28 July 2011 Krystian Lupa at Taipei Arts Festival

Krystian Lupa – one of the greatest Polish theatre directors – will present his Rodzeństwo (The Siblings) at the Taipei Arts Festival. During the festival, which starts today (July 28th) and will last for four days, the play will be staged four times. It will be performed in Polish with Chinese and English subtitles. A meeting with the director will be held after the last show.

The Siblings is a masterful presentation of the actors’ acting skills under the brilliant direction of Krystian Lupa. Małgorzata Hajewska - Krzysztofik, Agnieszka Mandat and Piotr Skiba create characters which will leave nobody untouched.

The siblings are two sisters and a brother, two actresses and a philosopher, who are all held hostage by the overwhelming tradition of their affluent background. They represent a generation which is repaying long-overdue debts to violated Nature. The sisters pay with neurosis and loneliness, while he - with insanity and obsessive creation. However, the brother’s another return home and confrontation with the sisters reveals new, surprising motives.

Krystian Lupa – a brilliant Polish theatre director, set designer, graphic artist and playwright, as well as adapter, translator and lecturer at the Ludwik Solski State Drama School in Krakow. Before he became involved with the theatre, he studied in the Department of Physics of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. He soon dropped out and passed the entrance exams to the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts. He then studied film directing at the Łódź Film School for two years and then theatre directing at the State Drama School in Krakow (1973-1977). While at university, Lupa met Konrad Swinarski. He was also fascinated by the work of Tadeusz Kantor. He made his debut in 1976, staging Rzeźnia (The Slaughterhouse) by Sławomir Mrożek in the Słowacki Theatre in Krakow. After graduating, he worked at the C.K. Norwid Theatre in Jelenia Góra. Among the foreign prizes won by Krystian Lupa it is worth mentioning the French Union of Critics Award (1999) for Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch, the Austrian Cross of Meriti (2001) and the French Order of the Knight of Culture (2002). In 2008 he received the European Theatre Award and in 2009 he won Paszport Polityki – a special prize for the Creator of Culture given to “masters, teachers of future generations, classics of Polish culture.”

In theatre, Lupa is mostly interested in the relationships between people, which he presents on stage using a subtle psychological play underscoring the complexity of a character’s motivations. He composes his scenes very meticulously and is adept at interpreting moments of silence, as well as consciously and purposefully repeating specific sequences and slowing down the action, experimenting with time in the theatre.

Lupa’s work is a fixture of the Divine Comedy theatre festival, which showcases his plays every year. In 2008, during the first edition of the festival, the artist presented Factory 2, in 2009 he came with Persona. Marylin, and in 2010 we could watch Persona. Ciało. Simone. It is also worth remembering that during the 2nd Conrad Festival the director took part in the Master Classes - Thomas Bernhard: Kalkwerk.