Włodzimierz Staniewski’s Director’s Note, 2007
The tragedy of feelings and ambitions makes the characters of “Iphigenia” particularly theatrically expressive, and yet very contemporary. Having cast aside the antiquarian historicism, we will see figures taken from our own lives. The final ritual of sacrifice is nothing else than an act of blind violence and forced religious faith fuelled by indoctrination and venom — a failure of those who are strong in words and yet weak in spirit. Bus surprisingly, it doesn’t hurt anymore — it has faded throughout the ages, it became cheaper and more familiar. It causes indignation, but not pain. Even the sacrifice of life as an expression of fanatical devotion doesn’t seem extraordinary anymore nowadays.
What causes pain in the Iphigenia in Aulis is the family drama. The end of society as we know it.
It is not about the foul politics, sickly ambitions, instinct for conquest, deceit, or lies. Those are nothing but a fat bait the Greek drama uses to lure us — Euripides uses it on an unprecedented scale.
This kind of theatre — theatre of intrusions and intruders wanting to “divide and rule” — is performed daily in the media and postmodern art. These are signals of the end of the world where “home” meant “home”, “mercy” meant “mercy”, and “fear” meant “fear”. The symptoms of our confusion are to be found in the crisis of community.
Rachel Saltz for The New York Times, New York, US
The stage pictures stay with you: The chorus members, drums between their legs, pounding in unison and chanting. Iphigenia curled fatally on a chair, a sacrificial lamb in white. Agamemnon, arms raised, sharpening knives with barely contained violence. Iphigenia standing motionless, a long red scarf dragged across her throat, the sacrifice complete. (…) In this production Iphigenia’s mother, Klytamnestra, separated from the chorus by a circle of light, asks, “Does no one speak against this?” It’s a powerful moment, a revealing combination of performance, stagecraft and text.
Anna R. Burzyńska for Tygodnik Powszechny, Kraków, Poland
The conflicts underlying this tragedy are on a knife edge. The actors’ extraordinary energy forces us to intensely engage in their struggles over life and death. (…) Clytemnestra’s desperate question if there’s anyone to object to the human sacrifice in the name of God or humanity (…) cuts through the action at the culminating moment.
Ayelet Dekel for Haaretz.com, Tel Aviv
Polish director Wlodzimierz Staniewski seeks to remove the “mask of time” from Greek tragedy through a process of what he calls theatrical “archaeology”, to bring the lifeblood of ancient Greece into what he describes as “touching distance” from contemporary audiences. This past week, the internationally renowned director led a five-day master class in English for a select group of students, as part of a conference called “Languages of Stage and Performance in Contemporary Polish Theater”. The event was cosponsored by the Tel Aviv University’s Department of Theater Arts and the Polish Institute, in the framework of the Year of Polish Culture in Israel. (…)
By developing a creative form with references to music and the body, Staniewski establishes meaning in relationship and dialogue. The reverberations of this dialogue, between the ancient and contemporary, the actor and his/her body, one actor and another working in partnership, create a powerful and unique stage presence. This dialogue was particularly evident in the partnership between Golaj and Holcberger, as they enacted a scene between Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, from Euripides’ “Iphigenia at Aulis” in the workshop’s final presentation.
Łukasz Drewniak for Przekrój, Warsaw, Poland
Staniewski’s performances are made to last for a long time (…).
The new performance grows out from an old one, its themes and motifs are budding; and the old performance suddenly gets infected with the qualities of the new one. It resembles removing an outer layer of paint from an Attic vase so as to uncover the earlier patterns.(…)
The theme of the performance becomes crystal clear in the final scene. Staniewski interprets Iphigenia at Aulis as a study of fanaticism. The words uttered by the daughter of the Achaean commander in which she exclaims ‘The Greeks ought to rule over the barbarians’ sound terrifying. The sickly, disabled child, beautifully played by Karolina Cicha, matures to her sacrifice, marries death, as it were – but her sacrifice does not stem from Good. On the contrary, it is a result of pride, hatred, and vindictive satisfaction that her suffering will soon be multiplied by the suffering of others. Because evil brings more evil and insanity – more insanity.
