Born in Poland, lives and works in London and Venice. Podrazik’s involvement in music has been wide-ranging and varied. In 1975 he enrolled to study composition at the Musik Konservatorium in Poland. The course of study was interrupted when in 1976 Podrazik left Poland for Frankfurt Germany. Soon he formed the group “Ominous Mirage” a free jazz ensemble performing Podrazik’s compositions, himself on saxophone. In the early ‘80 his musical collaboration included the establishing of the now famous “English Speaking Theatre” in Frankfurt.

In 1984 Podrazik moved to London and embarked on an extensive study of Schönberg’s Harmonielehre, which lead him on a journey of no return to computer programming and algorithmic composition. This accumulated knowledge and dexterity has enabled Podrazik to writing compositions for contemporary classical music, scores for film and the theatre.

Since 1991 Podrazik has conducted an extended research into algorithmic composition and computer music. The first step was to understand the creative process and methodology well enough to reproduce it as an algorithm that provides the composer with an unlimited scope for structural manipulation and tools to generate a series of variants and transformations.

The outcome of Podrazik’s work is the MRAC (Music Research and Composition) software. Here the computer interacts with compositional thought and imagination and explores regions we do not know – “what we know is far less important than what we do not know”. In 1996 the software was available to the music research community and MRAC Library algorithms became part of Symbolic Composer a composition software written in Common Lisp language, developed by Peter Stone. Since 2006 MRAC Library has added over 250 new algorithms to Symbolic Composer.

“The main focus of the MRAC Library is to give the contemporary composer support for the almost impossible tasks in composing music today – where there are no rules and the limit is your own imagination as well as the processing power of the CPU processor. In the world of the infinite and random possibilities the library – especially for a creative and daring mind – tries to build some kind of order to the world for the contemporary composer and thinker and maybe even help to picture her/his own language of composition.”

MRAC Publishing

Promo 1995

Production Duncan Ward
Editor Rudi Holzapfel
© 1995 Filmakers Limited

Read more about Malcolm McLaren

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Show Reel

[flashvideo file=valentino.mov /]

Play by Christian Grabbe.

Full length play from the Eyeplugin Archives

Adapted & Directed by Duncan Ward
© 1997 Filmakers Limited

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Play by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz

Full length play from the Eyeplugin Archives

“There is no idea, no fact, which could not be vulgarised and presented in a ludicrous light.” – Dostoevsky

“customer must be satisfied. Misunderstandings are ruled out.” – Witkacy’s motto

Adapted & Directed by Duncan Ward
Produced by Duncan Ward & Richard Strange
Music by Janusz Podrazik
Music Production: MRAC Publishing Limited
Lighting & Set Design by Jo Manser
Costumes by David Whiteing
A Found Theatre Company Production
© 1998 Filmakers Limited

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Theatre (London 2000)

Full length play from the Eyeplugin Archives

Conceived & Directed by Duncan Ward
Produced by Duncan Ward & Rupert Skinner
Music by Janusz Podrazik
Set design by James Bain-Smith
Sound by Byfergus O’Hare
Music Production: MRAC Publishing Limited
Costumes by Karen Concannon & Claire Hosegood
Special Propes Jemma Dickens
Assistant Director Charlotte Gwinner
Stage Manager Lara Denyer
Production Co-Ordinator Felicity Coupland
A Found Theatre Company Production
© 2000 Filmakers Limited

Cast

Katrine Boorman
Charles Cartmell
Camilla Heaney
Alex Marr
Roddy Maude-Roxby
Chris New
Maria Papageorgiou
Rupert Procter
Tanya Roberts
Richard Strange
Duncan Ward
Singer Helena Beren-Bau

The return of shockheaded theatre

Decades before Sarah Kane and Irvine Welsh, Antonin Artaud created the Theatre of Cruelty. Has the time come for a revival?

By Dominic Cavendish

21 June 2000

For some who has been described as one of the most important theatrical thinkers of the 20th century, Antonin Artaud has a surprisingly low profile. His writing, it is true, remains in print, some 52 years after his death; his best-known work, The Theatre and Its Double, which contains the two manifestos outlining his ideas for a Theatre of Cruelty, isn’t hard to acquire. It’s rare, though, to find Artaud’s theories being acted out and tested or even to see his turbulent, unhappy life dramatised.

