Songs of Lear, performed February 26-28 as part of Yale Repertory Theatre’s international performance series, No Boundaries, is a striking sonic tapestry of Shakespeare’s tragedy, woven live before an audience by Wrocław, Poland’s Song of the Goat Theatre (Teatr Pieśń Kozła). Directed by Grzegorz Bral, the company’s co-founder and artistic director, its threads comprise the richly varied sounds of twelve original musical compositions, prepared by Kacper Kuszewski, which the performer-creators sing over selected plot points from the original play to deftly interlace an eclectic adaptation. While the final fabric of Songs of Lear contains few traces of the original text of King Lear—in favor of material as intriguingly disparate as Coptic and Latin liturgies, an Emily Dickinson poem, and the ethereal overtones of throat singing—the performance ultimately conjures a visceral, almost visible image of its inspiration, while also expanding its significance for our world today.
The performance begins when Bral himself steps into the warm light that spills across the floor of the black-box Iseman Theater’s playing area. With the crisply precise, yet wholly organic rhythm that will characterize this entire experience, he introduces the performance and offers some clues as to its creation. The creative process for Songs of Lear was inspired by Bral’s visit to a Kandinsky exhibition, so much so that each song in this piece will be called a “painting.” But our way in to this world is through our ears, not our eyes—the space feels more like an empty loom than a canvas, framed by accessories poised to create, harness, or move strands of sound. A set of slim, cylindrical microphones is suspended from the ceiling on silver wires, and three musical instruments stand stage left: an Indian harmonium keyboard; a kora, the 21-stringed West African harp lute; and the sierszeńki, from the word for “hornet” in Polish, a bagpipe we will learn has an appropriately stinging, nearly hypnotizing whine.
Now, it is time. Almost as if on cue, Bral proclaims: “I welcome my company to the stage.” The theater’s thick quiet is promptly scattered into a storm of footsteps, as Song of the Goat’s ensemble of twelve men and women, from not only Poland, but places such as Finland, Italy, the U.S., enter from a door backstage right, clad in formal blacks, to form a choral semicircle in the center of the light. Two men settle in by the musical instruments, and finally, all are silent, ready, and waiting—the audience, too. Bral explains that the performers will now continue their ongoing process of sonic adjustment to this new environment, which includes tonight’s particular audience. He calls the company’s warm-up a “warning”—the notes anticipate a later song, “Cordelia’s Warning”—which sends a ripple of laughter around the room. Little could adequately prepare us, however, for the sheer force of sound that springs forth from the singers at a slight movement of Bral’s hand.
Poland’s Song of the Goat Theatre’s Songs of Lear directed by Grzegorz Bral. Photo credit: Anna Szczodrowska
Even as they pronounce these simple sounds (at least compared to the music that will come) to tune themselves, Song of the Goat’s performers sing with, and from deep within, their entire bodies. It is not necessary to know that their brand of training and performance is called the “coordination technique” in order to witness its extreme synchronicity both within and among them. The singularity of each of their voices, the resonance of which comes so completely from their individual physical instruments, seems to sail across the space to catch and wind together with the others in an intricate web of sound. The harmonies, and sometimes intentional dissonances, that result are clearly a product of such deep, shared, and open emotional connection that we cannot help but feel it too, as their song reverberates off of and also becomes tied to us as well. The sound grows large enough that we can almost see it, until it overtakes us, and eventually the entire room. It is surprising—and not—afterwards, in a discussion with the audience, when Bral mentions that the ensemble members did not, for the most part, have previous voice training before they joined Song of the Goat. The technique appears to be as all-encompassing for the performers as it is unique to the company.
Suddenly, as he will between each song, Bral is back, this time to speak to the opening of King Lear‘s story. The first “painting,” he concludes, is called “In Paradisum,” both the title of the liturgical chant that serves as its text and a reference to the untouched paradise that is Lear’s initial landscape. With this, he steps back into the shadowy fringes of the stage, opposite the musical instruments, where he will sit and conduct the songs throughout the show, always returning to us to string the tale together between them. Bral will later impart, after the performance, that this structural choice was inspired by an encounter with firewalkers in Greece, who performed their ritual only to sit and talk casually with observers, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Songs of Lear strives to keep us moving through the narrative, to experience it as a whole rather than to become lost in the emotion of any one moment—which, given the intensity of the music, would certainly be possible. In this way, Bral becomes a kind of guiding thread in the tapestry, enabling us to see the story’s shape as it is made. His presence in this work that he himself directed also carries the mark of the maker, as if his throughline were a kind of artist’s signature stitched into the fabric of the piece.
As the performance progresses, and the music becomes increasingly complex—especially when supported by the musical instruments—our familiarity with the voices and qualities of the performers intensifies. We are more able to make and detect connections between their combinations of sound, just as the performers, who seem to live in a constant state of discovery, adjustment, and collaboration, do. We also learn to follow the trails of the different characters and forces from King Lear that they embody, freely and alternately, often named by Bral in the interim. Threads of movement, such as a fleeting, frightening dance between Lear and Cordelia—punctuated by his removal of her shoes, an elegant and surprisingly violent indication of her exile—enter into the picture as well. A major visual flourish, the surprise setup of a series of drumheads, which appear as if from nowhere, also stands out in the song titled “War.” The performers hold these in their hands, and all of the other sounds stop as one performer beats a raging rhythm upon them.
