Wroclaw-the City-Phoenix

Wroclaw insists on emphasizing that it's a city of bad luck. Indeed, its history is replete with misfortunes-devastating fires, earth-leveling bombings, deadly plagues, Biblical floods... However, to stress on that today, when the city has the fastest growing economy in Poland and a next-to-non-existent unemployment, sounds like a PR trick. With its amazingly authentic-looking reconstructed center and a colorful student crowd (inhabiting its 13 high-education institutions!) Wroclaw looks like an antique jewel worn by an elegant-negligee young woman. What's the secret of this perpetual reversal-of-fortunes? The statue of the 1997 deadly Flood sums it up: a woman up to the waist in water carries not anything else but books on its shoulders!

The cultural life of this city (with a population of 700,000!) is indeed of outstanding proportions: only the theatres in its web-site are 21! In 2001 Wroclaw added one more entry to this impressive menu: an international festival.

The DIALOG Phenomenon

The idea was of the mayor, the realization of Krystina Meisner-a director and founder of another of the famous Polish festivals (KONTACT in Torun). The host institution, naturally, became The Wroclaw Contemporary Theatre-an institution of the legendary Tadeush Rozsevich and Jozeph Shaina, now headed by Meisner. The first edition of DIALOG was already a proof that it was not going to be just one of the many pompous and pointless Millennium projects: it chose to explore the rather non-festive reality of the European theatre after the euphoria of the first democratic decade had faded away. Why the expectations for a real interest and intersection between the former Cold-War enemies had gone awry? Why, despite the official coexistence, they still continued to lead a monologue existence? DIALOG set as its task to become the real meeting-point of the West and East.

Christopher Marthaler, Robert Wilson, Kristian Luppa, Oskaras Korshunovas brought their shows that year, while George Banu's speech in the final discussion (on "Theatre of the United Europe: Facts and Delusions") was an extraordinary non-traditional view-point on the stages to the East of the former Wall. The next editions helped endorse the international reputation of the young Alvis Hermanis and Arpad Schilling. Among the special guests then were Jozeph Shaina and the award-winning film director Agneshka Holand.

With its last edition (in the fall of 2007), inclusive for the first time of shows from outside of Europe (USA and South Korea), DIALOG can already claim it's truly international. Moreover, its selection was an attempt to shed light on an issue of a world-wide relevance today: is there a limit to the formal experiments, based on classical texts, in a time when moral relativism has blurred the art's borders to such an extent that everything could claim to dwell in them? The shows preoccupied first and foremost with their form hinted at a formation of a tendency which I'd call:

FYI Theatre

In it the text is drastically cut, literally boiled down to the critical minimum: parts of sentences which, not even telegraphically but in an abbreviated SMS manner, give a general idea of the plot and only vaguely sketch the characters. Not that cutting and transforming the text is anything new. What's new here is the attitude behind that, the air that theatre exudes: impassionate, formal, totally informative, with kind of a robotic edge.

The clearest example of this FYI theatre was, of course, its extreme: the Latvian production of Knives in Hens. In it the Scot David Harrower's play, which has been staged around the world since 1995 in productions of nearly three-hour length, lasts 70 minutes, considerable part out of which without a word being uttered! The plot happens (a word evolve would be inappropriate!) in something like a series of impressive, stylized "pictures" on a black-box stage, flattened along its length and framed as if in a black pass� partout. The young Gatis Smits, a director with film background, as if literally paints with the lights, the pastel colors of the costumes and the sparse set and props, and, as in great paintings, light is streaming as if from the very skin of the three actors.

The problem is that the people inhabiting these beautiful paintings are there just as silhouettes, bodies or colors but not as human-beings with human emotions. They do not seem to be happy, to suffer, to be excited. They simply inform us of what they are going through literally with signs, or with illustrative actions. For instance, when the woman in the triangle decides to sleep with the other man, she goes to his place, with an emphasized gesture unbuttons the lowest button of her old-fashioned elastic pajama and stretches it in his direction-all that with a totally imperturbable face. Or when, at home she thinks of him, he simply appears next to her husband. It's as if a graphic novel is being animated before us and the subtitles on the bottom stage frame are the balloons coming out of the characters' mouths. Even in the graphic novels, though, there is drama. Here, it feels like, together with the words, everything that precedes and follows them has been cut. Cut are the emotions, the drama, even as if the human beings on the whole. And the humanoids inhabiting the stage do not have souls but robotized bodies only.

