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Andrew Scott is one of my favorite actors of all time. For me the best acting is when an actor does not look as if he/she was acting. And that is how Andrew Scott does it. There is something truly remarkable about how he conveys the unspoken, how he builds the story, the suspense, the emotion finally unravelling. The way he sees what he is talking about, the way he not only speaks, but the way he sighs, walks, breathes, looks. His gestures, his facial expression. It feels like listening to someone just telling a story. And you hear every single word loudly and clearly. You cannot stop listening. It touches your soul so strongly that you remember every little detail, you closely observe his every move and wait for the way he is going to pronounce every word. I could have him read a dictionary to me and I would still be amazed. 

This solo play is truly heartbreaking in the end, although it does not begin like something that is meant to do that. The very first part is based on talking about little things, things that may not seem so interesting to one - until one finds that this is a memory of a grieving dad. As the play progresses, you do not really know what to expect; until last minutes you cannot really tell what exactly the story is about - it is just a representation of a very usual, normal life. There is something magical about how we see the character being is so much more pain as his speech progresses. We feel something really bad coming, but somehow it is revealed unexpectedly. 

Wonderfully written and played. I am speechless...

It’s like Andrew Scott could take your heart out, place it on his hand, wrap his fingers around it and press them so slowly you don’t even know when you’re lost. And you say thank you to him.

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PINA BAUSCH

German dancer and choreographer 

Influence in the field of modern dance since the 1970s as she blended movement, sound and prominent stage sets 

Created the company Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch which performs internationally

"It is almost unimportant whether a work finds an understanding audience. One has to do it because one believes that it is the right thing to do. We are not only here to please, we cannot help challenging the spectator.”

" The dancer is free to choose any expressive mode, whether it is verbal or physical when answering these questions. It is with this freedom that the dancer feels secure in going deep within themselves.”

Male-female interaction is a theme found throughout her work

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Collaborative project, 1st part of the research

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JUDY GARLAND

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During one of theatre lessons we watched “H” directed by Jan Klata. It is a polish adaptation of “Hamlet”. This whole spectacle is so well-directed, the actors are amazing, the parallelism between “Hamlet” and this version regarding polish society... this is all really impressive and I am too speechless to further elaborate on this piece of art. I just really recommend watching it. 

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Collaborative project work

As we started working harder on our collaborative project, I also started writing my document for the collaborative project.

Collaborative project Formal requirements of this task 

Each student submits for assessment: 

a process portfolio (15 pages maximum) which includes: the student’s identification of their own approaches, interests and skills in theatre and research into the approaches used by a professional company that creates and stages original pieces of theatre (not already studied in depth as part of the theatre course) 

the student’s account of the formation of the ensemble and the exploration of the starting point selected by the ensemble, which includes identifying the target audience and intentions for the piece 

the student’s reflections on the collaborative development, structuring and preparation of the piece for presentation and the specific artistic explorations led by the student 

the student’s evaluation of their own contribution to the final 13–15 minute presentation, the extent to which the piece fulfilled its intentions, the impact it had on the audience and the analysis and justification of their specific artistic choices (as evidenced in the video recording outlined below) 

a video recording (4 minutes maximum) evidencing the student’s contribution to the presentation of the collaboratively created piece; the selected footage must be chosen by the student and must demonstrate artistic choices made by the student; it can be either one continuous shot or can be from two different moments (maximum) in the presentation; the combined total submitted must not exceed 4 minutes of footage for each student 

a list of all sources cited. 

As I am very interested and engaged into exploring global issues such as gender inequality, racism, lack of tolerance for LGBTQ+ people, unbalanced distribution of wealth and environmental aspects, in theatrical projects such as this collaborative project I wanted to touch upon these topics in a metaphorical, nonliteral way that would reach hearts of the audience. As my friend, Marta Żakiewicz, with whom I am collaborating with is interested into similar topics, it was our mutual decision to create something important in the society’s discussion. I live in very privileged circumstances - I attend a private, international school filled with people who share my liberal worldview that stands for freedom of choice no matter the nationality, gender, sexuality. However, my country, Poland, is in many regions conservative and there are often situations in which people being different to certain nationalistic standards are getting bullied or even attacked. It is hard for me to imagine, as I myself was never involved in a relationship or situation in which anyone „different” was publicly treated like that. The fact that I am not directly connected to acts like this does not mean that this problem does not exist; to explore this topic and do something meaningful that would have a chance to prevent such situations from happening, Marta and I, agreeing on this matter decided to create a performance telling a story about two women in love. We did not have a precise idea of how we would like to present this issue, but we knew that this is something that we would like to speak up about. 