His outpourings have been widely acknowledged as having influenced some of the greats of the postwar era: Jean Genet, Jean-Louis Barrault, Arthur Adamov, Fernando Arrabal and Peter Brook among them. But whereas Brook partly made his name by staging a Theatre of Cruelty festival at Lamda in 1964, you’re unlikely to see today’s aspiring British directors staking so immediate a claim to Artaud’s legacy.

Step forward Duncan Ward, an independent film-maker and avant-garde theatre pioneer who has taken it upon himself to whip our reverence back into shape. In a sidestreet near Spitalfields Market, where industrial dereliction collides with accelerating gentrification, he has installed a temporary performance space in a former fabric manufacturers to present a work entitled Last Night in the Life of Antonin Artaud. Instead of offering up precise details about the life, Ward exhilaratingly strives to convey the essence of Artaud’s art, using biographical material as he sees fit. The lines are all Artaud’s but the pattern in which they are arranged is an intuitive elaboration on the part of his latterday disciple.

Artaud died on 4 March 1948, at the age of 51, in an asylum at Ivry, on the outskirts of Paris France where he had been a voluntary patient for two years following almost a decade of confinement at various sanatoriums. By notionally setting Last Night in the Ivry Asylum, Ward enables himself to adopt an appropriately hallucinogenic, surrealistic approach to the mise-en-scène.

Artaud once argued with typical intensity that “The theatre cannot become itself again until it provides the audience with the truthful distillations of dreams where its taste for crime, its erotic obsessions, its savageness, its fantasies, its utopian sense of life and objects, even its cannibalism, pour out on a level that is not counterfeit and illusory, but internal.” In the spartan white cell designed by James Bain Smith, the distilled dreams of the dying writer pour out in a nightmarish unravelling of the soul.

Rupert Procter’s feverish Artaud, who possesses the gaunt nobility of the bohemian in his youth, when he was an attractive stage and screen actor, is assaulted on all sides by grotesque figures. There are three versions of Antonin’s mother, tarted up in black Fifties cocktail dresses, who jeer and tear at each other, rebuking themselves for his lifelong dependence on drugs and oscillating between displays of maternal sympathy and cool contempt. A genial doctor hovers, anxious to conduct electric shock treatment. There’s a trio of malevolent, identikit generals who repeatedly burst in and attack Artaud’s agent whenever he suggests editing his client’s words.

Then there are the words themselves – heaps of them, culled from anguished letters sticky with paranoia and accusation, from angry manifestos and from the crude, rude four-page play, A Spurt of Blood (during which a bawd bites God on the wrist so that “a huge spurt of blood slashes across the stage”).

Ward’s achievement is to present a great deal of written material while at the same time transfixing you with startling, stylised movement and crepuscular tableaux – the emphasis of the show remains in keeping with Artaud’s wish for “an end to the subjugation of the theatre to the text.”

“Artaud wanted to transport the audience into an altered state of mind,” Ward explains. “It’s not a literary journey. Theatre of Cruelty is an attractive phrase to use, but what he intended was a general idea of theatre as a harsh, real experience. He wanted you to be shocked, to feel as though you’d actually lived the performance rather than witnessed it.” Ward recognises that because Artaud enjoyed such little success in his lifetime – he only staged a handful of productions – there is no way his work can ever be presented as a faithful reproduction. The aim, though, is to push forward his spirit of radical inquiry.

“What’s remarkable is how neglected he is now,” he says. “Most Sixties students were conversant with him and that familarity has vanished as commercial theatre has prevailed. All one can do is try and restate his theories in such a way as to inspire a new generation.” One can’t help wishing him luck.

