Conference 2/2015

The texts presented in the second

edition of "Conference" are fruits of last
year's activities. They concern, however, our
soonest actions. We suggest that the first
two texts be read as a commentary to
"Wielogos" ("Multivoice"), our performance
which is going to be shown in March on two
festivals, in Toru (March 17th) and in d
(March 28th). The third text is going to be,
we hope, a mental support for the talks and
discussions, which are soon to begin,
concerning this year's "Theatre Village". The
talks and discussions are going to be run,
as usual, within the group taking part in the
Zapusty/Carnival
workshop
and
the
audience
coming
to
see
the
Zapusty/Carnival shows on the 13th of
February.
Wacaw Sobaszek

Ewa Mazgal Wacaw Sobaszek

Aboutthe Multivoice

Joanna Kocemba

A flash of haiku
Zalessie (Belarus) Bochum (Germany) Wgajty (Poland)

A Collage of the Journey

of Emilia Ivanovna Hagelganz

1
2
3

Ewa Mazgal Wacaw Sobaszek

Aboutthe Multivoice
Ewa Mazgal: Inga Iwasiw in an issue of Polityka whose part was dedicated to
Szczecin, called it a city with no identity It was because its inhabitants come mostly
from other places, they feel alienated here and they feel no responsibility for the city. I
admit that I do not agree with the view that the societies of the so called Regained
Lands were worse than the inhabitants of ethnic Poland. What do you think?
Resettlement, mixing, levelling down class differences, is it bad or perhaps good, after
all?
Wacaw Sobaszek: Certainly, a high degree of influxibility is an obstacle for
developing solidarity, responsibility for the place, tradition and community. Besides, in
Poland there still exist false notions and stereotypes, imposed and accepted in the times
of Peoples Republic of Poland.
E.M.: What notions for example?
W.S.: The notion of Polishness, for example. All the time it has been falsified.
Another question, whether interculturalism is doing any better here? One would think that
it might be so. Take the Berlin example, for example, where there is a mixture of
newcomers. In Berlin, there is no xenophobia. The aboriginal inhabitants do not feel
besieged and pushed out to the margins as our writer living in Berlin, Krzysztof
Niewrzda, told us recently in Olsztyn. In Berlin there has always been a tradition of
openness. Even Hitler was afraid to come to Berlin because he feared that in such a
community he would not be able efficiently to implement his sociotechnics. So, how does
the presence of original inhabitants relate to the processes of europeisation, whose part
interculturalism is?
E.M.: Wait, but do we have any aboriginal inhabitants at all?
W.S.: We do. We do have the aborigines of Warmia. Observing them we get the
impression that being in ones own helps to develop an open attitude towards visitors.
And it does not matter whether you are German, Warmian or perhaps Polish, but
whether you stand well on your feet, whether you feel at home. And then I think that it is
a natural thing to have Others as neighbours, to get in touch, to communicate.
E.M.: But how about us, I am talking about people like me, whose grandparents
came to Warmia and Mazury after the war, are we already at home?
W.S.: People, who lived their adulthood in the PRL (Peoples Republic of
Poland)...
E.M.: But PRL finished 25 years ago!
W.S.: Well, yes, but it is still very present. The generation of new Masurians and
Warmians who were born here and grew up in the times of transformation, they have no
complexes, they are at home. Those people are Warmians and Masurians just the same

