“Theatre as a tool for civic activity”
– this was the title of the partnership project* that we
implemented in the 2023/2024 season together with the Teď nádech a
leť centre from Prague, led by David Zelinka. The title of the
project indicates an artivist approach to theatre work, very close to
both “Węgajty” and David. We have a lot in common, but we worked
on different paths: While we, the Węgajty Theatre, remained on the
path of carol singing, Shrovetide and Easter traditions, David’s path
has led towards Ukrainian refugees struggling with the effects of the
war.
After returning from one of his Ukrainian theatre trips,
during a joint conversation about his impressions and conclusions, a
phrase emerged that was to stay with us: “What’s the point?” We
began to ask ourselves anew the question of the sense of making
theatre in our safe Europe, in the face of the horror of wars taking
place just below our borders. This question became the starting point
of our Polish-Czech-Ukrainian panel at the end of the project.
Below
we would like to present two statements from this panel that were
particularly important to us: a text by Jana Pilátová from Prague’s
DAMU about searching for an external and internal guide in times of
growing fear and uncertainty, and a presentation by Tomasz Rakowski
about a new way of anthropological thinking, anticipating the layers
of pessimism in human culture and about positive inspirations in art
related to pessimism.
At this point, we would also like to give
you an insight into our own, current theatre work. Joanna Sarnecka’s
text „The Underground Internet of Mushrooms – Towards That Which
Cannot Be Seen” is a review of the play „The Mycelium of
Dreams” directed by Wacław Sobaszek, developed as part of the
project mentioned at the beginning.
*Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the Foundation for the Development of the Education System – the National Agency for the Erasmus+ Programme and the European Solidarity Corps. Neither the European Union nor the grant provider are responsible for them.
JANA PILÁTOVÁ ABOUT A GUIDE
My dear ones, friends known and unknown! I wish I were there with you. Alas, you can’t sit on two chairs when you have only one bottom. And I am running a workshop in Salvonice, so, instead of dispatching myself to Węgajty in person, I am sending only words.
The Theatre Village Festival is a meeting point of those who love living their theatre, and love such theatre as is worthwhile for life. They talk not only of theatre, but also about life with theatre. Last night, I think, David with his friends showed their “Visions of a better world”. I believe he succeeded in expressing the subject of today’s talk.
The question: „What is the sense of that” I understand as one not just about the meaning of theatre. I base my answer on the lives of wise people who answer this question with all their life. What is the sense of that, one cannot know in advance, it’s only later on, that we will know it. But we can try to think what sensible thing can be done, with the hope that the sense will emerge. It is a question of one’s whole way through life (maybe the Way to the East). We can get rid of whole bunch of nonsense on which we squander our lives, such nonsense as: how to realize ideas we have of ourselves in such a way as to gain applause. We can resign from quasi certainties and stick to what is necessary for our life “on the road”.
In 1969 when there were no mobile phone with GPS yet, I met a geologist in Algier, who, together with a surveyor and other experts was mapping out the route of the trans-Saharian motorway. They were great at what they did and sure of their abilities and yet (or thanks to the fact) they dared to enter a zone of uncertainty in the face of a greater force: the unknown desert and still undiscovered road. Still, they could not do without the help of a simple caravan master. After a week, when it was already clear that he is a true master indeed, that he never gets lost and always reaches the place where there is water, the engineer started asking the old Bedouin how that was possible. It was obvious that he could see and hear better than other people – for example, the sounds coming from oases, but not only. Asked how exactly he did it, he answered: “Each morning before setting off I go aside, I pray, and then I wait. And when my heart is calm, I know where to go.”
Today, a rational expert rarely meets the knowledgeable local, there is no need to combine rationality and intuitive experience. It seems to us that we can know things better, thanks to electronics, drones and other ways of securing our goals. Meeting the unknown and using “hidden knowledge” seems pointless to most people, however, we know the feeling of uncertainty as to where the next step takes us. This is a thing that we usually experience when we do something that is our own.
