Aztec Hotel by Teatr Cogitatur Chopin Productions

Highly recommended - Chicago Reader; Critic's Choice - WFMT FM; Live telecasts - WGN-TV

" Highly Recommended - Chicago Reader; Critic's Choice - WFMT FM


8/19/05 - 9/4/05

Fri 8p, Sun 7p


"Witold Izdebski and Katarzyna Izdebska’s meditation on the joys and pains of mortality, in which three creatures ? angels, aliens, or some combination thereof ? who have fallen to earth ponder the simple pleasures of life: vodka, sex, dancing, roses. The show veers between derivative and breathtaking: movement vignettes and visually arresting tableaux are interspersed with discursive dialogue and voice-overs, primarily in English. Despite the show’s propulsive techno-soundscape and postindustrial fashion show aesthetic, and underlying playfulness makes it easier to swallow the piece’s occasional excesses." - Kerry Reid, Chicago Reader 8/19/05

"Zygmunt Dyrkacz is one of a number of young Poles who have come to Chicago in the years since the Solidarnosc uprising began in 1980 and have worked tirelessly to advance the most sophisticated and challenging Polish and Central European cultural events here. Since 1990, Dyrkacz has owned and operated the 87-year-old Chopin Theatre at the old ground zero of Polish Chicago at the intersection of Division, Ashland, and Milwaukee in Wicker Park. Making his adaptable spaces available to many young Chicago theatre companies and presenting an astonishing 500 or so events a year (!), Dyrkacz also brings important European avant-garde companies to his venue, something that happens too rarely here since the demise of the International Theatre Festival of Chicago. Currently Chopin is home to the much-admired Katowice-based Teatr Cogitatur, a troupe that has done a superb job of passing on the techniques and traditions of the Polish avant-garde to a new generation of young Polish theatre artists. On this, their third annual visit to the Chopin, Cogitatur is presenting an abstract work that has at various times been known as Tribute to the Expressionists and La Luna. Its title, though, is not so important, nor, for that matter is its content ?a sort of vodka-intoxicated parallel to Jonathan Larsen's Rent. What matters in this highly-distilled 45-minute performance is the skill and individuality of the stylized and constantly changing stage pictures. This is disciplined work of a type we do not see enough of even in as theatrically rich a city as Chicago. La Luna will be joined in repertory this week by another of Cogotatur's signature (and similarly brief) pieces, Aztec Hotel. And there are still a few places on the street where you can round out your visit with some fresh pierogi and a cold beer" - Andrew Patner, WFMT FM 8/17/05

"The final image in "Aztec Hotel," one of two works by Poland's Teatr Cogitatur now running in rotating repertory at the Chopin Theatre, features a beautiful, bare-backed woman lying face down on the ground, nearly buried in lush red rose petals. It is so reminiscent of that scene in Sam Mendes' 1999 film "American Beauty" -- the one in which actress Mena Suvari is similarly bathed in rose petals -- that you may begin to wonder which director, Mendes or Poland's Witold Izdebski (and his collaborator, Katarzyna Mrozinska-Izdebska) -- saw the other's work. No matter: The scene is a dream of perfection -- the ultimate fantasy of youth, beauty and the fullness of life captured in that precarious moment when the greatest glory is just about to flip into an awareness of mortality.No one who has seen Cogitatur's other production, "La Luna," will fail to realize that this is an ensemble with a signature style -- a theater of poetry animated by light, sound, movement, color and powerful images that seem to emerge from the darkness in a few moments of blinding luminescence, and then retreat back into the void. There is no script at work, aside from such rambling lines as "We don't know ourselves or anything else." But the images created by the actors and designers conjure a kind of erotically charged delirium that allows you to free-float and associate, to weave your own dream or nightmare scenarios for a time-out-of-mind hour in the theater. The Aztec Hotel, like the jazzy La Luna nightclub, is a state of mind. In this case, it seems to be inhabited by beings from another universe who land here thanks to their strong but delicate wings (the images of flight are gorgeous, with hints of Icarus and Leonardo da Vinci and even the Wright brothers). "It always comes to an end," intones one of the characters. And then we see a man in a dense fog, running furiously in place, and two winged creatures perched atop towers -- a vision eerily evocative of the World Trade Center attack and those who jumped in terror. The actors of Teatr Cogitatur are as physically expressive as dancers, with the men's almost cadaverously thin bodies an eloquent embodiment of the human form on the edge of life and death. There is rain, wind and fire in "Aztec Hotel." There is flight and stasis. There is pleasure and pain" - Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun Times 8/24/05

Author
Witold Izdebski

Director
Witold Izdebski and Katarzyna Izdebska

Performers
Maciej Dziaczko, Karol Foltynski, Katarzyna Mrozinska-Izdebska, Marta Kadlub, Ewa Pirowska and Marek Radwan

Production
Tomasz Kalwak, Bogdan Smiganowski , Maciej Dziaczko

Tags: Theater, New Europe, 2005