MYTH IN ACTION

[lecture delivered on the Conference Ancient Myths in the Contemporary Theatre i

n Olympia, Greece, August 1st, 2002]
Greek Heritage in the Polish Theatre
Polish culture is based on a peculiar paradox. Our tradition and historical cons
ciousness are rich in rituals and martyrs, yet they function in a mythological v
acuum, as there has been no elaborate system of myths to help us understand thes
e ceremonies and sacrifices. Since we have traditionally claimed the Mediterrane
an civilisation as the source of our own culture, for many centuries we have als
o been relying on ancient Greek myths, albeit in the form passed on to us by the
Romans. There was a time when many educated Poles were bilingual, and their Lat
in was better than Polish. Throughout our history, as we were losing our indepen
dence, ancient Greek myths, told again and again, lent us strength to survive an
d gave a meaning to our struggles. They ultimately became an integral part of ou
r identity. In order to show how an ancient myth can be used as a device in cons
tructing modern identity, I will look at the work of three Polish theatre artist
s.
Odysseus in the Theatre of Death
In 1944, in the town of Kraków, then occupied by the German military forces, Tadeu
sz Kantor (1915-1990), a Polish painter and visionary theatre director, was plan
ning to stage at the main Kraków Railway Station, crowded with Nazi soldiers and p
olice, The Return of Odysseus - a drama by another Polish visionary Stanisław Wysp
iański (1869-1907). At that time the Nazis were in full retreat and Kantor envisag
ed Odysseus as a German Soldier coming home by train after the German surrender
at Stalingrad (02.02.1943). A war criminal and a traitor, Odysseus was also comi
ng from the world of ancient fiction to the real world. At the dirty and ugly st
ation nobody would notice him, nobody would care who he is and what he did. Ther
e was no Ithaca anymore. The station was an embodiment of a reality of a lower o
rder.
Of course, this idea has never materialised. Kantor had to stage his play in a p
rivate apartment. But still people who let him do it were risking their lives, a
s was the artist himself. There was a Nazi police station on the other side of t
he street and at any moment the Germans could break in. Moreover, the performanc
e itself referred to the war events directly. When Odysseus directed his bow tow
ards the suitors, the audience could hear the rattle of a machinegun coming from
the real loudspeaker stolen from the street. On the entrance doors to the room
where the performance took place Kantor wrote: "You never enter theatre with imp
unity".
There was not a set design or props; the performance was staged in a room destro
yed by the war. The spectators were not separated from the artists. There was no
isolated space for illusion. Everything had to be real. But the reality of wart
ime was the reality of the lowest order. The objects used in the performance wer
e the "poor objects" found on the street. "This everyday REALNESS - explained Ka
ntor, who was the best commentator of his own works - which was firmly rooted in
both place and time, immediately permitted the audience to perceive this myster
ious current flowing from the depth of time when the soldier, whose presence cou
ld not have been questioned, called himself by the name of the man who had died
centuries ago". Only the huge canon was artificial: made of wood, it placed the
war in the realm of fiction. Or more accurately: in the realm of death.
Odysseus, an Unknown Soldier in a dirty old mantel and a Wehrmacht helm, was ret
urning from the realm of Death. Kantor discovered art as a vehicle to cross the
gap between the other world and the real world, between death and life, between
fiction and reality. The Return of Odysseus was the first manifestation of his T
heatre of Death. The returning Odysseus became the prototype for all latter char
acters in Kantor's theatre.
But Kantor was an eternal pilgrim himself, he internalized the great Homeric myt
h by repeating the journey of Odysseus with his art and with his life. In 1955 h
e founded Cricot 2 Theatre, named after the theatre of painters, which existed i
n Kraków in the years 1933-1939. The French-sounding term "cricot" was an anagram
from Polish "to cyrk", "this is a circus". Kantor's theatre never had any legal
status or any building for staging performances. It was a genuine travelling tro
upe. The world of performance was Kantor's real home and his journey was a spiri
tual one, towards self-discovery.
