| Awkward Happiness or Everything I Don’t Remember About Meeting You |
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Studio Matejka performance Wed 15 May, 8pm Thu 16 May, 7:30pm Na Grobli Studio (Studio Space) Tickets: 10 PLN Bookings and tickets: sekretariat@grotowski-institute.art.pl; tel. 71 34 45 320 Online tickets Performance in Polish, English, French and Slovak  The journey of two couples in their struggles to discover happiness. Four different perspectives on the nature of happiness and how to reach it (or not). The performance is a reflection on the futility of happiness, inspired by Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Pascal Bruckner’s Perpetual Euphoria. The passage of time paints a relationship with layers of beauty, secrets, surprises and misunderstandings. When you hold a mirror to a human relationship, does the image it reflects bring you closer to an understanding of happiness? Is happiness something that we seek in another person, but will never fully be realized? The seed of the performance began from Studio Matejka’s research on the human body in contemporary performance practices. During 18 months of research while in residency with the Grotowski Institute, the physical training and exercises were explored through themes and images drawn from the performers’ own inspirations. These rough drafts of creative material were crafted into physical fragments of duets and solo structures, which went through a continuous process of deconstruction and reconstruction under the direction of Matej Matejka and a series of guest collaborators including Cécile Da Costa (Spitfire, Farm in the Cave), Milan Kozanek (Artyci Dance Company) Vivien Wood (DV8) and Ditte Berkeley (Teatr ZAR). Fragments of these structures were shared in public work demonstrations, demonstrating the practical research and the transformation into performative material. With the collaboration of DogDocs (Slovakia), Studio Matejka took the creative structures into the medium of film with the development of six short films. In July 2012 Studio Matejka collaborated with Vivien Wood to complete the first stage of the performance’s development. The creative material was restructured into a work in progress titled Everything I Don’t Remember About Meeting You, which premiered at the 2012 KioSK festival in Stanica ®ilina-Zárieèie, Slovakia. The performance premiered on 14 February 2013 in the Grotowski Institute as part of a programme of short performance works called “Solo Situations”. The text is primarily composed of the performers’ own writings. These writings are the result of two years of reflections and questions on the themes of human relationships, happiness, dreams and desires. Additionally, fragments of texts by Anna Świrszczyñska, Alexander Fleischer, Yehuda Amichai and Milan Kundera will be woven into the final performance to complement the performers’ own writing. We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come…We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch… Einmal ist keinmal… If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all. Milan Kundera The musical structure was developed from the approach of transforming live elements into sampled sounds in accordance with the action on stage. The musical landscape explored in the performance also includes contemporary jazz songs and instrumental compositions. Rather than using music as a background or simply to colour the atmosphere, the music in the performance is utilized as an element that is integrated with the physical action. AUTHORS: Matej Matejka, Guillaumarc Froidevaux, Zuzana Kakalikova, Daniel Han, Magdalena Koza DIRECTOR AND DRAMATURG: Matej Matejka PERFORMERS: Guillaumarc Froidevaux, Daniel Han, Zuzana Kakalikova, Magdalena Koza MUSIC: Guillaumarc Froidevaux, Daniel Han, Zuzana Kakalikova MUSIC AND VOCAL SUPERVISOR: Ditte Berkeley MOVEMENT SUPERVISOR: Vivien Wood COSTUME DESIGNER: Agnieszka Katyñska LIGHTING: Marcin Wójcik Length: 70’ The performance is a co-production with the Grotowski Institute and Compagnie T-d’U, Switzerland. Guillaumarc Froidevaux was born in Switzerland, and graduated from Scuola Teatro Dimitri in 2005. Before this, he performed with TPR and Théâtre Circus Junior school ensembles. He has collaborated with groups such as Twof2, Palin Teatro, Teatro Paravento and DschungelWien, and is currently a member of the duo The Sunny Side Up. Other artistic experience includes film, dance and cross- disciplinary collaboration. He is co-founder of Compagnie T-d’U with Zuzana Kakalikova, which presented its first play, Silence..., in 2008, and is currently touring their latest production Ôkô. Guillaumarc is a teacher of acrobatics in LeZarti Cirque in Switzerland, and leads sessions on acrobatics and body rhythms within the Studio work. Zuzana Kakalikova was born in Slovakia, and studied acting at the Academy of Arts in Banska Bystrica from 2000–2003, and later at the Academy of Musical and Dramatic Arts in Bratislava, where she completed her MA in dramatic arts in 2005. Her interest in movement led her to Scuola Teatro Dimitri in Switzerland, where she practiced pantomime, tai-chi, dance and acrobatics from 2005–2006. She is co-founder of the multicultural ensemble T-d’U, with which she has created Silence... and Ôkô, two performances which toured Switzerland, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Zuzana participated in many different workshops with companies like Farm in the Cave, Les Slovaks, as well as with Dominique Duszinski and