HA-M-LET—created and performed by Los Angeles-based theater artist Peter Mark—is a “multi-lingual, multimedia performance housed within a projection cube. Sourcing material from Shakespeare’s play, pop internet culture, home videos, and 3D animation, the projected image becomes landscape, body, narrative, and biography—shifting at a rate which pays homage to Hamlet’s own velocity of thought.”*
Presented by CalArts Center for New Performance and Hauser & Wirth, Mark will perform HA-M-LET this week at the gallery’s Arts District location.
Studio Teatrgaleria artistic director Natalia Korczakowska—keeping Poland’s avant-garde alive amidst a nationalist threat—has adapted and staged the writings of Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz to exhilarating end in WITKACY/TWO-HEADED CALF, a performance art-theater piece now in its second week at Redcat.
Shaped with delicacy, precision, and waves of comedic velocity, this hallucinatory family satire brings together a brilliant band of Polish actors with a group of young American players associated with the CalArts Center for New Performance., whose associate artistic director, Amanda Shank, will join Korczakowska tomorrow night for a pre-show conversation about the project.
The plays of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885–1939,* born in Warsaw, and known as Witkacy) languished in relative obscurity throughout most of their creator’s short life. A home country revival took place in the 1950s, and adventurous theater companies in Western Europe and the United States started producing his work in the 1970s.
A key figure of the European avant-garde—a peer of Artaud, Beckett, Genet, and Ionesco—Witkacy’s resolutely anti-realist theater work has inspired WITKACY / TWO-HEADED CALF, a new collaboration by Natalia Korczakowska (the artistic director of Warsaw’s Studio Teatrgaleria), and CalArts Center for New Performance.
Witkacy believed that nature can be a source of metaphysical experience that gives us a chance to protect our individuality from the soulless social machine of Western civilization. WITKACY / TWO-HEADED CALF is a journey of a neurotic boy and his family from Poland to the California desert—and also a journey into the depths of oneself.**
For the next eight days at Redcat, performing artists from Studio Teatrgaleria and CalArts will present the American premiere engagement of this sui generis production.
Friday and Saturday, October 18 and 19, at 8:30 pm.
Sunday, October 20, at 3 pm.
Tuesday through Friday, October 22, 23, 24, and 25, at 8:30 pm.
Redcat
631 West 2nd Street, downtown Los Angeles.
*Witkacy allegedly committed suicide upon hearing of the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, but when his grave was disinterred many years later, the body reportedly belonged to someone else.
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