Wacław Sobaszek – EKROS (English version)

So, what’s the next thing about this necessary theatre? And what it is exactly about? Saying: necessary theatre, I
say: „the theatre which is needed”, I point to something, but how about trying to name it directly. I try to think that there can be different kinds of poetics, different conventions in this field. Is there anything that binds them together?Maybe it is enough that they are necessary, needed, although they are different. Maybe it is even better that way. Yet, there is in us a striving for unification, for something that does not exist yet. A new kind of art? In the melting pot of the workshops, in the meeting and the exchange of different forms of necessary theatre there is a chance to create new energy, new language, new efficacy. I dreamt „art across”. First there was only: across borders and… crossing borders and something else, with some big luggage, a load of disturbance and struggle, very physical, even pain in the back. In fear, that on an uncomfortable bed I am going to have a sudden attack of mighty Hexenschuss. Fortunately, the bad waking up mood started to fade like morning mist, as it occured to me that something had broken over. And if in the waking state, on the previous day and for many a previoius day I couldn’t manage to invent any sensible name for a fundation that we, after all, want to start, why not this „across”? I held on to it like to some saving grace, a piece of wood floating by when you’re drowning. Why then? Is not my lingustic competence in English weak, not to say deficient, but still… well, after consulting the dictionary it turned out the phrase was far from the worst. Crossing, reaching the other shore, „across the ocean…”. Many times we thought this way about the function of dance in breaking some problem between people. Theatre which follows the patterns of ritual of passage, the role of mask, of music.Secondly, across means acting horizontally. That is exactly what we would like to create – as a message for all the Polish theatre – that is theatre under such a strong impression of the epoch-making achievements of Grotowski and Gardzienice. More power and imagination in social work. Maybe we also succumbed too much to the vertical vision of art as vehicle, Gardzienice spiritual journeys. By the way, I must admit, that Staniewski’s letter, somehow strangely distributed recently via Internet, a text about a festival of erring theatres, etc., evoked in me a particularily strong alienation effect. It seems our paths have actually gone apart a long time ago. There came the time to finally emhasise that literally. One more meaning of across: that is: cross. Cross not in relation to that or other theatre tradition, as it is difficult to be cross with traditions: they belong to the past. It is like being cross with here and now. Cross with reality, in which some problems cannot be solved by the means of institutionally structured world. And they can be solved by art. 

Wacław Sobaszek
12th November 2010

Translated by Saba Litwińska