Wlodzimierz Staniewski, the artistic director of the Polish theater group Gardzienice, greets his audience at the bottom of the main aisle of New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine. He is late, he says, because it allows him to use, through an interpreter, a wonderful world: "sorry."
The rather elfin Staniewski proceeds to inform the audience gathered around him in suitably atmospheric near-darkness that the group will have a warm-up session with them before the actual performance. He has a few things to say about the artificiality of theater these days, by way of introduction to what Gardzienice is not all about.
Named for the village south of Lublin where the group has its home, Gardzienice, a part of New York's First International Festival of the Arts this past summer, was founded in 1977 by Staniewski and "consists of a company of scientists and artists joined together by the common conviction that Native Culture is not only a 'National museum.'" Essentially it means that the company is interested in "living dramatic forms" and performs in the small outposts of Poland to a primarily peasant audience. Gardzienice eschews the theater of alienation of Brecht in favor of one that draws the audience closer to it.
Carmina Burana
Without further ado, Staniewski leads the group to the back of the cathedral into a small chapel behind the main altar where the members of the troupe are already chanting Latin. The audience is seated on the floor around the performing space, and as it settles, the chanting, reminiscent of the profane songs, or Carmina burana, of medieval monks, continues and rises in fervor.
Gardzienice does indeed warm up and reaches into the audience surrounding it for participation. "Spinning," says Staniewski, "was once a form of prayer." One by one, members of the audience are spun in the center of the players, the players turning them at the waist while the audience and the rest of the troupe clap and chant some nonsense syllables.
None of this is new, but it is entirely infectious. Gardzienice quickly gains the audience's trust; and its technique for doing so is nothing more than a childlike ingenuousness arising out of theatrical conviction.
The warm-up is what Staniewski calls "a gathering" where the essentials of theater, as Gardzienice sees them, come into play. (In his notes to the program, Staniewski parses the word theater, which comes from the Greek thea, the state of seeing or perceiving.) The essence, once again as Gardzienice sees it, is the unification of sophistication with simplicity, high culture with low, ancient forms with new--and, as we will soon see, the marriage of heaven and hell.
A Double Meaning
"Is it possible to touch without a double meaning?" Staniewski asks while members of his troupe run around touching the audience, by now warmed up themselves and clapping like children at a circus. Earlier during the warm-up the small director has used a phrase--"the heart is a language too"--which perhaps defines the emotional effect Gardzienice achieves.
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