Critic’s Pick – Michael Philips, Chicago Tribune 8/8/05 - "In covering Chicago theater, much of which operates on a mixture of justifiably healthy ego and low-grade insecurity, that's what a life of glittering poverty does to you, the Chicago theater press tends to rave about an awful lot, every week. It's good for business. And a lot of the raving comes from a place of genuine enthusiasm, on this side of the boosterism divide, as opposed to the other, cheaper, darker side. Yet we do the excellent work no favors when we oversell the pretty good work.

I'm here to tell you that a truly excellent company, one that happens not to be from Chicago, is back in town for its third consecutive year. It's the experimental troupe from Katowice, Poland, Teatr Cogitatur, which made its American debut two years ago at Wicker Park's Chopin Theatre. Through Labor Day weekend the company is performing two of its brief, densely packed works in repertory. On Aug. 19, "Aztec Hotel" begins its return engagement.

A beautiful meditation on angels and humans, it played the Chopin in 2003 and earned a place at the top of that year's theatrical achievements. Last weekend a Teatr Cogitatur production dating from 1998, "La Luna," opened at the Chopin. It's a work of sensory pleasures, as well as a certain amount of puzzlement what I'd characterize as the right kind, the kind that works on your subconscious in mysterious ways.

It begins with someone in a wedding dress, face hidden behind an ancient copy of Le Monde, swaying to a waltz playing on accordion. The person lowers the newspaper, and the face is that of a glowering male demon played by Maciej Dziaczko, with the company since 1995. At one point in "La Luna" this fine actor executes a dance in which he appears to be a Slinky engulfed in flames. "La Luna" originally carried the title "Tribute to Expressionists," and unfolds as a series of dreams depicting artists either in the throes of creation, or the anguish of falling short of their visions. Four rectangular diorama-like boxes serve as stages within the stage. In one, we see a writer at a decrepit typewriter, spewing an unknown substance into the carriage. Later, with each keystroke, a feather wafts from inside the guts of the machine. Dali would be proud. Here, the artist's lot has a 75 percent chance of ending badly. Three suicides later Dziaczko, who also plays a sculptor, reappears in the guise of a jazz trumpeter playing at a club called La Luna. He alone escapes the clutch of his death-muse.

"La Luna," all of 45 minutes long, isn't a story as much as it is a sequence of exquisitely crafted vignettes. The piece isn't overtly political, although we hear a woman speak of "the secret agents' silent steps." The music by Tomasz Kalwak and the light and sound by Bogdan Smiganowski and Alicka Chrzanowska combine echo-chamber polkas, train whistles, the sounds of dripping water and other fragments, brilliantly. My memory of "Aztec Hotel" is that it's somewhat more accessible and theatrically buoyant than "La Luna." Both, however, are remarkable in their imagistic, mist-shrouded ways.

While remarkable work happens on Chicago stages all the time, let's face it: Some of it's more remarkable than others"



Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun Times 8/10/05 - “First, a quick quiz: Q. Where will you find both the trendiest European audiences and the most European-style theater in Chicago?

A. At the Chopin Theatre.

Indeed, it was a fashionably bohemian crowd -- and one in which many flipped easily from Polish to English as they chatted -- that gathered in the lobby of the Chopin this weekend as local impresario Zygmunt Dyrkacz presented the third Chicago visit of Teatr Cogitatur, the experimental ensemble based in Katowice, Poland.

On view was the hourlong "La Luna," a work of eerily seductive imagery and powerful, sexually charged physicality that evoked the striving, twisted, frustrated, self-indulgent lives of four artists -- writer, sculptor, musician and dancer -- who share a tenement building as well as an all-pervasive angst.

Mood is of the essence in Teatr Cogitatur's productions, with the minimal text for "La Luna" -- which takes the form of poetic ramblings in the style of such French decadent writers as Baudelaire and Rimbaud -- performed by the six actors (Maciej Dziaczko, Karol Foltynski, Katarzyna Mrozinska-Isdebska, Marta Kadlub, Ewa Pirowska and Marek Radwan).