I was very perplexed to read the raves of a Polish colleague praising the director for having cut not only the didactics (obviously meaning the words) but the poetic ornaments of the text as well. I'd have joined her applauses had I felt any hint that the trespassing of the border between minimalism and the abstract emptiness was a sign of protest against the growing alienation and dehumanization, or had I felt any compassion towards their victims. Had there been any such motivation of the coldness of that show, it would have had the whiff of Ray Bradbury's novels. On the contrary, it was just mere registration and illustration of facts presented in a beautiful wrapping! (Actually, isn't that, alas, so typical of our time?!) While theatre is the very opposite of that: passion and compassion, a feeling of togetherness and complicity. This show made me shiver not merely because the world could become such but even more so because this could be presented as something beautiful.

Another show that could at first sight pass for a FYI theatre, due to its enormous interference in the text, was Oresteia of Narodny Stary Teatr of Cracow. Luckily this was another case because the "resume" of the known story was an outright slap in the face of the audience, a state-of-the-world warning made out of pain and anxiety. The director was my biggest discovery during the Festival:

Ian Klata - One of the New Faces of the Young Political Theatre of Eastern Europe.

He's called "the Polish Frank Castorff" because of his talent to turn theatre into a weapon for political criticism of the highest level. At 34 he's already famous for his "brave pioneer interpretations of the classics and his passion and perseverance in diagnosing the reality in Poland." Which doesn't mean that he's unanimously applauded. "Profaning of the classics" is the main contra-argument. He has his convincing answer: yes, his shows are remixes and cover-versions but in the end he is faithful to the spirit of the Great Authors", because what they believed in is that "caressing and embellishing the ulcers is no good."

Oresteia or Attention: the World Is Out of Focus!

This show doesn't center on feelings (of the well-known characters). It centers on insensibility and callousness in principle. Why is human sensibility so coarsened nowadays that we easily kill each other? Not with words but literally and en mass at that! Not the nuances of the personal relations between the characters are of interest to Klata. He is in search of the mechanisms behind the mass psychology and mass manipulation? The answers he finds in the milieu we live in: the drug effect of the thoughtless pop-culture, the brain-washing TV, the thought-erasing decibels which bombard us from everywhere, the racing speed of our life, the blurring of the borders between Good and Evil. In such a milieu there isn't enough time neither for thinking, nor for feeling.

A thick fog and aggressive, cacophonic music fill in the theatre almost throughout his show. In such an environment, it's easy for five nearly invisible people in dusty corporate suits, called "citizens" in the program, to prompt, urge and even foretaste the killings. They are the Chorus-one of Klata's discoveries!- an obscure manipulative force which is the puppeteer behind the characters, at times acting literally under the tones of the "Push the Button" song. And the killings are perpetrated as if in a game, without any hesitation or remorse. The Furies are girls in short dresses and masks, lying indifferently on chaise-longs. Then the Chorus applies make-up on them and they dance to the "I just wanna feel" song of Apollo-a pop-singer virtuously imitating Robbie William manner at the background of a stadium's crazed applauses. Orestes is simply one of his fans, dancing with a happy smile, even after the song has finished. Like Faust, in a recent Romanian production of "Faust", who continued to make love even after the woman underneath him had already slipped away. With one major difference: the Devil and his entourage there felt pity of him. Here Apollo doesn't care and flashes his naked bottom as a final "gesture" to his fans. Athena, in turn, is the glamorous host of a TV game which turns out to be the very trial of Orestes. Finally, without a trace of remorse, with a robotic voice and gestures, Orestes delivers a memory-and-identity monologue: "Do I remember? No, I don't."

