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Public Vs Private
Diana Damian
The red brick gothic City Hall lies dormant in Wroclaw’s expansive main square. In the early hours of the day, the buildings are asleep in their history, the vast open space waiting for the tos and fros of the day. On the other side of the main square, just round the city hall, down a cobbled side street, I’m greeted with murals leading my eyes towards Jerzy Grotowski’s memorial plaque. Next to it, The Grotowski Institute, one of the participant venues in Wroclaw’s Zero Budget Festival. And what better setting for a festival than Wroclaw, a timely, culturally rich place eager for reaction; and, most importantly, the home of Jerzy Grotowski and his Theatre Laboratory.
The festival venues spill out into far corners of the city, from the Centrum Impart’s smoky jazz bar to a gymnasium far away in the industrial area of Wroclaw. This is October 29th- November 12th, Zero Budget Festival time in Wroclaw, Poland.
Organized by the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards, Zero Budget Festival aims to work ‘outside the realm of commerce and competition’, uniting artists big and small in a cultural dialogue about form and process of theatre that ‘helps new air to circulate’. It is a free festival with zero profit.
It has been exactly ten years since Grotowski’s death. His last two disciples, Thomas Richards, now the Artistic Director of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Mario Biaginni, Associate Director of the Workcenter, have curated the festival in order to celebrate, present and develop work inspired by their master. The cultural dialogue that emerges through the performances, screenings, talks and workshops poses a challenging question; one of responsibility, legacy and, ultimately, cultural impetus. Do you preserve, continue, develop or challenge a set of practices which you are ultimately connected to? As the last disciple, what is your responsibility towards the work in relation to a wider cultural environment? And what happens to this set of practice when it collides to a new environment of which it is no longer a response to?
‘Art as a vehicle’ is a video documentation of the ‘Downstairs Action’ project, part of what Peter Brook titled Art as a Vehicle at the Workcenter between 1988 to 1992. Actors perform or rehearse their actions, exploring religious rituals through their newly found physicality. The video shows a small number of actors, wearing only white, performing an African ritual. It is mesmerising to watch, yet its language remains locked in the physicality and trance-like behaviour of the performers. This is performance that requires no audience, focused on the individual as vehicle for understanding a different side of the human situation.
In contrast with the video, ‘I am America’, directed by Mario Biaginni and performed by current actors at the Workcenter, explores, through song, movement and spoken world, attitudes towards and within America. The main character in the story is America itself, a personification that explores different feelings and thoughts about America. The ensemble sing in different rhythms and paces, the sound of a new folk music whose vibrations affect the physicality of the performers. This exploration remains vague in its manifestation- the performance does not seem to capitalize on any one aspect; its song-verse structure does not add up to any narrative. It is hard to understand the lyrics of the song in their poetic verse, and the intonation of the actors gives equal weight to all spoken word. Hence tension is not a dramatic tool in this performance.
Where ‘Art as vehicle’ is a voyeuristic experience of an unknown ritual, ‘I Am America’ feels like an almost religious reflection on aspects of the country often criticized in the media. There is both joy and sorrow in the songs the ensemble sing, and America, in her embodied suffering, seems to be a mother with children she can no longer control. This is perhaps the allegory alluded to in the performance.
Where the two works are similar, is in their very distinct physical language. Through movement, the concept of religious ritual becomes less abstract, more tangible for the audience. But the experience of the performer remains a personal affair, and so the audience is delegated to a voyeur. Although these are only two samples of the cultural milieu of the festival, there is a unique atmosphere that binds the work together. A precisely internal physicality, a fragmented narrative and a specific attention to the internal life of the performer, all aspects of Grotowski’s theatre practice.
The work in the festival lies somewhere between the public and the private. It is no coincidence that the atmosphere of Wroclaw ties in so well with the atmosphere in the festival works, from the performances to the talks and videos. There’s a thread which moves through the work and into the city as a cultural space: the secular. Theatre as a ritual for self-discovery, a physical and spiritual means of communicating with the inner voice of the actor as opposed to the audience.