Nehad Selaiha for Al-Ahram Weekly, Alexandria, Egypt
(…) Rather than tell a story, or treat us to another interpretation of Euripides’s play, Iphigenia in Aulis spoke to us in a vivid, audio-visual terms about the contrasts of life and the simultaneity of opposing phenomena. Played on boxes, which the actors kept rearranging in different formations, dispersing them, or piling them up on top of each other, it seemed to take us back to the origins of theatre in magic and to transform the stage into a Theatrum Mundi displaying the play of primeval passions, cosmic forces and erotic drives. Eschewing realism in a drastic way, and putting us face to face with the magical powers of theatre with devastating directness, it created through its dynamism and ecstatic scenes a new, overwhelmingly intense reality, full of dissonance and tensions, songs and dances, shouts, whistles, moving processions, clowning, high leaps, sensual desire, incantations and magic. The impact was positively euphoric. (…)
George Hunka for Superfluities Redux, New York, USA
The “Gardzienice’s” Iphigenia in Aulis is a ritual, a sacred rite, precise in its choreography and bodied language. Each gesture here is a carefully sculpted example of the research that Staniewski and his company have conducted into folk and ancient ritual and music. Dressed in loose, delicate robes (…) the performers dance an oratorio of the play, evoking what the program notes call a “(restoration of) tragedy from the spirit of music.” Mariusz Golaj as Agamemnon, Joanna Holcgreber as Clytemnestra and especially Karolina Cicha as Iphigenia embody Staniewski’s style of ageless, rehearsed bodied actions, simultaneously precise and violent. (…)
That said, the “Gardzienice’s” Iphigenia in Aulis, presented here in its world premiere (…), is a unique look at the reclamation of the tragedy from ancient Greek history, seeking with care and love and research to restore the tragic spirit to the contemporary world. There are those who don’t think tragedy is possible (or even desirable) in the 21st century, especially the deep, irregular rhythm of tragedy that was first explored by the ancient Greeks – the rhythm, though, is that of the human heartbeat. It is through the ignorance of this tragedy at the heart of human experience that wars, for Helen or for oil, continue to be waged. Iphigenia at Aulis is not anti-war, then, but an exploration and speaking, singing embodiment of whatever part of the human spirit – a spirit composed of desire, of dominance and submission, of masochism, of sacrifice, of both love and death – is expressed through it.
Fred Backus for NYTheatre.com Review, New York, US
Zygmunt Konieczny’s original music, which is sung by the ensemble in several captivating numbers, is a beautiful display of folk and choral traditions, and includes a wide range of vocal styles and sounds that evoke a tribal and primitive soundscape. Iphigenia at Aulis is also ripe with stunning stage pictures centered on a simple and effective set of moveable blocks and platforms, and the staging overall conjures up a feeling of a lonely tribe perched on a cliff, exposed and vulnerable to the gods and to nature around them. (…)
But what makes this company even more exciting is the way text, movement, and music are used and combined. There are many multi-disciplinary companies that can bring these elements together in interesting ways, but with Gardzienice it’s as though they were working on a more primal level: as though the disciplines were a seamless unity from the very beginning. Here the advantages of the company’s extensive development process is in full display, with the cast seeming like a single theatrical organism that shares a richly textured and deeply layered theatrical language of movement and sound.(…)
Here, instead, one feels almost like an anthropologist traveling back in time to witness our own cultural origins, with the only link between them and us being the primitive reptilian brain of Western society that still exists in us somewhere underneath our more civilized and evolved cultural trappings. Iphigenia in Aulis is, after all, a tale of ritualized human sacrifice in the shadow of gods and natural forces that humanity cannot reason with or fully understand, and in many ways this production feels fittingly more like it could be the ancient prehistoric source material for Euripides’s play, rather than an adaptation of his work written 2,500 years after his death.
Joanna Ruszczyk for Newsweek Polska, Warsaw, Poland
(…) The new performance of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis presented at the National Old Theatre in Krakow (Teatr Stary) is yet another successful attempt to strip the antiquity of it museal characteristics. The glass behind which our contemporaneity puts the antiquity has been shattered.
(…) The world of lost, mentally and physically crippled characters fascinates us, but at the same time fills us with fear. We start to realize this story hasn’t been simply taken out from a theatre antique shop and supplied with beautiful music by Zygmunt Konieczny; on the contrary, it is a story about the present time. It is how Staniewski resurrects antiquity.
(…) “Gardzienice’s” performances represent theatre of the highest artistic risk. Staniewski searches through the text for the traces of Dionysiac rituals from which the ancient drama was born. He seeks connection between myth, symbol and banal, vulgar everyday life.