Ana Stegnar. She is part of Studio Matejka’s team of artists, as well as continuing to work with her company in Switzerland. Daniel Han was born in Korea and grew up in the United States. He holds a BA in economics from Northwestern University. He has a background in taekwondo and in classical violin. Daniel studied acting in Chicago and collaborated with various film and theatre projects in the US, UK and Poland. His training includes workshops and collaborations with Zecora Ura/Para Active, Les Ballets C. de la B., and Song of the Goat Theatre. In 2009 he enrolled on the MA Acting Programme of Song of the Goat Theatre with Manchester Metropolitan University. He leads workshops for the international Brave Kids project in Wroclaw and continues to develop his research on the human meeting of song and body in conflict zones, focusing on the region of ex-Yugoslavia. Magdalena Koza was born in Poland, where she studied at the Academy of Physical Education. She qualified as an instructor in contemporary dance at the National Centre of Culture in Kraków under the Polish Ministry of Culture and Heritage. From 2003-2006 she was a member of Experimental Dance Studio, and later worked with Krakowski Teatr Tañca, before joining Teatr Capitol Scena Tañca in 2009. In 2008, she represented Poland in the 13th Biennale of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean in Bari, Italy. She has extensive experience in many different approaches to dance, contact improvisation and physical theatre, both in Poland and abroad. Magda is also trained in classical ballet, and attended ballet school for seven years. Compagnie T-d’U was created in 2007 in Switzerland by Zuzana Kakalikova and Guillaumarc Froidevaux to facilitate meetings and exchanges between artists from different backgrounds. The group offers the opportunity to gather and disseminate multi-disciplinary performances by facilitating the concrete realization of production. The company’s artistic focus is, first of all, physical theater, but the company is very familiar with the use of music, multimedia and unconventional space arrangement. After creating Silence... and Ôkô, the company members joined Studio Matejka and started a close, long-term collaboration with the ensemble. The wish to link people inspired the company to collaborate in supporting the production of Awkward Happiness. The power of the present casting is the long and intense background that the four performers have together through a common training and language in addition to the variety of experiences and cultures from which they come. www.cietdu.com Matej Matejka is the founder and leader of Studio Matejka. He studied acting at the State Conservatory in Bratislava, Slovakia, later at JAMU University, Brno, Czech Republic. From 2001–2006 he was an actor with the theatre studio Farm in the Cave, Prague, and co-creator of the projects and performances Dark Love Sonnets, Journey to the Station and SCLAVI/The Song of an Emigrant, which won a Total Theatre Award, a Fringe First Award and a Herald Angel Award at the 2006 Edinburgh Fringe. Since 2005 he has collaborated with the Grotowski Institute, where he is engaged in research of physical expression in the theatre. He is also an actor and leader of physical training in Teatr ZAR, performing in Gospels of Childhood, Caesarean Section: Essays on Suicide (winner of a Total Theatre Award and a Herald Angel Award at the 2012 Edinburgh Fringe) and Anhelli: The Calling. He leads his own work sessions called Wakening the Listening Body at the Grotowski Institute, as well as with Teatr ZAR, both in Poland and internationally. In his work he searches for the performer’s “essence of communication” where both dance and drama are only vehicles for the actor’s expression. Studio Matejka is a physical theatre laboratory exploring 21st-century performance techniques that specifically work across borders: borders between performance genres, borders between training techniques, and borders between individual expression and collective resonance. Through practical investigation, the performers work to develop the strength, agility and dexterity to physically “speak” through a diverse range of ideas, images and vocabularies. Studio Matejka does not work to create something different from existing performance approaches and training regimes. Rather, it uses such established methods as a springboard for pedagogic and creative exploration, charting individual discoveries, drawing out patterns and/or contradictions and integrating these findings into its ongoing work. The Studio is led by Matej Matejka and composed of eight performers from seven countries. Additionally, the Studio is regularly accompanied by external affiliates. Vivien Wood (UK), Sarie Mairs Slee (UK/USA) and Milan Kozanek (Slovakia) assist the leader in the psychophysical research. Ditte Berkeley (Denmark/UK) and Jaros³aw Fret (Poland) lead music training and supervise music composition. Bryan Brown (USA) collaborates on the dramaturgy of the performances. The academic team of the Studio is supervised by Sarie Mairs Slee (USA), assisted by Torbjorn Oppedal (Norway) and Ragnhild Freng Dale (Norway), who record, contextualize and inform the laboratory research. The Studio’s film and documentary team is comprised of Adam Hanuljak (Slovakia), Peter Kotrha (Slovakia) and Karol Jarek (Poland). In total there are nineteen persons, representing eleven nationalities, involved artistically in Studio Matejka. As part of BodyConstitution, practical seminar |