CONFERENCE TALKS IN WGAJTY THEATRE

Book 1

A record of a Polish German conference in the Wgajty Theatre 1 1 .1 1 .201 3

Art Above Barriers

Thats the way it is experiences of a sculptor working with dementia patients

Dorothee Schfer

page 3

Preserving litotical narrations about the processes of the breaks in self-awareness of people who are old, who suffer from social isolation, and about finding ones own role in the collective narration of theatre performance page 12
Zofia Bartoszewicz

Kamila Paprocka

The workshop and performance project Transgressions of the body (Wacaw Sobaszek talking with Zofia Bartoszewicz after the premire show) page 19

Photo by Jarek Poliwko

Introduction
A process of working together with people struggling with limitations associated with age or disability is an important experience for all its participants. A clash of universal questions asked by art with existential reality of disability or old age is tragic, but at the same time it shows many up to now unknown aspects of our life, habits, cultural code. The language of art goes beyond everyday conventions. This allows us to create new possibilities of communicating with people pushed beyond the margin of social life. It can help us understand them better. We are however facing a very little known area for us, which is the reality of care or adjusting your living conditions to special needs. Every Other is different. Proposing in this area our artistic actions we feel a need to transgress many of our own cognitive barriers and a need for dialogue, exchange and mutual inspiration. We hope that the meeting Art Above Barriers contributes to opening new ways of cooperation. Erdmute Sobaszek: Openig the conference Art Above Barriers I would like to introduce to you our first guest: Dorothee Schfer, whom we met in Bochum, in the FKT centre Freies Kunst Territorium. Dorothee Schfer is a sculptor and she works with people afflicted with dementia. She cooperates with a very interesting organisation: the German Alzheimer Association (Deutsche Alzheimer Gesellschaft). During our stay in Bochum in December 2012, she assisted us organising the shows of our performances in FKT , as well as co-organised shows in Old Peoples Homes. The second guest will be Emilia Hagelganz She is working together with us in quite a few areas of theatre. She is participating in our work at the Social Care Home in Jonkowo. At the same time she takes part in our ethnoartistic expeditions and in performance work as well. Recently she has begun organizing activities with elderly people in Bochum. She has found very interesting ways to use the Internet to contact other people who have similar interests. At our conference she will give a practical workshop of internet exploration. The third person is Kamila Paprocka. Kamila is a sociologist. She wrote her university thesis about her observations of our work in the Social Care Home in Jonkowo. Her study concerned social communication problems and questions of social exclusion. And the last guest we have is a group of guests: Zosia Bartoszewicz and the group inspired by her project. They worked together on communication between people who have some kind of movement handicap and people who have no handicap. The focus of their work was the body in its personal and social meanings and relations. The result is a theatre performance.
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Thats the way it is experiences of a sculptor working with dementia patients

Dorothee Schfer

Dorothee Schfer: Hello everybody. I will speak very simple English, so I hope everybody can understand what am I talking about. As Erdmute told us, I am a sculptor. I have a laboratory together with six other people, painters, photographers and other sculptors. Two years ago I started to work with old people in the Alzheimer Gesellschaft. The organization was founded 20 years ago to bring a focus to dementia, the illness where the brain disappears bit by bit. The Alzheimer Gesellschaft has brought this disease into focus. This is very important because this is a disease you dont notice at the beginning. You only find that something is different than before. It is very difficult for everyone to deal with it. The Alzheimer Gesellschaft has a flat in Bochum where one can bring the elderly relative for the day, and we work with them. In the afternoon the relatives come and take the people back home. When I started to work there I had a group of women. Now I work with a group of men in the age of 55 to about 90 years. Its a group of about 10 to 12 men, and there are 4 or 5 of us to deal with them, because they are in very diverse states of dementia. Some of them seem to be very lucid; they can talk, they can understand you, but some can only sit around and smile or walk. There are many forms, different types of dementia. The most famous is Alzheimers. Bit by bit the brain dies, and you lose the connections between mind and hand or mind and what you see. So you forget how to behave in a community. People start to eat on the floor or go to the table of other people and eat from their plates. You forget the related person and the name and the function of the person so that your wife becomes your mother and later you forget her; she becomes a stranger, you dont know who she is. Your daughter becomes your mother and later maybe an enemy, because she seems strange. And your son becomes your father. For the relatives, as I realized, this is the biggest problem - your parents or your