Writing this text I am at a crossroads. Shall I remind us all what we gave up, believing in technology? Right now the airports worldwide report a breakdown of traffic caused by a crash of communication and security systems. I could also write about what we are taught by the crisis itself, or by artists, scientists and weirdos who have not given up ineffective or risky options, and show what they gain therefrom. On every road there are crossroads on which we have to resign from something for the sake of something more important; thus our road takes us not only to the world, but also to ourselves. Every step we make, we make a choice and we learn who we are, who we are becoming, and what sense it has here and now. I continue with the question what is the sense of a calm heart not in the desert but in the turmoil of the world of man. Anxiety is so high that many people are already looking for a leader whom they will follow. Yet the anxiety is not only from outside, it comes from within.
Karel Čapek wrote the trilogy „Hordubal”, „Povětroň” („Meteor”) i „Obyčejný život” („Ordinary life”), touching upon noetics, that is, the limits of knowledge and the issue of truth. In the shade of leaders’ regimes from before WWII, the author tells stories of people who do not share the official vision of reality: in the same facts, they can see different realities, because they contaminate facts by their very gaze. In „Ordinary life”, the one who discovers the multiplicity of reality is an old railway man, the station master. Because he is used to being orderly and he feels his time is drawing to an end, he decides to sort out his entire life, and write some kind of a record. He begins to remind himself of various things and he is astonished how many different persons he can find in himself. He realizes that each life, so also his own, is full of inner conflicts. That it is a drama and a fierce fight of different characters for the leadership of the inner crowd (in the eyes of the public) and the power of decision about the destiny of all. An ordinary man, he can feel that in him there was once a boy, and perhaps still there are: a hero, a hypochondriac, a poet, a tough boss and a tormented husband, a stately patriarch and a fool, and that they are all fighting for the banner entitled “I”, pushing to the front for others to follow. The old man, however, is reconciled to all his selves, when he discovers that thanks to them he can understand other people, too – that there is in him a particle of every human being, even of a criminal. He is not alone in himself anymore. Every one of us is We, he writes. You are almost all mankind, whoever you are, I recognize you and you are near to me. If I succeed in something, it will be our success; if I harm somebody, it hurts everybody, because we are responsible for one another! That is the real, the normal life, which is not only mine; all the glory, misery, success, pain and rubbish is ours – and that unites us.
Even much earlier than at the time when we are summing our life up we can recognize that we have in us and beside us many people – and they are near to us. Actor’s privilege is to invite them publically to his or her life, understand their secrets and pass this knowledge on to others. This is why I repeat after Jan Amos Komensky that theatre is a workshop of life.
Jerzy Grotowski in his text „Droga” [“The Way”] W tekście „Droga” calles upon Bolesław Prus’ “The Pharaoh” and the pharaoh’s dream about prayers flying out of people like birds. The rich and the powerful pray that their certainties be not threatened, and the helpless and poor pray but for a part of these privileges. These prayers-birds bump against each other and fall on the ground before they set off. An ordinary man prays that the Sun may rise tomorrow, and his prayer flies straight up.
TOMASZ RAKOWSKI ABOUT PESSIMISM
Frankly
speaking, I would change the question from „What sense does it
make?” to “How doesn’t it make sense?”. I would rather not
beat about the bush.
My path runs from theatre to ethnography and anthropology, from understanding Otherness, Other worlds. Recently we have been talking about Oriental culture, in which various elements of nature, such as mountains, trees, mountain passes, rivers, stones, patches of land, possess a spiritual substance. For example, the nowadays Mongols: politicians, businessmen, wander to the places in which they were born. They touch that ground, they roll around in it. Such places are called “nutag” and their build political emotions in contemporary Mongolia. One can try to explain this phenomenon by imagining spiritual beings which belong to nature, to the earth. Anthropology, however, allows us to understand that it is not so. Agnieszka Halemba in her article ,,Góry Ałtaju nie mają duchów’’ [The Altai Mountains Have no Spirits] explains that this way of thinking in terms of spiritual beings is our Euro-American aberration. There are no spirits in those places. There are certain life currents which consist in building relations. And there you cannot imagine man as a being who does not enter relations.
In English there is the word ,,individual’’. Anthropologists propose the notion of a „dividual”, denoting a human who is always in relation. For example with mountains, whose existence is celebrated by organizing local businesses or great festivals. In Mongolia you say of such a mountain that it is fed, it is fat, that it smiles, it feels good. These are extremely strong affective structures, in our language: spiritual ones.