What is crucial here is the spell director Witold Izdebski and his troupe weave with the use of light, sound and driving music (the work of Tomasz Kalwak) that sets the rhythm of the brief, atmospheric "scenes" that emerge from the black hole of the stage like living nightmares. It is out of this void that -- with the use smoke and mirrors, as well as a set design comprised of four cubbyhole "apartments" that assume the quality of peep show stages -- that the characters and their dark psyches emerge. As the music surges, a girl in "Cabaret"-style lingerie does suggestive leg exercises; another strips slowly; another knits with a certain madness. A man attacks his typewriter. Another clearly is drinking himself to death. And yet another erupts in a whirlwind of futility, swinging his arms to generate a crazy momentum. A train pulls into a station. There are shouts of "Merry Christmas," heavily laced with irony. And there is the ultimate question: "What happened?" -- meaning when and how did these artists' dreams go so wrong? (There are occasional comic bits, too, as when the sculptor angrily douses the bust he has carved in water, and the sculpture promptly spits right back.)

The accrual of hallucinatory images with the quality of both film noir and contemporary ballet is mesmerizing throughout. But the style is invariably more intriguing than the substance. Nearly 25 years old (and with an international reputation), Teatr Cogitatur seems a bit stuck in avant-garde cliches of decades past.

It will be interesting to see if its second production, "Aztec Hotel" (the tale of creatures from a different world who land on Earth and are given a chance at human life), has something fresh to say. It opens Aug. 19 (with performances at 8 p.m. Fridays and 7 p.m. Sundays) and will run in rotating repertory with "La Luna."



Critic’s Choice – Justin Hayford, Chicago Reader 8/11/05 - "Opportunities to see world-class experimental theater in Chicago are few and far between. But for three years running Chopin Theatre director Zygmunt Dyrkacz has brought Poland’s astonishing image-based Teatr Cogitatur from Katowice to Wicker Park for the U.S. premieres of its shadowy, hypnotic pieces.

Writer-director Witold Izdebski’s La Luna ostensibly follows a group of bohemian tenement dwellers banding together against a host of unnamed menancing forces. The more overt the content, however, the more the work verges on cliche‚: what success in Izdebski’s ritualized scenes is the cryptic and oblique a man throwing wine contemptuously in a mannequine’s face, a woman blowing dust from her palm toward a hooded figure. These meticulous images emerge silently from total darkness, then recede after a matter of seconds, like fleeting phantoms from the depts. Of the unconscious. Beginning this weekend Teatr Cogitatur will perform a second piece, Aztec Hotel, in repertory with La Luna, providing an embarrassment of riches"



Critic’s Choice – Andrew Patner, WFMT – “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"



Christopher Piatt, TimeOut Chicago 8/11/05 - “"We have little basis for comparison in Chicago for what Poland’s visiting Teatr Cogitatur is doing in La Luna, an excellent performance piece comprised of little more than a series of strikingly lit stage pictures.

Even with our army of artists that excel at visual spectacle and physical theater- from Redmoon to Plasticene to Mary Zimmerman nothing in town looks or feels like this staggering collage.

And even with our boatload of fine, DJ-influenced sound designers and theatrical composers, nothing in these parts sounds like Tomasz Kalwak’s accomplished score, which fuses fashion runway techno, a drunken jazz trumpet and haunting chamber music and filters it all through a scratchy record needle.

What’a more even though we’ve seen endless redoubtable local companies reinvent the Chopin Theatre’s space, Teatr Cogitatur somehow demolishes it completely, using only a little stage fog, some carefully placed spotlights and honest-to-God blackouts (a real rarity) to create an abyss that seems 100 yards deep.

Perhaps beyond our borders there’s an abundance of work just like this, but it’s doubtful; every moment in this tantalizing 45-minute flash feels singular. There’s very little narrative structure to latch onto (although we do know that it’s about the troubled lives of four urban Bohemians), so instead all we can do is revel in the marvelous, stark imagery, which is executed with so much technical precision it’a basically a master class.

If you're willing to take the risk on this unusual offering, and you absolutely should, Teatr Cogitatur will gladly show you how stage pictures, when correctly rendered, can become the wholly environmental living version of a flip book for adults"



Nina Metz, NewCity Chicago 8/11/05 - "Emerging through the dim shadows and perfumed fog are images of the louche and bedraggled sitting alone in their little box apartments pondering their isolation. In terms of narrative, that’s about it Teatr Cogitatur’s La Luna, the latest show at the Chopin Theatre from this experimental Polish ensemble. Their work is physical theater, but a better word for it would be sensory theater there’s no denying the troupe’s finesse in creating haunting, abstract tableaus accompanied by an equally potent soundtrack. But the stage pictures, in this production at least, don’t connect to a larger emotional thread. The desolate wallow in desolation, though it rarely feels human. But don’t write these folks off; later this month, the company stages a remount of Aztec Hotel, a production first seen locally in 2003 that garnered enthusiastic critical praise for its Wim Wenders Wings of Desire-like sensibility"