"momentous contemporary themes....such as the most topical-and possibly 'prophetic'-- interpretation of the present European crisis"

Culture Now. Athens, 28.09. 2011.

Editor's choice:

"The dynamic of the historic Gardzienice theatre... one of the best known Polish theatre companies, extends way beyond the limits of its roots"

Maria Kriou, Athinorama 4.10.11

This work by Staniewski-besides its artistic merit- must at all costs be seen for its historical value."

Ileianna Dimadi (editorial in Athinorama, 13.10. 11 )

(in Staniewski's adaptation of the Iphigenia in Tauris) "the original theatrical theme marries ancient Greek with eastern European iconography to uncover momentous contemporary issues".

Vana Papadopoulou, Theatro, 14.10.11.

"A polyphony..of tempestuous rhythms and relentless energy [shows us ].. the world again divided between the 'civilized' and the 'barbarian'."

Daphne Kontodima, Ta Nea, 14.10.11

Super-Polish Euripides

Włodzimierz Staniewski: Invoking the historian Wincenty Kadłubek, I claim that the Greek Amber Route went from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea, and I request archaeologists to search for ionic columns at Gardzienice. Interviewed by Grzegorz Nurek

/Tygodnik Powszechny, No. 26 (3233), 26 June 2011/

Grzegorz Nurek : With the spectacle "Iphigenia in T.", based on "Iphigenia in Tauris", you return to the cycle that is devoted to Iphigenia. The spectacle "Iphigenia in A." was made in 2007, and it was a study of fanatism, an attempt to present the end of the world of community. How to look at "Iphigenia in T." in Poland, when the Polish reality is becoming a competitive theatre, a scene full of dramatic divisions and quarrels?

Włodzimierz Staniewski: A theatrical spectacle is like yarn, and its author (director), is like a spider who spines its thread. But he is also an investigator, walking through the labyrinths of thoughts of other people and those of his own. He conducts an inquiry, investigates motives and circumstances, even those removed farthest away. He formulates hypotheses. He projects the whole world that is within him onto the intrigue which he illuminates. Where linkages are missing, he resorts to intuition. I have assumed that the organizing principle of Euripides' "Iphigenia in Tauris" is a division into two opposing worlds, a Europe of two velocities. Eternal historical tensions existing between the so-called civilised and the so-called barbarians; between the drawing-room and the street. I remember from my own youth how the pages of Napoleon's biography affected me with a delirious mood when I read an account of how the future imperator, confused and (and often dirtish) in the fever of the closing French Revolution was running back and forth from the vampiric crowds in the streets of Paris to the drawing-rooms, where people plotted about how to get into a scuffle with the hydra. Yet there was not a daredevil who would undertake to rout the masses. The drawing room relied on Bonaparte, at the time, of small significance, seeing in him one of the tools of realizing their policy. Napoleon, having a mandate of the drawing-room to clear up the mess, fired cannons at the crowd by the Versailes. It was the first time in the history when canons were fired at street rioters, and how very effectively! That is how the cult of a strategic genius was born. And, from the historical perspective, an idol symbolizing the quintessence of civilization reached the bottom of barbarism, while the barbaric mob became a symbol of noble sacrifice.

And how does it relate to Euripides?

In Euripides we have metropolitan Athens and provincial Tauris. It is as if one were looking at today's Paris and Warsaw. Orestes and Pylades, perverse and treacherous characters and braggarts arrive at Tauris from Athens aboard a magnificent five-oar galley. When depicted on ancient paintings, they appear as if cut out from a today's cartoon. They are celebrities, avatars of all possible types of things "post-". The Tauri, on the other hand, are exemplary barbarians, community bumpkins, pious ritualists. A little cruel, though it is hard to say whether more or less cruel than the Greeks. In general, Euripides paintings suggest that he liked them. One has to remember that the Tauri were a historical people, living at the territories of contemporary Chersonesus in the Ukraine. How close it is to a Warsaw street Krakowskie Przedmieście! And even closer to Gardzienice! All right then, a construction is based on contrasting two worlds. We also see it in Joseph Conrad, we know it from today's Poland, too. Here are lords - there are bumpkins. These have barbarian inclinations and overstrained biographies - those, murderous tendencies, which they are ready to release in the name of defence of sacred objects. Matters become complicated though, as the leader of the God-fearing, Taos, is an analogy to Achilles (an icon of the civilized). It is in that compositional polyphony that Euripides' genius is manifested. If Toas is an analogy to Achilles, the second of the three Iphigenia's journeys would be a trip to her wedding with Achilles/Toas (multiplication of hero's embodiments has been a common phenomenon since time immemorial!). Her first journey, from Argos to Aulis - is a summons for bloodshed nuptials. A wedding with Achilles was a trap to lure Iphigenia, in order to make a murderous offering of her, performed by her father (Agamemnon). Iphigenia's third journey, from Tauris to Brauron near Athens is a summons for her not only to become an Artemis' priestess, but also to establish new initiation rites, as well as to establish the cult of Iphigenia herself. However, it was the second journey, the one from Aulis to Tauris, that was most mysterious, and the one that opened the field to formulating numerous hypotheses. As was stated, it could be a summons to nuptials proper with no one else but Toas. In my performance, Taos is an elderly man, which additionally enhances the malignancy of the relation with a young, perverse Iphigenia, who uses him as a pawn in her game. However, she becomes not only a priestess at a shrine, but also a depository of Toas' power, a confidante, worthy of his highest trust. Toas is emotionally dependent on Iphigenia. Is it only emotionally? Iphigenia is a co-ruler of the country of the Tauri. She - the one who belongs to a different tribe.