Poland’s Song of the Goat Theatre’s Songs of Lear directed by Grzegorz Bral. Photo credit: Z.Warzyński
A fluid sense of time also weaves throughout the piece, and over and upon itself. Before we progress to “In Paradisum – Part Two,” where we witness the kingdom now ravaged by discord and regret, we witness Monika Dryl’s Cordelia, the character most at the heart of this adaptation, sing her famous farewell to Goneril and Regan—”The jewels of our father, with wash’d eyes/Cordelia leaves you”—first as a child, then as a girl, and ultimately as the young woman of the original play. Such chronological twists interweave meaningfully with the piece’s pulling together of sources both familiar and foreign to the world of King Lear and Songs of Lear‘s New Haven audience. We move from an “Ave Maria” to the Fool’s admonishment of the King, from a Coptic chant to a moving near-lullaby, which aspires to tune perfectly enough to set off the “fifth voice of angels,” as Lear wanders the forest, lost, mad, and grieving. All of it, however, gives the sense—even if does not speak the exact words—of King Lear. As Song of the Goat pulls the forces of chaos and reconciliation that drive the play from so many different sources, and criss-crosses them into new material, the very heart of Lear rises, and it feels as vast, universal, and timeless as it does specific to the play. It is these very qualities, after all, that have kept artists and audiences returning to Shakespeare’s tragedy for hundreds of years.
As a company, Song of the Goat also epitomizes a condition of concurrent rootedness and expansion that is increasingly representative of Polish theater today. As innovative as their approach is, traces of Polish theater history are also as clear in the fabric of Songs of Lear as the strands of Shakespearean language. Bral and Anna Zubrzycki, co-founder of Song of the Goat, collaborated with Włodzimierz Staniewski of Gardzienice, whose work also delves deeply into the potential of the human voice. The rich world that emerges from the performers’ physical work also evokes the Poor Theatre of Grotowski, whose Laboratory Theatre Staniewski was a member of, and Bral’s presence in his own work also recalls the director Tadeusz Kantor’s in his. At the same time, Songs of Lear‘s universal approach to its specific source material echoes Song of the Goat’s global approach to its work. They tour internationally, teach at Manchester University in England, and also produce the Brave Festival: Against Cultural Exile, an annual presentation that draws practitioners of vanishing performance traditions around the world to Wrocław.
Krystyna Duniec and Joanna Krakowska, in their introduction to (A)pollonia, a 2014 anthology of contemporary Polish plays in translation, which they edited along with Joanna Klass, state: “In recent years, Polish literature and theater have stopped dwelling on obscure topics peculiar to the local situation, joining a broader debate on global conflicts and dialogue between cultures.” This must, of course, grow out of Poland’s last decade as a member of the European Union, and the resultant shifts in Polish culture and society. The final segment of Songs of Lear laments, in mesmerizing Celtic keening, not only to the tragic deaths that the play builds to, but the fractured state of the larger kingdom, as if that included us as well. As the melody builds and sustains to suspended cries, we almost feel compelled to join them. In this light, we can read the performance as a homage not only to Shakespeare’s vivid storytelling, but to the past and future of dramaturgical approaches in new Polish work, along with its role in an increasingly global community. Song of the Goat’s intensely interconnected performance style, and the many threads that tie into its telling of Lear’s tale, seem thus to take up a politics of togetherness, as they draw upon the specific and the universal to simultaneously show us one timeless work and our world.
is a theater artist, producer, and teacher. She is currently a DFA candidate in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at Yale School of Drama, where she earned her MFA in 2014, served as co-artistic director of the Yale Cabaret for its 2013-2014 season, and worked as web managing editor of Theater magazine from 2012-2013. Her writing on art and culture has appeared on Culturebot.org and in The Krakow Post and Words Without Borders.
European Stages, vol. 4, no. 1 (Spring 2015)
Editorial Board:
Marvin Carlson, Senior Editor, Founder
Krystyna Illakowicz, Co-Editor
Dominika Laster, Co-Editor
Editorial Staff:
Elizabeth Hickman, Managing Editor
Bhargav Rani, Editorial Assistant
Advisory Board:
Joshua Abrams
Christopher Balme
Maria Delgado
Allen Kuharsky
Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
Magda Romańska
Laurence Senelick
Daniele Vianello
Phyllis Zatlin
Table of Contents:
- Report from Berlin by Yvonne Shafer
- Performing Protest/Protesting Performance: Golgota Picnic in Warsaw by Chris Rzonca
- A Mad World My Masters at the Barbican by Marvin Carlson
- Grief, Family, Politics, but no Passion: Ivo van Hove’s Antigone by Erik Abbott
- Not Not I: Undoing Representation with Dead Centre’s Lippy by Daniel Sack
- In the Name of Our Peasants: History and Identity in Ukrainian and Polish Contemporary Theatre by Oksana Dudko
- Performances at a Symposium: “Theatre as a Laboratory for Community Interaction” at Odin Teatret, Holstebro, Denmark, May, 2014 by Seth Baumrin
- Songs of Lear by the Polish Song of the Goat Theatre by Lauren Dubowski
- Silence, Shakespeare and the Art of Taking Sides, Report from Barcelona by Maria M. Delgado
- Little Theatres and Small Casts: Madrid Stage in October 2014 by Phyllis Zatlin
- Gobrowicz’s and Ronconi’s Pornography without Scandal by Daniele Vianello
- Majster a Margaréta in Teatro Tatro, Slovakia by Miroslav Ballay
- Remnants of the Welfare State: A Community of Humans and Other Animals on the Main Stage of the Finnish National Theatre by Outi Lahtinen
- Mnouchkine’s Macbeth at the Cartoucherie by Marvin Carlson
- Awantura Warszawska and History in the Making: Michał Zadara’s Docudrama, Warsaw Uprising Museum, August, 2011 by Krystyna Illakowicz and Chris Rzonca
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center:
Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications
Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director
©2015 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
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