Gardzienice Theatre has enjoyed an international reputation for its extraordinary theatre performances for over twenty five years. The productions have been variously described as ‘music theatre’, ‘ethno-oratorio’ and ‘allegorical song theatre’. The origins of each performance are firmly rooted in music and this is not merely an aesthetic choice but rather a reflection of Artistic Director, Włodzimierz Staniewski’s deeply held belief that musicality is “a key which opens heart and soul” thus enabling a profound relationship with its instigator.

Musicality exists only if it is in permanent connection with its source….Musicality speaks about identity, it identifies. It says who I am and what I am doing here. It has a direct relationship to existential reality.

The theatrical source for musicality within Staniewski’s work has been found in a “new, natural environment of theatre rooted in life”. It was in Eastern Poland that Staniewski recognised the “natural phenomena” that he valued so highly. “These concern the human being in nature – something that alarms us, alarms our senses, alarms our perception.”

Founding the Company in the village of Gardzienice in 1977, Staniewski and his colleagues have undertaken some forty expeditions to remote regions of Eastern and South East Poland and further afield to countries including New Mexico, Italy, South Korea and Norway. Here they encountered songs, myths, rituals and oral histories of indigenous communities. This was not an anthropological exercise but rather a genuine process of exchange in which the Company responded with its own artistry, offering fragments of performance and song. These extraordinary ‘gatherings’ - often overcrowded and heady with the sense of occasion, anticipation, pride, artistry, competition and humour - have formed the basis of Staniewski’s own model of theatre. Responding to what he describes as “the boiling reality” of these events requires intuition, ingenuity and dramaturgical skill. It is an environment which Staniewski feels is an ideal school of training for actors.

Our training is drawn from this realistic inspiration. I pick those moves, turns, curves and dynamics which have the most impact. Then, later on…working with the tempo, rhythm, changes in the dynamics, I use the same gesture but try to transform it into an allegorical language which breaks this realism.

Gardzienice’s leading actor, Mariusz Gołaj, stresses that gestures are not explored for their psychological content, nor are they simply copied:

I don’t believe in copying because you never know exactly what emotions the village people have. Very often they know how to dance the body, how to use the gestures, and very often they are doing this cold. And this is its strength.

Gardzienice theatre’s work has spanned two contrasting political realities in Poland: Soviet-led Communism and since 1989, a political democracy based on Western models. Responding to acute political and cultural changes, Staniewski’s performances have consistently sought to penetrate the ‘temper of the times’ in a poetics of theatre that is both metaphorically rich and complex in form.

All the material which I refer to may seem very exotic and without any relation to our own problems. For example, the historical texts of Apuleuis’ Golden Ass and The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum…But these books were reflecting situations which occurred in contemporary life.

In 1981, the first performance which consolidated Gardzienice reputation abroad was The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum. Based on the life of a dissident Russian cleric, the performance offered, somewhat provocatively, “a study of the Russian soul” during the stringencies of martial law in Poland. In 1990 Carmina Burana followed, a treatise on the vicissitudes of love told through European myths in the euphoric atmosphere which followed the collapse of Communism.

In 1997 Gardzienice entered a new phase of work when Staniewski drew on a popular folk narrative, Apuleuis’ The Golden Ass, to create Metamorphoses in which the hero is transformed into a donkey, eventually finding spiritual renewal through initiation into the Isis mysteries, before returning to his human form. At its premiere, Staniewski commented on the story’s contemporary significance:

Now at the beginning of this millennium we know that we are still in the middle of a transformation, which is similar but possibly even more difficult than the one that took place 2000 years ago when the ancient gods were thrown away and one new god appeared.

The second performance this evening is a theatrical essay based on Euripides’ Elektra. Whilst dance and music is much in evidence, Staniewski has taken a literary text as the basis for his performance for the first time. In this adaptation he has created a physical vocabulary in reference to the Ancient Greek art of Chieronomia (gestures) which is believed to have been a practice rooted in the theatre of antiquity. Staniewski describes this performance as ‘a tragedy of feelings’.

In each new performance Gardzienice makes direct reference to the iconography of an historical epoch, animating it through living indigenous traditions. In recent years Gardzienice has focussed its research entirely on Ancient Greece - which Staniewski refers to as the “childhood” of Western civilisation. Both these performances are the results of this sustained research. Fragments of ancient music were re-animated in relation to the irregular rhythms of speech, song and dance that the Company found in the Carpathian Mountains and the Ukraine. The texts, musical notation and images were not read but retrieved through “a forgotten line of life inside ourselves”. Gardzienice have unfrozen static postures and fragments of music so that “figures are running, spinning, flying… Antiquity is dancing”. Again, musicality is the catalyst, shaping the theatre’s language as ancient texts are excavated, danced and sung until they touch, reveal and provoke our contemporary selves through Gardzienice’s secret music of the body.