Photo by Dorothee Schfer

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children forget absolutely who you are. And the consequence is that people who are ill with dementia feel insecure; they dont know where they are and they are surrounded by strangers. When I try to imagine their situation, I picture myself in a foreign country: I dont know the language, I dont understand any sign. I dont know how I got here. How I came to this place. This is the purpose for many people to walk, because they always want to walk home but they dont know where home is. What I as an artist and my colleagues try with our work is to fulfill a lot of functions. We try to give them a place where they feel comfortable. Where they can get positive reactions and where they can get positive feelings. Because in normal life on the street they are always criticized. They are too slow, they do this wrong, they do that wrong. And everyone says oh, why dont you do that like this? And what we try to do is to make their surroundings good and safe for them. There are different ways to get in contact with people. You can talk with many of them; they can understand you a bit. Some of them you can only reach with your look, or if it is possible, if they like it, with touching or taking them by the hand. Art is another way to come closer to the people. Maybe it is not art as we are used to think about art: picture or something, but the attitude of art, the attitude of free thinking, of having no expectation of the result. When I first met my group of men, I didnt know much about them. I just came in, shook their hands, said my name and tried to learn their names. Then I took out something that I had brought. It was clay. I gave a bit of clay to everyone. I just laid it on the table. I said nothing. I didnt give it into the hands of people but just put it on the table. ( D. Schfer put pieces of clay on the tables surrounded by the public. The people took the clay and began to crease it while D. Schfer was speaking. As a result various little sculptures where created by the end of the lesson.) And they started to react. This was my way to get in contact. Today I picked up the white one for you. But there was a lot of laughing because the first time I had picked up the brown one. They just looked on this, but they didnt want to touch it. The translator, who had known them much longer, said, They think this is shit. Why there is shit is on the table? For me, one of the most important questions when I meet those ill people is not to force them to do something very special, very good, with a very specific result. I usually say: it is what it is. That means: everything is good, is accepted. The main point is that the people should feel comfortable. I avoid sentences like, What have you done there? We have a wonderful lady in the group of women. She cant talk any more. We dont know much about her history, but she is happy when she can take a hanky, put jam on it and flatten this jam with a knife . That makes her very happy. We dont know why she does it and what she is thinking about, but for her it is a wonderful action. So she spreads two or three hankies with jam per day . When you have the chance to look at the peoples biographies, then this sometimes makes a connection to what they do. But if there are no relatives and you cant find out any facts about their biographies, you just take it as it is: a happy lady with jam on her hankies

Photo by Dorothee Schfer

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I try to do with them things which were useful in their past. Here you can see a photograph of a puppet. In dementia you first forget the things you learned most recently. The things you learned as a child or youngster are covered and you can bring them back. Women about seventy, eighty, ninety years old all know how to sew with a needle and thread. So I have brought the puppet and weve started to make clothes and a hat for it and every lady has done what she is able to do. One takes only a woolen string and only makes this movement (D. Schfer is demonstrating). It has no sense in our world but in her world it has much sense. This is something that the doctors remind us: we should remember that they are often only in a physically way present in our world, but in their minds they are in totally different places, and we cant bring them back. Its not like with children, who try and learn and learn and learn. These elderly patients try to learn, and they forget and forget. So, our task is to enter their world, to try to enter their world and leave them there. For this lady its all she can do, and she is happy when you say, Oh, it is wonderful what you are doing. And when you smile at her. Body language is a very important thing. With your body language you can make good contact even with people who can do nothing more than open and close their eyes. I have given you the clay to show how you can start; also, clay is a very natural material and a material which we know from our infancy. When little babies see mud outside, they want to grab it and to take it. Clay appeals to the instincts. Its not a matter of special psychological knowledge but I feel it opens something or moves us in a certain way. While we are working, my interest towards these people is focused also on their stories. My father is ninety two years old, so I have come to know a lot about World War II, for example. Some of the men dont like to talk about it, but even so, they do it constantly. It comes out in a special way: they start to get nervous or start to cry.

