 So, welcome everybody to the Barclay Seagull Theater Center here in the United Center of CUNY. My name is Frank Henschka, the director of the program. This is a great day for us. Not only this is the beginning of the spring season, we start all the programs in March. And it is also a great way on to one of the great living room keycaps with us. And this is a Christian Luka who is here. We are looking forward to a really interesting, I think, and hopefully inspiring conversation. The Seagull Center bridges academia and professionals theater, international and American theater. So, we continue, I think, towards an understanding and a conversation. What theater means and performance in the 21st century. We have a fantastic audience tonight. So many familiar faces and great faces of the New York theater community. Thank you all for coming. And I would like to ask Christian and the transgender Thursday to come over now. And I think we are going to start the evening. Thanks also to Tom and who helped us so much to put it all together. And please come here. Good afternoon. Well, again, good afternoon and welcome. It's in your print, in your brochure, but I still want to take a little moment to read the biography. Christian Luka born 1943 is truly one of the greatest European living theater directors. He studied in Poland physics, graphic design, as well as directing film, and directing theater. He collaborated with Konrad Zynarski and was influenced, truly influenced by the work of Tadeusz Kantor, also at the time when Kantor was not yet fully accepted, I think, by the theater scene also in Poland. He is famous for his unique method of working with the text and actors in the Pacific organic way. We will talk a little bit about this. And he describes his work as a laboratory rehearsal, like a laboratory setting. It's like, perhaps, like the sciences where we are in this building. Productions have been based on text of Robert Musil, Thomas Werner, Dostoyevsky, Rylke, Wittkiewicz, Gombrowski, Gombrowicz and many, many arts awards have been given to him. The Wittkatzi Prize, the Critics Circle Award, the Gold Gloria Artist Medal, the Order of Polonia Restituta, the Order des Arts Edeletron, and the Austrian Decoration for Science in the Arts. So, as you can hear from this very short bio, or that could be much longer, this is a very highly decorated worker in the vineyard of theater in performance, and in chess terms he would be a grandmaster. And it is truly for us a great honor to have him here. So the evening, tonight we'll serve a bit a look at his work, his artistic career, but also the situation of theater in Poland, Europe and in America at the moment. I also would like to welcome the viewers from HowlRound TV. So, you know, the site HowlRound is an initiative to release stream and live stream, significant event in the country that happened around theater and performance, and we are honored and proud to be collaborating with HowlRound, so I can make a lot of our viewers. So, maybe we start. How do you feel being in New York? I love New York, I'm not at the moment, because there are so many New Yorkers. I love the energy of this city. Every time I come here, I look what's new, what has been built. Now I look at the pencil building in this overlooking central park. I like it, there is some crazy thought in this area. And when one goes deep into central park and turns around and look at the southern wall, it's an unbelievable view. And it's new, there's something different about it. It's quite exciting. And one of course gets right into the whirlwind of what I see as a star. To see some of the things that come out, see the museums. And HowlRound, it's a good Manhattan, it's a great walking. I never get into the subway, because I don't particularly like the New York subway. And even as someone who watches films of New York, I'm a little bit afraid of the subway. And of course this is a city that one knows from the landscapes of a lot of better famous films. A few years ago we did Andy Warhol, a strange spectacle in which we were trying to fill out the unknown hours in life of Warhol. And we walked around the city looking where his famous factory was, the New York of the 1960s. And I'm also a man of the 60s. Everyone treats the years of his youth as a point of departure. And so on and so forth. In a way, I take New York as a kind of a father city. And it's a piece of my own myth. Well, thank you very much. Coming to American theater and performance, has that influenced your work ever? Well, who do you follow? Has the American theater and performance influenced this work? I would say that I can say that the great influence had numerous films and American literature. But right away I can say that it was an enormous influence of American films and literature. When I was a young man and I watched the movie theater, for example, when I watched the movie theater of Mamma. When I was a young man and I looked at the theater. These were the performances that made for elements of something that... These are the performances that I watched in my own private mythology. Of course, these are all the performances that I watched in Europe, in Poland. But these are the performances that I saw in Europe, in Poland. When I started to visit New York, the great wave of American avant-garde