"METAMORPHOSES"

Directed , text and music arranged
by - Wlodzimierz Staniewski
Ancient Greek music arranged
by - Maciej Rychly

fot. Wojciech Olkuśnik
/Agencja Fotograficzna - Gazeta Wyborcza/

Director's Note - Włodzimierz Staniewski

Dear Guests,

It has been our tradition for the past twenty years to present two performances in one evening:
an older, "departing one", and a new "arriving one".

Today we are presenting only a new performance - "an arriving one".

Just like it is the case with all our work (from
the very beginning) this one originated in music.

Music or - one should rather say - musicality constitutes the origins and essence of everything we create.

For the first time in this work we changed
our philosophy and learnt music not from living people, but from stones.

fot. Wojciech Olkuśnik
/Agencja Fotograficzna - Gazeta Wyborcza/

Living stones.

Traces of this ancient Greek music
- from the 5th c. B.C. to the 2nd c. A.D.
- can be found only written in stones.
Singing from a stone is like singing out a stone, testifying that it is at least as alive as nature.
What we invite you to hear is most
of all contemporary voices singing
the ancient melodic lines in the ancient keys.

Everything has been slightly adjusted,
e.g. tempo, rhythm, dynamics... And perhaps "not adjusted", perhaps put in agreement with The Spirit of Time organically, because no one
can recreate the lifeline of rhythm. One can only follow one's intuition.

Those songs maintain the relationship with
the book, the philosophy of which we referred
to in our working process. This great book "Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass" entered
the scene at a critical time when the Old Gods Dionysus and Apollo were leaving and Christ,
the New God, was coming. The book was written by Apuleius of Madaura, who used to say about himself and his friends: "We, the Platonic family, know only what is festive, joyful, sacred, sublime, celestial..."

Apuleius, the 2nd c. A.D, was a Platonist. Therefore, our work refers to the Platonic essences: the nature of soul, the nature of love, and the mysteries of changes. It refers
to everything Apuleius, the Platonist, presented allegorically in "Metamorphoses".

What we will sing for you is - to use a painter's expression - priming of a canvas.

The form "it" has taken upon I call "a Theatrical Essay".

From a wide range of songs, which we have been rehearsing since last year - or perhaps longer
- we choose for each evening a slightly different arrangement, testing the depth we want to reach and aiming at a direction we were destined
to follow.

A couple of interesting details. In the past we approached Apuleius and the songs of stones several times, and kept abandoning the concept. However, as if in passing, several things resulted from our continuous attempts: a strange fruit such as "Golden Ass", the Artistic Inn, in Grodzka street in Lublin, below our office; and a scenario written by a well-known English dramatist Howard Brenton. The scenario was an outcome
of our collaboration with The Royal Shakespeare Company. These are the origins of a song entitled "You Are Broken", sung in English

And one more story. About our singing
- during late night rehearsals in Gardzienice,
in our barn, on the hill between the forests
and the fields, in this "nowhere place",
where melancholy and misery spin around; about
this singing in Pythagorean scales, during autumn nights when it is difficult to take out your shoes from the mud, and when the black sky cuts down the spirit; on winter nights when the snow
and the cold winds from the steppes of Euro
-Asia kill every joy of life
- on such nights the wild and hungry dogs would arrive.

They were the first participants of our expeditions back to the Ancient Times.
Their trust and tameness is once again the victory of Pythagoras who wished to tune the spirits
to be tamed and to healed with music.

Włodzimierz Staniewski

"Metamorphoses" by Gardzienice constitute
a theatrical treaty on the unavoidable stretching of love between two opposites, and on man being bound to live in a conflict of contradictions.
However, this essay is mainly a theatre,
an ecstatic performance which finishes definitely too quickly in the eyes of the audience. Wlodzimierz Staniewski, the founder
of Gardzienice company and creator of their performances, says that 'Metamorphoses' words are of no significance. And that is only partly
a joke. For words, show, lead and explain,
of course.
However, in 'Metamorphoses' they find their equivalents in situations on stage, live images, acting, dance, singing and music. The fact that you can understand the performance without understanding the words is proved by reactions
of foreign audience, who without knowing Polish, is able to understand the performance and gets enchanted by it.

Fragment of an article by Bronisław Wildstein, Rzeczpospolita, 1.09.2002

Premiere cast (1997):
Tomasz Rodowicz, Mariusz Gołaj, Mariana Sadowska, Marcin Mrowca, Elżbieta Rojek,
Joanna Holcgreber, Katrin Forsmo,
Martin Essen-Möller, Britta Forslund

Present cast:
Mariusz Gołaj, Marcin Mrowca, Joanna Holcgreber, Anna Dąbrowska, Agnieszka Mendel, Benedict Hitchins, Karolina Cicha, Maria Bikont, Jacek Timingeriu, absolwenci Akademii Praktyk Teatralnych .