Photo by Dorothee Schfer

Photo by Dorothee Schfer

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These are two pictures painted by a very old man. He is from Serbia or former Yugoslavia. We dont know a lot about his history, but looking at the picture he paints, you can imagine that it was not a very good time for him. He always chooses the red color. Maybe this is a drop of blood. That is the way he expresses the feelings he cant talk about. In those moments he sometimes starts to cry. And then you have to take his hand or cry with him. If you take his emotion and make it your own emotion - for him its helpful to break free from this emotion, and then he stops crying. You can cry together. I cry with him, and we stop together and he feels better. This is a way to talk to someone who cant talk: when you are a mirror of his emotions. There is a technical term of it: validation. This is teamwork between two men. The one cannot bring his thoughts to action. He says, Do it like this, do it like that. And the other one does it. They are a perfect team. One is the painter and the other one says, Now, take the red color, put it here, color it like this. Its a wonderful team.

Photo by Dorothee Schfer

This is a very interesting man. He came from a family of millers, and he learned his job in his fathers mill. It seems to us that this father was very very strict towards him. It seems as if he was very often punished, because when a bit of something falls on the floor, his reaction is, Oh no! He constantly picks up every little piece of bread or whatever he sees on the floor, and he also this outside. He needs perfect surroundings, and when you take a walk he collects a lot of things that disturb his esthetic or that he fears someone will punish him for because they are lying on the floor. But he is a very good painter. He painted the construction of a mill wheel for us and wrote exactly which elements that are.

Photo by Dorothee Schfer

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He has another very lovely behavior. He collects flowers to dry at home. This means he tells us that he intends to dry them at home, but I dont know if he really does. He collects daisies. And if his pockets and his hands are full, he collects them in his stomach! We allow him to do this, but it means we have to a lot of attention to be sure that he will only collect daisies and not something poisonous. For him its logical: oh, pockets full, hands full, stomach is empty, so we let him do that. For the relatives its very difficult to have this tolerance because they are with these elders every day and every hour. But for us its easy because we only see them for a fewhours a week. The name of this man is Horst. We found out hes a wonderful painter. I dont know exactly what kind of dementia he has because he seems to be verylucid; he is funny; he talks a lot. But sometimes he disappears somewhere. We discovered his talent when we changed our activity from making soapstone sculptures to painting. Soapstone feels very wonderful and some of the men simply sit there just touching it while the others are working, doing things. But this man wasnt doing anything, he woke up just when I came with the piece of paper and paints. The first thing I showed him were some pictures of Kandinsky.

Photo by Dorothee Schfer

He liked these pictures and he painted this one. (picture) Then he asked me, Is it possible to paint in a free way? Can I paint freely? I said, Sure, you can. He painted this work freely. After that he painted this one (another picture is showed).

Photo by Dorothee Schfer

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This is a typical building in the region of Mnsterland . For him it was free; he could do what he wanted and he painted his father or mothers house. A typical house of the area he came from with a typical horses head on the roof. You can read the number: the house was built in 1394 and it is surrounded by the garden, the fence and there is the potatoes field. When he painted it he said: oh, its so brown. I dont like it so brown, I will make some daisies and some strawberries. Finally, when his wife came to take him home, everybody was exhausted, and he was so happy. She bought a frame and now this picture is framed, hanged on the wall in the Alzheimer Gesellschaft. He grew and grew and grew during this action. It is so simple if you let them do what they want! And if there are enough people present to deal with what is very important, because you have to treat everyone as an individual. You can start with one material, you can give everyone a piece of clay, but after this movement you have to deal with everyone as an individual. But, if you are alone with ten people, imagine, one has to go to the toilet, one runs to the door. You need a minimum four to share the tasks. Im lucky as I have only the task to paint, to make sculptures, to do these things. There are always aides from the hospital, they bring the people to the toilet or take them for a walk. If someone wants to, they take them for a little walk and come back. That is better than to say Oh no, stay here, stay here, come back. Because the man doesnt know - Why should I come back, why should I stay? - If you go on a walk you can make a circle and you just come back and they feel all right. For such things, many people are needed . Normally in social care houses there is not enough of a staff to deal with these people in a good way. You need also a lot of time to learn their biography. It helps if you can learn their story.