In 1975 Kantor staged his greatest performance, The Dead Class (Umarła Klasa). A f
ew years earlier, during holidays on the Polish coast, he came upon a small vill
age school and when he looked inside the empty classroom through the dirty windo
w he discovered "the reality of memory". In The Dead Class Kantor brought thirte
en old people back from their death to the school. In the class they met thirtee
n manikins (or better: puppets) of children who resembled them when they were yo
ung. They had to sit few lessons before they could return to the realm of Death
again. The performance had a structure of a spiritualistic séance. The actors were
haunted by their characters; they were the living people inhabited by the dead
ones. There was no room for psychological acting, or more accurately: there was
no acting at all. Kantor required his actors not to embody a character but to pr
ecisely accomplish a real task, as for example "packing of the pack". For Kantor
, actors were crooks who unsuccessfully tried to cheat the audience. He himself,
always present on the stage, directed the whole ceremony like a conductor or a
priest rather than a director. All these ghosts were projections of his Memory.
During the show, it was the Memory that had to be real, not the actors.
In his next performance, Wielopole, Wielopole (1980), Kantor put on the stage hi
s own dead family. He mentally returned home to the village where he was born in
1915. The performance took place in the family room, which did not resemble any
space at Kantor's home in a Polish-Jewish village Wielopole, but was the Room o
f Memory, an autonomous space created by the simultaneous universes of a physica
l world overlapping the world of memory. Wielopole, Wielopole was created not in
Poland but in Florence, Italy. Florence, once an intellectual and artistic cent
re of Italy, had become his second hometown. Both cities, Florence and Kraków, wer
e depositories of glorious traditions. Wielopole, Wielopole was Kantor's first s
cript which did not include any quotations from the existing dramas.
His next show, Let the Artists Die (1985) continued Kantor's road towards self-d
iscovery. The structure of the revue, as he called it, was based on his own life
, from his birth till his death. It was a bitter testimony to his failure to bec
ome his real self. Kantor exposed life as a process of continuous dying. Continu
al transformations made forging an identity impossible. The revue was created in
Nuremberg, a hometown of another ill-fated artist, a great Renaissance sculptor
Weit Stoss (1447-1533), who was one of the main characters in Let the Artists D
ie. Kantor was similarly damned in his hometown Kraków where he usually was given
bad reviews and had no place to work. Weit Stoss, accused of not paying his debt
s, had both his cheeks pierced by the Nuremberg magistrates. As a motto to his p
erformance Kantor chose: "Artists are victims of a society".
The last performance Kantor managed to produce for his Cricot 2 Theatre had a ve
ry meaningful title: I Shall Never Return (1988). For this show he created his o
wn manikin. He came to the end of his road. Now he himself was haunted by the gh
osts from his previous performances. The show began with his own voice coming fr
om the loudspeaker: "An artist has to be at the bottom"... He himself was sittin
g at the table on the stage watching the procession of his own creations. In the
middle of the performance his other Self came on the stage, the manikin of a yo
ung Kantor, dressed as a groom. He was accompanied by an empty coffin, his bride
. At the end of the show the real Kantor was approached by the characters from T
he Return of Odysseus. The suitors brought him a coffin. And then Kantor read fr
om the old script of the original production: "In my fatherland I have found a h
ell". He died two years later, while working on his next performance, Today Is M
y Birthday. He spent his last days completely alone in Kraków. After working durin
g the day on the new performance, he came home and wrote in his diary: "What emp
tiness surrounds me", "Nobody comes. I think, they are afraid", "I have so much
to do".
Kantor's travelling theatre was the twentieth century version of an old Greek my
th. Like Odysseus he went into the realm of Death and then returned to discover
himself in his own art. With his death his theatre inevitably ceased to exist. B
ut the Theatre of Death was also a testimony to the 20th century notorious for t
otalitarian regimes and genocide. Kantor discovered the enduring power of the re
ality of the lowest order. Like a totalitarian dictator he reduced his actors in
to Bio-objects. In exposing their humiliation, he revealed the greatness of huma
n beings. The act of a genius transformed the Bio-object into the masterpiece. L
ike Homer in his epics, Kantor recounted brutal and heroic events and proved tha
t art will triumph over war and politics. While revealing his own Myth he has gi
ven shape to our own Memory.