as the people who lived here before the war. They are in their own.
E.M.: I wonder what role in the shaping of our identity, lets call it Warmian
identity, is played by your theatre. I have known you for years, I have known your
hermitage, but I have no knowledge whatsoever of the neighbouring villages, or their
inhabitants. To me, Wgajty Theatre is an urban outpost among fields and forests. I
come there with friends from Olsztyn, I see people from Warsaw. Your theatre is a
village theatre by name but it is not very rural. On the other hand, you have realized
projects which were lets say ritual, like going around with the Schemmel. Is there such a
thing as folk culture anymore? Not a reconstruction of ritual, but ritual practice.
W.S.: In Dziadwek, at the end of the eighties, the habit of Easter carolling was
dying out. We took it over. It was a place which people called a dying village. The young
people didnt want to till the soil and were leaving the village, so that only old people
stayed. We worked there with the intention to prevent that at least partly. And it turned
out that the sense of selfvalue of those abandoned people raised. They started to be
more attractive to their families. Relatives started visiting them in the time of Easter. They
were coming from Biaystok and from Suwaki, The village didnt die, after all.
E.M.: So, theatre influences reality?!
W.S.: We were witnesses of different epochs there, Balcerowiczs reform and
transformation. The village survived and still is a village.
E.M.: But the subjects of your performances, at least the ones I have seen,
concern universal issues. Multivoice is a show which one could realize anywhere and
show anyplace. You speak theatre language of the second avantguard, mastered by
academic theatre and thus intelligible.
W.S.: Recently we have been interested in performance studies. This is a
relatively young field, but according to performance studies approach, rituals are exactly
performances, springing out of traditional ground.
E.M.: You mean that performance/ritual is the kind of activity which has a certain
scheme but is carried out in different ways. Its shape is influenced not only by the person
of the author and his/her creation, but also by behaviours of the audience as well as
mutual relations between all the participants of this action.
W.S.: What is important, is that ritual is a language, a tool for communication,
which gives a possibility of communication by means of gesture, recitation and
movement.
E.M.: And, as I understand, it also enables one to express and transfer emotion.
In ritual/performance, fixed gestures and texts serve to express your own self. During a
funeral, our mourning and sadness we express through ceremonial behaviours, words of
prayer or song, even if we are not believers. We participate in a ritual which can help us.
W.S.: That is a good example. Funeral is a form of theatrical performance. In
Dziadwek, funeral ceremony is very interesting. And it is because of the presence of the
Ancestor (Dziady), described by Mickiewicz
E.M.: Really?!

W.S.: In Mickiewiczs play, the core of the ritual consisted in talking to the dead.
And at the funeral of Marianna Maliszewska, one of the oldest inhabitants of Dziadwek,
who for many years received us in her home, as our quarters, we witnessed it happen.
E.M.: They talked to Marianna?!
W.S.: Not literally. There was a conversation concerning problems in her family.
Shortly before her death it seemed that those conflicts were going to be mellowed down,
but it didnt happen. Suddenly, during the wake at her body, one young man suddenly
started speaking as if on behalf of Marianna, using first person and feminine gender.
Somebody else joined into the dialogue. This way something was freed, something was
repaired between people. Such an old mechanism, which Hellinger used in his
constellations. This case shows also that very personal spheres of life cannot be seen on
film. We were admitted to the ritual, because we had become as if members of the
family.
E.M.: From what you say it follows that Dziadwek is much richer, as concerns
rituals, than Wgajty or its neighbouring villages.
W.S.: Maybe. When we were first coming to Dziadwek, we read a lot about
Lithuania and the tradition of the borderland. This village also used to be Lithuanian
once, but it became polonised. Brueckner writes about the legendary feast in Old
Prussia. It was called cern. The Romantic poets were greatly interested in that sort of
thing. Our mythological interests are not vast, we were more interested in the theatre of
everyday life. But the event that took place when Grandma Malishewska died reminded
us of this forgotten mythology.
E.M.: It testifies of the great strength of culture there and its place. We may
think that similar rituals were everywhere, but we live on land which had been burnt and
ploughed over.
W.S.: Such kind of eastern Prussian land we traverse once a year in the time of
Easter, on our way to Dziadwek. In Bakaarzewo, on the old border between Prussia
and Poland we can still see two different worlds. Although in fact in Warmia there also
was the Easter going with the kadyk, that is, juniper branches.
E.M.: I wonder if there is someone among the living who has seen this custom
with their own eyes.
W.S.: Some very old people told us about it. And in Dziadwek, on the cultural
border between Prussia, Suwaki land and Lithuania, Grandma Maliszewska had friends
on the other side of the road who spoke German. The socalled Prussian women. A
couple of kilometres from Dziadwek, in Wiajny, there was a synagogue.
E.M.: When you speak about it, I remember some books I read, my travels and I
see that we are surrounded by Mickiewiczs world. He wrote about the Prussians and
about the Order of the Cross and about the Lithuanians, paganism and Christianity.
W.S.: Well, yes, it was all saturated with Mickiewicz, those stories which at first
people told us and we wrote them down. There were a lot of live memories about the
war. Thats why we brought young people there, for the expedition to be truly an
expedition.