Photo by Dorothee Schfer

Photo by Dorothee Schfer

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Photo by Dorothee Schfer

I want to share a little list of useful things taken out of my own experience when I was with this group: 1. To talk about my own life. People always can say something about it: oh, its funny And then they start to talk. 2. To say, Can you help me please? I dont know how to do it. Maybe you can instruct me. Can you teach me? For example the women I am totally untalented with threading needles. And the old women laugh at me when Im trying to do this. They say, Give it to me! They are really quick at it. So, in a very simple way you can create a good mood for the people. 3. To support the people doing something and rather than doing it for them. An example is when someone wants to prepare his sandwich, but he is not able to pick up the knife and he really doesnt know what to do with it. Then you give a little impulse to give him the chance to remember what to do with the knife, to take the butter and put it on the bread. Because it is a strange thing the knife. For over seventy years he knew what to do with the knife or with the pen but now he doesnt. With a little help you can enable him to butter his bread alone, not just doing it for him which would not create a friendly atmosphere. 4. Sometimes its helpful just to sit around and take someones hand and do nothing, or to look into her eyes. There was one lady who was always putting her finger on the nose of whatever person she was sitting next to. I was surprised at the beginning, but then I started to do the same thing, to imitate her and simply put my finger on her nose. And it was so funny. She was happy; she started to laugh. I dont know what it meant. It was always the nose. She cannot walk, she cannot talk, she cannot eat, she can nothing, but she can put her finger on your nose. There is a simple thing I have experienced: When I leave this place I am happy because the people always give me a lot in a very simple way. Probably you, here in your theater, have a lot experiences of this kind, but I do not. I am quite closed. One has to open oneself. If one is closed and says, I want you to do this, I told you, it must be done this doesnt work. You get angry, and you get direct reactions from the people; they start to walk around and they try to run, they get nervous. You cant always put them in a good mood. Then they are very nervous; they go to toilet ten times, when normally theyd only go twice. Sometimes its difficult to create a nice atmosphere.

Photo by Dorothee Schfer

This is an interesting man. Once he had a lot of money, he had an airplane. Now he forgets words. He starts from nouns. He says: aaaaa. If you know him for a long time, you know what that might mean, but he can only say: yes, yes, yes. So you will suggest some words and he responds, okay, okay. Then you know you are right. He loves painting, but he is not able to touch the paper with the brush. Always some two centimeters beyond the paper he stops. You have to take his hand and make the first line, then it works, then he makes pictures like this (picture is shown), with different colors. But the first impulse must be given by yourself. Then he smiles and he paints very carefully. Its funny, he looks like a child. There is also a special task when the sexuality rises in a special way. There are some moments when these people wish to have sex with everyone they meet. There is no one to have sex with, so they begin to masturbate wherever they are. The task is to react and bring them to a place where they can do it, where they are not watched by other people. That is not always possible. It is a difficult task because they are so spontaneous. It is difficult if you are the wife or some relative of such a person, to go out in the streets or to a restaurant or some such thing. That is more or less impossible. So the result is isolation. But if the relatives bring them to the Alzheimer Gesellschaft, they can act as they are. We have some rooms where we take them to be alone. For me as an artist, working with them is very interesting, because they dont have any rules or parameters when they paint. They paint or make sculptures very freely. Sometimes they generate little sculptures or pictures which make me think, Oh, why didnt I get this idea?! It is so fantastic that I could take it and bring it to an art exposition. This inspires me.

Photo by Dorothee Schfer

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Photo by Dorothee Schfer

This is a funny man; he is really young, fifty-five years old. A huge man with a beard. He loves painting cars. He sits there all the time (D. Schfer is pointing with her finger somewhere in front of her): Hey, Manfred, would you like to paint something? He replies, Yep! The next minute the picture is ready. What we often do is to sing because they all know hundreds of German songs from their childhood and they love singing. They sing the same text in many different styles. It is a very funny and lighthearted situation when we are all sitting together and singing a song about a mill or little ducks. Some of them can sing very nicely. There is a man who sang in a choir and he gets very angry when somebody sounds like a cat. When the tuning is not good, he tried to correct it. It sounds like cats again, but he is satisfied to achieve something. One more time I want to tell you that the main thing is to get the people into surroundings that enable them to feel strong for some hours., They gain self-confidence doing things with their hands and when they feel they are accepted as they are. Because emotions function to the end. Even if the body does not function any longer, if the language is gone: the emotions function. And this is what you can stay in contact with. Wacaw Sobaszek: The language of emotions is the only one? Dorothee Schfer:... that stays till the end. Because the body becomes a kind of stone. They cant move, they stop eating, but when you smile in a friendly way, you are a person with friendly eyes and a friendly voice, you can touch them and give them a little good moment in this horrible cage they are in. I think this is what I wanted to tell you. Thank you so much.

