La Luna

Christopher Piatt, TimeOut Chicago

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"