. the play is the quintessential emotional abstraction, or, in other words, an attempt to reduce drama to its basics, as with colour and texture in painting. it is all about acting compressed to situations or emotions drawn with a few quick strokes: a couple of facial expressions, a gesture, a pose. suggestive images in a handful of lines: theatre haiku anyone? Audience thrown into hastily constructed world the director’s words and actors’ bodies come together to reveal individual emotions and thoughts of an everyday quality, somewhat banal, slightly guilty: hidden and suddenly revealed. are they there in the movements and gestures of actors, or is our gaze that produces them, prompted by the voice-over narration? at times the spectator is plunged directly into the hastily constructed scene: “now Zosia is

karasińska the fantasia tr WarszaWa

playing someone who’s in love with you, but will never tell you.” and then there are the little nuisances, like staring at people on the public

• transport. presented with no context, simple situations sometimes

morph into poetic micro-stories verging on magical realism. as a case in point, Wichłacz becomes a gold-medal winning champion of farewells: she has already said goodbye to her parents, her lover, and the whole street. maja, in turn, is a woman on her allotment who is suddenly chatted up by the dead lying underground. A play on dramatic form Fantasia completes the series that one could name a tetralogy on looking and empathizing. in the debut production of Ewelina’s Crying, tr actors played their own replacements, interns imagining what it is like to be tr actors. in The Second Performance at teatr polski in poznań, actors sitting on the stage acted all sorts of imaginary reactions and expectations of the audience. Finally, in Birthday Karasińska herself stood motionless on the stage, with voiceover playing her monologue on fear of public performances and embarrassment with one’s body that slowly proceeded to a description

• f an imagined birthday.

in essence, it is a play with the dramatic form and imagination, statically positioned actors, and voiceover. “more of the same”? But isn’t saying that all Karasińska’s productions are similar tantamount to complaining that all traditional theatre performances are the same: after all, there’s always some text, characters, and a scenography?»

Witold mrozek, gazeta Wyborcza – stołeczna online/april 14

The Fantasia might speak only to the theatrical nerd who wants to see behind the wizard’s curtain, but it speaks very softly and very

• eloquently. (…) yet if The Fantasia is a slow burn, it’s a genuinely

fascinating and utterly charming slow burner. it’s all a game. it’s all a frame. none of it really happened. none of these people exist. even though all of it exists.

the arts review, chris o’rourke

karasińska the fantasia tr WarszaWa

the director anna Karasińska’s piece for tr Warszawa might best be described as a kind of inverse conjuring act: now you don’t see it, now you do. everything within its playful, largely improvised hour requires an imaginative collaboration: through a microphone, Karasińska gives each of her six performers a character, a context, perhaps a secret; they respond with some fabulously minimal reactions (one actor’s periodic disrobing notwithstanding), and the audience projects the rest. “switch,” Karasińska calls intermittently, and her amiable ensemble reposition on stage to begin a new tableau. irish times, peter crawley, october 2018 It’s the kind of play that cannot be recounted: it’s micro-theater by Anna Karasińska.” (…) the interpretative opportunities ofgered by the term micro-theater welcome discussions of the thought spaces explored by the director. the characters in her plays occupy a micro-world whose boundaries

karasińska the fantasia tr WarszaWa

are defjned by personal experience: the ostensibly irrelevant situations and mundane gestures that make up our everyday lives. the director typically begins with a quotidian detail and, using it as her axis, spins a tale that often takes an abstract turn. she often develops several mini- narratives in parallel, bringing them together to build ephemeral and elusive depictions of the world. Karasińska is consistent her efgorts to strip ofg the veneer of theater, to thoroughly deconstruct the theatrical illusion, thus proving that theater is limited by nothing but our imaginations. (…) anna Karasińska’s plays aren’t easy to “read”; answering the question “what are they about?” poses a challenge. they are largely experienced at the sensual and emotional level, particularly Fantasia and All Imaginary. (…) the viewer’s intellectual efgort often appears to play a backseat role, secondary to the emerging associations, thoughts, and emotions. the atmosphere of theatrical directness which the cast strives to create makes the actor-audience relationship a highly personal one. in result, the interpretative stances assumed by the viewer, while extraordinarily diverse (ranging from irritation to absolute rapture), undoubtedly become more engaging. the unpretentiousness and abundant self-ridicule in Karasińska’s productions are a breath of fresh air in polish theater. (…) the director

• fgers respite from the dominance of “grand” socio-political topics,

speaking directly to the singular viewer and his or her individual

• experience. (…) With its allusiveness and intimacy, micro-theater is an

attempt to address our unspectacular, everyday confrontations with the world. these encounters rarely warrant discussion. ultimately, they resemble a play that cannot be recounted, as Karasińska herself

• bserves in All Imaginary. Furthermore, micro-theater turns its

attention to minor narratives, compositions made up of the minutiae

• f human activity, details that demand to be told. Karasińska’s theater

becomes an exercise of the imagination, allowing viewers to embark

• n voyages that reach far beyond the boundaries of the stage.

Rozświetlamy Kulturę, agata Kędzia, october 2017

karasińska the fantasia tr WarszaWa

AbOUT TR WARSzAWA

tr Warszawa’s programs integrate residents of Warsaw and visitors to the capital into the city’s cultural life, joining other theaters and cultural institutions in shaping a 21st-century civic identity and building Warsaw’s international position as an important center of artistic life. this is a theater that has carved out a space for itself on the map of Warsaw cultural institutions. the company led by grzegorz Jarzyna has developed contemporary stage forms and a new language of

• theater. here, in the late 1990s, a new model for the functioning of

polish theaters was created. here experience was gained by a group of artists, actors, producers and managers who today are shaping polish theater. tr Warszawa’s continuous development and artistic explorations mean that it plays an important role in creating culture. it generates new talents and ideas for the theater. it works with artists who create new directions in the theater. it raises socially important issues that are not yet being addressed on the stage. it develops the competences

• f the audience and the professional skills of theater professionals.

tr Warszawa integrates new circles of participants in culture, building solid relations with them in the national and international worlds

• f art. it engages in innovative forms of dialogue with the audience,
• perating both on the stages tr Warszawa/marszałkowska 8 and

tr Warszawa/atm studio, as well as outside its facilities, in other cultural institutions and organizations, and in non-theater spaces. Natalia Dzieduszycka managing director Grzegorz Jarzyna artistic director

karasińska the fantasia tr WarszaWa

CONTACT

Agata Kołacz head of international projects agata.kolacz@trwarszawa.pl Małgorzata Cichulska head of production