E.M.: You put on the skin of wandering theatre performance studies,

Mickiewicz, the war. Here, many universes entwine with each other.
W.S.: In his book about the Ancestors, the Dziady ritual, Leszek Kolankiewicz
presents the genesis of volochebniks going around with puppets or dolls during
Christmas or Easter. It was called chodzenie po wooczebnym, volochebne walk. The
volochebniks went around in Eastern Poland, in Podlasie and the Belarus.
E.M.: But also Halloween consists of walking around houses and dressing up. It
is not an invention of modern culture, a diabolic culture as seen by the Catholic church.
Is there any use for pumpkins in Dziadwek rituals? Any pumpkin tradition?
W.S.: There is one in the Balkans. One makes ritual props out of pumpkins
there.
E.M.: We were talking about multiwandering. Lets talk about Multivoice. In
this performance you have touched upon very actual, specific things. In your work this is
new. And another new element was: jokes. You had been deadserious so far. Here, the
audience were laughing. Does this change foretell something new in your theatre?
W.S.: I hope so. The new season is round the corner. A year ago, when the
Multivoice project started, we were talking a lot about polarisation of society and
political debate and about cultural war which was beginning in Poland.
E.M.: Some people even talk about the third world war information war
between the East and the West, or, maybe better said, between the government of
Russia and the governments of other countries.
W.S.: The idea of Multivoice consisted in letting in more voices and allowing
them to became articulated. A part of Multivoice was also the performance of The
Street of the Crocodiles, realized in the social care house. People closed in the social
care house are an example of people who are excluded, who do not participate in public
debate.
E.M.: And in culture? I dont think they go to the cinema, theatre, to concerts or
buy books. Also in social hierarchy they hold a low position, because social care house is
a bit of a last station for them.
W.S.: Yes. What we were after, was introducing into such an environment the
tool of theatre, a tool which enables them to speak up. The social care house wards
showed that they can talk about serious matters. And they started being treated as
participants in a broader dialogue. It is an important thing.
E.M.: I guess that personally they started feeling better. But did their situation in
the social care house or in their families change?
W.S.: That has changed, too. But the primary thing is the audience, the
spectators who look at them, appraise, bring them into broader circulation. The Street of
the Crocodiles we have shown in Olsztyn. Anyway, we have been working with people
from the social care house for six years. It is not a onetime action.
E.M.: What did the work with the wards look like? After all, they are not theatre
people like your actors and they have their shortcomings.

W.S.: They already have some theatre background. This is a group of people
with experience and acting capabilities. Entering their world with theatre was a way to get
to know them and to open their life. The Street of the Crocodiles is close to them,
connected with things they have experienced. For example, the figure of the Father.
Under the character of Schulz Father, the late Albin Krajewski is disguised. It is to him
that the performance is dedicated. Albin was a sculptor and a performer. He lived in the
social care house, he was the soul of the community. He had energy to do theatre and he
inculcated others with it.
E.M.: Dont you think you should run a chronicle of your actions? A performance
can be recorded, but what happens between people is very interesting. Still, it is
evanescent. Maybe one should make some footnotes to performances?
W.S.: Such a footnote is Emilia Hagelganz film "Gombrowicz w DPSie"
(Gombrowicz in the Social Care House). In this film, Albin Krajewski tells about his life,
about a tragic accident which he caused and which got him into jail. These were Stalins
times, so Albin tells there about a Stalin prison, about Pozna in 1956 when as a soldier
he was entering the city on a tank, a city burning with social rebellion. You can watch this
film on our website.
E.M.: What is going to be next? After Multivoice?
W.S.: We are considering less as a motto. Maybe we create a minimalist
performance?
E.M.: O! Minimalism is becoming to be trendy in Poland. There are people who
have only a hundred objects in their home, including clothes, plates, books and a bike.
W.S.: Exactly. This is interesting.
E.M.: Minimalism on one side makes sense, when you want to avoid amassing
too many things. On the other hand, the ambition to fit everything you have in one
backpack resembles to me the fashion for finding your food in the garbage. I mean
people who can afford to go shopping, who dont have to do it. They say that in garbage
there is a lot of delicious and good food. I dont like it. Because to them its fun and
adventure. But there are people who ransack garbage because they are forced by
poverty. There are people who have all their belongings in one plastic bag because they
are poor.
W.S.: But we are facing overproduction and overconsumption. Much too many
clothes are produced. People buy plenty of things which after a short time are thrown
away and new things are bought. But it does already occur to many people that the
planet may be destroyed by the species homo sapiens. Whereas the direction that is
encoded in our civilisation is to increase the production of everything. But perhaps one
has to seek a new paradigm. Because there is no other way out..
E.M.: So, you have to invite to your projects the owners of oil corporations, car
corporations, clothes and food corporations.
W.S.: When I hear that it is not possible to get off this road, I always think about
the times, when Andriej Amalriks book was published, entitled Will Soviet Union last
until 1984?. When we were reading that book it seemed a crazy intellectual proposition,
didnt it? Yet it turned out that the system had finished. We are also talking now about