There was for example a festival whose organisation was connected with the impulse to support local wrestlers. Wrestlers who win competitions are people having access to the energies which dwell in the core of the world. Those people become politicians, leaders. The festival aimed at starting a crowdfunding action and rewarding the wrestlers for their work. Their underfinancing was a cause for shame for the society living around the mountain.
Ever since the birth of anthropology, there has been a great hope that when we understand other worlds, we shall bring about a global change, the extinction of conflicts between different cultures. However, in a situation when we are experiencing histories which are incredibly, incomprehensibly cruel, we start to think again of violence, which is hidden very deep in cultures. A new way for anthropological thinking starts leading us through revealing deeply hidden pessimism, ambivalence.
This kind of ambivalence is very well illustrated by a story from World War II, about how the Luftwaffe, the Third Reich’s airforces, bombed the harbour of Bari in Italy. This was the place where the allies kept iperite: a nerve gas causing horrible death. Later it turned out that the marines from the bombed ships had a strong atrophy of blood cells. Thanks to the research done on this process, the modern chemotherapy was born, together with the methods of cancer treatment known today. Consequently, we are dealing with a situation in which the most horrible instrument at the same time lets us stay alive – I, for example, am alive thanks to chemotherapy.
The adjacency of develompmental mechanisms or bridge-building mechanisms with this inevitable pessimism is simply very important, and maybe it is time to confront it. I have already had to do with it a little – for example while working with Węgajty Theatre on the performance “(Not)possible”. I try in my work to show various kinds of theatrical and anthropological tools having some impact on the powerful, destructive structures encountered in the world. Let me bring by a couple of examples.
The first one shows the reaction to the construction of the Olympic town in London, which was encircled by barbed wire. In reply to such a structural appropriation of the terrain, a certain artist built a hut in which he installed a system of cameras filming people who filmed him. He also created an art movement whose members recorded and monitored the space around them. They created a kind of an artistic system of industrial monitoring.
The other story is about the construction of high-speed rail between Lyon and Turin. Mateusz Laszczkowski described the protest action against this construction. It was organized by members of old leftist radical groups, who were, at the time, seventy or eighty, and some Catholics. In the fields, one could hear “Bella ciao” and “Salve Regina” being sung one after another. The neoliberal media tried to depict them as some diabolic figures, reaching for means of violence characteristic for similar actions in the sixties. And they protested by over-eating. They called themselves: „The fraction of active ganders”. One of the participants would speak about it as follows: „As the police station reports, we are executing instructions from above, so we have armed ourselves. At the moment, we are implementing our most terrible strategy: emptying the bottles. May the enemy tremble!”. It turns out suddenly, that the gesture towards the inside of the body, especially its lower part, to the material-bodily bottom makes the authorities not really know what is going on, what is really happening. And then the vectors, as if, get reversed. This is why I would like to turn the question over to: “How doesn’t it have sense?”, but in the context of creative resistance or the practice of positive pessimism.
In our work on “(Not)possible”, what was immensely moving for me was the discovery of a certain dance-and-music culture in Africa – in Angola. People who experienced civil war there, create an amazing culture, using very simple tools. Maybe you have heard about Buraka Som Sistema, a group which entered the festival circuit in Europe. They also make music called kuduro, which, in translation, is “hard ass”. This music alludes at ritual motifs of African trance percussion music, and it is accompanied by a dance which is similar in character to breakdance. The dancers perform incredible figures, saltos, jumps head-first from cars, they imitate all kinds of body damage, paralysed limbs, they crawl on the street – they do acrobatics causing permanent damage to the body, or movements which reflect that. They say about themselves: “We are the generation of kids who were running away on their mothers’ backs, trying to escape explosions. Throughout our childhood.” To me, this dance and that music are another form of a serious pessimist response to structures of evil which have always been there in our world.