To 30 June. 1a Fleur de Lis Street, London, E1 (020- 7247 0773)

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Film Clip

Director & Produce: Duncan Ward
Actress: Rachel Weisz
Photography: John Mathieson
Music: Janusz Podrazik
Editing: Duncan Ward and Anabel Turner
Sound: Ken Lee and Nigel Heath
Music Production: MRAC Publishing Limited
© 1995 Filmakers Limited

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Documentary (UK 1984)

A Film by Duncan Ward, Nico Roeg Jr. and Tom Ward
© 1984 Filmakers Limited

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Documentary (UK, 1997)

Film Clip from the Eyeplugin Archives

Director Duncan Ward
Journey concept and art sites by Gabriella Cardazzo & Richard Demarco OBE
Producer Duncan Ward and Gabriella Cardazzo
Photography Duncan Ward & Jeremy Briggs
Music Janusz Podrazik
Sound Recordist Ken Lee
Music Production MRAC Publishing Limited
Assisted Annabel Turner
© 1997 Filmakers Limited

Screenings:

GUGGENHEIM PUBBLIC, MUSEO I GUGGENHEIM, VENEZIA
ATVIROS LIETUVOS FONDO NAMAI, VILNIUS, LITUANIA
CENTRUM SZTUKI WSPOLCZESNEJ, VARSAVIA, POLONIA
SONY HOUSE, LONDON, UK (PRIVATE SCREENING)
VIDEOTECA PASINETTI, COMUNE DI VENEZIA, ITALIA

Art imitates life it is said and life is a journey.

This film takes us on an extraordinary visual journey towards a definition of meaning and power of space in art.

Sometimes that space may be a void waiting for an imagination to find peace in its almost holy purity, as in the remarkable spaces of the Panza di Biumo collection in Varese, Italy. At the other extreme the film proposes that lessons in space contained in great art have prepared us ( since the painted frescoes of Giotto, the explicitly numerous early Christian churches and even earlier stone circles) to react to such vast totems of modern technology as the very large array of satellite tracking dishes in Arizona. The soundtrack plays over visual ideas like a fugue, as fleeting statements, fragments, themselves layered in poetic juxtaposition……the film is an eclectic textile woven of ideas, sounds and images constantly connecting, layering, shifting their colours as richly as a seventeenth century Genoa velvet.

Tarkovsky the great film director memorably called the art of cinema “Sculpting in Time”. Through the juxtaposition of different spaces, cultures and works of art, in Italy, Poland, Arizona, India, Scotland and England, Duncan Ward takes us on a journey of comparison from the Ganges to the Western Isles in search of connections between the art of the distant past and that of the present. Film, the medium which has come closest to portraying the quality of memory, is used here to dissolve not only the time barrier between art of different centuries but finds analogies in the way that western eyes see, for example, the scenes ( dream-like in their unfamiliarity ) of the boatman who takes bodies to be burned at Varranasse and the colours and faces in a fresco by Fra Angelico.

From the monument that marks the death place of a witch ( she who, as Banquo says in Macbeth “…can look into the seeds of time and see which grain will grow and which will not” ), to the formal charred olive tree stumps installed in the garden of Guilano Gori at Celle, Italy. From the theatrical living bas-reliefs of Tadeusz Kantor and his troupe in Warsaw to Dan Flavin’s flickering tubes of fluorescent light illuminating white corridors and empty halls, this hypnotic film takes us into a space which affirms the scared and redeeming qualities of art.”

© 1997 Patrick Kinmonth

DVD available

Read more about ‘The Demarco Archives’

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Documentary (UK, 1991)

Full length from the Eyeplugin Archives

Director Duncan Ward
Producer Duncan Ward & Gabriella Cardazzo
Photography John Mathieson
Music Janusz Podrazik
Editing Duncan Ward and Anabel Turner
Sound Ken Lee and Nigel Heath
Music Production MRAC Publishing Limited
© 1991 Filmakers Limited

Screenings:

CENTRUM SZTUKI WSPOLCZESNEJ, VARSAVIA
ESTONIAN FILMMAKERS UNION, TALLINN, ESTONIA
MISSING FILM FESTIVAL, GENOVA
MALMO KUNSTHALLE, MALMO, SVEZIA
ISTITUTO POLACCO, ROMA
KINO GALERIA, RIGA, LETTONIA
ISTITUTO POLACCO, LONDRA
MUZEUM GORNOSLASKIE, W, BYTOM, POLONIA
VIDEOTECA PASINETTI, COMUNE DI VENEZIA, ITALIA

DVD available

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Unauthorised copying, hiring, lending, public performance and broadcasting of this record prohibited.