theater has already passed. So I had to make up for what I lost and I watched a lot of Broadway. Broadway is something that is not very well known in Europe. It's not my favorite tale, but it always offered a great experience. Yesterday I was for the second time I watched The Phantom of Opera. Since I was invited by Harold Prince 20 years ago. He wanted me very much to do a musical here in New York. But when I saw The Phantom of Opera, I came to the conclusion that I would never do a musical because I just wouldn't know how to do it. I think it was Andrzej Wirt, who said that Poland was a superpower in theater. If you think about Kantor Kortowski with Kiewicz, Gombrowicz, Mrojak, Wyspianski and so many, many on. You are part of the legacy and you educated. Smolarski and others. But still do you quoted Living Theatre? Do you feel closer to Living Theatre than to Kortowski? If I had to choose from my great predecessor's source, I would certainly mention the heritage of Kortowski. Because when we talk about Living Theatre, that's the current. I remember and I have had great experience watching one stage of Living Theatre. I am a little bit surprised so I can't remember exactly the name of that stage. I saw at the festival an open theater in Wroclaw. But I was struck by its separate poetics. I have always felt that Kortowski is not with Kortowski as a director but with Kortowski as a guru. I always fought with Kortowski, not Kortowski the director but Kortowski the guru. Those of disbelief and distance. Lots of amazing things. You know, maybe everyone wants to have a conversation about the secret of being. But on this way they commit a lot of self-lies. But from the very beginning I was also a great admirer of Kantor. Kantor always called Kortowski the thief. Because he maintained that Kortowski took everything from him. But what was amazing about Kantor was his uncompromising honesty. He didn't pretend to be the enlightened wise man who offers his performances to the whole humanity. He was striking at his own ego. His message was I, the artist, impress myself on you or on another person on the viewer. To circle back to your work, your contribution or your discoveries is something you can also call the landscape. Your interest in the landscape of the actor or the play. I think it was Heino Möller who said the landscape of America changed his work. But of course, Heino Möller said the landscape changed. Of course, it's something different. But tell us a bit about your idea of the landscape, of this organic theatre and your discoveries. For most of my life I was interested in the way of the actor. How they work to reach a message to arrive at a message and a transmission of one's imagination. The imagination which we are calling a landscape. The original idea that every actor has before he begins to transform into a performer. What is his idea of the figure or person that he wants to get to know and then transmit to the audience? Often the actor's way is too fast. An actor doesn't have time to have enough time to actually get to know the character that he spots. And already has to transmit it. Our accelerated production of a performer which aims only at the effect. Does not permit the actor to have the most important experience. Do you believe that an actor has a way to get to know another being that is deeper than a psychiatrist? He has a phenomenal opportunity to be a human being. Not a type of human being, so to speak, rather than to burn. But an actor has a person with whom he can experiment. Leads through a situation multiple times. Whom we have an opportunity in real life to experience only once. And when an actor begins to go on this slow way to recognize in himself the person he is going to perform. It is in a way in which it is possible. For many years working on various performances and in workshops with the actor. We created a way. I don't like the word method. So that's why I am saying a way of internal monologue. The experience of internal monologue. Which in the internal monologue that everybody conducts with him or herself. And one can use our own internal monologues as a way of recognizing and cognizing the person, the character. And it is a personal journey. For which I also take into account the whole life. I take characters from my own life. I get typical characters, mother, father, husband, wife, husband, and me. life has been, and me, and using that internal monologue as an instrument of auto cognition. Before I start to construct a character for some kind of an effect, for me, the most fascinating for me the most fascinating is that an actor is the most perfect instrument for the cognition of another person that exists. An actor who follows the way of a monologue and improvisation. Very much, and I think, I don't know if you were able to see artwork which was at the Lincoln Center some years ago, and so the work doesn't travel so often, but it is quite amazing, it's discoveries, also it's reworking of literary classics of novels. But Chris, today I ask you how you feel in New York, so how do you feel in Poland right now, what is your inner monologue? Well, yes, actually it's a personal monologue to proclaim my own personal monologue. And of an artist who is becoming lost in his own country as a space which each of us needs. Because right