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Preserving litotical narrations. About the processes of the breaks in self-awareness of people who are old, who suffer from social isolation, and about finding ones own role in the collective narration of theatre performance.

Kamila Paprocka

A Midsummer Nights Dream in the Social Care Home Jonkowo insc. Waclaw Sobaszek, phot. archive

Wacaw Sobaszek: I would like to introduce Kamila Paprocka. For the first time she had come to us with the group of Aldona Jawowska. Aldona brought a group of her students and she asked us to do a workshop with them. Kamila was in that group. That was a time when we were looking for something new in our work, some sociological theme, a new project. And Aldonas students got employed in a very important section, because of the fact that they were able to do a sociological interview. They got the task of making interviews during the dancing party in the Social Care Home, the DPS. We initiated the dancing, playing traditional dances. In an unwritten scenario of such a dancing party there is a space for meetings, for talks face to face and touching upon personal subjects. I came up with four questions, every student was supposed to win the answers. After the visit in the DPS we all came to the theatre. And here the students started writing down the interviews from their mobiles, dictaphones they all gathered around here, somebody by the well, someone in the bushes. And suddenly everywhere you could hear the stories of the DPS residents. I thought then that perhaps one can make a performance out of it! Kamila Paprocka.: I also wanted to mention that experience. To us, sociologists, it was not at all that easy, even though in the end I wrote my MA thesis about it all. The thesis dealt with Wgajtys work in the DPS and about their idea or concept, or paradigm of necessary theatre. The experience mentioned by Wacek was its starting point. I will try to recreate it now. Our visit to Wgajty was a part of our obligatory practice and we had no idea what would happen to us here. We were invited to the barn where we got informed what we were supposed to do the next day. That
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even though we were not theatre practicians, we would do various physical activities and run in the forest first I thought: no way I could do it Probably the assumption was we would go to the DPS as professionals, that we would immediately know how to talk to people. And this is not obvious at all. Because nowadays sociologists tend to be such couch sociologists. Very seldom do they go out to do any fieldwork. Not to mention the areas of exclusion, as difficult as the DPS, where there are barriers, where people have problems telling things, entering human relations. We had not been taught to overcome such barriers. In Wgajty we were thrown into a difficult situation and we had to cope. The dance organised in the DPS was supposed to help trigger spontaneous action, immediate reaction To help us in some way. We were surprised that the dance was to take place in the DPS, where half of the people are on wheelchairs. What is more, our task was to invite those people to dance. Before that, we were given a mini-questionnaire, four questions, basing on which we were supposed to touch upon very intimate spheres of experience of people whom we did not know. We had no idea where they came from. We only knew that they have been brought together into a ghetto of a kind, that a Social Care Home is. And here was a necessity to investigate into their personal history, releasing in them the memories of their grandmas, grandpas and dances. The last one was the most neutral and pleasant, because when the DPS dwellers told us what excellent dancers they used to be, we could feel them open up. Well, those were the times!... And today I cannot even walk. [] I dont really know why I should talk about it; I can only tell you what a great dancer I was then. I can also remember one very overwhelming situation. We would run the interviews in couples, getting with our respondents into strange nooks. One of my interlocutors was a very old and sick resident of the house. At some point something broke in her, she burst out crying and said Girls, I do not want to talk any more. And that was completely too much. Me and my friend felt we could not do anything. Today I would not know what to do, either. The task of a fieldworking sociologist is to get out of their respondent some interesting material he or she works a bit like a reporter. Sometimes you must in such a way manipulate the conversation so it is not dominated by so-called unnecessary information. Here, however, as we discovered with time, this unnecessary information was crucial. The purpose of our action in the DPS was simple, although at that stage we did not know about it: to open the residents and encourage them to speak. Some of us came across people, who could talk long and they felt great about it for example Mr Albin Krajewski, a real sociometric star. I, on