systemic changes. Every system has its life: its beginning and end. And the end is
showing stronger and stronger now. Several years ago in Poland nobody would think
about criticising Polish capitalism from liberal position, as it was done recently by
Prof. Marcin Krl.
E.M.: So, less?
W.S.: Thats right, less.

Joanna Kocemba

A flash of haiku
IZA
To me its some kind of dramatic theatre
Here, everybody is a liar
Mister, you are a liar
Miss, you are a liar
The player there, he is a liar as well
I am a liar
Who is true is the people on the street, who live their own private tragedies

With disarming frankness and conviction in her voice, Iza Giczewska, the actress
of the Wgajty Theatre, in the play entitled Wielogos (Multivoice) (its first title was Krtki
spektakl o zabijaniu i mioci A short play about killing and love) accuses all the
participants of a theatrical event of lying. She makes no exception for the actors, shows
no mercy to the spectators, no leniency to herself even. She tells everyone to seek truth
elsewhere, not in theatre. Where? On the street. Why? Because there are people
manifesting their private feelings there.
In the context of the subjects touched upon in Wielogos, when you hear the words
about truth on the street immediately your mind is visited by images of bloodily
suppressed manifestation on the Kiev Maidan. The brutish actions of Russian army in the
eastern part of the country were going on throughout the time of the first gatherings of
the group working on Wielogos. When the prepremiere show was taking place
(Dziadwek, 21 April 2014) the war was already a reality.
Bearing in mind the image of the Kiev Maidan, one can actually agree with Izas
opinion. Still, certain reservations and questions come. One can doubt whether the
mainstay of the mythical truth is really on the street, that is during protests of social
character. Firstly, it is not easy to judge the intentions of persons taking part in the
demonstrations. Secondly, the artists in theatre, just like the manifestation participants,
during their actions can be guided by their own surging emotions and deeply grounded
thoughts. Thirdly, there is no doubt that street manifestations can be called a form of
theatre. They are also characterised by their own dramaturgy, scenario, characters who
play the roles appointed to them.
I would not call the participants of Theatre Wgajty events liars, although in fact
almost every theatre situation owes its existence to illusion. The very theatre convention
is a kind of a lie. The spectators and the actors agree that whatever happens on stage is
make believe. Thanks to that agreement, the artist can die in peace, kill and steal in
peace, be unfaithful or beg for love nobody will react, the play will go on.
With some actions of theatrical character, this convention is, however, temporarily

