Ewa wojciak biography examples

“With age, I have learned that unless you’re dead, life can always get worse.”

—Ronnie Kale, narrator of Bruce Kalberg’s autobiographical novel, Sub-Hollywood

Limo driver Byron Baker was between jobs on September 11, , when he stopped at home for a late-afternoon break. A day later, the TV would be full of stories on the Metroliner rail crash in Chatsworth, but for now, the story that caught his attention was a fatal shooting in a loft downtown, which the reporter labeled “roommate rage.” Remembering that his drinking buddy and friend of 20 years Peter Haskell was staying with friends on North Main, he put in a call.

“Hey, Peter, it’s Byron,” says his message on Haskell’s cell phone. “I just wanted to see if you’re okay. I heard there was some kind of funny business down in some loft by the San Antonio Winery on the news just now. Just checking on you, man. Hope everything’s okay.”

It wasn’t. At the time Baker’s call came in, Haskell had been dead for at least three hours, maybe more, shot once through the heart at point-blank range with a caliber handgun.

That evening, the killer was identified as Bruce Kalberg, 59, then being held on a $1 million bond. Like Haskell, 51, Kalberg was a veteran of the early punk scene. He had been the editor of No Magazine, a scrappy chronicle of L.A.’s teeming punk subculture, which he self-published with then-girlfriend Ewa Wojciak from to Though no longer a couple, Kalberg and Wojciak continued to share the loft where the shooting took place.

Haskell, a strapping 6-foot-2 raconteur and bon vivant, was a peripatetic filmmaker, musician, artist and actor, who had dated Exene Cervenka of X in the mid-’80s and directed a number of her videos, and who seemed to have crossed paths with everybody. As charter members of the small, intense scene centering on the Masque in Hollywood, Haskell and Kalberg had known each other for 30 years, haunted the

The Theatre of the Eighth Day (Teatr Ósmego Dnia), from Poznań, has been a phenomenon of Polish independent theatre for 54 years. It is comparable to Jerzy Grotowski’s Laboratory Theatre or Tadeusz Kantor’s Cricot 2 Theatre. Like each of these theatres, it determined the area of its artistic autonomy. It was founded in by students of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. As the students’ theatre of poetry, for the first few years it operated under the direction of Tomasz Szymański. They were closer to the legendary Rhapsodic Theatre of Mieczysław Kotlarczyk from the years of wartime occupation than to the theatres of the countercultural rebellion of the s. Already by then, however, the Theatre of the Eighth Day marked their disagreement with the current reality. Stanisław Barańczak, one of the most talented poets of Generation ’68, joined the group. In the s he was an activist in the anti-communist opposition movement. In , his poetry was the basis for the performance In One Breath (Jednym tchem), a critical description of the reality of communism in Poland. (1)

The change of the stage form began two years after the group was founded, when Zbigniew Osiński became involved with it. He brought a fascination with Grotowski’s method. In the important , Lech Raczak became the group’s leader. At the beginning of the s, Ewa Wójciak, Adam Borowski, Tadeusz Janiszewski and Marcin Kęszycki joined the Theatre of the Eighth Day. After Raczak left in , these actors were the group’s core.

The Theatre of the Eighth Day in historical context

The year was an important caesura around the world. It ends certain epoch in the history of Western civilization, which started with the conclusion of World War II. After the war, the world was divided into two poles. Eastern Europe was separated from the West by an Iron Curtain (W. Churchill). In the world of democracy under the American umbrella, post-war generations began to build a “welfare state”. Communism was built within the b

Ewa Wojciak, director of Poland’s Theatre of the Eighth Day, was fired by Poznan mayor Ryszard Grobelny on 28 July. His administration oversees culture and arts in the city, including Wojciak&#;s subversive and anti-establishment theatre group.

The official reason given was that she did not ask for permission to leave the city between 18 and 28 February, when she visited Yale and Princeton universities, performing her touring duties as director and actress with the theatre. However, these trips were not sponsored by the local government, so it is hard to see why she would need permission from authorities.

Wojciak’s career with the theatre began in when she was a dissident artist under the communist regime. After the end of communism, she turned the theatre into a welcoming space for refugees, minorities, anti-facists, feminists, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people and emerging theatre-makers. She has become a &#;new dissident&#;, confronting the realities of life after communism. During her tenure, the theatre, known for its artistic experimentation and politically subversive productions, has drawn the fire of Grobelny, known for his ultraconservative views.

The Theatre of the Eighth Day has played at the Edinburgh Festival, London’s LIFT, at the universities of Yale and Princeton, as well as innumerable major and small venues in Poland. The New York Times has written on their production under the heading &#;When Courageous Artists Ripped Holes in the Iron Curtain&#;.

During last month’s Index on Censorship debate with Timothy Garton Ash, Kate Maltby and David Edgar, about freedom 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I tried to emphasise how important such new dissidents are in Eastern Europe. Commenting on this debate, Index CEO Jodie Ginsberg reminded us how authorities are taking an increasin