ABOUT EWA

In Brief

Director, performer and teacher, Ewa Czajor worked in theatre in Melbourne and Canberra for more than thirteen years. She grew up in Canberra and was a founding member of Canberra Youth Theatre and the experimental theatre company Fools Gallery. In Melbourne she performed with Arena Theatre Company, then worked for three years as Artistic Director of Student Theatre at Melbourne University.

Ewa was awarded a Director's Development Grant from the Australia Council in 1986. During this time she worked as assistant director with Playworks, the Melbourne Theatre Company and Anthill Theatre, as well as directing a play at La Mama. In 1987 Ewa was appointed a member of the Drama Advisory Panel to the Victorian Ministry for the Arts.

Ewa was murdered in Thailand in January 1988. Her last work as a director was Angry Young Penguins at The Church Theatre. She had a rare ability to create witty and passionate theatre. She was an idealist who believed that the stage held unlimited potential for the imagination, and was able to inspire all those around her with this vision.

All About Ewa

an article written for the Melbourne Age, 19 September 1998 by Joanna Murray-Smith on the occasion of the award's tenth anniversary

She had the intensity and radiance we associate with brilliant people who die young. There always seems to be one or two in each generation in a certain territory - those who stand out by virtue of some indefinable vigour, who act as conduits for the energy of a time and place and who always retain an iconic status and distinct silhouette in the shadows of memory.

Ewa Czajor arrived like comet into the uninspired landscape of student drama at Melbourne University in 1984, a beautiful young woman with thick light-brown hair and vivid brown eyes and an unstoppable felicity. She had won the position of Artistic Director of Student Theatre after co-founding the acclaimed Fools Gallery theatre company in Canberra and a couple of years acting in Melbourne. Ewa seemed too beautiful to be good at anything else, but she had an immediate galvanising ability, with which she collected up those of us with ambitions to write, design, direct or perform for the stage. She tolerated no ordinariness and set about helping us to discover anything at all that was distinctive about ourselves.

Ewa was fiery, energetic and ambitious and she had the great gift of glamorising whatever world she entered. She had an instinctive talent for intimacy, could move into a circle and immediately become a focus of it, but was the prism through which others shone. She had a great sense of mischief, a wicked delight in gossip, a wonderfully black sense of humour but not a shred of cynicism. At a time when the rest of us were desperate to show our credentials by being unimpressed by anything, she was an advertisement for joie de vivre. Ewa not only made us feel as if we had great futures ahead of us, but seemed impatient with us that we did not see it for ourselves. She avoided debunking self-delusions at a time when it would have been easy to do so, instead illuminating any sign of artistic courage in us and signalling it to the world. Her impatience with self-doubt combined with an ecstatic faith in her own and others potential. Her worldliness enhanced rather than intimidated her generosity of spirit. When Ewa directed Ghost Trains at the Guild in 1984, my first play (written with my then lover Ray Gill), it felt more surreal than it did to open a play on Broadway earlier this year.

In 1987, Ewa agreed to direct my first semi-professional play, Angry Young Penguins, about the Ern Malley affair, at the Church Theatre in Melbourne. I learnt a great deal from Ewa. My own "voice" as a writer was shadowy and self-conscious and Ewa, who was quite a few years older than me, seemed a great deal further along in her own creative confidence. I was fascinated by Ewa's understanding of how ideas could translate into physical terms, since her style of direction incorporated a genius for design. I was struggling to understand how to deal with unwieldy intellectual conceits in dramatic language, a problem exacerbated by the factual material the play was based on. While I battled with the need to be true to both the complexity of history and of my own observations about history, Ewa had a pure, uncomplicated instinct for enchantment. She had an innate sense of what lifted or touched human spirits. She was blessed by a condition of perpetual excitement which, when combined with her imagination, was theatrical rocket fuel.

The play was a success and by the end of the season I knew that I was facing my own professional future. Ewa showed me how to look beyond the first horizon of my own imagination. She showed me how real theatre is about preserving the aliveness of what it is to be human from moment to moment, extracting life from theory or language or philosophy. Good theatre is as much about abandoning things as about producing things, about finding the clarity and distillation to make things sing.

After the season ended, Ewa resolved to leave Melbourne for a year or more to study in Europe. She would travel through Thailand and India with her boyfriend Peter Murphy and then continue alone to study with the Gardzinice theatre company in Poland. Ray and I farewelled her in the city before Christmas and left for Erith, the uninhabited Bass Strait island on which I have spent most summers of my life.

In the first few days of January 1988, lying on the pristine beach, I looked up and saw Ray walking towards me along the sand, his face stricken, and I knew that everything was about to change. I put down Richard Ford s The Sportswriter on the sand and looked up into Ray s face. "Ewa s dead" he said.

For days afterwards, our information was limited to the ABC radio news broadcasts or patchy communications with the mainland via radio contact with the lighthouse keepers on the island a mile away from us.

After spending some time in Bangkok and Burma, Peter and Ewa had taken a train up to Chiang Mai, then further north to Mae Hong Son and the village of Soppong. Staying in a backpackers hostel, they were intent on visiting the legendary Tham Lot cave, a large limestone cave with a small river running through it. Tourists would go at twilight to see the change of shift as vast numbers of bats leaving the cave were supplanted by vast numbers of starlings entering it. After becoming cold and tired in the cave, Ewa told Peter that she was walking back to the hostel, a fifteen minute walk along a narrow forest track. Two days later, her body was found behind a small hillock in the bush. She had been strangled and injected with heroin. Ewa was thirty. There was no motive.

For many of us who had been befriended by Ewa and she was a champion of friendship her death was the first death of a peer. And in that way, it would always have had symbolic significance. For a large group of us united, or perhaps fractured -- by grief, her murder triggered some years of collective trauma. I certainly blamed Ewa s death for my long and calamitous break-up with Ray and for a period of illness. I blamed her death, too, for my father s death six months later. During a devastating argument with my father on the island the day after the news came of her death, both of us fragmented with grief, I had told him that I wished he had died instead of Ewa.

For those of us who had lead protected lives, Ewa s death finally allowed us to feel the burden of good-fortune being lifted from us. The shock is no longer volatile, but reappears in odd moments like a cold breeze. The melodrama of surviving that time has dissipated. Her loss feels more real to me now than it did then, and more poignant. Some ten years on, with lives more deeply etched, with marriages and real jobs and children, I suppose I know more about what was denied to Ewa, and what was denied to us by her death.

Ewa was an exuberant, theatrical woman and she would have been one of the great theatre directors of any where, at any time. Our artistic life would have certainly benefited from her honesty and her savoir-faire. I think she would have been one of the great cultural iconoclasts, a provocative independent voice who wouldn t have flinched in challenging the political sycophants, who in every pronouncement would have incited passion in artists and audiences.

Peter Murphy and many of Ewa s friends have had an unending task in keeping her name alive, since she died as a young woman, before having developed a reputation with enough momentum to survive without their vigilance. Those of us who knew her hope that those who did not can give meaning to her life by supporting young artists with similar conviction. A dedicated committee, lead by Peter Murphy, has maintained the Ewa Czajor Award for women directors, which allows young women the opportunity to study abroad, to fulfil the vision that Ewa was denied. This week, the Ewa Czajor Memorial Award is running a symposium for Women Directors.The symposium aims to provide a forum for artistic concerns and leadership issues. A benefit for the Award is to be held at the Malthouse on Sunday, 27th September, featuring the wonderful Sue Ingleton and other comedians, music, food and drinks before the announcement of this year's award winner.