the other hand, would usually meet people who found it hard to talk: repeating phrases, fixation on random sentences that they would repeat unknowingly what was surprising, Mute and Wacek found the material very interesting. From both sides there appeared the need to go on working, to visit the DPS again. I decided to get involved and I would come to the Jonkowo DPS again and again, trying to construe questions on my own, to reach the right people. The topics for conversation I came to them with were quite varied. I tried to explore the theme of dancing a bit more. During the work, it turned out that someone had just died in DPS who was especially important to the community. Therefore talking about dancing was not proper. So, naturally, the subject of death came up. I asked people to tell me about their experiences and rituals connected with death, about their close ones who were dead. Unexpectedly, among other topics there came the subject of relations between Poles and Jews. Simultaneously, theatre work, run by Wacek and Mute in DPS, developed. It was worth learning what those people were thinking of that work. What they understand, what it is for them. What do they know about The Wedding? Why Wgajty Theatre come to them to work together with them. I was interested in how they understand it, how it looks from their point of view, what this work is for them. At some point I found it important to ask them about the DPS itself, about how they feel there, what they relationships look like there. At that stage of my research, difficulties appeared; it ended up with a conflict between me and the head-mistress. And people started simply to feel some kind of fear, they didnt want to talk. Later it broke through. We were able to come out of that situation. I came back to questions about theatre, sometimes I would smuggle in some questions about the DPS, there was more trust already. To the extent that they wanted to talk about it, or they would talk in metaphor. One could communicate. Nevertheless I had another difficulty: I had gathered a great deal of interviews I was supposed to write an MA thesis about it After the death of Professor Aldona Jawowska, I started talking about the work with Professor Joanna TokarskaBakir. I came to her with the interviews. At first she had an assumption that here there may occur the
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situation of exploiting the symbolic capital of a weaker party. It is called cultural appropriation, that is: appropriation of somebodys good, the fruits of somebodys life, somebodys heritage, happening at the level of symbolic violence. When I brought her the interviews, however, she changed her point of view. She said: we rule out this kind of thinking altogether. In fact the value of the gathered material lies is that it consists of very inconspicuous, short utterances of little coherence. This is the subject we should have a look at. We decided that what the DPS residents say, the manner in which they say it, are litotic narrations. This term we had coined together, it is a term which is absent in analyses. Litotic, that is deriving from the Greek rhetoric figure called litotes. I shall bring by the definition from the Dictionary of Literary Terms: litotes weakens the power and pointedness of speech, and, similarly to euphemism, it alleviates the sharpness of judgement, yet when supported by particular intonation or face it can more efficiently focus the attention on the opinion of the speaker than it is in the case of direct expression. It is also the opposite of hyperbole, which decreases the image of a given phenomenon. Neutralization of the clarity of portrayal, intended orator's modesty, e.g. confessing in the face of the listeners the shortcomings of one's eloquence compared with the weight and scope of the subject. I discovered that exactly this kind of narrative strategy appears in the stories of the residents. Continual depreciation of one's own experience, one's own character, saying bad things about oneself, orator's modesty. It is interesting that this rhetorical figure was supposed to focus the speaker's attention on himself. That is, what you say gains importance through modesty. It turned out that the litotic stories inspired Wgajty to specific theatre work. Actors went out to the people, they were getting to know them and what they portrayed as crippled, incomplete. Out of it, they could draw true value and work on it. On biographies, stories, on their talents and experiences. Onto this observation, in my thesis I laid another construction. I treated Theatre Wgajty's work as narration, as a narration of anthropological theatre, out of which this theatre derives and with which it had a break-up of a kind. The breaking up occurred in connection with a racist incident which happened here*. A break-up with local community and also with the tradition of anthropological theatre. An example of that turn is the performance Synczyzna(Sonland), which is a kind of the group's squaring accounts with traditional culture.

