“Wieszcze”

(“Bards”)

PRIZE OF SOCIETY OF AUTHORS AND COMPOSERS ON THE 7th FORUM OF YOUNG DIRECTORS 2017:

more: http://krakow.ast.krakow.pl/7-forum-mlodej-rezyserii-17-19-listopada-2017-r

SELECTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL “DIVINE COMEDY 2018” for the section Paradiso presenting most inspiring shows from young directors.

more: https://en.boskakomedia.pl/spektakl/289

producer: National Academy of Theatre Arts in Krakow

premiere: 19.11.2019

“Wieszcze”* is an abstract story of a young director meeting Polish national bards, Adam Mickiewicz, the title character of Juliusz Słowacki romantic drama, Kordian and Witold Gombrowicz. The performance is an attempt to confront the sources of experiencing difficult Polishness full of insecurities, heroic obsessions and suicidal tendencies. 

We are trying to get to the cultural source of our affection for pain and suffering. We ask a question of relevance in terms of romantic concept and its actual, also political, consequences.

This story is spiral of Polish obsessions at the end of which, there is subconscious fear and trauma. The play ends with the scene of unsuccessful, grotesque and clichés matriculation examination followed by Maria Janion famous words ending Congress of Culture (Kongres Kultury) in 2017:

”… I have no doubt about the fact that our permanent inability to modernization has its source in phantasmatic sphere, in the culture of collective attachment to pain, sources of which we try to touch blindly and with so much effort. The nation that doesn’t know how to function without suffering has to provide it to itself. That is the source of shocking and sadistic fantasies, to force women to give birth to half dead babies, digging the graves of plane crash victims, attacks on natural monuments, and even, please do not be surprised, stubborn cultivation of coal energy, surrounding cities with smoke and threating to collapse the civilisation. 

…

Alarming formula by Goethe- die and become- means everlasting change, possibility to unglue ones personality from unequal start but also traumatic experiences of past generations. It doesn’t mean forgetting, it means exactly opposite. Memory of pain and reality of what has been done to others and to us, what we have seen and still see- that cannot be erased. Die and become.

Difficult years ahead of us, I know it...”