Where is room for contemporary Polish interpretation?

Imagination and awareness of the existence of countless interpretations of Greek myths forces us to ponder on how Toas found Iphigenia and how he adopted her. That she falls, or floats, down from heaven, in a cloud, is a shortcut that offends our imagination. How could it be? The first and the third journey has so much descriptive flesh, so why should we be satisfied with a shortcut when it comes to the journey to Tauris? Did she fall on the heads of the Tauri and at once was named an arch-priestess of the local rites? The phenomenon of Iphigenia's sudden descent cannot be ascribed even to a well-developed application of deus ex machina (that was, incidentally, invented by Euripides). Evdently, a link is missing here. Has it been lost? Let us not forget that Euripides had a divine gift of creating myth-generating narrations. If a link is missing, one should add it, compose it, if it has gone away somewhere. Or was it a part of the story that was lost? We need a relation of Toas with Iphigenia to expose the next problem in the Euripides' polyphonic construction - the problem of intrigue and betrayal. How lowly does Iphigenia betray Toas. She owes him so much, and betrays him so meanly. Toas had found her as a naked, manhandled human body. He gave her shelter and idolized her. Myths and heroes are born out of a catastrophe. A black meteor rends the sky, leaving behind a fiery wound, and falls onto Athens, on Ephesus, on Truris. It becomes an object of a cult, an icon. The Artemis of the East has a black countenance, a Black Madonna painted on the surface of the supper table by St. Luke the Evangelist, travels a long way (through Ephesus? Through the land of the Tauri?) to Jasna Gora. I can see Iphigenia thrown onto Krakowskie Przedmieście on April 10 th , where the air vibrates with the eternal Polish call: "Treason" and "Under you protection" (a Polish religious hymn). This happens under the protection of the Black Madonna, who is compared to the Tauric Artemis by Voltaire in a letter to Catherine the Great. With a suggestion of bringing order amongst the stick-in-the-muds, barbarian bastards, the peoples of the past. Voila ! If in Mickiewicz God can be an exhorted tsar, then in my play Athena can be Catherine the Great. Even more so since the tsaritsa Catherine was overwhelmed with the myth of Iphigenia, Artemis and Tauris.

From one spectacle to another you have been developing an interest in social matters - the problem of the victim , of power. In "Iphigenia in T." there were conspicuous allusions to the Smolensk tragedy and to what happened later under the cross at Warsaw's Krakowskie Przedmieście - moving the candles, taking them away.

There is a scene of playing with the candles, that is, of playing for the future, and a scene of cleansing. But I am interested in History as a Great Prostitute, which does not change the fact that it also is a teacher of life. A prostitute!

You introduce voices touching upon Polish themes. The slogans thrown out by the protagonists of the spectacle, e.g. "The unaccounted past of the Polish Peoples' Republic", "The Institute of the National Memory":, ("Alive? Not alive?").

Those are the so-called gnomes, short cut-in shots in the folk-style, sentences and exclamations used in the songs of the choir. Euripides was very good at it. In our performance, they spill from the bewails of the Euripides' choir and transform into wails, with allusions to what surrounds us, to what chafes us, and to what we are infected with. Folk-market bitter complaints over oneself. Super-Polish.

Welcoming the audience before the spectacle, you said: "Euripides, the father of the European Union"

He could be that. He could be the subject of research concerning from whose legacy a pre-conception of a federation emerged. Whether it developed from the Charlemagne's Christian concept, or from a Hellenic idea of Alexander the Great's. One does not believe one's eyes when one realizes how huge charge was associated with Hellenism. A common tongue ( koine ), universalism with respect for the diversity of the regions, free trade, religious syncretism, flourishing of culture, technology, sciences, the building of gymnasia, theatres, libraries. - all in an outburst of frantic passion... An ability of civilizations and cultures with totally different rots to co-exist.