suspended, and the status of the entire event becomes unclear. Such experiments were
first made by the artists of the counterculture in the seventies of the 20th C. I have an
impression that such a kind of specific shift, uncertainty, instability one can find in
particular performances by Wgajty Theatre. In Wielogos there are many a moment in
which reality from outside the world of art invades the performance. In need of poetical
vocabulary, I shall name those moments flashes of haiku. Why?
***
The classical, semiotic framework sees in theatre art a number of signifying
elements. According to the proponents of semiotics, all reality manifests itself to us
through signs, or rather through whole systems of signs. The task of the addressee and
at the same time a measure of his or her competence, is reading the meanings encoded
in the signs. The leaves have fallen today, autumn is coming, it is meaningful a
semiotic scholar shall tell us. Whereas the art of theatre speaks to us by means of signs
of those signs, as everything that appears within the space of the stage sends you off to
something more than itself. Whats more, all the theatrical signs, as opposed to those
characteristic for real life, are artificial, because artists produce them totally consciously
and they fulfil a specific, defined role, consciously intended by their authors. So, there is
no place for immediate experience of reality in theatre: everything we will hear and see
on the stage is an artistic projection, dictated by aesthetic choice and intermediated by
the codes serving to transfer meanings.
In the performance Wielogos, Sebastian wider and Moti Aszkenazi, and in later
version Wacaw Sobaszek, play a scene of two friendssoldiers meeting. The artists
present a fictitious situation which, however, could happen in reality, and thus they
perform an aestethisation of such a scene as they imagine it. By means of a system of
signs of other signs (so that we are really far from reality), they tell about the
dehumanising character of war. As it is suggested by the sequence of scenes, the friends
could fight on opposite sides of the front. A theatralised relation is presented, whose goal
is to evoke great emotions. The artists play specific roles, which, however they have not
been built in a psychological way, refer us to a situation which is not connected with the
real here and now. This scene can be considered a kind of theatrical lie, however even
this scene passes in the ironic style, so characteristic for Wgajty Theatre, emphasising
the existence of convention.
However, in the performances created by Wgajty Theatre, not everything is an
artificial sign, or a sign of another sign. First of all, doubts can arise in all the situations in
which the actors manage to draw the spectator into the action, convince him to enter the
stage thus, when elements of extended theatre appear. The performances of Wgajty
Theatre end in common dance, and the same happens in Wielogos. The actors invite
the audience into common action, invite the spectator to exit the role of the passive
onlooker and assume an active attitude. This common dance which happens when the
show is still going on, depends equally on the actors as on the spectators. It is not
marked by any additional meaning, its sense is connected with its material being only.
The essence of this dance is the very fact of its coming into being in the theatrical but at
the same in the real hereandnow. Art and nonart permeate each other with every turn
of the dancers and one can have no doubts that emotions: joy, fear, feeling moved both
on the side of the recent actors and spectators are authentic.
Similar doubts can be brought about by another scene from Wielogos, which,

unfortunately, during the premiere appeared as a record from prepremiere in

Dziadwek. The scene was built on a very simple, however very impressive staging idea.
Eliza is sitting on a pouffe (resembling those which can be found in bourgeois living
rooms) and talks to the public . She tells the spectators about her grandfather, his great
selfdiscipline and will to get enrolled in the army. A pleasant chat is taking place, in two
languages Polish and Russian, most of the audience understand both. The scene
finishes with a Russian song, which Eliza learnt from her grandfather. The spectators
cant have any doubts the story which is told is an authentic one, it has really
happened. The artist on one hand employs the convention of a pleasant chat in order to
convey a specific message but on the other hand it is a pleasant chat. Eliza is not
acting she just is, she is on stage, presents her story, fully aware of the presence of the
audience and of here and now in which she herself is immersed. Rapport, story,
communication the very situation of transferring content is immediately a sign.
Escaping the semiotics of theatre is a frequent feature of theatre in search,
employing the gains of the performative turn from the sixties of the twentieth century. The
artists of those years questioned the status of the work of art as an artefact in which the
author enclosed meanings to be read. Visual artists started emphasising the event
quality of their works, cocreation and contextuality, but first of all: action performance.
The work (Polish: dzieo) became action (Pol. dziaanie), which took place thanks to
the relation between its participants. Together with the development of new forms of
expression one started questioning the primate of the artist over the development of his
piece. From the perspective of time, the researchers called those changes the
performative turn, whose consequences are nowadays present not only in
contemporary art but also in all the humanist reflection.
Each theatre performance, even one employing the convention of the fourth wall,
is a kind of cultural performance, because its essence is action. Some performances,
however, come closer than others to performance as a genre. Does it concern also the
shows of the Wgajty Theatre?
The newest performances of the Wgajty Theatre, prepared by the Other Theatre
School (both those from the cycle Four Elements, made in the years 20102013 and
Wielogos) are characterised by their event quality, and accidentality. They do not claim
to be finished works, they are oriented onto real contact with the onlooker, they adapt
their form and plot to the place and time in which the event is taking place. They do not
use the tools of actors art to build real characters, they just sketch certain situations. It
all makes them to come, both aesthetically and idelogically, very close to performance
art.
It seems that the critics and theoreticians trust performers (in the generic sense of
the word) much more than they trust actors. The performance artists are not easily
accused of lying, or of insincerity of intention. Also, the situation in which a performance
artist is performing is not considered safe. Performance art, attaching value to basic
means of communication between people, becomes an authentic, immediate experience
of life and art at the same time.
Theatre Wgajty artists are both actors and performers. In the course of presenting
their shows, they employ tasks of acting and performing interchangingly. Examples of
scenes which, one could say, are close to performance art, are plenty. Among them there
would be, of course, the aforementioned dance, with which the show ends, and in which