now all these criterias like patriotism, patriotism, a sense of national identity, all of this in the modern world becomes a fuse, changes its presentation. What is our fatherland? It is certainly the space of one's language, a space of a certain common understanding. A society in which we live together for the achievement of common goals, certain dreams. And one could say that we should actually construct or articulate a new meaning for the concept. But a concept for which until now people are killing each other, it's probably not anymore. Still there are events and incidents where we come back to it as if to some kind. And something like that is happening in Poland. We are trying to construct a new cultural reality which is trying to construct a new cultural reality and which not unlike the Third Reich pays great attention. But the culture in Gabylsian, something that builds propagandistically a certain model for which a hypnotized nation will go on to kill. After getting out of communism Poland has an incredible opportunity to join the new human dream. I am from the generation of the hippies and one of the texts that inspires me to follow would be imagine a space without borders, without nationality, without God, without all those things for which until now we've been killing. We can think that humanity is a project of something that hasn't existed until now. We should not only come to this project but ever more urgently we need to reach it. Otherwise our planet will perish. I can say that at certain moment when Poland emerged from communism it was this possibility of having the whole society enter the future and the idea of tolerance, the idea of new understanding of what living together means. All of this was possible and the artists joined this struggle to reach that future. We found a new goal because before we were all engaged in the fight with the totalitarian system and it turns out that suddenly I am talking about a little bit of a failure there. But suddenly the power appears and the social moods emerge where all of this foxtap and we return to nationalism, to very well known hell, of people who hate mediocre, who strive for power. And you can say that in a country like that suddenly you still have. It was similar to the epoch of fascism. An artist tells himself, yes I have to live in this country, possibly I could escape if life here becomes impossible. But then it is still somehow possible one has to live in this space and struggle to have the choices overturned. In Poland right now creates a great crisis for me. Personal, civic and artistic. It is strange to have to say I don't know what next. A person feels safe in a space where he has a past, a present and a future. Then he can somehow make himself comfortable. Especially if he is an artist. An artist makes himself accommodate in the future. He builds a future not just for himself, but a modern future for another person. An artist says you have this way. My intuition finds some kind of a possibility and builds a work of art from it. Look you can go there in such a space like one that we have in the past and such building of the future is impossible. You have to go back and fight again for something that a few years ago we thought we have already achieved. And this is a terrible situation. But what can we do? He wrote a book called The Mission. They tried to cope with it. What is the mission of the artist now? I just said a moment ago that one of the artistic crises in Poland, perhaps in other countries in Europe where we see that there is a certain regression of social and cultural development. What you call a mission, which is to say a struggle with something immobile, the mission of the artist is always a struggle for movement. Zarpus said that between an artist and a politician there is always a total difference of interest. When a politician and he strives for power, when he comes to power, he strives to keep it. And therefore to immobilizing, to making any change because if he doesn't do it, he will lose his power. The mission of the artist is always striving for a change because only the constant change of the world and a change of our spirituality, striving for a divine condition because God is nothing but our own product. God will be, God will be. A man is the creator of God, as a project, perhaps not fully consciously because if he were to become conscious that this figure of God is his task, he would escape from fear. If the mission of an artist is change, then we know that an artist cannot be somebody who is at the disposal of a politician. Because he will be a prostitute. My politician, a politician who has some decency and a vision, should not pay the artist as an employee, a worker, but he should feed him as his own necessary enemy. If he destroys this enemy, if a politician destroys culture, he leads to a catastrophe, his own and his own society which he leads. The life of any society is not possible without spirituality, this pushing forward. Politicians don't know this and therefore all of them fall into the hands of a politician. It is strange that from the experience of politicians who strive for authoritarian power and with a catastrophe, if it only were their own catastrophe, we can see what kind of a catastrophe Hitler led. How he destroyed for many years that society that