Saturday, September 28, 2019
7:30 p.m.

Bohemian National Hall
321 East 73rd Street
New York, NY 10021
FREE and open to the public.
Seats are limited, on first come, first served basis.
Reserve your seatonline at eventbrite.
The production will be performed in Polish with English subtitles.

There will be an additional performance on September 27th @ 8PM at the Jersey City Theater Center,
Merseles Studios, 339 Newark Ave., Jersey City, NJ, 07302
FREE with RSVP

“Piotr Borowski could be considered the consummate Polish experimental theatre director, one who physically connects Grotowski and Gardzienice in that he worked long-term with both.” – Paul Allain

The Polish Cultural Institute New York is pleased to announce “Truth”, conceived and directed by Piotr Borowski and performed by Studium Teatralne. Longtime collaborator of Polish director and theorist Jerzy Grotowski, Piotr Borowski returns to New York with this performance about the absence of the sacred at the heart of contemporary Europe. Drawing on the ecumenical councils and Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor from The Brothers Karamazov, Truth interrogates the sources of our cultural traditions, and through physical theater renowned for its tremendous precision presents a stage preoccupied with the struggle for knowledge and invention, with aggression, the survival instinct, envy, insatiability and with a usurpation that claims a monopoly on the truth.

Director Piotr Borowski worked with Jerzy Grotowski’s Laboratorium Theatre in the 1970s and was later active in Grotowski’s Workcenter in Pontedera, Italy. He co-founded the noted experimental theater Gardzienice, and in the mid-1990s founded the independent ensemble theater Studium Teatralne in Warsaw. Since the beginning, Studium Teatralne has operated as an independent theater company in the tradition of Grotowski and physical theater, exercising freedom of association and aiming to deepen and spread artistic truth, with an emphasis on reaching the young generation. Studium Teatralne’s numerous works include “The North” (1998), “Henryk Hamlet Hospital” (2006), and “The King of Hearts is Off Again” (2008), a play about the Warsaw Ghetto based on a book by Hanna Krall, which appeared at La Mama Theatre in 2014.
“I met Grotowski in 1975 and later worked with him for seven years in Pontedera, Italy….It’s hard to define what profit I took from his work. In his speeches and texts Grotowski always encouraged everyone to go their own way, to find their own technique, and to do it with their whole existence. He was always trying to respond to the spirit of his time. Like Grotowski I ask questions about the meaning of what I am doing, about its techniques, about my needs and the ethic of it all. They’re the same questions Grotowski asked, only the time is different, because my time is the present.” – Piotr Borowski

The Rehearsal for Truth Theater Festival, honoring Vaclav Havel, provides a platform for artists from the Central Europe to perform in New York City. The Rehearsal for Truth festival is organized by the Vaclav Havel Library Foundation and the Bohemian Benevolent & Literary Association, in partnership with Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Slovak cultural institutes and performing arts institutions, to highlight Havel’s legacy as a playwright through live performances, panel discussions, exhibitions and an award ceremony.

The event is organized by The Vaclav Havel Library Foundation, the Bohemian Benevolent & Literary Association and the Jersey City Theater Center in partnership with The Polish Cultural Institute in New York. It is co-financed by the City of Warsaw.

The performance will be followed up by a talkback with the cast conducted by Krystyna Lipinska Illakowicz, lecturer at the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures, Yale University, and an afterparty reception at Bohemian National Hall’s Ballroom Bar.

Co-financed by the City of Warsaw.