Polish director Wojtek Klemm stages a new adaptation of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? with A.R.T. Institute students
by Kai-Chieh Tu
In the rehearsal room, one can hardly escape the electrifying vortex the director Wojtek Klemm creates with his actors. This past January, Klemm visited A.R.T. for the first time to lead a workshop with the A.R.T. Institute acting students. It was an eye-opening experience for all of us. Klemm works like a mathematician, carefully sculpting actors’ bodies and lines in space and time. “Be precise,” Klemm always says. “We don’t want any unnecessary ornamentation on the stage.” Quivering, sweating, dashing, leaping, wriggling, screaming, and mumbling—Klemm’s work is a laboratory for actors to overreach their physical and psychological limitations. The honest, galvanizing energy Klemm generates dismantles not only actors’ inhibitions, but also the distance between audiences and performers.
Born in communist Warsaw in 1972, Klemm was immersed in Polish theater as a child. He moved to Germany with his parents at the age of thirteen after his mother was released from prison. Since graduating from the prestigious Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin, Klemm has worked extensively across Europe, mainly in Germany and Poland. This Polish-German director’s hybridity of styles, and the boundary-breaking vitality of his work, have riveted and challenged theater audiences across Europe.
Klemm’s work is unpredictable, wild, and physical, but at the same time, it is full of analytical clarity and intellectual depth. He tends to create a non-linear, multi-leveled narratives; he believes his audiences have the ability to connect these dots based on their individual experiences. “None of us is linear in our real lives,” Klemm suggests. “So why would we want to see a linear character on the stage?”
Klemm pushes his actors to think beyond creating a “well-rounded” character: he never tries to hide the fact that a character is played by an actor. “An actor should understand he/she is the unity of performer and character, as opposed to the conception that an actor turns into a character.” He tries to find a straightforward way of communicating with his audiences, primarily by breaking down barriers between audience members and performers. He encourages his actors to use their whole bodies as “instruments.” For Klemm, the body creates the purest form of music, which can converse directly with a spectator’s mind and soul.
Klemm frequently talks about different types of “separations” in his work: character/actor, inside/ outside, language/body, text/emotion. Actors in his productions are often jumping in and out of their characters, changing pronouns constantly. Sometimes an actor speaks one thing, while his or her body does something completely different or even contradictory. Predictability equals boredom for Klemm. He always aims to break down preconceived notions and to encourage his actors to think beyond traditional styles of acting. “Why would you inhibit yourself with the question ‘would my character do that?’” he asks. “Most of the time, fake knowledge about your character leads to fake results.” Giving his actors the freedom to choose from a wide range of ways to tell the story, Klemm’s productions are never short of theatrical twists and turns.
His work thus offers audience members multiple levels on which to analyze and engage the social, political questions Klemm poses. For him, theater is a place for public debate. “Theater came from politics,” he says. “Greek plays were all written to support certain ideas of ruling regimes. We would call them propaganda plays nowadays. All of them.” He has explored a number of sociopolitical issues in his previous work for Polish and German audiences, ranging from economic inequality to xenophobia, from dubious interpretations of history to the lack of effective separation between church and state.
This spring, Klemm will direct Rick Sparks and Gary Carter’s adaptation of Horace McCoy’s novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, a story about a brutal dance marathon set in Los Angeles during the Great Depression. The production will be his debut on the American stage. They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? is about love and despair in a time of economic hardship, and how people are willing to humiliate and torture themselves for the slightest possibility of economic reward. “We’re living in a time of shaky economies,” Klemm reflects. “We are not that far from the world of the play.” Featuring actors from the A.R.T. Institute’s graduating class of 2016, the production will be staged in the A.R.T.’s club theater venue, OBERON—an immersive space that will put audience members in direct contact with this story’s dance of desire and survival.
Kai-Chieh Tu is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T. Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University.