Prometheus in the Poor Theatre
Kraków is the Polish necropolis, where our greatest kings and poets had been burie
d. Founded in the eight century AD, it was the capital city of Poland from 1305
to 1595, and today it is still an important cultural centre. The Wawel, the cast
le where the Polish kings resided, has the same significance for the Poles as th
e Athenian Acropolis for the Europeans. Here, in the years 1903-1904 Stanisław Wys
piański wrote Acropolis, his most important and difficult to interpret drama. The
narrative is simple. On the night of the Resurrection, before Easter Sunday, fig
ures descend from Wawel tapestries to recreate the great myths from ancient Gree
ce and the Bible: the Trojan War, Paris and Helen, Jacob's wrestling with the An
gel, Jacob and Esau.
At the time when Wyspiański was composing his play, Cracow was both: the Polish Ac
ropolis, a monument to our heroic past and a cradle and a grave of the national
identity, and a huge ruin. Like the Athenian Acropolis the Wawel castle was wrec
ked by foreign invaders. This meant that the play's title Acropolis had a ring o
f ambiguity about it.
In 1962, in a small town of Opole, 170 km from Kraków and 80 km from a former conc
entration camp in Auschwitz, a twenty-nine-year-old director Jerzy Grotowski mad
e a decision to stage Acropolis in his Laboratory Theatre. Grotowski and his lit
erary adviser Ludwik Flaszen (born in 1934) could not ignore the fact that they
read the play in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Their collaborator was Józef Szaj
na (born in 1922), a well-known painter and a survivor of the Auschwitz camp. He
decisively inspired the shocking and petrifying vision of the Acropolis as the
crematory of civilisations. The burial ground of tradition was confronted with t
he reality of extermination camps. The motto to the production was taken from th
e poem of Tadeusz Borowski (1922-1951), who also had been a prisoner in Auschwit
z:
Its just scrap iron that will be left after us
And a hollow, derisive laughter of future generations (trans. B. Taborski).
Grotowski's Acropolis became thus a poetic vision of an extermination camp. The
drama was acted among the spectators who were placed on different levels all ove
r the acting space. But there was no direct contact between the actors and the a
udience. They inhabited two separate and opposite worlds: the spectators belonge
d to the realm of Life, the characters of the play to the realm of Death. Flasze
n explained: "The physical closeness on this occasion is congenial to that stran
geness: the audience, though facing the actors, are not seen by them. The dead a
ppear in the dreams of the living odd and incomprehensible. The fact that they a
ct in different places of the room - individually, and sometimes simultaneously
- is intended to create the suggestion of spatial vagueness and obtrusive ubiqui
ty".
In the middle of the acting space stood a huge chest, with iron junk heaped on t
op of it: rusted stove pipes of various lengths and widths, a wheelbarrow, a bat
htub, hammers and nails. As the action progressed, the actors-prisoners were con
structing out of those objects an absurd civilisation, a civilisation of a gas c
hamber, symbolised by the stove pipes which surrounded the whole room as the act
ors hung them by strings or nailed them to the floor. Their costumes were just p
ieces of sack cloth with holes in them, put over their naked bodies; on their fe
et they had heavy wooden clogs which made an unbearable noise, on their heads th
ey had dark, non-descript berets. The actors performed the absurdly aimless work
of convicts, prescribed by prison camp regulations. Thus, in Acropolis, ancient
and biblical myths were performed by the prisoners of a concentration camp. Wys
piański's drama ends with the Resurrection and the apotheosis of Christ; this perf
ormance ended with a procession of prisoners who triumphantly carried a headless
mannequin whom they took for the Saviour and disappeared one after another into
a crematorium oven. Instead of an identification Grotowski proposed a confronta
tion with a myth.