Yes, the political theatre, in any of its variations, is easily readable. At times it's even too literal. Is that so for everyone, though? The boy, sitting next to me in the audience, was dancing with a happy smile in his seat to the tones of the electronic rhythm till the very end of the show. This was more frightening to me than the mirror world before us.

Oresteia is the second show about the dulling and mind-debasing effect of the pop-culture which I've seen recently. The first one was at the Stratford Festival of Canada: its outgoing head, the retiring Richard Monette had used for that purpose again the classics-Comedy of Errors. The result was a foolishly funny parody of our world that has made the mistake to take seriously the falseness of its elementary pop-culture. Monette could take the liberty to laugh his head off at the sight of the ubiquitous kitch and human stupidity because it was not his world, it was not his present. This world was/is the present of the generations coming after him. Unlike him, Klata is in a totally different position: at 34, he can't simply laugh at his own present or at what it forebodes for the future of his own generation. Hence, the frightening picture his theatre presents. In the aggressive, dulling milieu his characters inhabit, the danger is that the murder will become a matter of reaction, not of thinking, not even of passion. He doesn't put any effort in developing the characters' relations because it's exactly the broken ties between people-he wants to stress-what makes them so easily manipulative.

His previous show, Transfer, deals with similar problems through similar means of expressions: the painful displacement of huge groups of different nationalities in Central Europe after WWII takes place under a platform on which another manipulator of a Chorus is situated - the trio of Rousvelt, Churchill and Stalin in a form of a rock band.

Human nature is definitely not the place where Klata is in search of the roots of Evil, at variance with the Rationalism's cannon of the Western civilization from the Enlightenment till today. His tries to salvage the human being in principle-and it's this aim of his that pinpoints his so rare for today, par excellence classical, humanism, i.e. his truthfulness to "the Great Authors."

From a similar aesthetical and philosophical springboard but with a totally different address-Korea and Seoul's Sadari Movement Laboratory-came

the Biggest Surprise of DIALOG: "Woyzeck" as Pure Harmony. It's an axiom that the East, unlike the West, has never stopped being enthralled by the ideas of humanity and beauty. Nonetheless, Buchner's play-the epitome of gloom and doom-was the last thing one would expect to go through such a transformation. The company has developed a new language which they call "mimage" (mime-image), resulting in a mixture of theatre and dance, with a taste of puppetry and three-dimensional animation. The director is working miracles with the bare feet and arms of the actors, with their faces and with 10 chairs-the only props which are transformed into everything possible. This exquisite minimalism is delightfully offset by the lusciousness of the music (the accent of which is a tango) and by the burst of emotions in the rendering of the main part.

The merely impossible metamorphosis of this Woyzech came though even more clearly in comparison with an Irish Giselle also superbly performed (by the Fabulous Dance Theatre of Dublin) but drastically drawn downwards into the mud of the Irish village, with all its archetypes of literal and figurative ugliness. This contrast underlined one of the trademarks of Asian theatre: the brevity to talk about beauty, happiness and warmth in a time obsessed with cruelty and violence; brevity to be in search not only of the so fashionable today inner demons of ours but of the innate goodness in us as well. Woyzeck and Giselle were, to me, the really big meeting on the DIALOG territory: between the East and the West, with their different sensitivity, mentality and attitude towards beauty.

When Wroclaw insists on emphasizing its new logo-a meeting point-it's because this city really means it!

*Dr. Kalina Stefanova is the author/editor of 11 books, three of which are in English and were launched in New York and London. Her articles have been published in 22 languages. She has been a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at New York University and Visiting Scholar at the University of Cape Town, and has delivered lectures and led seminars in 12 countries. For two mandates she served as Vice President of the International Association of Theatre Critics (IATC). Currently she is Associate Professor at the National Academy of Theatre and Film Arts in Sofia, Bulgaria and Director, Symposiums of the IATC. In 2007 she served as a dramaturge of the highly acclaimed production of Pentecost at the Stratford Festival of Canada. Her first fiction book Ann's Dwarves has brought her comparisons with The Little Prince and has been published in Macedonia and South Korea.