ABSTRACT
My first encounter with the Gardzienice Theatre Association was at a conference organized by the Centre for Performance Research at Dartington College in 1988, entitled ‘Performance, Nature, Culture’. The presence of this group sent waves of excitement through the proceedings. In a demonstration of their training, these exotic figures swirled round with their long hair flying in an exercise based on Hassidic spinning. In the evenings, beneath the apt medieval timbers of Dartington's Great Hall, they stamped heavy-booted through their sung performance Avvakum, based on the seventeenth- century autobiography of the eponymous Russian Orthodox priest. In 1988, both nature and culture meant something very different in Poland from what they suggested to us in the West, as these practices revealed. Gardzienice's director Wlodzimierz Staniewski has always avoided the term ‘folk culture’, which at that time still under Soviet domination implied state-organized presentations of mythologized Polish dances, songs and rituals. The Jewish music and Russian Orthodox hymns and Slavic laments, the ‘native’ songs which formed a central part of Gardzienice's canon before they went on later to explore Western European and Ancient Greek melodies, were from quite another mythology – of Poland's East and Poland's neighbours, of abandoned border villages and forgotten churches in what are for us even today culturally remote lands. Through nature especially, as well as performance of course, Gardzienice found kinship with CPR. Both were looking for new spaces and sources for theatre-making. So began also the actual realization of my own explorations into Polish theatre that until then had been at one remove: through Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz's writings and paintings (he painted commissioned portraits under the influence of a cocktail of drugs) and a much thumbed copy of Towards a Poor Theatre.
