JOURNAL
September 2011 – A Note from Joshua Pohja, TDC Artistic Director
Welcome to The Duende Collective’s fundraising page for our upcoming production of Aeschylus’ The Persians. The first surviving play in recorded history adapted by esteemed playwright Robert Auletta.
The Persians captivated me the moment I witnessed Auletta’s version at The Mark Taper Forum in 1993. It was presented during the first televised war of my lifetime, The Persian Gulf War. A war I skipped a day of high school to watch live on CNN. A war that has dominated the news of my lifetime growing in magnitude since the days in the Post 9/11 age. Its theme ever present and relevant as history reveals and repeats itself.
Aeschylus fought in the Greek/Persian Wars writing this play 10 years later. It humanized the Persian perspective galvanizing an audience of Greeks for better and for worse. What was important about Aeschylus’ composition is that it gave no definitive answers, but raised important questions. Who is the enemy? What does the enemy feel? What is tyranny? Where does the core of tyranny live? What if it was us? It was a brave act for Aeschylus to write and equally as brave for the actors and audience to perform and witness.
Robert Auletta’s adaptation is set in a mix of the past, current and potential future. This adaptation was written before 9/11 and grows with fierce potency with each passing news day. It is a vital piece of poetry and a labor of love to bring to you.
I am equally as grateful for this talented company of actors who have spent months training in the Viewpoints Method and mining this dense text on early Saturday mornings. These artists commitment and courage astound and inspire me.
In lieu, of a Q&A session please feel free to e-mail me or the actors comments, afterthoughts, questions, revelations and criticism or for any actor related contact information at josh@duendecollective.com.
Thank you for supporting us. We truly appreciate you.
Joshua Pohja
Director, Artistic Director
The Duende Collective
August 2011 – A Note from Joshua Pohja, TDC Artistic Director
We are THE DUENDE COLLECTIVE. We explore classic drama and merge the art of dance, music and spoken word to form a cohesive theatrical experience for the audience’s total being. We hope you join in and attend our inaugural season of classic and new works in 2009. We have an exciting and challening year ahead of us! We are committed to thoroughly training our Artists through innovative pre-rehearsal workshops in preparations for our mainstage productions. We use no curtains, and when you enter the space the show will, most likely, have already begun. We look forward to surprising you all season long as we develop our inaugural season after our succesful WORKS/SHOPS Reading Series of THE PERSIANS at the Shakespeare Festival LA and The Music Center, Los Angeles.
My Co-Founder, Adrian Rieder and I collaborated and trained in Viewpoints with Anne Bogart and the SITI Company. It was a pivitol turn in our outlook as artists and friends. I’ve since expanded my awareness of the Viewpoints in daily life which fed me a fresh vocabulary to be a better artist everyday than I was each day before. Even when I wasn’t working. This excitement led me to approach Adrian about building a company with this momentum. A disciplined, courageous collective group of artists willing to investigate storytelling with great profundity. Adrian was game, and here is where our story begins…
Our Inaugural Season begins with Aeschylus’ THE PERSIANS. An extraordinarily modern adaptation humanizing the Iraqi perspective of the Gulf Wars. THE PERSIANS is the earliest of Aeschylus’ surviving plays. The play is set in Persia at the court of the mother of King Xerxes I leader of the expedition against Greece who awaits word of her sons return from the battlefield. A messenger appears and tells them Xerxes survived, but the Persians have lost. Finally, we witness the arrival of Xerxes who has brought about the downfall of his father’s empire with unbridled hubris. It’s about family and unnecessary wars — wars guided by arrogance, greed and honor.
Secondly, we have a staged reading of my new play, POTTERS FIELD. A play about the lives of anonymous people, and the dreams they had when they were alive. I am thrilled to share this labor of love with you. We look forward to presenting this to you as we begin to enter into our WORKS/SHOPS program.
Next, we have a triple threat. Clifford Odet’s GOLDEN BOY, Eugene O’ Neill’s LONG DAYS JOURNEY INTO NIGHT and William Shakespeare’s HENRY V. We will invite special guest artists to collaborate with us as we re-imagine the classics with innovative table reads.
Finally, as we WORK/SHOPS through the season. We will present a final task. 60 plays in 60 minutes. A sewing together of the fabric of theatrical Open Viewpoints discovered through the year.
We have many exciting plans for our upcoming season, and I look forward to sharing them all with you! We appreciate any contribution you can make to our developing company. Come to a workshop, check out a show, sneak into a reading. We want to be around friends and patrons who love great storytelling. Thank you for your support. – JP