There was no individual hero. Actors were prisoners and they were made into iden
tical beings, bereft of any distinguishing marks of sex, age, or social class. S
ix actors presented an ideal ancient chorus. Their masks were created solely by
the facial muscles, frozen in a bizarre grimace. Acropolis was a decisive step t
owards a poor theatre. Flaszen explained: "The production was constructed on the
principle of strict self-sufficiency. The main commandment is: do not introduce
in the course of action anything which is not there from the outset. There are
people and a certain number of objects gathered in the room. And that material m
ust suffice to construct all circumstances and situations of the performance; th
e vision and the sound, the time and space. The poor theatre: to extract, using
the smallest number of permanent objects - by magic transformations of objects i
nto objects, by multi-functional acting - the maximum of effects. To create whol
e World, making use of whatever is within reach of the hand".
After the collective confrontation with a myth in Acropolis, the natural consequ
ence was to take one step further and make actors confront a myth individually o
n the most intimate level. Grotowski explained: "I demand from the actor a deed,
in which is contained his relation to the world. In a single reaction the actor
ought to open, as it were, successive layers of his personality, from the biolo
gical-instinctive, through thought and consciousness, up to the peak which is di
fficult to define, but in which everything unites in one; there is in it the act
of totally revealing oneself, sacrifice, sincerity, which translates all the co
nventional barriers and which contains, both at once, eros and caritas, I call i
t the total act. This act should function as a self-revelation. This act can be
accomplished only on the basis of one's own life - it is an act which strips one
bare, deprives, reveals, discovers. The actor ought not to act, but penetrate t
he areas of his own experience with his body and voice. At the moment the actor
achieves this act, he becomes a phenomenon hinc et nunc; he does not tell a stor
y, or create an illusion - he is there in the present. If the actor is able to a
ccomplish an act of this kind, and moreover in confrontation with a myth which r
etains its validity for us - the reaction which he evokes in us contains a pecul
iar unity of what is individual and what is collective".
In the total act the actor was to present here and now not only himself but also
the myth. A classic example of the total act was the role of Ryszard Cieślak (193
7-1990) in The Constant Prince (1965), based on Calderon's drama in the free tra
nslation of a great Polish Romantic poet, Juliusz Słowacki (1809-1849). Grotowski
transferred the action from a historical to a universal level. Cieślak had to face
the myth of Christ. On a personal level he verified the myth referring it to hi
s most intimate memories. Grotowski demanded that the actor remain independent a
nd pure to the point of ecstasy. Cieślak achieved this state by recalling his firs
t love encounter with a girl during the scenes of the prince's martyrdom. In the
performance his total act was contrasted with the behaviour of the King's court
, "the community of fanatical conformists". To enhance the tragedy of a human se
lf-sacrifice Grotowski radically separated the audience from the actors. The spe
ctators were placed behind a high fence; like a public in the Ancient Rome obser
ving bloody games they looked down on the actors. "In the middle of the room the
re was a dais which - according to the requirements of the action - could serve
as a prisoner's bed of misery, an executioner's platform, a table for surgical o
perations and a sacrificial altar". Theatre was transformed into a sanctuary, wh
ere an ancient myth was performed and actualised, and where an actor became a Ho
ly Actor.
The production of The Constant Prince and Cieślak's great creation marked the begi
nning of a long process of research and workshops to accomplish the total act no
t just by one actor but also by the entire company of the Laboratory Theatre. On
19 July 1968 a single open rehearsal took place in Wrocław, followed on 11 Februa
ry 1969 by the official premiere of Apocalypsis cum Figuris. The title alluded t
o the last work of Adrian Leverkühn, a hero of Doctor Faustus (1943-1947) by Thoma
s Mann (1875-1955), who "as a man of thirty five, under the influence of the fir
st wave of euphoric inspiration, composes his main work, or his first great work
, Apocalypsis cum Figuris, to fifteen woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), or d
irectly based on the text of the Revelation, in an uncannily short time." In 196
8 Jerzy Grotowski was also thirty-five year old and Apocalypsis came to be consi
dered his most outstanding work, and the fullest work of his actors all of whom
achieved creations of exceptional intensity.
