Polish show among winners at New York’s United Solo Festival – “Norwid’s Return,”
a show starring, directed and produced by Marek Probosz, has won the Best New York
Premiere award at the United Solo Festival in New York.
6 pm 03/11/2023 at Polish Home Association
Tickets are available at EventBrite, but also available for purchase in person on the day of the show.
Door opens at 5 pm
Written, based on the works of Cyprian Norwid – KAZIMIERZ BRAUN
Performed and directed – MAREK PROBOSZ
Musical arrangement and accompaniment – ŁUKASZ YODER
The monodrama “Norwid’s Return” is a minimalist contemporary dialogue between an actor and a pianist, a rich tapestry between words and music in which Norwid pulsates with emotion and provokes with every thought.
The stage is set to a contained space of a mere paper square – the representation of Norwid’s spiritual and material reality, the homeless world of an emigrant, a reflection of the inner world of an outcast. In this realm of tension, rebellion, and passionate intellectual polemics, the paper stage is gradually ripped, defaced, and ultimately torn to shreds. Past and present intertwine making painful settlements with a rejected love, society and criticism, which ridiculed his work as “complex” and “brilliantly suicidal”, and the Russian Tsarist regime, which condemned him as an exile and prohibited his return to the homeland.
The dialogue between the actor and the pianist is a dynamic collision of words and sounds, a web of inner contemplation and resonance that reverberates deep within the heart of human emotion, confronting traditions, and enchanting with a radical truth and the raw genius of a poet ahead of his time. By melding and cleaving a stage play and a musical performance, it illuminates the Norwidean darkness and the complexity of his mind. Represented by familiar forms of classical music of the great composers (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Maurice Ravel, Frederic Chopin, Karol Szymanowski) the melodrama uncompromisingly transforms through extended piano technique into an exotic, and colorful orchestra that exceeds what is possible.
It delights and terrifies, all at once. An instrument was torn from its familiar world of elegance and comfort and a homeless emigrant, a poet on the brink of insanity, collapses on the pavement of the modern metropolitan dumpster, subject to the same torture.
The rejected visionary returns to us today, more than 200 years after his birth, as a contemporary innovator who delights, cheers, moves, and shocks with aesthetic radicalism.
Performance is part of the Spring of Polish Culture in the Western United States, supported by the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in Los Angeles.