10

all the event participants can join, as well as the aforementioned scene with Eliza Pa
telling the audience about her grandfather. In Wielogos we find at least two other scenes
of similar construction. The author of one of them is Moti Ashkenazi.
On the stage only the screen is standing. On the left, the musicians, on the right
the remaining artists are waiting for their turn. The performer enters the stage walking
unhurriedly, but with decision. He says: My mother is Jewish American. My father is
Muslim Palestinian. Here I am and shrugs his shoulders. His words are hanging in the
air for a while, in a moment the content they carry shall be repeated. Thats it. Nothing
more. The artist, in this short action, does not act as anybody, is not theatralising his
action, he just talks. His action is limited to what is supposed to be said, the sense is
connected with the meaning of the words, the performer only transmits them.
Another scene that is close to performance art is also Iza Alwingiers scene, during
the premiere shown by Pamela Leoczyk. The artist enters the stage on all fours, with
her body posture copying that of a dog. This is where theatre ends here. I love him. He
is always with me when I need him she says, looking the spectators deep in the eyes.
Her story about the relation between the dog and its owner, that is somebody who owns,
is anchored in her own experience. It is, like in Eliza Pa action, a kind of confession.
The spectators, participants of the theatrical event, are brought into contact with
authentic emotions, they have an opportunity to hear a private voice in the course of
duration of a theatre show.
Performance art is a new artistic genre. One can, however, seek correlations with
this genre in forms which are much older. Affirmation of the experienced here and now,
the need to stop a moment from passing, literalness all that can be found in haiku the
Japanese poetic form, which flourished in the 17th and 18th centuries. The universally
acknowledged master of that form is Matsuo Basho. Among his most famous haikus is
this one:

Worthy of admiration
He who does not think: Life is passing!
On the sight of a lightning!

On the turn of 19th and 20th C haiku gained great popularity in Europe, and its fame
has by no means passed today. Numerous translations have appeared, many Polish
poets have tried to emulate Japanese masters. Stanisaw Grochowiak often used the
form of haiku writing his own pieces. The interest in haiku is often treated as a
counterweight to the dominating culture of consumption. As Teresa Kostkiewiczowa
writes: The haiku offers one the chance of focusing on one object and deeply entering it,
it invites you to calm contemplation, linguistic asceticism, sublime simplicity of form 1.
Also the French theoretician of literature, Roland Barthes, was interested in haiku.
In his book Empire of Signs, the scholar ponders on its essence from the semiotic point
of view. On characterising the haiku, Barthes finds the words which I was looking for
writing about the sense nonseparated from materiality, in many scenes from the
performances of Theatre Wgajty. As he puts it, in haiku the essence is that what we
want to talk about (signifie) be possibly the closest to the way this content is conveyed
(signifiant). As Barthes emphasises, in European art behind the word storm poets