Grotowski stated: "In Apocalypsis we departed from literature. It was not a mont
age/compilation of texts. It was something we arrived at during rehearsals, trou
gh flashes of revelation, trough improvisations. We had material for twenty hour
s in the end. Out of that we had to construct something which would have its own
energy, like a stream. It was only then that we turned to the text, to speech.
From the various texts a language without an author was created, a language of t
he human kind. In what we are doing now there are no quotations. The word appear
s when it is indispensable for us". Apocalypsis was his last performance. In the
early seventies Grotowski proclaimed the end of the "Theatre of Productions" (1
957-1968). Now spectators were required to actively participate in workshops and
para-theatrical events, and in the works of the international Theatre of Source
s (1976-1982).
In 1982, following the imposition of the Martial law, Grotowski left Poland. Aft
er few years of lecturing at American universities, he started in 1985 in Italy
his Ritual Arts project. With a small group of young collaborators he founded th
e Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski in Pontadera, Tuscany. Their work focused on anc
ient vibratory songs. These songs derived from ritual tradition were used as a d
evice for the inner transformation. To activate "inner action" in the performers
, Grotowski developed special performing structures, which were called simply Ac
tions. Although the main goal of Action was to transform the doers, Grotowski in
vited to Pontadera guests to witness the process. In 1998 he and his collaborato
rs visited Wrocław and presented Action to small chosen audience. We could witness
how ancient ritual songs revealed their great mythical power again. In these so
ngs ancient myths regained their universal dimension.
For Grotowski, myth was a vehicle for collective and personal transformation. Tr
ue to this idea, several times in his life he himself underwent a radical transf
ormation. He changed from a corpulent party member in dark glasses, through a sl
im hippie with long hair, into a white-bearded recluse. He constructed and recon
structed his own Self as an artist. His final creative achievement was to become
a myth himself.
Rural Dionysos
The third artist is Włodzimierz Staniewski (born in 1950), a founder and a leader
of the Centre for Theatre Practice in Gardzienice, a small village in south-east
ern Poland. In 1976, Staniewski, after parting his ways with Grotowski, moved to
the rural and backward areas in order to find a new environment, a new audience
and new resources for the theatre. This most Dionysian of Polish artists used t
he spirit of music as a creative force for his performances and for two original
theatrical practices - The Expeditions and The Gatherings. For Staniewski, like
for Grotowski, myths are still vibrating in "the Musicality of the Earth". But
their artistic roads were very different. Grotowski was more like a scientist wh
o put the actors in the laboratory in order to stimulate and study their transfo
rmations. Staniewski has left the theatre and took the actors on a journey to br
ing his art directly to the people, like ancient Thespis - if there is any truth
in Horace's words that Thespis took his plays about on wagons.
Initially the Expeditions were undertaken every month, mainly in the eastern reg
ions of Poland where many ethnic minorities including the Byelorussians, Gypsies
and Lemks still live. During such Expeditions Staniewski organised the Gatherin
gs. In the evening the actors performed a play for the villagers and later in th
e night the villagers were asked to sing their local traditional songs. The Gath
erings provided the material for Gardzienice?s early performances: Sorcery (1981
) and The Life of Archpriest Avvakum (1983). Sorcery was based on the Part Two o
f the drama Forefathers Eve (1821) by a Polish great Romantic poet Adam Mickiewi
cz (1798-1855). Using folk rituals and the structure of a Greek tragedy Mickiewi
cz sought to create a Slavic national myth, which in his opinion the Poles did n
ot possess. Staniewski did not propose any new interpretation, but repeated Mick
iewicz's creative procedure, fusing the elements of a high and low culture. Sorc
ery arose from the fragments of the drama and from the songs and gestures of vil
lage people. Russian and Byelorussian songs and Hasidic Jews whirling dance serv
ed to recall the original context of an ancient Slavic ceremony resembling the a
ncient Anthesteria, a festival of Dionysos which was associated with the new win
e and a commemoration of the dead.
