AWWAKUM
based on “The Life of Archpriest Avvakum by himself outlined”
translated into Polish by Wiktor Jakubowski
Television spectacle
Production: Telewizja Polska S.A. – Łódź 1994
Online broadcast: July 18, 2021 at 12:00 pm (noon of GMT+01.00)
![?]( "Gardzienice online ? Awwakum 2")
Watch on: https://gardzienice.org/gardzienice-online-awwakum/
The television version of the play produced at the Centre for Theatre Practices “Gardzienice”.
The first show of the theatrical performance took place in 1982.
In the next dozen or so years, the performance was played at numerous festivals in many countries around the world, among others: Baltimore – Festival of the Nations, New York – The First New York International Festival of the Arts, Stockholm – Scensommar Festival, Boston, Toronto – World Stage Festival, Mito and Toga in Japan – Suzuki Festival, Visby on Gotland, and many others.
It was received in Poland and abroad as a metaphor of suffering and tragedy of martial law.
The performance was based on “The Life of Archpriest Avvakum by himself outlined”, a work from the mid 17th century
(…) Avvakum was at the head of the Old Believers who did not accept the liturgical reform. It was a time of persecution (…) and Avvakum himself was exiled to the north of Russia and burned at the stake there.
The text of the Biot is ungrateful to stage, complicated, immersed in a historical context completely unknown in Poland. An even greater artistic challenge for “Gardzienice” was the aesthetics of the performance, which Staniewski dreamed up. He wanted to refer to the Orthodox liturgy, base the musicality of the performance on the liturgical songs of the Eastern Church and “move the icons” using the bodies of his actors. In order to do that, the actors of Gardzienice had to come into contact with the living liturgy – regularly every Sunday they sang in the choir of the Orthodox Church in Lublin. And Trips to Lemkivshchyna were connected with a real ‘naturalisation’ – actors’ bodies and voices were to be immersed in liturgy, so that it became ‘like air’. [Osiński 1999]
/ after: www.encyklopediateatru.pl /