"The Life of Archpriest Avvakum"

Directed by, music arranged and text adapted
by - Włodzimierz Staniewski

Stage design by Małgorzata Dżygadło, after the concept provided by Włodzimierz Staniewski.

"The Life of Archpriest Avvakum"

Director's Note - Włodzimierz Staniewski

Gardzienice's third performance had its premiere in a little Italian church of St. Antonio al Fonte
del Cerro, in the Molise Region in August 1983.
The experience drawn from the Expeditions in the eastern outskirts of Poland, in particular research concerning human behavior and movement,
a thorough analysis of the rules of Orthodox singing along with the studies on gestures
and compositions of icon figures contributed
to developing a special kind of training
- the foundations of the Avvakum performance
- a telling analysis of an Euro-Asian soul,
as Staniewski used to say.

"The Life of Archpriest Avvakum"

The performance is based on the text of "The Life" written by the 17th c Russian religious phanatic, Avvakum Pietrovich (1620-1682) who was against all reforms and finally perished at the stake. His writings offer a mixture of contrasts and opposites, lively speeches and subtle spirituality, interspersed with his declarations
of divine humbleness, outbursts of hatred and descriptions of half pagan customs, while at the same time they are a perfect evidence of the true Siberian suffering (he spent 25 years on exile in Siberia) - all that provided Staniewski with the material to build this extraordinary performance.

"The Life of Archpriest Avvakum"

The meaning of performance emerges from complementary, different and often contradictory gestures, actions and singing. The text was adapted accordingly. Staniewski proposes a new method of prose adaptation. He translates it comprehensibly into theatrical language, avoiding a mechanical approach to Avvakum's story.
All elements merge into one vocal and movement whole, forming a total, artistically compact picture.
For over ten years Avvakum was successfully performed in several versions throughout the world.

Taranienko, "Dwadzieścia lat Gardzienic", Konteksty 1-4, 2001

"The Life of Archpriest Avvakum"

"AVVAKUM" in context Halina Filipowicz

In keeping with its struktual principle
of juxtaposition, discontinuity, and disjunction, the forty-minute Avvakum joins Russian Orthodox liturgical songs, the 'Digression' to Part Three
of Forefathers' Eve, pagan practices and beliefs, and the story of Archpriest Avvakum
(ca. 1621-82), a strong willed, charismatic leader of the Old Believer movement which opposed ecclesiastial reforms instigated by Patriarch Nikon and supported by Czar Aleksej. Avvakum's autobiography is not only a masterpiece
of medieval literature and an important document from the history of the Russian Church, but also 'an imperishable portrait of the mood of an era torn apart by commiments which now seem bizarre and sometimes quaint, for all their tragic, hideous consequences' (Brostrom 1979:2).

Staniewski, who scripted and directed Avvakum, does not respect the original. His Avvakum
has little to do with imitative transpositions
from the page to the stage. This compelling, ingeniously patterned work is a thematic extension of the Life, not a dramatized biography. A piece of unsettling originality, power and vision, it is, in its ovn way, as profound as the story,
on which it is based. Avvakum's aim was
to illustrate eternal truths, while Gardzienice's production explores a human truth. In its handing of mounting rensions and accelerating tempos, Avvakum is full of insistent sights and sounds, showing Staniewski's ability to find a telling theatrical metaphor and develop its multiple associations.

"The Life of Archpriest Avvakum"

Avvakum represents an essentially poetic principle which negates illusionism. Reality
in the production is entirely problematic, existing in a constant of destruction and reconstruction. This fluid dramatic structure reflects a view
of human nature as something infinitely melleable to control and transmutation, and thus succeed where casual and discursive dramaturgy might fail. The obsesive stream of images is in a process of continuous, kaleidoscopic transformation which divests the work of permanence and closure.
In this world of instability and endless flux, where indeterminancy reigns, the images bifurcate, each of them producing two partially discrete images with anti-thetical and sometimes irreconciable connotations. Fire is both
a life-giving force and a force of destruction. Religious rapture suddenly turns into brutal eroticism. A holy procession shifts to a lusty
and violent village mob seeking a sacrificial scapegoat. Bodies writhe in paroxysm of pleasure and pain. The characters' religious practices often blend into the magical conjurations of paganism. The character of Avvakum oscillates between bellicose warrior and passive martyr, the images of his martyrdom suggesting the Passion. The cart (in Russian, kibitka) in which Avvakum is deported to Siberia is, at least to Polish audiences,
a metonymical designation for the political exile of Polish revolutionaries some two hundred years later. A dead men drops from a wheel of torture into the cradle and is covered with a shroud.
Next moment, one of the women lifts the cloth, screaming, 'Look, he's drunk!' The dead body from the opening tableau is used as a ram to pound
the gate, one priests flagellates himself with
a censer, and another sits cross-legged
on the platform above the gate and frantically pulls at a bell cord, jerking his body as if he were masturbating. In a moment of ambiguous ecstasy, he gasps, looking down at the amorphous mass of bodies and shadows, 'They're suffering great pain, but their souls are merry'.

(extract from the Drama Review, 1987)

Premiere cast:
Jadwiga Rodowicz, Anna Zubrzycka, Mariusz Gołaj, Henryk Andruszko, Jan Tabaka,
Tomasz Rodowicz
in the Polish premiere participated trainees:
Ulrich Hardt, Franz Hodl, Wolfgang Niklaus, Susanne Philhoffer