The source and inspiration for The Life of Archpriest Avvakum was The Life writt
en by 17th century Russian Orthodox fanatic Avvakum Pietrovich (1620-1682), burn
t at the stake. Staniewski's actors lent life and energy to the hieratical figur
es "frozen" in the old Russian Holy Icons. It was of a huge significance that th
e performance invoking suffering, heroism and constancy was created during the M
arshal Law in Poland. While working on their next project Carmina Burana (1990),
which centred on the myth of Tristan and Isolde, the company went abroad to stu
dy Celtic themes and medieval music.
In 1996 Staniewski composed his last performance, "a theatrical essay" based on
the only Latin novel, which survived in its entirety, Metamorphoses or Golden As
s by Apuleius, a second century writer and orator. Staniewski attempted to revit
alise not only an ancient myth but also ancient Greek music. Tomasz Rodowicz, th
e main actor in Gardzienice, explains: "The work on Metamorphoses proceeded on t
wo independent levels for many months. The first level conducted by Włodzimierz St
aniewski was connected with Apuleius and Plato, looking for references to our Ex
peditions, studies of ancient iconography and the creation of new actors' techni
que. The second level conducted by a professional musician Maciej Rychły was an at
tempt to enter the world of ancient Greek music. He wanted us to read ancient mu
sic through the rhythms of the Balkans or Peloponnesian Peninsula. Singing Greek
hymns like Balkan ones (3+3+2+2) we felt in our bodies that these rhythms have
a power of flywheels".
With equal intensity Rychły studied both the scraps of ancient manuscripts with mu
sic and the paintings preserved on vases. He tried to enliven each dancing gestu
re frozen on the vases and to apply to this movement the best suiting musical fr
agment. So, for hours he had been dancing and singing in order to bring about hi
s own body experience. Later he passed on his discoveries directly into the acto
rs' bodies and voices. At the crucial stages the process was verified by Staniew
ski who incorporated chosen materials into the final performance. During the wor
k on Metamorphoses Gardzienice closely collaborated with classical scholars in P
oland. Regardless of the academic value of their reconstruction they probably su
cceeded in bringing back to life the spirit of ancient Greek music and dance. We
couldn't ask for more.
In his musically structured performances Staniewski has always attempted to embo
dy the idea of the Expedition culminating in the Gathering and to bring about th
e meeting of "high culture" with the "low culture". One year ago an American sch
olar Richard Schechner accused Gardzienice of neo-colonialism and escapism. I wo
uld argue, however, that the opposite is true. Staniewski's work has always been
a testimony to the complex structure of Polish society, something which the com
munist rulers tried to deny by perpetuating in their official propaganda a visio
n of a homogeneous and a unified nation. In his early performances he gave a voi
ce to the ethnic minorities who were not only ignored and silenced but for a sho
rt time after the Second World War also persecuted and exterminated by the Polis
h government. Even in the very "archaeological" and elaborated Metamorphoses the
actors behave like simple villagers who still remember how to sing their tradit
ional songs. Only this time these songs belong to the heritage of the ancient Gr
eece.
Conclusion: In search for a definition
The focus of my presentation was the performative power of myth. Kantor, Grotows
ki and Staniewski proved with their art and lives that myths have certain basic
structures and potentialities which allow for different retellings, interpretati
ons and applications. Kantor internalised myth to construct his own identity, Gr
otowski used myth to redefine and restructure the identity of his community, and
for Staniewski myth became a vehicle to enliven ancient artistic procedures and
empower people living in the rural province. No generally accepted definition o
f myth exists. The best approximation was given by Walter Burkert (born in 1931)
, one of the main scholars of ancient Greek Religion, a Professor of Classics at
the university of Zurich. In his 1979 book, Structure and History in Greek Myth
ology and Ritual, Burkert wrote: "myth is a traditional tale with secondary, par
tial reference to something of collective importance".
The word "traditional" implies a story which cannot be connected to any first st
oryteller known by a name. In the context of oral culture at least, there was no
t a fixed narration which was passed on but different plots associated with diff
erent performers. Polish artists can be counted among them. They contributed to
preserving ancient myths by re-enacting their basic patterns and merging them wi
th their own stories which, in a mysterious turn, acquired a collective importan
ce.