What was Euripides to his contemporaries?

Euripides died in 405 B. C. in Pella, at the court of Archelaus, an ancestor of Alexander the Great's. This is where he wrote "Bacchantes". A legend has it that, he set out for his customary walk to wilderness, and was torn apart by dogs. Unwanted in Athens, idolized in Macedonia, everywhere in almost the entire basin of the Aegean Sea regarded as one of the most well-known legends of the epoch. Posthumous tribute was also given to him by Sophocles. Legends say that Socrates ostentatiously left the premiere of "Electra", but also that he never missed a premiere of any Euripides' play. Euripides was called a philosopher of the stage. Following the Syracuse defeat in 413 B. C., some citizens of Athens received free food and drink for singing songs of his authorship. An outstanding painter, a director, an author of choreographic routines, a connoisseur of the secrets of human soul. But also a loner, a misogynist, a religious provocateur, a bibliophile who had gathered in his cave on Salamis a most precious collection at the time. Banned from Athens, he moves to Macedonia, where his teachings shape the intellectual culture of Pella. Fifty years after Euripides' death Alexander would learn by heart Euripides' and Homer's works. In breaks between his military campaigns he would order theatres built and Euripides' plays shown. It surely was not the xenophobic Aristotle who instilled in Alexander cosmopolitan ideas. And it was not Homer. It was Euripides, an advocate of co-existence, a friend of Herodotus, who could be the source of a vision of the world as a community of many civilisations, many nations, many cultures.

How long did the work on "Iphigenia in T..." last?

Two years in irregular bouts, with long breaks. We do not have yet at our disposal conditions that would favour continuous work on a new spectacle. We are carrying out dozens of other projects. Every new spectacle for us is like a trip to another dimension. One has to think out and master new means of expression, appoint a new constellation of actors, find new sources of fresh energy.

Do "Gardzienice" move to Warsaw every year?

We resided in Warsaw for shorter or longer time in the last three years. It is high time we had a constant base in Warsaw. Our power is movement, dynamics, new openings. If we do not get a new shelter in town, a second lung for expansion, that "black hundred" that have been following us will finally stifle us. I am talking of the demonic phenomenon of appropriating people, ideas, territories that I have settled for the last three decades.

In 2008, "Gardzienice" shot a film in Delphi based on motives of "Iphigenia in A...". The camerawork was done by Wojciech Staroń, this year's laureate of the Kraków Festival of Documentary Films, for directing the document "Argentyńska lekcja" ("Argentinian lesson"). Krzysztof Globisz also participated.

Wojciech Staroń found us through Joasia Kos and Krzysztof Krauze as a well-known outstanding cameraman. And for almost twenty years now we have been doing something together with Jacek Petrycki, a "Mercedes of Polish cinematography", as he is called in the film society. "Gardzienice" is en exclusive club for the best, hence our adventures with Krzysztof Globisz, Andrzej Seweryn.

How is the construction of the European Centre for Theatre Practices at Gardzienice proceeding? During the construction works interesting archeological finds were discovered. Will it delay the opening?

I do not think so. I must only keep an eye on the construction so that we were not touched by the National Stadium or the Chinese highway syndrome. I have an excellent team coordinated by Wojciech Goleman, a deputy manager for the administrative affairs, I have good supervision. We find agreement with the Provincial Conservator. Two architectural teams from Kraków and Białystok include top class specialists, reliable and highly cultured. Together with the outstanding Polish research workers in the fields of history of architecture and archaeology, we experience strong fascination over what is being revealed and is coming out of earth. Earth speaks, and stones sing. It was worth it, during that period of 33 years of exile to nowhere, to be mistreated and, despite sacrifice, forays and attempts at eviction, to return to this patch of land and raise it from ruins, from scrap, and noblify it and make it known (following the Bishop Kadłubek) that this way must have been frequented by ancient Greeks, proceeding from their Back Sea and Ukrainian colonies to the Baltic Sea. The only thing that was needed to complete happiness was for Mr. Łukasz Rejniewicz, an archaeologist, to unearth the capital of an ionic column. Possibly dragged centuries ago from the today's Chersonesos, a legendary land of the Tauri, where the beautiful shrine of Artemis stood. A spice to the whole story is the fact that an airport is being built constructed 15 minutes' drive from Gardzienice, and a highway is being built from the neighbouring Piaski. Just think: at the turn of the 1990's, to reach Lublin from Gardzienice, one had to walk to Piaski, or fetch a ride on a horse-cart (but only if the peasant wanted to give a ride, and not a whipping), and wait for hours at Piaski for a bus or someone willing to give a ride to appear on the horizon.