was then called Germany. I try to avoid the word nation because I think it is a term that causes more evil than good. We live in the times when nation, religion have a destructive character. It is a serious moment for artists but also for society, but you said mankind created God, so now you interpret the holy scripts of the Kafka, the Rilke, of a museum. So what led you to the trial, why the Kafka's trial at the moment? Tell us a bit how it started, the complications and why did you decide to do that of all texts? What happened that really I took into account all the works which were for me kind of an initiation? The works that create us in our youth and most of them are from the youth. Sometimes some others come at the late age and then we feel again, when we find a text like this at the age of 50 and suddenly you are again 20. It is amazing what such a text do to us. Kafka was one of the initiating authors of my youth. I was in with Kafka for over a year because you have to get in through these things. Such as some in a way like you get ill with Dostoevsky or you are ill with Bernhard and there are some writers who won't leave you alone, who torture you with whom you disagree. We can say we read Kafka but we don't agree with him. We don't accept that way. I have to say that for a long time I have lived three years and I didn't make Kafka. Even though he was my initiating author, I was afraid of him. I was afraid to touch him. There was something so threatening and others said don't do Kafka because you will never do such a thing. And it's true, I've never seen a well done Kafka. My great masters did Kafka and they were terrible performers. I've never seen a well done Kafka because if it contains some strange poison there is something in Kafka's imagination. It can be extracted and put into reality. Because a performance is a return of literature into reality. When in the moment when Kafka made it into literature he wanted always to remain a literature. And not return cannot make a performance. It is something impossible. It will be a little bit longer story even though I want to tell it. I got a proposition to Kafka's festival in Italy and then I did Thomas Bernhardt for the first time. I said that Thomas Bernhardt is Kafka of the second half of 20th century and unlike Kafka who pushes me into death and unconditional defeat and unconditional absolute pessimism some kind of a wild love or sadism. Bernhardt let's say he doesn't leave anything on other people. He doesn't leave anything untouched. But in his artistic aggression there is a will to live. There is humor. There is a goal worth to destroy what Bernhardt wants to destroy. And so for many years I did Bernhardt at the moment when people in Poland began to say that the reality that is oncoming now is from Kafka. What is in the trial? There is this entity called the court, the power which in the trial doesn't even have a human face. There is a change, a passion to put an individual under indictment. Because a person who is accused uses his own power, autonomy, freedom and becomes an object to be manipulated. That is in fact something that every authoritarian power is trying to do. He wants to have every individual accused and put under indictment. And then one can say that this individual is defenseless. There is one more thing which is the reason why we say that current reality recalls Kafka. It is the triviality, the blunt stupidity of that power. A person through all his life thought as his spiritual development and through this development leads his own goal to some kind of a goal, this confrontation with this trivial force. The individual's goal is destroyed, annihilated. The hero of Kafka's trials in confrontation with the court becomes annihilated. This is an entity as a being who thought that he can follow the road of his own individual dreams. The basic thing for every human being is that you live in a world in which you can follow the road of your own individual dreams. Society is a collection of people who live together on this road to individual dreams. This confrontation with the trivial force of the stupid imperative of power annihilates this group. So we could say that perhaps it's time to confront this work that is so pessimistic. So how did you approach it dramaturgically? How did you put it on stage with Bally's? What was the idea? And what did you find out? What surprised you in the rehearsal process? I found one thing, a hole in this novel, a white spot, a blank spot on the written. I know that Kafka didn't write the trial in the way that he intended. And it's very strange how the novel got written. It was created in a very personal way. And it was connected to the love relationship between Kafka and Feli's power. It's known that Kafka's love relationships were strange. There was something in him that made it impossible for a normal love relationship. He was five years old, he was a fiancée, but in reality he was lying to his fiancée, constant delaying of his promises. And he himself was very afraid of Marius. And he explained that he was afraid that Marius would make it impossible for him to write. But I think that real reasons were much more painful. He was afraid of a strong relationship with another person. Perhaps they were also sexual. But then something very strange