Zielnik
Scena Plastyczna (Visual Stage) and Chopin Productions

"I could burrow through half a dozen dictionaries and still not find the words to describe Polish theater maker Leszek Madzik and his company, Scena Plastyczna ("Visual Stage")" - Justin Hayford, Chicago Reader


06/07/94 - 06/10/94

730p


Critic's Choice - Justin Hayford, Chicago Reader 6/16/94 - "I could burrow through half a dozen dictionaries and still not find the words to describe Polish theatermaker Leszek Madzik and his company, Scena Plastyczna ("Visual Stage"): Madzik's breathtaking, purely imagist work exists in a preconscious realm unapproachable through conventional language.

Eschewing spoken text (he says he's been "maturing to silence") and using actors almost incidentally, Madzik plunges his audience into absolute darkness--so dark you literally can't see your hand in front of your face--and coaxes out of this abyss hallucinatory images more mesmerizing, disturbing, and achingly beautiful than the most vivid dreams.

This Chicago appearance marks Madzik's American debut, though he's been making theater for 24 years and his company has been presented in nearly every European capital.

Last weekend fortunate audiences saw The Herbarium, a 1976 work in which Madzik used color for the last time. That piece explores images of birth--a mummylike man, lit by an occasional strobe, suspended by thick ropes by his hands and feet struggling to free himself; four gaunt, towering female figures from whose abdomens are torn handfuls of feathers; a mysterious woman, seemingly 100 yards away, emerging again and again from her coffinlike home.

This weekend's offering is 1978's The Moisture, which reportedly looks at death. Some may think Madzik's work too brief--The Herbarium is just under half an hour, and The Moisture is just over--but why criticize an eclair for not being a chocolate cake? I left The Herbarium hungering for more, but oh, it was delicious while it lasted".

Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division, 278-0075. Through June 19: Thursday, 7:30 PM; Friday-Saturday, 7:30 and 10 PM; Sunday, 3 PM. $25 on Thursday (includes reception with the company); other shows, $15.


Poland's Intense `Herbarium' A Short, Beautiful Fragment – Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun Times 6/13/94 - “ A short, extraordinarily intense experience in the theater is nothing to sneeze at. But expectations play a large part in theatergoing, so if you stage a 25-minute piece, it's only fair to tell the audience in advance.

The audience at Saturday's performance of "The Herbarium," the first of two productions by the Visual Stage theater or Scena Plastyczna of the Catholic University of Lublin, Poland, was made up largely of the artistic and intellectual elite of Chicago's Polish immigrant community. But even they seemed to stumble out of the show with the distinct feeling they were part of an avant-garde hoax. For at the end of 25 minutes of stunning, hallucinatory imagery blending cinematic motion with theater craft, the show simply stopped. A dozen gauzy ghosts hung from the rafters, the lights remained on, and no one moved until a few bold souls fled to the lobby. "The Herbarium," created in 1976 by Leszek Madzik, can only be described as a beautiful fragment. A surreal, wordless, quasi-religious mass, it explores sensations of life and death through a remarkable use of light, puppets, and phantasmagoric masked and manipulated actors that move to a haunting, lyrical, but nightmarish score by Andrzej Manka and Waldemar Sulisz.

The stage for the production, a tightly draped black box with an inner core of white parachute material, is the backdrop for illusions of a man who falls to Earth (conjured with blinding strobe lights); embraces a cadaverous dummy in some post-apocalyptic wasteland; pulls strange treasure from the bellies of giant female figures that are part puppet, part human; and, most astonishingly, exists in an architectural space of endlessly deep perspective.

The company's second production, also under a half hour, is "The Moisture." It will be performed June 16-19 at the Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division. (312) 278-0075. Four giant puppet figures were among the hallucinatory images in "The Herbarium," a work by the Visual Stage of Lublin, Poland”

Director
Leszek Madzik

Performers
Cezary Figura, Jaroslaw Figura, Ewa Karolak, Edyta Kruk, Agnieszka Twerd, Marcin Pastwa, Dariusz Golinski

Tags: Polish, Theater, , 1994