Plumbing the depths of drama

By Ayelet Dekel

Today we experience ancient plays, such as Greek tragedies, from a remove of many centuries: We don't actually know how the chorus declaimed their lines, and all that remains of the original staging and choreography is rumor and commentary.

Polish director Wlodimierz Staniewski seeks to remove the "mask of time" from Greek tragedy through a process of what he calls theatrical "archaeology," to bring the lifeblood of ancient Greece into what he describes as "touching distance" from contemporary audiences. This past week, the internationally renowned director led a five-day master class in English for a select group of students, as part of a conference called "Languages of Stage and Performance in Contemporary Polish Theater." The event was cosponsored by the Tel Aviv University's Department of Theater Arts and the Polish Institute, in the framework of the Year of Polish Culture in Israel.

Staniewski, born in 1950, studied literature at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Initially influenced by Jerzy Grotowski (an innovative director and educator, said to have been one of the greatest reformers of 20th-century theater), he left a promising theatrical career in the mid-1970s to journey into the rural areas of eastern Poland, seeking traces of the region's many ethnic communities, with a special interest in Jewish culture.
Staniewski established the Gardzienice Center for Theater Practices in 1977, in a small village near Lublin, to develop what he calls "theater ecology." His aim: to expand the concept of theater through investigation of the relationship between artistic activity and the environment in which it exists.

During the past 12 years, the innovative director has focused on ancient Greece, researching the kinds of ephemeral phenomena that typically elude the contemporary director's grasp - particularly the sounds and visual aspects of the original performances - to recreate the sensual experience of theater of that era. He has created a training method that demands the total involvement of the body: breathing, voice and movement. In addition, he employs elements of ancient musical notation as elaborated upon by contemporary musicologists, as well as cheironomia (an ancient art related to dance, based on hand gestures), to "reinvent" the chorus. Documentation of cheironomia can be seen in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Staniewski has developed a dynamic vocabulary of movement and gesture, based on his research of Greek art. "My obsession," he explains in an interview, "is to add a little drop to that which already exists. If there are three images of cheironomia of Clytemnestra, depicted on ceramic vases, is there a fourth picture that I can imagine with my demonic intuition, with a bit different cheironomia? It has to be in reference to these three other [vessels]. It's a sort of archaeology with a margin of freedom to create."

Tel Aviv University's Prof. Ruth Kanner, a theater director with her own group of performers and her own distinctive style of theatrical language, attended a performance directed by Staniewski of "The Metamorphoses" in 2003 in Gardzienice. She describes it as "a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, far from civilization with no transportation, but in the evening people arrived from all over Poland and Europe to see the performance." Dance and musical performances preceded the play, which was followed by a festive meal.

"It was an ecstatic situation," says Kanner. "Each person had to make a 'journey,' to make the effort to get there. [It was] very sensual - food, music, wine. All your senses were working."

Based on her acquaintance with the work of Staniewski, Kanner selected the students who participated in his master class in Tel Aviv, based on their physical and musical abilities, and their willingness to engage and take risks.

Staniewski and his actors - Mariusz Golaj, Joanna Holcberger and Marcin Mrowca - worked intensively with the students each day. "All the body is working," Holcberger told the participants on the first day, as she moved with graceful energy through what is called the "vocabulary of gestures," while corresponding images of Greek art were projected on a screen behind her. The students attempted to imitate her movements under the discerning gaze of Staniewski, who urged them on: "Your body is very available, very able." Meanwhile, Mrowca sang and played the harmonium (a free-standing keyboard instrument similar to a reed organ and often used in Indian music), and introduced harmony and dissonance, which added yet another layer to the delivery of the text.

'Any possible mishmash'

In speaking of his special brand of theatrical art, which he says does not contain a psychological dimension per se, Staniewski prefers to avoid terms such as "improvisation" - "a primitive key which allows [one] to do any possible mishmash and to pretend that there is art. Art is 3,000 years of tradition and [the] 'me' is almost an invisible part of this tradition. An actor has to have knowledge, to be nourished."

By developing a creative form with references to music and the body, Staniewski establishes meaning in relationship and dialogue. The reverberations of this dialogue, between the ancient and contemporary, the actor and his/her body, one actor and another working in partnership, create a powerful and unique stage presence. This dialogue was particularly evident in the partnership between Golaj and Holcberger, as they enacted a scene between Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, from Euripides' "Iphigenia at Aulis" in the workshop's final presentation.

In observing the workshops, it seemed to one outsider that, despite coming from a background which is more psychologically oriented, text-based and individualistic, the local participants communicated effectively with Staniewski and his troupe, and understood their method. Staniewski insisted on both physical and verbal precision, offering participants what he considers to be the tools for truly experiencing and expressing action. He encouraged them to emphasize rather than conceal their breathing, for example.

"We use breathing as a means of expression in which the fury is contained - desperation, blood, the final moment of the apocalypse. The breathing of the cosmos of eternity," he explains.

According to Staniewski's method, once certain physical actions and concepts are internalized, they become vehicles for expression. Hence, the students were instructed to increase the speed and energy of their movements - to go "wild," as the director put it: "We are not flirting anymore - we are ecstatically making love with the text and with the gesture."

Although the workshop was less than a week long, training for actors at Gardzienice takes about three years. Indeed, one of the many unusual features of Staniewski's approach to theater is his attitude toward time and performance. Asked how long it takes him usually to produce a play, he responds, "We can work for one year and if it doesn't [succeed], then we stop and after half a year, we start again."

Comparing theatrical exploration to reading the Talmud, - "moving back and forth, reading, reading, finding how it speaks to you between the lines, reading and exploring" - Staniewski stresses that his method is one that demands energy, endurance, complete engagement of mind and body, and an abiding patience.

"I have been on my way to Israel my whole life," he declares, adding that he harbors "a deeply hidden dream: that the symbiosis between Polish and Jewish culture should be reinvented."