happened. Feli's power shoot him in Berlin with a friend in a hotel. And they kind of contacted a trial over Kafka. And that was a trial during which Kafka said not the word. He returned to Prague and he began to write the trial. He was transforming his own intimate experience and trying to universalize it. And that was a genius idea. Because my idea is, as it's called now, something that needs to be very intimate. Without it there is no artwork. He began with quite energy at the beginning. He energetically wrote the ending. And he began to suffer about the metal. Which where he wanted to dive into internal experience of his character. And until now, neither in the beginning, neither at the end, neither the hero Joseph came, nor the prosecutor. They don't say the word for what he is accused. This is another genius thing. The reader does not know what Joseph is accused of. That was something that was supposed to happen in the middle of the night. We know several sketches which are available in the facsimile of Kafka's notebooks. But with the metal Kafka didn't know, didn't find a way to deal with it. This is not the first time. It was similar with the castle. And similarly with America. Kafka was not somebody whom writing came easily. Kafka said that himself that he somehow could not match his own imagination. Writing was sometimes a torture for him. But not to write meant to die. When Kafka was dying, he asked Max Brot to burn the dry. As well as work in his own opinion, a bad one. When we know of course that Max Brot didn't do it. But he did something else which I think was... He put the beginning into the end and published it as a whole novel. This book has a void in the middle. I think I knew that we are doing the performance for this void to enter into it. As if to write that middle. Not only to do what Kafka wrote, but to do more. To say what Kafka did not write. I always have a feeling that I take an author to write or to say something that the author has not written. And I already told you about internal monologue. And if an actor who plays the part of Joseph Cape will go into the monologue. And perhaps he will succeed. Think this something. What was there but was not written. This is how far our dreams go. Mine as a director and one more thing. We started to do rehearsals. We were in the middle of working on it. We were poisoned with searching for Kafka's secrets. When the theater where we were doing when we were working to present this underwent its own catastrophe. The director of the theater who very ambitiously led that theater. Somebody who was not liked by the powers that was removed from his post. In stage the competition the powers nominated somebody a man of the new right. We all protested. I stopped working with the actors. And others were fired by the new director for not being yielding to the new leadership. And there were some court proceedings that reminded one of Kafka's crime. So a reality arrived that began to write the middle of that book. That our adventure with Kafka was at an end. Some theaters from Warsaw. Warsaw is an island that does not follow the right wing national government. And they could afford to ask us to return to work on that right. And then we said we are not going back to what we have been. But we will write that adventure with Kafka from the beginning. And we will include our artistic idea into Kafka's story. Jackie, I don't know if it's possible to say we have a short trailer. So we are going to see now part of what Kafka wanted to be burned. What he couldn't write and matches the imagination with the powers of that. And now for whatever reason it's not arriving in New York. So this is the two minute or three minute trailer. So we want to watch it. I don't know if it's possible to say. I don't know if it's possible to say. The audience questions. When you heard it would not come to New York, what came to your mind? What was he thinking when he knew that show in New York would not happen? What was his initial reaction? It was very sad for us. Every show that goes on the road is a beginning of something. It begins to grow like a fetus. And this fetus was quite advanced. The organizers were quite in the way. And one can say that this abortion plays in the last month of pregnancy. It is a loss of something. It's not just that the show will come to New York. We will try to have success in the performance of our own shows. And that we will have a success in our own demands for having a successful performance. It's like when everybody, when we had a very emotional relationship with our own web, it's life. It's a fragment of the life of that specter. So it is kind of a killing. I do understand the emotional reaction of J. Webman. He felt cheated. Everybody feels like it's a certain disaster, the compromises. But on the other hand we try to look into the reasons why this happened. I am unable to fully explain it. I cannot understand the motive. We know that all invitations to take part in festivals have something wild about it. Artistic festivals continue to struggle with a lack of money because of the worldwide deficit of funds for culture. Especially the avant-garde that is searching. That's not the point. That is why we know that directors of festivals are trying this way and that to fulfill their dreams. Because it's always