The Theatre Times: ‘In theatre the national differences, instead of dividing, are now connecting,’ says Polish theatre critic Hanna Usarewicz at the end of her article on the significant presence of Czech and Slovak theatre practitioners on Polish stages (Usarewicz 2012). In contrast to the complex political relations between the Polish and Czech peoples, in both current and historical contexts, Polish–Czech cultural exchange has recently been flourishing.
4 comments:
I am so poorly versed in international theatre it makes me really damn sad. My family history originates in Poland so this article was really interesting. I’ve definitely considered studying abroad and I’d love to go to Prague or Poland and study theatre is a completely different atmosphere. I feel as though America has such a stigma towards other countries and their performing arts vs our performing arts. It feels like America turns its nose upward when looking at other countries and their calibur of theatre vs ours. Also, puppet theatre is super cool. I remember during playground this year there was an awesome puppet theatre performance. I find it fascinating that this relationship between the Polish and the Czech is the first international project in the modern history of puppet theatre. I believe that collaboration between countries is a great way to further a countries understanding and knowledge in theatre. I believe the success of Poland and Czech should be an example of how countries should collaborate within theatre generally.
I wish the following was truer in American theatre. “‘In theatre, the national differences, instead of dividing, are now connecting,’ says Polish theatre critic Hanna Usarewicz”. This might be true that in Europe that different national theatres strengthens one another but in America, I haven’t really heard of this. I think American theatre would benefit greatly from borrowing techniques from other countries. Probably one of the most interesting things in this article for me is that the connection between the two different schools. Though there is a lot of collaboration between the school of drama people with each other, I think artists at CMU Drama would definitely benefit from collaborating in class with other schools at CMU and other schools in Pittsburgh and around the world. If you look for it there is the cross-school collaboration but I don’t think that it is as easy as it could be. I think it would be really cool for there to be a class offered by the school of drama that requires equal amounts drama students and engineers or something like this. This would require us to work with non-drama people, which would be beneficial. Since there is a structure in this method of collaboration then it has to happen unlike when students are left up to their own devices to try to find ways to collaborate with people outside the school of drama.
I clicked on this article simply because it mentioned Poland and I'm Polish and talking a Polish class and I thought it would be interesting to learn a bit about what is happening in Polish theatre. I thought more of the article would be about the first image with the marionettes, but both of the videos only had puppets that were shadows of real people. Sure, the second one also had a ground row of houses that they made look big, but there were no made puppets. It was a pretty cute video though and I did like how they used the larger throws of the shadows to make the story of the ugly duckling literally become larger than life. To the actual point of the article, I think inter-school and international collaboration is really important and a lot more could be done to integrate curriculum from one school to the other. We do have some of that through study abroads, but all study abroad are optional. I think it would be really interesting to see what happens (over the years) if all art students were required to do a semester in another country and what kind of changes in art styles we would be seeing.
I’ve always thought that puppetry is one of the cooler means of performances. Puppets can range anywhere from simple to extremely complicated. Shadow puppets can be your hands or far more advanced paper cut outs or something else. It’s always beautiful to see art bringing people together; as the article states: “‘In theatre the national differences, instead of dividing, are now connecting,’ says Polish theatre critic Hanna Usarewicz at the end of her article on the significant presence of Czech and Slovak theatre practitioners on Polish stages (Usarewicz 2012). In contrast to the complex political relations between the Polish and Czech peoples, in both current and historical contexts, Polish–Czech cultural exchange has recently been flourishing.” I didn’t know that there was tension between Polish and Czech cultures, but I’m incredibly pleased to see that the two countries are rebuilding their relationship using a form that we all understand: art.
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