Jadwiga Rodowicz
Anna Zubrzycka
Mariusz Gołaj
Henryk Andruszko
Jan Tabaka
Tomasz Rodowicz
Guests: Ulrich Hardt, Franz Hodl, Wolfgang Niklaus, Susanne Philhoffer.
My soul, my soul, why are you sleeping? Wake up and arise, you cursed! … You fell asleep a ruinous dream, dozed with food and drink. Look, you lover of dung! ” Awwakum exclaims in one of the key scenes of the performance, beating himself with the thurible for the mass. One can desire the miracle of revelation so much that he is ready to sacrifice both life and objects of worship. The historic Avvacum has become a living torch. He was burned at the stake as a defender of the old faith.
Theof the Artists of Life.
We dreamed a better world together.
Not necessarily on this earth.
Not on this earth? What then?
There was always one answer: on the earth of your heart, your soul, performance of the Gardzienice Theater was created during the martial law in Poland, as proof that even from the depths of despair and hatred for a political enemy, a song of life can be sung.
One of the concepts of Polish Romanticism is that the Spirit is bound by matter. A baptism of blood (a sacred sacrifice) is necessary to free the Spirit.
During martial law, the call to the soul to wake up was a call for the miracle of freedom. The miracle has come true. The grace of political and social freedom has drained. So why am I, an artist, standing at the crossroads today, crying out: My soul, my soul, arise?
While working on IAWWAKUM, our entire team traveled through Polish-Russian and Polish-Ukrainian villages. We established Congregations belonging to centuries-old traditions. We sang, recited texts, showed scenes from rehearsals for the performance. We drank vodka with people and cursed their wicked lives, we listened and learned their songs, we watched their movements, we slept in their beds. Life “naturalized” the spectacle.
Yes – then, while wandering – we were the Brotherhood your mind.
And maybe, perhaps, in the land of Art.
The final song of the performance can be summarized in the sentence: All creation sings a song of praise.
I believe that the genius of art lives in every creature.
The experiences from the Expeditions in the eastern regions of Poland, and expecially the material concerning human behaviour and movement, the particularity of walking for a long time, the studies of the body gestures and the positioning of the figures in icons allowed a special form of training to be worked out – the basis The Life of Archpriest Avvakum (1983) – a pictorial analysis of “the soul of Europe” as Włodzimierz Staniewski called it. Work on the spine put together movements and gestures of the “collective body” of the actors. The recreated liturgical songs, sung with the whole body, imposed the construction of the whole in a greater degree than in Sorcery.
The groundwork for the third presentation of <Gardzienice> was the text The Life written by a 17th century Russia unbowed and fanatical religious activist Avvakum Petrovich [1620 – 1682], burned at the stake. The mixture of contrasts and contradictions, of life speech and subtle spirituality, full of declarations of humility towards God, full of mad explosions of hatred and descriptions of half wild customs, together with evidence of real Siberian torment [Avvakum spent a quarter of a century in exile] served Staniewski in building an extraordinary performance. The unending road to penal servitude became intertwined with scenes of death, massacre, sinful love, rebellion, personal avowal, theological conflict, violent and destructive actions of the crowd, collective joy full of euphoria and prayer, sadness and suffering. It was saturated with an air of fervour, boorishness, violence and hope.
The meaning of Avvakum emerged from the totality of complementary, often opposed activities, gestures, behaviour and song. The text was constructed in a similar way. Staniewski proposed a new method of adapting prose. He achieved a full translation of its content into theatrical language without transferring the history or the events of Avvakum mechanically. He dissolved all the elements into one vocal-mobile totality, creating a complete, compact, artistic picture. The events overlapping each other dynamically turned into episodes of the performance – the torture, crying, prayers, teaching, incitement of rebellion, funeral, motherhood, scenes of cursing, erotic promiscuity, revolts – are linked with the rhythm of the road to penal servitude corresponding to an equal degree to the fragments of Archpriest’s autobiography and to the evidence of Orthodox iconography. Pride and violent behaviour, mixed with servility and humility, anger and hatred, combined with acceptance of suffering and the love of God, uncouthness tangled up with lyrical experience and curses, connected with prayers and blessings, indicated the state of mind of Avvakum, the behaviour of the crowd, the soul of the Eurasian. It was the soul that the performance was all about. It was also about people entangled in the community and dependent on it to such a degree that they were no longer able to differentiate between the collective convictions and theirs. The performance referred also to suffering, to heroism, to the ability of enduring slavery – it is not without reason that it surfaced during the martial law in Poland. Finally it included the idea of searching for ways to measure individual values, of the necessity of finding one’s own personal road.
Zbigniew Taranienko, ‘Twenty years Gardzienic’, Konteksty 1-4, 2001