a subject for negotiations. Artists doing so are completely struggling with all sorts of obstacles. Now usually they get that. Because who wants gets. That's the truth. That's the point. When someone says in Poland that the contract was not signed. That's what the authorities that administer and rule over culture in Poland are saying. This is really the reason that they don't want to do. This is the first case. But we had a failure of a dream. Because among artists such dreams usually do. Only when someone comes really doesn't want to do that. I think it also displays a great deal of insecurity and misinterpretation of a strong heritage. Exceptional was Poland has produced a kind of poet's theatre, artist, painter, sculpture. It's a cultural diplomacy but also a social credit for that tiny nation that suffered so much over centuries. It is our hope that things will do change and move. For sure it's part of moving and not showing perhaps even stronger in the pointing to the void pre-thought. I think we have time for one or two audience questions. One and it's the second one. So we start here. Carol. So first of all just as this is not a question I saw your production of Helden plots. And I thought it was extraordinary and I kept saying to John Kloss. I want that one. I want that one here. Because it so speaks to the moment but clearly so does Kafka. My question, comment concerns the Adam Kiewicz Institute. Which many of us producers, presenters, scholars have worked with. And they now seem to present themselves as unreliable partner. And how does this institution as far as you know imagine itself going forward? There is also the fact that we have a great spirit in the presence of the Institute of Kiewicz. We have a great debt to the Adam Kiewicz Institute. Many great people who were propagating Polish culture. And part of us to find our dreams. And they themselves were dreamers. And they did try and they did achieve propagating and presenting Polish culture to us. But at the moment when Adam Kiewicz Institute was an object that was laid over by the current government of law and justice which is the hand of present regime in the realm of culture. To this day there were still such practices that the Kiewicz Institute would say a little bit. And now they were trying to kind of maneuver around the minister of culture. So that objects would not be drawn. As you know is a clear threat in the current regime. And the reason for this sudden lack of money is the change of the director of the Adam Kiewicz Institute. The new director is nominated by the Law and Justice Party. And those unofficial ways of going around some bureaucratic obstacles. The minister of culture has a so called blacklist of artists. I have a good question and I think it also should go to the institute. How it is organized, regions of Poland are proud to declare themselves gay, lesbian and queer free, shocking developments for everybody and indefensible. And I think crime also against humanity and the access to arts, to healthcare, education, our basic human rights. And I think we all have to support that and we have to be fighting for that. So maybe one more question a little bit over time. Is there one more? And we are here. We have been recording so you will have to take the mic. Is the production running in Warsaw? Sometimes, yes. As I say, Warsaw is an island. But if Warsaw were administered by the Law and Justice Party, it would not be presented. So we have to fly to the Marshall Island to see your play. Flights are cheaper since the coronavirus. Hotels are cheaper. Yeah, so maybe we should go. I think it's a great loss and we are terribly sorry that we are not able to see your work. We have to act locally, we direct and do theater locally. But we sing globally and we all work in global connections. And dramaturgy is becoming globally. Like world musicians will know what music is being played in other countries. It's not significant to have an exchange. It's already hard enough to hear voices outside of America. So it's a very sad day, I think, for the world theater. But I would like to thank you really for coming despite being rejected. It's to take your time and energy to fly in for this discussion. And for Sunday I would all encourage you to be of time. NYU and Jay Wegman, the great artistic leader of this group, organized together with Penn, the writers' organization and the public theater. And also with us reading a marathon reading of Kafka's trial, which will be nowhere close to I think the production, or in a motor world you will have and you read the text, but still I think it's important to show up for that. And again, I would all, you like to recognize this is a master of theater. It's very hard. People say it's a touchdown, score a goal, but to be great director of theater over decades is an incredible achievement. And so we have our highest respect now. Would you like to acknowledge the presence to be of a great artist? So thank you for coming and thank you. Thank you very much. I am very happy that I could be with you. I hope that next year we will be able to meet more physically with the performance. So we are going to have a little reception in here, so at least we share a moment to get a quick pass. That's the way it works. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.