The Collaboration
The collaboration began in late 2017, when CNP hosted Korczakowska for a brief residency on the CalArts campus. Working with a team of student performers, Korczakowska used this time to introduce the CalArts community to the legacy of the Polish artist and writer. While many of the students were encountering Witkacy’s work for the first time, their training is dominated by a focus on cross-cultural influences and experimental forms, creating an instant synergy with both Witkiewicz and the work of STUDIO teatrgaleria.
“We both try to continue the avant-garde tradition,” Korczakowska says, speaking about the partnership with CNP’s artistic director Travis Preston. “Avant-garde is the synergy of the arts, so no art is better than another one and all artists working on the project should be free and equal. It’s why CalArts was the best place to explore this.”
The following autumn, Korczakowska and an expanded team of Polish collaborators returned to California for an initial rehearsal period focused on a more specific exploration of Metaphysics of a Two-Headed Calf. Echoing the play’s dramaturgical thread of doubling and doppelgängers, Polish actors from STUDIO teatrgaleria were cast alongside CalArts actors, and the design and production teams were similarly bifurcated (Polish designer Bartosz Nalazek created the lighting, for example, while current CalArts MFA student Salmah Beydoun designed the set).
Speaking of the conception for the piece, Korczakowska recalls that she “took a trip through the California desert for three weeks reading Witkiewicz and everything was born there.” She also notes the crucial influence of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s 2018 3D: Double Vision exhibit, which she was able to visit along with Beydoun during their early stages of development.
Avant-garde is the synergy of the arts, so no art is better than another one and all artists working on the project should be free and equal.
The Script
The script, based largely on Witkacy’s original text and adhering to its three-act structure, went through a process of transformation and adaptation, spearheaded by Korczakowska. “Witkiewicz was less experienced with theatre than I am,” Korczakowska explains, reflecting on the artist’s early focus on painting and visual art before beginning his experiments with the theatrical form. “I needed to explain his great ideas to the public, and I decided that I would use his own texts to build a new structure that is much more related to our time.”
Korczakowska began to develop a fresh adaptation of Witkiewicz’s text, incorporating new elements and influences such as excerpts from his letters and diaries. However, her point of view emerged most significantly in her approach to act two of the piece. In Witkacy’s play, this act opens with sixteen-year-old Patricianello beside the bed of his dying mother. Witkacy’s text articulates this pivotal action with spasms of melodramatic grief and petulant humor, all underscored with the same sense of existential contemplation that defines the full scope of the play. Korczakowska wanted to remain true to this tone while also excavating a deeper and more complex experience of the mother’s death.
In search of a conceptual language to do so, she turned to an unexpected source: Ingmar Bergman’s 1972 film Cries and Whispers, a Swedish period drama centered around three sisters and a servant who struggle with the approaching death of one of the sisters. Touching on similar themes of family, death, and suffering, the film is also concerned with the female psyche, a texture that rhymed unexpectedly with Korczakowska’s reinterpretation of Metaphysics.
“I used a form—which is profanation of [Witkiewicz’s] masterpiece—to try to make the mother’s death real,” Korczakowska explains. This new version of act two, full of sweeping, full-bodied humor and overt allusions to Bergman’s film, managed to stay true to Witkacy’s text while also completely transforming it. “This was risky,” Korczakowska reflects, “but a lot of people tell me that it is the best part of the show.”
This initial rehearsal period culminated in a limited run of preview performances at California Institute of the Arts’s Walt Disney Modular Theater in December of 2018, followed by a brief rehearsal period in Poland in preparation for a performance at the Divine Comedy International Theatre Festival in Kraków. The evening of the first CalArts preview performance was one of light rain, Southern California’s variation on a winter mood. Following the performance, there was an atmosphere of strangeness and delight among the audience, having witnessed an unexpected convergence of artists working across geographical, cultural, and linguistic divides and, in the process, discovering something new, vital, and alive.
Comments
The article is just the start of the conversation—we want to know what you think about this subject, too! HowlRound is a space for knowledge-sharing, and we welcome spirited, thoughtful, and on-topic dialogue. Find our full comments policy here