The 2012 CUST production is looking for 4 female and 4 male actors with a special interest in physical theatre and absurdist comedies! Some singing skills are preferable but not mandatory.

Auditions will be held on Monday 4-6pm, and on Thursday 1-4pm, in Nozhem; The First Peoples Performance Space. Until tech week at the end of February, rehearsals will be held on Monday and Thursday after 1pm.

To book an audition, please email Professor Diana Manole at:

dianamanole@trentu.ca

 

Tadeusz Rózewicz Tadeusz Rózewicz is a renowned and award-winning Polish poet, novelist, and playwright. Born in 1921 in Central Poland, he joined the underground Home Army during the Second World War and fought against the Nazi occupation for four years. After the war, he published his first collection of poetry in 1947, completed his education, studying art history at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, and gradually became one of the most celebrated Polish writers.

His style rejected the traditional form of writing at the time. He championed the style of “anti-poetry” (Patrick Kurp), leaving his poems in fragmented sentences and words strung together, read like a collection of incomplete shards. In his essay, “Preparation for a Poetry Reading,” he expresses his views on the confinements of writing within the traditional structure: “I don’t care about aesthetic values. That’s what our classicist is all about, our stylist, the distinguished translator, the one there who hasn’t spoken a true word for fifteen years. His whole style is made out of plaster!” Just like his “anti-poetry,” Rózewicz’s dramatic work goes against the structure of the traditional drama and the more formalized styles. He has written over fifteen plays, including The Card Index (1960), The Laocoon Group (1961), The Interrupted Act (1964), The Old Woman Broods (1968), On All Fours (1971), and White Marriage (1974). Halina Filipowicz describes He Left Home (1964), which will be the Cultural Studies production this year, as one of his “most coherent and unified compositions for the stage… a strange and puzzling work, complex in structure…built like a collage out of the collapsing ruins of the traditional family drama.”

Tadeusz Rózewicz truly is a writer worth discussing! Reading He Left Home and watching the CUST production will certainly open your eyes to a whole other way of writing a play. Enjoy! (Chris Chapman)

The Director’s Open Question

After the great success of last years’ productions of “Attempts on her Life” by Martin Crimp and “Arabian Night” by Roland Schimmelpfennig, the Cultural Studies Department will produce He Left Home by Tadeusz Rózewicz. As film and TV narratives of lost identities have become quite popular today, He Left Home appears even more relevant than at the time of its writing. It loosely tells the story of Henry, husband and father, who slips on a banana peel, falls, loses his memory, and comes back home not knowing who he is. His family repeatedly attempts to help him, paradoxically humiliating, abusing, and treating him like a puppet in the process. Eve, his spouse, gradually changes from a desperate wife into an abusive life coach who is trying to enforce upon her amnesiac husband his forgotten identity, although that means restoring him to a state of daily unhappiness. Rózewicz’s play mixes together several dramatic styles, from traditional realism to poetry and dance scenes, in an absurdist scenario with post-modern undertones. The pastiches of cultural archetypes include a scene in which Henry’s wife deplores his disappearance similar to Penelope in the Odyssey, a Gravediggers’ Interlude that reminds of Hamlet, and a series of pseudo-intellectual speeches, which recall Waiting for Godot. Through its ironic engagement of culture and society, He Left Home expresses the desire not only to mirror the world but also deconstruct it, revealing its carnivalesque nature and value systems.

The 2012 Cultural Studies production will emphasize the fragmentation of identity and the reversal of traditional gender roles, restaging in an ironic style the second childhood Henry experiences against his will. The setting will recall an absurdist playroom, with child-size furniture but oversized toys. Performers will continuously engage the spectators, treating them as their playmates and challenging them into abandoning their comfortable passivity behind an imaginary fourth wall. The actor playing Henry will be the only performer with a realistic appearance and acting style, contrasting with the increasingly parodic representations of the other characters. He will eventually hide under a head bandage and leave his family and the stage, shaking off any remnants of his old identity but earning his freedom. His departure will abruptly end the show and leave us with an answered question: If this would happen to any of us, would we re-learn who we were or rather start from scratch? (Diana Manole)

Sponsors:

                                                   

Theatre Trent <www.theatretrent.ca>