Rehearsal photo showing full cast and main hall of Polish Army Veterans Association of America (S.W.A.P.), Chicago, Illinois (2003)


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Rehearsal photo showing full cast and main hall of Polish Army Veterans Association of America (S.W.A.P.), Chicago, Illinois, 2003
From "Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land," five channels shot on 16 mm film, transferred to video, projected from DVD, 21 minutes 48 seconds per channel, black and white, silent. ©
© Catherine Sullivan

"’Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land’ was a piece that began with my interest in a hostage crisis in Moscow in 2002, when a faction of Chechnyan separatists stormed a theater. (What particularly interested me about that event was that the musical playing in the theater was based on a love and adventure novel about polar aviation and the Russian arctic, and that it had aspirations of being a kind of Broadway spectacle ‘with a Russian soul’. I thought that was painful- that, in Russia where there’s a tradition of theater as spectacle, the aspiration would be toward a Broadway spectacle.)" - Catherine Sullivan ...

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"’Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land’ was a piece that began with my interest in a hostage crisis in Moscow in 2002, when a faction of Chechnyan separatists stormed a theater. (What particularly interested me about that event was that the musical playing in the theater was based on a love and adventure novel about polar aviation and the Russian arctic, and that it had aspirations of being a kind of Broadway spectacle ‘with a Russian soul’. I thought that was painful- that, in Russia where there’s a tradition of theater as spectacle, the aspiration would be toward a Broadway spectacle.)"

- Catherine Sullivan

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