Sonland, a performance of the Wgajty Theatre insc. Wacaw Sobaszek, phot. Archive

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Fot. Maciej epkowski

Fot. Maciej epkowski

The change of paradigm consisted in focusing exactly on little, litotic stories. Those litotic narrations questioned all the narration of anthropological theatre and in a sense they saved it, caused Wgajty to change their field of work, they built the concept of necessary theatre. I treated it as a situation of very democratic exchange. Theatre saves litotic narrations from ultimate extinction, from their washing away, giving them cohesion, writing them into great narrations, such as Wyspiaski, Gombrowicz, belonging to public domain, well known. At the same time, Wgajty use those narrations to re-formulate, to create meaning to the works on which they are now focusing.
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Photo by Izabella Pajonk, part of the portrait cycle from Social Care Home Jonkowo

Photo by Izabella Pajonk, part of the portrait cycle from Social Care Home Jonkowo

My work consisted of three chapters. In one of them I described the change of paradigm, critical approach to traditional culture and to local community. I also described the notion of necessary theatre and its manifestations. Later, I dealt with DPS itself, where I tried to reconstruct people's narrations and to show their discontinuity, their falling apart. I wanted to show moments in which they are becoming extinct, that there is a problem with building one big story. I portrayed the residents and the DPS as such, the way it functions everything based on my observations. I described the work on performances, rehearsals, and what people from DPS say about this work, how they treat it. Some of them take it very seriously, almost as if it were the sense of living for them, something that builds them anew, creates their identity anew. Some of them, however, keep their distance, in the sense that they understand the situation as mere play, diversion in their free time. They also are more aware of what Theatre Wgajty is. There are others still, who are not interested who the people are, what the theatre is they are simply having fun. The point of departure is the situation of theatre rehearsal, but not everyone understands it the same way. In my work I tried to show the differences in understanding the theatre situation. A part of my work is going to be published in the magazine Studia Literaria Historica, issued by the Institute for Slavic Studies. I encourage you to read the interviews.
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Wacaw Sobaszek: I wanted to add something on the subject of litotic stories. In connection with Wodowo. We had planned that the goal of our Theatre Autumn would be Wodowo. Before we went there for the first time this spring, with a theatre action, with the carnival show Zapusty, I showed here in the theatre the film entitled Gombrowicz in the DPS. Emilia Hagelganz' film bases on two motifs: Albin Krajewski and Ms Lucjanna. Maybe somebody can't believe that the performance I am speaking about Iwona married here is an authentic work based on Gombrowicz' texts? So far, only one reviewer has admitted that it is an important work in the field of staging Gombrowicz. If there wasn't such kind of recognition, that would mean that this Gombrowicz is only a pretext, right? That would imply that the text does not fit in the place, does not fit with the residents. Still, the point was to prove it. The film fills in the gap. Namely, Ms Lucjanna in the film speaks about suicide. You know that Iwona, the Princess of Burgundy is a kind of a study of suicide. It is a question, how it happens that someone is brought to commit suicide. An incredible literary undertaking. And Ms Lucjanna tells some interesting stories about suicides in her own village. There is such a village between Jonkowo, Wgajty and Wodowo... Kamila mentioned the racist attack. There, in Wodowo, you know, there was a lynch. I think that narration about the dark side of reality is necessary, because otherwise you have an impression like How come, suddenly a racist attack?. The memory of such an incident is being very quickly pushed into oblivion. Lynch? How can it be? How come it happened? So, we have complementation, in a way, two narrations about the dark side. Of course, what we are after, is not some exaggerated emphasis on those dark features. Yet the question remains, not only about the lynch, also about the racist attack. Where did it come from? Because there was a whole series of texts, a lot of it was released in the press, and then total silence. Nobody referred to it, the first and only one was Kamila. The group Fady, who made an appearance yesterday during the action City on the Way have in their manifesto something on the subject of silence. Namely, that silence destroys society. They act, they do visual actions against silence. Kamila Paprocka: I am going to read now some of those litotic stories. First, a short utterance of one of the DPS residents, speaking about Iwona: In my free time of boredom I have this unused time, I put the text in my lap and I memorise it. It is not that I have to learn the text. I treat it as entertainment. Maybe it sounds funny, but it is like that. I do not want to get very involved, I do not want to be a great actor, I simply treat it as an adventure. It was a comedy, so one could fool around a little. Kamila Paprocka: I divided the residents according the following categories: the time they speak about, the places they speak about, how they see the DPS and what they say about other residents. There is also such an interesting chapter in my work: Strategies and tactics of surviving in the DPS. What they do to tear themselves out of this structure. About their relatives, sometimes great narration do pop up, e. g. the war, the People's Republic of Poland. I also have a chapter entitled Untellable, speaking about breaks, about how the story breaks somewhere, loses its coherence. And here I shall bring by a couple of lines. Artur: I don't feel like doing anything. What can I think now, now that I think down and not up? I like, I do like those dances of theirs, only I don't have legs, so I don't go. Besides, I don't remember to do anything. Here is another dialogue, Ms Ania and me: Ms Ania: One cannot walk any more. Me: But one could walk one day. Ms Ania: Yes, one could, but now it has ended. You think one remembers? One doesn't. I have lost my sight and I can't walk. Well, so it is. Me: Still, you have a lot before you. Ms Ania: I don't have anybody any more. I liked it a lot once. I liked dancing, playing, merry dances. One has lost, one has lost the young years.
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Mr Dominik: And now I cannot play anything. I can play three instruments, so if I only could, I would play, too. Well, I dream to play music again, but I can't manage any more. To play the guitar at least, but I can't even that. My right hand is not in order, so I can't even hold the guitar's neck. Not to mention the saxophone, because my lungs are no good and the organ I cannot play either because you have to wind up and all. And that is why I am feeling so sad. *In 2006, during the Theatre Village festival, a black actor of one of the ensembles invited to perform was attacked and gravely beaten.

