Polish Theatre Ireland New Play ‘Scent of Chocolate’

Coming up in September, Polish Theatre Ireland present their first play of the year Scent of Chocolate by contemporary award winning playwright Radoslaw Paczocha and directed by PTI’s Artistic Director Anna Wolf.

PTI are having a fundraiser in The Gin Palace on Middle Abbey Street, Dublin 1 on Wednesday 1st September from 8pm and would welcome anyone who would like to come along and support the evening. The event  has been funded solely by the performers and members of the theatre company so far with kind help from Focus Theatre and Underground Dance School and the LAB in the form of free rehearsal spaces.

The performances will start with preview show in Focus Theatre on Pembroke  Place Dublin 2 (off Leeson Street) on 27th September. The play will run until 2nd October with performances in both English and Polish.

The Fundraiser in Gin Palace will be held in Back to School theme (it is 1st September after all!) So get on your back to school gear and we will see you there. Below is more information on the play Scent of Chocolate.

Rehearsals of Polish Theatre Ireland's play Scent of Chocolate

Enter into 13 year-old Misza’s world where elephants are gods and chocolate reigns supreme. Join him and his sisters as they tackle the broken family left them by their emigrant mother. Experience the effects of separation, distance and the imagination of a boy living in his own world on a small family unit and we watch as the lines of communication between them fall further apart in this heart-warming, surreal drama.

Scent of Chocolate is written by award winning contemporary playwright Radoslaw Paczocha and written originally for radio, this translation and adaptation by director Anna Wolf in her début play for Polish Theatre Ireland is a unique theatrical experience that will transport audiences into an abstract world.

“Paczocha’s text is not only the successful attempt of fighting with difficult reality, but it is also a proof of author’s excellent technical skills in building the course of events, dialogues and theatrical metaphor” Gazeta Wyborcza – Trojmiasto

at work in the studio

My good friend Mick Berry came into the studio recently to take some pictures and here’s the outcome:

at work on christchurch

playing with pastels

Last week in Portugal I picked up some pastels and for the first time in a few years began playing with them in sketches again. Conte crayon is a much preferred medium of mine, as it is smoother and allows for more definition, but the pastel chalks can get some nice results, these are a few examples of the first sketches made over the weekend, with view to translate these onto larger format and experiment with adding ink.

tripping across the sky

tomorrow morning, ash cloud permitting i will fly across the sea to Portugal to the town of Nazaré for a painting and drawing and relaxing old time away from the hubbub and maddness of Dublin.

While there I will be realising quite a few projects, the first will be the beginning of the Sneachta series of paintings which will be exhibited in the Signal Arts Centre in January 2010. More to come on that.

For now I leave you with some pictures of latest adventures.

All the best

Helen

playing with portraits

playing with the mac book’s built in camera and low light on photobooth can produce some interesting images

lighting up

Self Portrait. Photograph

looking down

dark negative

postcard

metamorphosising

People Sketching in March 2010

Some samples from my March 2010 sketch book… getting back into the exercise regime of sketching people again and having fun with pencils

quick sketch of the singing man

Shauna Sleeping

listening to music

the nature of nature?

“What do I do with my regalia? My history? What do I do with who I am?” Chinua Achebe

New beginning, time to build, create and then destroy this new regalia. Is that the duty of the human? Create and Destroy?

Destroy to create, create to destroy

Born to die, die to cause rebirth

Circular, never ending process of ending and beginning again…

the nature of nature?

excersising the imagination

the spring has come at last. the reawakening of the senses has begun, the light sits on the surroundings in a different way, and the green begins to come back into the landscape. the eyes open wider, the ears prick up, the head seeks out nourishment as does the body. the winter sloth and depression has finally lifted and now the engine is rolling.

i wonder if ideas get better during these spring hope moments compared to winter darkness?

coombe cottage has sprung into being recently, it has been bubbling since we began to inhabit this wonderfully peculiar space. from day one much of our interaction with the cottage has been in a playful way. its architecture lends itself to it.  as you enter the cottage facing you is a white ladder which leads almost in bunkbed style up to a mezzanine bedroom with a glass sheet reflecting the roof lights. there are skylights above, letting in the daylight. a projector screen rolls out from below the bed, leading to the left of the cottage where an exposed brick chimney of yellow ochre, burnt and raw sienna, and a tinge of naples yellow in the brick. around the open fire at the bottom the colour shades into a dark raw umber with few features visible from the door. but inside a hearth, in an old cradle fashion, sits there in wait of logs and turf to be set alight. if i had all night i would talk on about the potential of this place as a space for performance, but it must be shown. so… what will follow intermittently on this blog will be the results of the possibilities of this space in the coombe dublin 8.

declan and i have been enjoying the space for what it offers, both as a living space, and a space wherein artistic activities are ripened. we are currently working on a project that questions why people want to live together, and the processes and stages they go through trying to make it work. will it work? won’t it? the anxious questions we all place on relationships. personally i don’t like to think that far in the future about any situation, for it is my belief that it is all temporary. there is no eternal apart from the moment you are in, it is the only constant. we are playing, improvising, reading poems, writing songs, writing speeches, drawing portraits, caricatures, playing the ukelele, guitar, knitting, filming, photographing, whatever medium necessary, the ideas that live within us. it has reawoken a sense of play in me that i felt had waned slightly. the process of making, doing, writing and playing is invigorating.

Now some odds and sods of images i have encountered and conjured recently. all photos from a little period of reawakening.

an experiment with aim in a darts game in dingle

rolling waves in Dún Caoin in aice le Daingean

colourful caolan

sleeping man

the nature of applying for funding in the arts in times of recession

as i sit here and think about (and have to write about)  why we do what we do for the arts, all to get the money, that money which i am very glad is still out there … somewhere… i can’t help reminisce of the times when it was abundant, when the arts where known to be of value (only a year or so ago).

yet now, as the world is changing and the plug has been pulled, we whirl down a giant drain together, hoping the stopper will be put back in before all the water is gone. to stay in the bath we must provide evidence of our worth, the worth of our activity, the worth of art… and so I thought of this poem by W.B Yeats…

To A Wealthy Man Who Promised A Second Subscription To The Dublin Municipal Gallery If It Were Proved The People Wanted Pictures

By William Butler Yeats

You gave, but will not give again

Until enough of paudeen’s pence

By Biddy’s halfpennies have lain

To be ‘some sort of evidence’,

Before you’ll put your guineas down,

That things it were a pride to give

Are what the blind and ignorant town

Imagines best to make it thrive.

What cared Duke Ercole, that bid

His mummers to the market-place,

What th’ onion-sellers thought or did

So that his plautus set the pace

For the Italian comedies?

And Guidobaldo, when he made

That grammar school of courtesies

Where wit and beauty learned their trade

Upon Urbino’s windy hill,

Had sent no runners to and fro

That he might learn the shepherds’ will

And when they drove out Cosimo,

Indifferent how the rancour ran,

He gave the hours they had set free

To Michelozzo’s latest plan

For the San Marco Library,

Whence turbulent Italy should draw

Delight in Art whose end is peace,

In logic and in natural law

By sucking at the dugs of Greece.

Your open hand but shows our loss,

For he knew better how to live.

Let paudeens play at pitch and toss,

Look up in the sun’s eye and give

What the exultant heart calls good

That some new day may breed the best

Because you gave, not what they would,

But the right twigs for an eagle’s nest!

People’s Art in St Stephen’s Green

day one of People’s art is over and day two remains. pics will be uploaded shortly.