I would also like to tell you about the poet of pessimism – the Austrian writer, the playwright Thomas Bernhard, who uses the most extraordinary, most wonderful literary language I have ever encountered, in order to describe horrible things. In his debute novel “Frost” he shows a situation in which a Viennese doctor persuades his assistant to go to the Alps and meet his brother, a painter, who went mad over ten years before. This young man goes there, pretending to be a student of law. Their conversations are the most magnificent anthropology I have ever read. The dialogues become mad monologues of the two: the painter and the beginner doctor, trying to understand him. They go on forever, throughout the book. I shall read you a passage:
– Thoughts – said the painter – rise and fall.
He explained to me the tracks of wild animals.
– Deer? Here, you see? A hare! Oh, look, a roe deer – can you see? There! A fox! Oh! Aren’t these wolves?
Often he sank into snow and he felt embarassed that I had to take him out.
We keep jumping from the perspective of the painter to one of the young student. They become a dividual, they swap. And they set in motion such a cascade of pessimism, and it draws us in like a bottomless well. As an anthropologist, I am surprised with such a formula. I would call it productive pessimism.
At the end of reading the book I realized that on the book’s cover there is a brain with waves characteristic for the Rapid Eyes Movements (REM) phase. Just like with Bernhard, so in Węgajty Theatre’s „Mycelium of Dreams”, dreaming is a theatre metaphor for pessimist activity. In this phase of sleep, the brain’s EEG record shows as if one was not asleep, but living as always, functioning in the usual way. And that’s why this phase of sleep is also called paradoxical sleep. How is it that a dreaming man does not get up, go out, start smashing things? Simply, because his or her muscles gradually relax, until at a certain moment, the breathing muscles relax as well and the moment begins in which the breathing stops…
JOANNA SARNECKA
THE UNDERGROUND INTERNET OF MUSHROOMS – TOWARDS THE INVISIBLE
….
Węgajty Theatre and The Other Theatre School: „Mycelium of Dreams” – work in progress, from the cycle: Sources and the Future: July 20th, Saturday, at Węgajty Theatre.
Texts by: Boohani Behrouz, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Paul Eluard, Andrzej Grabowski, Martin Heidegger, Małgorzata Iżyńska, Marcin Lamh, Krzysztof Niedźwiecki, Wisława Szymborska, Tom Waits (Polish rendering by Kazik), Khayke Beruriah Wiegand
Actors: Zuzanna Dobrzańska, Maria Legeżyńska, Julia Lizurek, Wojciech Marczak, Jan Mrazek, Agnieszka Porowska, Erdmute Sobaszek, Wacław Sobaszek, Eter Staniszewska
Staged by: Wacław Sobaszek
….
„The Mycelium of Dreams” is a performance of Węgajty Theatre and a group which formed itself for the needs of activities undertaken together with the local community of Dziadówek as a part of Spring caroling. It is Węgajty’s ever-going practice. The performance consists in over a dozen scenes-etudes, intertwined with the theme of the mycelium. Each of them, in its own way, touches upon the issue of connections, links, ties or invisible correspondences between beings. The picture of fungi and underground internet created by their intertwined roots, via which information is transferred, exactly depicts the very subject undertaken by the authors of this work, calling them a mycelium of dreams. It is mushrooms, like invisible threads, which link up elements of the everyday with the elements of the inner world. They show non-obvious connections, reveal interdependence between phenomena and things. Dream is in some sense a kind of deformation of reality, yet often it portrays the truth of our experienced world more aptly than any realist renderings.
What is revealed by the senses, what you can see, is not all that we experience in the sphere of spirit, but also in the everyday sphere of human relations. Dreaming is personal reworking, spontaneous etude of the brain on the subject of the everyday, which sometimes makes us laugh, sometimes makes us think and also sometimes horrifies us.
The fish that fell in love with a fish
Many etudes in the show start with the words “I dreamt that…” or „I had a dream in which…”. Some other take us directly into the atmosphere of a dream, among surrealist images, like for example the stream of Heraclitus’ river, in which a fish catches a fish, a fish cuts a fish up with a sharp fish, a fish escapes a besieged fish, or invents the fish of fish in order to kneel before it. A girl dreams about a man who turns into a little girl and a man struggling through an apocalyptic world comes across a bungalow with a happy family on its verandah. All those measures, references and fantastic images have a great power and resonate in the spectators exactly the way other people’s dreams do. We feel that we could have dreamt something similar, experience it a similar way, that it has already happened, that we have heard it somewhere. What brings us together, at the same time disturbs. The reality of dreams carries a trace of the individual – a uniquely experienced reality. One can imagine, however, that there, in the dream, thanks to the nature of synapses, our worlds join each other at least by the universal, archetypal images.
