Week 12: Cultural Blog:3.05.13 - 10.05.13

This week I attended “Wieczor Strawinskiego” in the Poznan Theatre House which translates as “Stravinsky Evening”.

 My friend Zane, from Latvia, had seen a beautiful advertisement of the ballet, and as she regularly attends ballet in Latvia, she was eager to go. Despite not being a regular spectator at this sort of event, I decided I would join her for the experience, as I have always admired the elegance and grace of Ballet dancers, the tickets were only 24 zł (£4.90) for students and ever since selecting the ‘Acting craft in Polish theatre’ module, I have wanted to see a performance in Poland for myself. We joined a number of excited Erasmus girls at the Theatre, found our seats and awaited the spectacular show. However, within five minutes, we realised that this show was not one we had expected.

This was not an elegant, graceful ballet show. This was an Opera-oratorio of the Greek Tragedy Oedipus the King. Yes, the one where the King gouges his own eyes out in despair with Jocasta’s (his mother/wife) dress pins. Just to add to that, it was performed in Latin,

Zane and myself outside the theatre

therefore the subtitles were in Polish. Even though I couldn’t understand very much, I understood that it was a very dark and quite unusual performance. The melody of the orchestra and the singing were performed slightly off-key from one another to give the audience an ‘on edge feeling’.  At the end of the show, once everyone had finished clapping, we began packing our bags to go home, when we were told that this was only the first part of the concert. 

We stayed to see the second half, and to our delight, it was the Ballet “The Rite of Spring” by Igor Stravinsky. I’m not an expert, but even I could appreciate how elegant, timely and flawless their performance was. 

After seeing the performance, I spoke to a friend who is studying theatre in France. She said there is a stark contrast between studying theatre in France and in Poland, as Polish theatre focuses more on body movement.  According to Lust (2012), it has become increasingly vital for actors to use body movement to bring "authenticity and believability to a character". Thinking back, it was very obvious that the performers were using a lot of body movement to represent feelings, emotions and communication, with the other performers and the audience, which is why I understood a little bit of what was happening. 

Some of us from Acting Craft in Polish theatre 

                This emphasis on body movement in theatre is also very apparent in our ‘Acting craft and Polish theatre’ class. We have been creating individual physical movement 
sequences, which hopefully we will perform at the end of the semester. Last week we did a very interesting exercise exploring the use of the voice. Using a piece of text we had each selected from our own country, he conducted us like an orchestra, playing around with several elements such as volume control, pitch, rhythm, speed, staccato and legato. This exercise was used to remove our own ideas, meanings and memories from the text, enabling us to have more freedom with the text, and add it to our journeys in a more creative way. It really worked!  Last week I was having difficulty separating the meaning I had given to the text, restricting me in the way I could use it through my journey, however, after this activity, I felt confident and experimented with the text, using it a metaphorical way, rather than a literal way. 

My Polish friend Ada and me relaxing
after a hard week in our favourite bar!

I am sure that when I return home I will use many of teaching ideas from this class, if not all of them, as I truly admire my teacher’s approach.

Lust, A (2012) 'Bringing the Body to the Stage and Screen: Expressive Movement for Performers' Scarecrow Press