Paul Bargetto

Paul Bargetto

Paul Bargetto is an international theater director and festival curator.  He has lived and worked between New York City and numerous European countries including Poland, Romania, Germany, and Turkey for the past fifteen years.  He is currently making work with his new company Teatr Trans-Atlantyk in Warsaw.  He founded the theater company East River Commedia (1998-2010) and the Undergroundzero Festival (2007 -2014).  He created his workshop for actors, The Flying Sandbox, in 2004 and has presented it in numerous incarnations in New York City and Internationally.  In 2005 he helped to found the League of Independent Theater, an advocacy organization for independent theater in New York City.  He holds an MFA from Columbia University in Directing and B.A. in Drama from San Francisco State University.  In addition to his work in the theater, Paul is a passionate amateur photographer.

Recent directing credits include Album Karla Hockera with Teatr Trans-Atlantyk at Instytut Teatralny in Warsaw,  Laknienie/Hunger/Foame a conceptual staged reading and feast with the Theatre of the 8th Day and at the 2014 Temps D’ Image Festival in Cluj, The Rainbow Vacuum Cleaner Project, with Teatr Trans-Atlantyk,  The Gospel of Saint Matthew after Pasolini with The Living Theatre, A Couple of Poor, Polish-Speaking Romanians by Dorota Maslowska at the Abrons Arts Center, AutoMotive, an original dramatic exploration of the American experience of the automobile at PS 122, Auto da Fe, by Masataka Matsuda with International WOW at Baruch Performing Arts Center, Crumble, Lay Me Down Justin Timberlake by Sheila Callaghan at the Theater Bielefeld in Germany, Necessary Monsters at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, The Magnificent Cuckold at the Connelly Theater in New York, The Jamal Lullabies at Collective Unconscious, The Taming of the Shrew and Serenada si Vulpe Filosof at the National Theater of Constanta in Romania, Serenade & Philosopher Fox at Collective: Unconscious, Philosopher Fox at the Malta International Festival in Poznan, Poland, Striptease & Out at Sea at La MaMa ETC, A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Riverside Church, and Hecuba in Assos, Turkey.

Paul Bargetto (1969, San Jose, United States) creates performances, photos and conceptual artworks. By contesting the division between the realm of memory and the realm of experience, Bargetto wants to amplify the astonishment of the spectator by creating compositions or settings that generate tranquil poetic images that leave traces and balances on the edge of recognition and alienation.

His collected, altered and own performances are being confronted as aesthetically resilient, thematically interrelated material for memory and projection. The possible seems true and the truth exists, but it has many faces, as Hanna Arendt cites from Franz Kafka. By applying a poetic and often metaphorical language, he finds that movement reveals an inherent awkwardness, a humor that echoes our own vulnerabilities. The artist also considers movement as a metaphor for the ever-seeking man who experiences a continuous loss.

His works appear as dreamlike images in which fiction and reality meet, well-known tropes merge, meanings shift, past and present fuse. Time and memory always play a key role. By questioning the concept of movement, he absorbs the tradition of remembrance art into daily practice. This personal follow-up and revival of a past tradition is important as an act of meditation.

His works isolate the movements of humans and/or objects. By doing so, new sequences are created which reveal an inseparable relationship between motion and sound. Paul Bargetto currently lives and works in Warszawa.