"Carmina Burana"

Directed, music arranged and text adapted
by - Włodzimierz Staniewski
Stage design by Rena Targońska, after the concept provided by Włodzimierz Staniewski
Premiered during 'Theatre Practices and Ecology", the international symposium in Gardzienice
in October 1990

"CarminaBurana"- G.Bral , A.Zubrzycka

Director's Note - Włodzimierz Staniewski

The original "Carmina Burana" is an anthology
of poetry from the XII and XIII centuries, which remained hidden for a long time in a monastery
in the Bavarian Alps.

It was "discovered" and published only in the XIX century. As if the big censors were afraid of these "free thinkers" songs, sung too loudly; songs which glorified cultivation of love, emancipation
of eroticism, freedom of ideas and spiritual awakening. They were often directed with the cutting edge of satire against the overwhelming rule of the Church.

In our performance this poetry is interwoven
with the Anglo-Norman story of Tristan and Iseult.
It comes from the same historical era and similarly belongs to the basic works of European culture. The performance was born of these
two literary works.

Scholars have written that "the legend of Tristan and Iseult is the most beautiful and the most moving song of the amalgamation of love
and death that is known in European literature".

"CarminaBurana"

The XII and XIII centuries were a period
of enormous change across the entire European continent. It was a time of great hope
in the renewal of the world. It was as if the whole intellectual and spiritual energy of that period
was concentrated on the concept of love.
As if the existence and the value of the concept
of love was to be the only condition
for the existence of culture and civilisation.

Our performance tells about love.
I understand love as the meeting of a free spirit with song.
From this comes movement. The movement
of body, thought, emotions.Song, incantation,
is the beginning of everything we do in our art.
Art is a religion for individualists.
Our performance is a chain of allegories, symbols and associations, and the literary original
is the pretext for interweaving these.
As in the painting of Hieronymus Bosch.
Bosch does not interpret. He creates.
The allegories in his pictures are entangled hieroglyphs. By no means can one find stories, thesis or rational assumptions in them.
Rather more they are themes. They appear
and disappear, like themes in music. However, one can feel in them a high-pitched chord of cry.
A cry to the soul, to the Spirit.
A cry for the mystery of illumination. Hieronymous Bosch was a member
of the Brotherhood of a Free Spirit.
The brotherhood of artists of life.

The musical dramaturgy of our performance
was mostly constructed from transformed songs of native music. Some of them were collected during our Expeditions to remote settlements. There are fragments of melodies, which - sung
in the villages - can be recognised as everlasting. In some sounds, in some phrases, attentive listener can hear echo of Middle Ages.
One of the motif sung in the performance
was written down from the bum of the naked person in Hieronymus Bosch picture "The Hell
of the Musicians" (to the words "Ego sum Abbas Cucaniensis" - in "Carmina Burana" no. 222). Some fragments are comically paraphrased from Carl Orff, and - last but not least - fragments adopted from René Clemencic interpretation
of "Carmina Burana"; for instance "Bonum est confidere", "Ecce torpet probitas".

Scenography of our performance is made out from archetypal pictures transformed from eternal myths, e.g.: Wheel of Fortune, or Boat with Black Sail.

"Carmina Burana" was made in the end of 1990. The year in which new epoch has begun. In barely a few years of our life the borders of European countries have changed, political and social systems crumbled. Someone has declared
the end of history. The Wheel of Fortune
has turned upside down.

But people remain the same.
Perhaps more irritated, more lost. But also their dreams became more frantic, and their passions more violent.Sometimes so violent, that it seems that a ship called "The Earth"" has unfurled
a Black Sail.

Włodzimierz Staniewski

"CarminaBurana" - G.Bral , A.Zubrzycka

"A Few Notes before the Performance"

(…) "The legend of Tristan and Iseult, as it was once sung in the West of Europe is now virtually unknown to us in its original form.
It's been said that the legend was spread
by Breton, Armorican or Island minstrels.
At the beginning of the 17th century, Blédrin
of Wales apparently sung it in Poitiers,
at the Court Count Wilhelm Troubadour,
the grandfather of Eleonore (Alienor) of Aquitaine. Unfortunately his songs were not preserved.
Chrétien de Troyes version of "King Mark
and Iseult the Fair" has been lost, and the 17th century Anglo-Roman version of Thomas
and Beroul has only been saved in fragments. Gottfried von Strassbourg's version from
the beginning of 18th century was never completed. Our greatest knowledge of the legend comes from Joseph Bedier who, in 1900, reconstructed it in prose.

(…) His version is based, above all,
on the unrefined and simple edition of Bedier.
It contains a primary and genuine feeling
of the legend, develops its plot within the framework of mediaeval court life and yet reveals even older layer of ancient Celtic legends.
"Gardzienice", basing on Bedier, go even further

(…) by adding the characters of Merlin
and the sorceress Vivian. They are generally known from the Tales of the Round Table,
but derived from older Celtic tradition. (…)

"CarminaBurana"- D.Porowska,M.Golaj,G.Bral,A.Zubrzycka


The director presumes that the audience
is acquainted with this

(..) "most beautiful and touching song
of the irreversible stream of love and death ever known to world literature". The "Gardzienice" performance is built on the basis of this tale, which in this case is treated as a particular cultural code. Therefore "The Tale of Tristan
and Iseult" is not re-told here but evoked.
The performance itself does not develop here
in a dynamic chain of events,
it does not even have a distinct dramatic action. It is constructed of episodes and each episode, although an entity in itself, recalls the whole story from the beginning.

(…) All events are present in the same time,
in a kind of mythical synchronicity, evoked and associated poetically. The performance seemingly opens with the same scene that opens The Tale
of Tristan and Iseult - namely drinking the love potion.
In that scene Tristan and Iseult, in the middle
of the space, stand on a boat and, tormented
with the desire that overwhelms them completely, taste love's delights.
It is the Younger Isolde who stands at Tristan's side. But in this scene, as well as in all
the performance, we have two Isoldes together!
And here the performance differs from the legend because the two loves do not follow one after another (Isolde of the White Hands after Isolde the Fair). On the contrary, they are together;
it is, so to say, the same love in its different stages.

"CarminaBurana"

So when the Younger Isolde tastes her first
love with Tristan, the second (or indeed perhaps
the very first one) - Isolde the Elder - standing
on a high mansion on the right hand scene, finds the flask of wine which she drinks overwhelmed
in helplessness and despair. The meaning
of all this probably is that she - Isolde the Elder
- has already tasted loves delights and what
is left to her now is only the dregs of wine
and despair. Or, probably, it means: that there
is the picture of Isolde the Younger's future despair, despair of the one who now experiences her first love embraces with Tristan.
Exchanging Isolde of the White Hands and Isolde the Fair with Isolde the Elder and Isolde The Younger, the director has managed to preserve the structure of duplicity present in the legend, but has given it a different meaning.
This kind of transformation that Staniewski did does not spoil the mythic taste of the tale itself.
The Tale of Tristan and Iseult begins after everything is over.The end is present in the very beginning of the tale.

Leszek Kolankiewicz, in "Dialog" 5/1992

Premiere cast:
Grzegorz Bral, Catherine Corrigan, Mariusz Gołaj, Stanisław Kral, Elżbieta Podleśna, Dorota Porowska, Emma Rice, Tomasz Rodowicz, Jacquline. P. Thomas, Anna Zubrzycka