Aurea Porta (POL)
A Multimedia Thing
Bakelit Multi Art Center, 2008. November 29., 19:00
(50 minutes without interval
Agnieszka Wielgosz, Marek Frąckowiak, Waldek Obłoza / Karol Wróblewski, Bogusław Schaeffer
Writer, Music: Bogusław Schaeffer
Director: Karina Piwowarska
A Fundacja Przyjaciół Sztuk – Aurea Porta production
Producer: Krystyna Gierłowska
It can be said that Bogusław Schaeffer is one of our times biggest Polish artists. According to his qualification and vocation, he is both a composer and theorist of music. Even so, his plays are received almost as well as (if not even better than) his musical compositions. In Poland he is one of the most often staged living writers, despite of his not letting his plays be published. Here in Hungary his name is still unfortunately mostly unknown, even though his life’s work (about 400 musical compositions, 17 books and 44 stage works) have already been translated into seventeen of the world’s languages. Interpretation of Schaeffer’s musically charged stage work is extremely hard, if we try to analyze it according to conventional theatrical ideas and dramatic „plot”. If we want to try to understand his work without losing our way in interpretation, we should examine it through the laws of music instead. (Patrícia Pászt: Contemporary Polish Drama)
„What the title suggests is all that it can convey. This is a theatrical something, something for the theatre and most of all for the ‘schaefferian’ actor. The pianist and the kind woman are a welcome plus, but it must be stressed, that without them the play cannot be what it should be: a night-long spectacle. Like in my previous plays, an actor reads his part aloud, while trying to interpret what he can of it. But if he is inspired, he will do this without the text, like a good musician, who knows the piece by heart but has sheet music in front of him anyway. The piece begins by the text being read aloud, but slowly departs from it, so that only what is interesting remains. Jan Peszek read the playscript the first time, but could only say it without reading after many, many tries at interpretation, almost one thousand and one hundred in number. Sometimes he seems to return to reading his tattered text the way the plot was thought up at that time (and has since perhaps grown together with said text). Meanwhile, Marek Frąckowiak and Waldemar Obłoza can do pretty much whatever they want, within the limits of intellectual and aesthetic canon.” (Bogusław Schaeffer)
Besides the performance, Bogusław Schaeffer’s exhibition of graphic sheet music can be viewed as well, along with a short documentary about the artist.
Tickets: Bakelit Multi Art Center [+36 (1) 347 0803]
(Budapest, IX. Soroksári út 164.)
For further information visit: www.bakelitstudio.hu, www.dramafestival.hu