Both Marta and I are very interested in music - singing, creating, playing instruments. No wonder that the primary idea of our collaborative project came into our minds while we were listening to a song. My teacher, seeing that the song „Wiped Out” by The Neighborhood evokes strong emotions in us, told us to improvise to it; based on this improvisation our first idea of the project evolved and developed. We want to tell a story about two women slowly getting to know each other; slowly getting closer to each other; slowly falling in love with each other. This will not be a continuous story with a lot of dialogue - the important details and signs will be put into subtle gestures and looks. We will play with our bodies, we will signalize closure in something much more literal than words. 

I am not yet sure how this is supposed to look like, but I am doing my best and will still continue to write about our progress.

[zohaossowska]

Every weekend I spend about 16 hours acting in Roma Gąsiorowska’s school. As we have different teachers, we are in the middle of a lot of projects and various approaches to acting. 

During Roma’s classes we were creating our own characters and figuring out everything about them, including their traumatic experience. Based on this experience we were improvising and our latest task was to write a script for one of the scenes. We were divided into groups and each group had a director and actors. I was a director for the two exquisite ladies - old friends finally getting into the conversation about holding grudges towards each other. Unfortunately, due to winter holiday I was not able to participate in the workshops during which my actresses were presenting the scene for the first time.

After that we were filming various scenes and improvisations so that we get familiar with how we look on the camera.

During workshops with Kamila Baar each one of us is working on their monologue in polish. It takes a lot of time to cover one person’s performance, so I haven't been fully practicing yet, but even watching someone else doing that is a very valuable experience.

During workshops with an another actress we were finding out about Meissner’s technique and we were creating our to circles - love and success, and based on that we were improvising monologues about one extremely happy memory and one traumatic experience. 

I am in love with these workshops, the development I can observe in my acting, the whole group and our teachers. They all are extraordinary people who I can learn from and with whom I speak the same language.

[zohaossowska]

During our theatre lesson we went to an amazing exhibition about the history of theatre and art that took place in one of the best Polish museums - Zachęta. It was really impressive - the amount of information and topics touched upon within the exhibition was tremendous and we spent there almost two hours to gain from it as much as we can. It is a really valuable experience to see the history of arts presented like this in once place; compare the styles, judge the development, see what firs my artistical vision best.

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NYU - summer program application

I am trying to engage into theatrical projects as much as I can - I have theatre HL in my school, I am spending all my weekends in Roma’s acting school, I am in the process of development of a project with one director that I am not allowed to talk about yet. Naturally, I also wanted to do something connected to theatre during the summer, and it has always been my dream to go outside of my country and develop somewhere else. Another dream of mine was to go to New York, as NYU is also my dream university. After a lot of research I finally found a high school summer acting program organized by NYU TISCH. I decided that I want to apply for this program. Since the beginning of December I have been collecting materials for the application - self tapes, Cambridge English test results, personal statement, creative resume, three recommendations, passport, money for the application fee. Roma really helped me in making self-tapes and three people strongly connected to my life as a student and actor wrote recommendations for me, but apart from that I have done everything on my own. Even the collecting materials part taught me a lot and filming the tapes took a lot of work and rewarded me with more camera experience. Only 16 people get into the program that I am applying to, so we will see how it goes. I will have the results in over a month.

UPDATE 1 -- I am on the waitlist!

UPDATE 2 -- they gave me the opportunity to choose another program I am interested in! I will have my final results on the 27th of March

[zohaossowska]

As a part of my end-of-the-semester exam I had to make a 15 minutes long presentation about one of the theatre theorists. I chose Jerzy Grotowski, as his approach to acting seemed very interesting to me and I wanted to experiment with his method in my solo performance. I’ve talked about him a lot more than it is on the presentation, I watched many of his spectacles. I will be trying to get even more into his work as a preparation for my performance. 

[zohaossowska]

My best friend and I are beginning to work on our collaborative project. We started thinking about the topic -- there were so many we were interested in presenting. However, we settled for homosexuality. It is such an important theme in today’s society... many of our friends struggle with their self-acceptance and the acceptance of their family. As we attend a private school filled with liberal, tolerant people, we think that we live in some kind of an idealistic bubble in which everyone is free to be themselves. Even tough, we are highly aware that the situation in our country is slightly different. We want to speak up. Make a change. Come up with something that will make people reconsider their views on this topic. We want to spread love. We want everyone to feel supported and accepted. How will we approach this topic? We don’t know yet, we don’t want to make it too cheesy or basic or stupid. We want it to be something fresh, something new, something with a meaning. Not so obvious but understandable for everyone. Metaphorical.