Agnieszka Laska Dancers

premiere

LAMENTATIO

November, 2009

multi-media/dance, music, video
performance premiere

November 18-19-20-21-22 @ 8 pm
     Sunday, Nov. 22 @ 3 pm
     run time: ca. 60 min. (no intermission)

Imago Theatre space
17 SE 8th Ave.
Portland, Oregon 97214      [map]

Agnieszka Laska Dancers (ALD), Danscoreo and Impetus Arts (IA)

Tickets on sale now:
   general: $15 ($20 after Nov. 1)
   discounted: $11 ($15 after Nov. 1)
   all general seating + $1 ticketing fee
online: www.ArtixPdx.com     tel: 800.757.7384

New choreography by ALD and IA Directors, Agnieszka Laska and Curtis Walker, to a new score by ALD Resident Composer, Jackie Gabel composed around excerpts from the Missa pro defunctis - Requiem of Roman Maciejewski, with projected montages by video artist, Takafumi Uehara. Poetry is from "POEMS FROM GUANTANAMO, THE DETAINEES SPEAK," edited by Marc Falkoff, U. of Iowa Press, 2007 and "HERE, BULLET" by Brian Turner, A. James Books, 2005. Performance video footage will be edited/authored to DVD and submitted to international film festivals.

LAMENTATIO is a companion piece to THE FALL '01 - (premiered 09/11/06), a dance-theatre epic about the empire at the precipice of its fall. It focuses on the suicidal Global War Of Terror. LAMENTATIO examines the emotional and physical damage to victims on all sides. As for polemics, LAMENTATIO is a call for re-humanization of all victims. Any veteran and any refugee of any armed conflict from anywhere in the world will be freely admitted to any showing in this premiere run, as well as all disabled persons.

Like THE FALL '01, LAMENTATIO is not a poster piece for the peace movement, but a keening for our collective soul at a time of historical crisis and a document of our collective pain, shame, loss and suffering. THE FALL '01 is perhaps an 'Iliad' for our time... LAMENTATIO possibly an 'Odyssey' - a wending homeward for some, through emotional straits, across seas of grief - likely as much for scholars millennia from now.

all images: Chris Leck LAMENTATIO Premiere Gallery - media, please contact us for high-resolution publicity images
ALDancers@comcast.net

In review:


Agnieszka Laska interview at

Local Choreographer Tackles
Effects of War in Lamentatio
By Rebecca Ragain

  When choreographer Agnieszka Laska gave her husband, composer Jack Gabel, a book of poems written by Guantanamo detainees, she set in motion an artistic project that would consume her life for the next year.      more>>

Lamentatio

photo - David Steck

Some people make dances; others obsess over an idea until they birth a whole stage experience months or years later. Local choreographer Agnieszka Laska would be of the latter persuasion, and her Lamentatio is an big multimedia undertaking, centered on movement and music inspired by "poems of detainees from Guantanamo, soldiers from the Iraq war and mothers of victims from all sides of the global war of terror." She says the 70-minute show features 50 performers onstage at one point or another, while some music comes courtesy of Portland composer Jack Gabel. It's not the first time she's taken on the damage of war, either. Her 2006 multimedia/dance/Web work The Fall of '01, has been screened worldwide.

KELLY CLARKE - Willamette Week       more>>

The eyes will focus on the dancers and multimedia elements, but the excellent Portland composer Jack Gabel's new score will tantalize audiences' ears. A sequel of sorts to the Laska Dancers' previous music-theater-dance-current events piece, the searing The Fall '01, Lamentatio combines voices and cellos (conducted by Keith Clark) in music. It takes as sources revenue figures from the five largest U.S. military contractors, a setting of soldier-poet (and former Oregonian) Brian Turner's "Eulogy," about a soldier's death he witnessed during the second Iraq war, isotope numbers of depleted uranium (used in American weapons that contaminate the area for decades, causing birth defects and cancer), The Odyssey and more. Composers from Bach to Shostakovich have done this kind musical encoding for centuries, and, as with Jack Gabel, have proved that emotional commitment invigorates rather than impedes their musical vision. When audiences complain--too often accurately--that contemporary art doesn't reflect real world, here-and-now concerns (or on the other hand lapses into preachiness or didacticism), it's great to see justified passion transformed into urgent, compelling art, as Gabel and Laska have demonstrated before. Don't miss this American premiere.

BRETT CAMPBELL - Willamette Week       more>>

Performance Top Stories
Portland choreographer's 'Lamentatio'
a serious, ambitious look at war

photo - David Steck
click for more photos by David Steck
August 2 performance Queretaro Mexico

"Lamentatio," by Portland troupe the Agnieszka Laska Dancers, uses movement, music, video and poetry to examine the emotional and physical damage to victims on all sides of the war on terror. War is a serious business. And so Portland choreographer Agnieszka Laska has approached her examination of the war on terror and its human toll with seriousness and ambition.

To craft her latest show, "Lamentatio," inspired by poems of detainees from Guantanamo and soldiers from the Iraq war, she's had her company's resident composer, Jack Gabel, set poems to music; incorporated sections of a requiem by Polish composer Roman Maciejewski and theatrical scenes based on writings by military families and a former Guantanamo camp guard; crafted movement with assistance from Curtis Walker of Impetus Arts; and gathered dozens of dancers, actors and musicians from Portland and Queretaro, Mexico (where they've rehearsed in recent weeks) -- all to present a view of "human reactions under extreme conditions."

MARTY HUGHELY - The Oregonian

...an important event that fans of new music, dance, and anyone interested in the excesses of the Bush regime's so-called War on Terror shouldn't miss...one of the most potent artistic responses to war and state terrorism perpetrated by our government I've ever seen..."

Artistic Response to War, Brett Campbell
Eugene Weekly - Feb. 8, 2007       more>>

"...absolutely beautiful...on one hand...confessional and metaphysical, on the other, full of the fervor of uncertainty ...the inseparable element of contemporary life."

Glos Wielkopolski - Aug. 25, 2007

"...one of the Northwest region's hottest young companies, irreverent, ambitious and mythological. Walking the line between modern and classical, their work is at once rooted in indigenous music, Polish folk skits and formal theater. It's a simple pleasure, pairing live music and dance, but it happens all too infrequently, especially in the age of canned music."

Bravo! - Rachael Carnes
Eugene Weekly - Sept. 22, 2005       more>>