1st International Theatre Festival "The City"

Teatr Modjeska, Legnica, Poland
Jacek Glomb, Artistic Director

In the summer of 2005, Lit Moon artistic director John Blondell met Jacek Glomb, artistic director of Teatr Modjeska of Legnica, Poland, at the Shakespearean Festival in Gdansk. It was a "blind date" of sorts.

Jerzy Limon, President of the Gdansk Theatre Foundation, had recommended that the two meet, and thus commenced one of the most intense and active periods in Lit Moon’s history. The two immediately hit it off, and Teatr Modjeska was invited to participate in the 2006 Lit Moon World Shakespeare Festival

Before Teatr Modjeska’s visit to Santa Barbara, however, Jacek Glomb invited Lit Moon to come Legnica following Lit Moon’s August appearance at the Gdansk Shakespearean Festival.

Then in October, Teatr Modjeska – all 27 of them – descended on Santa Barbara. Their magnificent production of Othello filled the Lobero to bursting – occupying the cozy confines of the Lobero stage were audience and performance both, including a mammoth ship structure with working sails, creaking boards, and upon which was staged a riveting production of unparalleled intensity and power.

Now, but a year and a half since first meeting, Lit Moon and Teatr Modjeska join forces again for a truly one-of-a-kind theatrical event. Sponsored by Teatr Modjeska, and the brainchild of Jacek Glomb, the 1st International Theatre Festival "The City" will be presented in Legnica September 13-16, 2007.

Lit Moon is proud and honored to be invited to this event – the first site-specific theatre festival in the world.

For this festival, eight theatre companies from Europe and the United States have been invited to create world premiere performances for some of Legnica’s atmospheric non-theatrical venues, including an old factory hall, a 13th century church, an old market, and the derelict theatre space of Legnica’s former Jewish Theatre, among others.

In the words of Jacek Glomb, the purpose of the festival is to: disseminate the value of site-specific productions around the world; reclaim neglected buildings in Legnica and inspire their renewed use; and promote the city and region. This will be the first such festival in the world.

In January, representatives of the invited theatres descended on Legnica for a series of meetings where they chose the sites that they will create a new work for. The theatres will rehearse their pieces away from the sites, and then one week before the festival the companies will travel to Legnica to finalize the productions and "write them into" the assigned venues.

Lit Moon will be creating a piece about love and loss in an abandoned discotheque that has occupied the Summer Theatre in the City Park for decades. Using Nikolai Gogol’s The Wedding as inspiration, the production will be a grotesquely comic examination of the erotic misadventures leading up to a wedding. The production will use all facets of the discotheque, including lighting, sound, bars, and balcony areas to create a piece that sparkles with Lit Moon’s signature theatricality, and bursts with the energy that can come from creating theatre for "found" spaces.

About Teatr Modjeska and
"The City" Festival

In the words of Jacek Glomb:

We want to meet you in the theatre whose stage is the city. Our theatre takes over various spaces within the city – be it an old factory hall, a ruined cinema, a run-down theatre, a church, or a Renaissance courtyard.

Our performances bring these run-down spaces back to life, often saving them from demolition.

Thus the theatre exceeds borders of artificiality and becomes more socially oriented, it breaks off from being exclusively for entertainment and helps develop a theatre where social dialogue is important.

Such theatre shapes the picture of a place where we live. It builds a civic society aware of history and tradition and conscious of its place in the contemporary world.

Before World War II, there were six buildings used for theatre in Legnica. They were visited by thousands of citizens. Since there was no television, everybody attended theatrical shows.

Today, most of the places are in ruin or neglect, but our theatre makes frequent use of them, and so reclaims them for the people of our town.

Our point is not playing in strange places, not the outdoors performances popular in Western Europe, but the conscious choice of a place to perform something made for that space.

We want to, we choose to, and we invited our invited guests to, "mark the space of performance" by the absolute relation of a chosen place with a story being told.

In this attitude, out of the idea of "true stories shown in real places," we have created the most pro-urban theatre in Poland.

Now, we would like to invite you here – theatres from around the world – and together create the most pro-urban theatrical festival in the world!

Invited Companies

Double Edge Theatre (The Farm), Ashfield, Massachusetts
New Baths Theatre, Krakow, Poland
Basement Theatre, Tbilisi, Georgia
Stalker Teatro, Turin, Italy
Theatre.doc, Moscow, Russia
Teatr Modjeska, Legnica, Poland
Mouth to Mouth, Poznan, Poland

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