In the winter, or during rainy autumns, we were far from laughter. We used to take a shot at the "Rarytas" restaurant and killed the time playing "Brasilian football" on the surface of the road, that is, kicking an empty can. A trip to visit families, far away in Wrocław, Warszawa, Poznań, Kraków and other towns was an ordeal, too. One had to have a strong personality. The construction, so far, has been proceeding according to plan and by 2013 all buildings should be opened for use.


What will be their use?

At the Granary - The Academy for Theatre Practices. Throughout the last two decades the Academy had fieldwork conditions; the infamous "henhouse", threshing floors at the nearby farms, that is - wherever one could work and live in Spartan conditions. It was from the Academy that an army of young artists had come who now are rocking out Polish culture. Not the Polish mass culture, of course. At the Small Annexe, the Workshop for Close History will be held, a kind of research institute serving the function of renewing and restoring the memory of the traditions and nations that have contributed to the culture of this land. As an example, let me remind that Piaski and its surroundings used to be regarded as Jewish. Restoring the memory of our older brothers in faith has stood since 1977 at the core of my activity. In the spacious castle's cellars, wrapped in mystery, excavations will be exposed as a super-attraction for travellers. There will also be interiors for artistic gatherings, or theatrical jam-sessions which are held after spectacle marathons. I will perform special rites so that the spirit of Piwnica pod Baranami would be transposed here - the place of many experiences in my youth. Initial rites have already been performed when Zygmunt Konieczny worked with me on "Iphigenia in Aulis". In the ballroom, a stage is being erected for theatre performances and concerts. Besides spectacles performed by us and by guests, I want to have exclusive concerts of what is best in chamber music. But, in accordance with an old working hypothesis - here must harmonize the music of the so-called "high culture" with the music of the so-called "low", ritual culture.

Who is all this for ?

" Gardzienice", risen anew from ruins and the spirit of music, from the idea that the way to practise humanism is not - as it was with Grotowski - an attempt to create a new man (rings a bell, doesn't it?), but the creation of a new natural environment for art. "Gardzienice" so conceived will be a generator of new theatre undertakings. This is what it has been like so far, but now it will be still bolder. Let us imagine that a theatre group from Columbia University in New York shows up, on a several weeks' visit, to generate their new spectacle with a premiere performed in Gardzienice. Or Andrzej Seweryn comes, with a group of artists, to give rise to a new undertaking. In peace and calm, far away from the noise of a big city, to concentrate on work, as Bergman used to do on Gotland. And our people, first of all - our people. What else will be at this Dream Republic of ours? A multi-media library, enabling one to travel in time and space, a small film studio, equipment appropriate to serve international symposia, may be even dressing rooms for actors and musicians. However, this requires negotiations with the implementation authorities, and compliance with the rules. There will be an observation terrace with a scenic view at the foot of the excavated walls of a medieval fortification. There will be a sanctuary of the beginnings of the "Gardzienice" theatre, at the Arian chapel, that is, where, for the first several years, we used to sprinkle the walls and the floor of that 5x7 square meters room - first with our tears, then, with a song and with blood. Literally. For the time being, no one will cut the woods that surround the palace complex, the Roztocze ravines will not be filled back, the wetlands that spread like an ocean will not be covered with asphalt, the river Giełczewka will not dry out.

And around the palace - a beautiful garden..

Culture always starts with a garden. At the moment when communities were destroying gardens, as it happened during the Communist rule, they themselves were putting the noose around their necks. When land stops singing, the soul dies.

WŁODZIMIERZ STANIEWSKI (born 1950). Director, founder and head of the Centre for Theatre Practices "Gardzienice". Laureate of the Konrad Swinarski Prize, decorated with a medal "Distinguished for Art - Gloria Artis". Visiting professor at Rose Bruford College - London.

Lee A. Feinstein, the United States Ambassador to Poland has visited Gardzienice Centre for Theatre Practices on April, 4th.

He was accoompanied by Mrs Lisa Helling, Press Attache and Mr Andrew Paul, Cultural Attache as well as the Polish participants of the US governmental interchange programs and Fulbright stipendists.
Włodzimierz Staniewski hosted the delagation in Gardzienice's palace complex (that is currently being renovated) and presented history and perspectives of Gardzienice Centre for Theatre Practices.
Guests have seen "Scenes from ELEKTRA" by Euripides - the Gardzienice theatre performance.