11

place a broad variety of meanings and often this is what makes for the strength of poetry,
in the eyes of the person who interprets it. And in the haiku it means storm and
nothing more.
Flashes of haiku I call all these moments in the performance Wielogos, in which
we have an opportunity to hear a true, in the least possible degree intermediated by
semiotic encoding, voice of the artists who create this performance. Thus, all those
situations in which we do not encounter signs of signs but the signs themselves. It is
those signs themselves which stop the world of art for a moment, showing elements of
reality, reachable and authentic. A flash of haiku shows the artist in truth, the artist who,
even though he or she is standing on the stage, in fact is living their own private
tragedies and we do as well, together with them.

1. T. Kostkiewiczowa, Haiku, [w:] Sownik terminw literackich, op. cit., s. 190.

12

Zalessie (Belarus) Bochum (Germany) Wgajty (Poland)

A Collage of the Journey

of Emilia Ivanovna Hagelganz
One little girl grew
from her nose two blue ribbons,
on one it was written Mars and on the other Jupiter.
What??!
It seems there is a need of an expert here.
That is the very convincing attitude of our times.
But with a high degree of probability
I am not one, so with delight I yield to inspirations
from the side of Danilo Charms and Laurie Anderson.

Lets say there is a stable civilisation there.

Which has survived its first atomic lesson.
The experts blame the imperfection of Soviet atomic reactors.
Soon the shock was over.
Radioactivity does not kill immediately and when someone falls ill with cancer five
years later, nobody cares anymore. Owing to the catastrophe, 1,5 million people died.
And later, the second lesson. Emergency in eleven Japanese reactors at the same
time, Fukushima.
Peaceful atom, released from its bonds by the forces of a natural disaster.
One feels like howling. But howling you best learn from the wolves. Howling does
not reach its limit so soon, it allows you to fly far to the Belarus. But there is a border,
HOOOWWWL! Suddenly, I didnt know which was better: forget, keep it in memory or
even run away?
Run away from the country of origin with your family, or from your family, or from
the war or after an ecological disaster, or looking for adventure, for example, to an island
of a picturesque name: Lampedusa. There are people for whom Lampedusa is not a
charm which can make certain events unbe. After their reaching the Ruhrgebiet, one
employs experts so that they organize the lives of the newly arrived refugees. Their
passports are confiscated. If later on the police catches one of them, he has to stay in
prison until his identity is established. Preparing meals is forbidden all over the building.
The meals you get do not contain fruit or vegetables. There is no medial connection with
the outer world. On the spot, only the guards and escapee experts. Some experts are,
however, accused of serious acts of discrimination and torture. What is left is an escape
to your own inner world.

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Alzheimer. A situation, in which a man is brought by his wife to a centre of day stay.
And the experts, who maintain that Here your husband will have proper care. The man
tries to fight blindly, beating around with his fists, trying to run away and other elderly
people scream: We are imprisoned here!. Later, the experts regain their control over the
situation. There is no problem.
Theatre village, a consequently developed platform for exchange, space for the
practice of nonexcluding art. Barriers, here, at our festival? One of the collaborators of
the festival tells me with tears in her eyes that a festival guest, a woman in a wheelchair,
could not find herself at home. A vague feeling of having let somebody down creeps in.
But we are not experts! How good that it also happens here, so I sit down and drink my
tea. And, drinking tea, I think: festival. Somebody invites some other body to visit them.
Performances on dirt roads, without pavement of any sort, a makeshift field toilet, no
lighting after sunset, wooden ramps with no balustrades.
The true experts first ask themselves: How to take the control over? How to be the
master of the situation? They tackle the problem with a radical cut. Control over the
problem. When youre in control of a problem, you can solve it.
The consequence is that you decide to support financially only the bigger
institutions which organize life in Warsaw, in buildings, with concrete ramps and steel
balustrades, suitably large toilets with automatic doors to which broad corridors lead.
Because people in wheelchair belong to the space which is controlled by experts.
Cause only an expert can see there is a problem and only an expert can deal with
the problem. (Laurie Anderson)

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