The dreamers’ dance
Thus, we meet in a dream or in a succession of dreams. We hear familiar songs, which all of a sudden acquire some new meanings, because they are connected with the previous image and they catch on the next one. A drunk, pretending to be sober, counts how many drunks there are for one sober man. The band, instead of being at the ready – falls asleep, in order to come back to sound later on, among others, to the well-known “My Wild Love” by the Doors, sung out with the Czech lyrics: „chce mlouvit o postawie chlapa z kiblem na hlavie” [I want to speak about the situation of a man with a bucket on his head]. A seemingly banale situation changes into an image which deeply touches upon the existential truth about us, about our not seeing the way things are. The figures dancing with buckets on their heads are at the same time the khokhols of Wyspiański, masks from a weird carnival, or maybe witch-doctors who can see in a different way. Regardless of interpretation, they create a fantastic image, a strong, interesting scene.
The absurd, however, is not only there to make us laugh. It is also there to disturb. It shatters the everyday order of things. We don’t know what springs out of the scenes we see and if the reality, entangled in the performance, is going to takes us further still. The order of the dream has something in common with the carnival. Don’t we, falling asleep, die a little, to be born anew in due time at dawn, to start a new cycle? In dreamy chaos, different logics are mixed up. Out of the dark primary matter, every now and again a crumb, a fragment, a quotation is born, which consequently gets annihilated in a paradoxical, unconscious blackout.
A bloke that gave birth to a stone
And if there is carnival, there are also masks. Just like in many Węgajty performances, there are characters and situations out of folk ritual theatre. Here, two babushkas dance pertly, only to show in a moment how much they are plagued by rheumathism. In a twinkling of an eye, the mood of the gags changes. Here an organist, a poor sexton, labours to give birth to a stone – the reverse of life, which the community on stage will later treat as an instrument of crime. Ritual murder, like for example sacrificing a scapegoat, traditionally relieved a community of bad luck or a plague. Yet, a carnival prophet arrives at the place of sacrifice, a fugitive from the well-guarded centre on Manus island – a space hidden and excluded. “People take care of people, and not make them quarrel!” – he shouts out his new commandment.
Only the carnival allows one to reverse the everyday order and to give space to what is every day marginalised, unwanted, unseen. In the final song, performed by Mute Sobaszek, a strange being, perhaps a bird of paradise, sings with incredible poignancy an alternative version of the Eight Blessings. With its message I was leaving the theatre, the village Węgajty, and I have wandered on, thinking of the blessed who are never entirely sure of everything, who have nothing to offer, about the blessed kids always lonely at the school canteen table, of those who have no documents, and the blessed compassionate, for they know what it is all about.
Dark mycelium
Behind a seemingly light formula of simple situations on stage, of etudes, light with the lightness of conventional ritual actions, there hides a great charge of meanings and questions. The mycelium, present in the title, mycelium of which one talks so much nowadays in the context of cooperation, efficiency or survival, reveals its dark side, shows the entanglements, pathological dependencies, the burden of social life with all its charm and violence. The carnival reversal gives us a unique chance to see the underside of everyday life and to see the perspective of change. This, in turn, leads us to hope and to find hope in places when it is least expected: in what seemingly is unimportant, in rejected, marginalized, forgotten stories, people, situations or memories. Thus, the road to hope is not straight, and it does not go through classical good, truth and beauty, but through winding corridors of the subconscious and through the collective unconscious. – Staszek, what is this about? – asks a theatre critic in one of the scenes, finally mixing the levels of reality: the reality of the stage with the reality of life. There are no easy answers. One has to reach into darkness and entanglement. Only the revelation of the mycelium’s secret corridors will allow us to understand ourselves a little better. And, certainly, to shiver, but perhaps also to love.
(translation:
Zuzanna Saba Litwińska)