LESZEK BZDYL: CHOREOGRAPHIC AUTOBIOGRAPHY / PERFORMANCE No. 3

LESZEK BZDYL: A choreographic autobiography / PERFORMANCE No. 3

October 17th (Thursday), 6.45 PM/ Stage in The Shed

Lightning design: Michał Kołodziej

Do you read autobiographies?

I don’t.

I could never fathom the idea that one should be able to remember the past in such detail – and to recompose that past, in its events and sensations, with such precision.

After all, if I allow myself to evoke the past, and it is projected back to me as several frozen frames, it occurs to me that my Temporary Self has little in common in That Other Self – so infinitely remote, so infinitely gone. Instead, the Temporary Self will fictionalise the past, interpret it, transform it into a more or less attractive tale.

Thus, upon the invitation to participate in the AUTOBIOGRAPHY project, which I carelessly accepted, I found myself horrified with the vision of standing in front of an audience and painfully struggling to hide, one long minute after another, how earnestly I am starved for myself.

I know I could never muster enough strength and courage to repeat after Le Corbusier: “I am a deviant. I failed to achieve anything in life.”

Moreover, how could anyone be so cruel towards the audience? I am not heartless: I have never allowed myself to sadistically plunge the voyeurs into one or two hours of starvation for the self and a story of unfulfillment.

As I helplessly approached this AUTOBIOGRAPHY, fate had it that I came across one of those papers that are hidden so deeply that one forgets they have ever existed. Thanks to the tectonic shift of moving flats, I happened to unearth the screenplay of my very first show that I wrote back in 1987.

The screenplay bears the stamp of the state censorship. It had been added to the register of “publications and performances” by the now defunct regime. I also came across the posters announcing the Dada von Bzdülöw Theatre and the title: Performance No. 3.

The screenplay, the logos, a couple accompanying photographs spoke to me:

“You who call yourself the Temporary Self, return to us. We didn’t even imagine you’d live to see your sixties. It must be both comical and heroic to reach such a venerable age, is it not? Hey, Temporary Self, you probably look at our twenty-something years with surprise and unease, because you don’t understand what drove us and why there are Miodrag Bulatović, Witkacy, Gunnar Ekelöf, Pär Lagerkvist and Edward Stachura in the screenplay of Performance No. 3.

We’re on the opposite banks of the wide river that is life. We reckon the journey to the other side has cost you much – hasn’t it? Hey! Return to our bank, cross the bridge of forgetfulness, and do just that: once again do Performance No. 3.

Why not? Maybe you’ll discover that whatever your sixty-year-old brain contains descends directly from us – what did you call us? That Other Self? – and that you’ve never freed yourself from us.”

And so I walked right into that one.

I will face That Other Self through that one, surviving screenplay. As for me, I know I have little to say; but perhaps he, That Other Self, will try and say something through me, the Temporary Self. Thus, I will play a game with the Autobiography. I will do Performance No. 3.

/Leszek Bzdyl/The first version of the Choreographic Autobiography was curated by the Cultural Institute of the Mazovian Voivodeship in 2024.

Leszek Bzdyl – dancer, choreographer, actor, director and instructor, the founder of the Dada von Bzdülöw Theatre (1992). His path as a dancer took him through Henryk Tomaszewski’s pantomime, Wojciech Misiuro’s physical theatre, acting, as well as Eastern techniques of approaching the mind and the body. He created nearly a hundred performances, cooperated with numerous companies in the Polish Tricity, but also elsewhere in the country and abroad. Currently, he is a lecturer at the Aleksander Zelwerowicz Theatre Academy in Warsaw.

“The dance I am ceaselessly seeking is the tale of a man in his everyday life.”