G OMBROWICZ IN DPS
a film by Emilia Hagelganz about the theatre work in the Social Care Home

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Transgressions of the body

Zofia Bartoszewicz

A performance built during a cycle of theatre workshops undertaking the theme of the body the basic tool of the actor which goes to meet the other body, excluded due to disability. During the project Transgressions of the body, Zofia Bartoszewicz was recording utterances concerning the inner sense of the body of people significantly disabled in the area of motion.
The author about her workshop project:

Presently I am discovering an area unknown to us, the fully able, the area of sensual sensations of people, to whom possessing the body is not obvious or unquestionable. Thanks to intermediating bodies the bodies of the performers I wish to make manifest the inner, independent worlds of persons almost entirely deprived of the ability to move. The workshops are a part of theatre project which I am realizing thanks to the grant I am receiving from the Ministry of Culture. The project is an attempt at redefinition of the notions of able and disabled, an attempt to show that disability is not merely a faulty print of normalcy. I wish, thanks to Transgressions to strengthen the contents connected with abolishing social stratification, but not diversity, because the latter is a guarantee for development.
During the workshops we aim to:

- widen the capacities of physical action - seek expression beyond tendencies of movement - get inspired by the experiences of persons of alternative moving skills - through body, to change thinking - discover what moves immobility and sets it in motion - collaborate with the voice - appreciate silence - learn intuitive singing and dancing - work on texts (among others, on the material gained thanks to talks to disabled people) - explore relations with what attracts our attention, what repels it and what it entails - talk and do homework - seek answers to the questions: When does action, and act, become actor's work? What art is actual? What does it mean to be active?
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Photo by Agnieszka Pa

Photo by Agnieszka Pa

Photo by Agnieszka Pa

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Wacaw Sobaszek talking with Zofia Bartoszewicz after the premire show W.S.: I see. Now perhaps the question of cultural appropriation. You remember, Kamila Paprocka said there can appear such a problem, when you take material from some social group, from some people and process it in an artistic way. She was talking about a morally uncertain field between the artist and the group which gives his artistic activity inspiration.

Photo by Agnieszka Pa

Z.B. : Yes, I know what you mean. These were also my questions, which I asked myself. Am I not going to abuse somebody? Because, as I understand it, this is what you mean? I had spent, I remember, many meetings just trying to make Ms Irena (Irena Anacka, afflicted with SM, a resident of the DPS in Jonkowo) willing to share her experiences. I am speaking about it because it made me aware of many things. Firstly, that it is quite a painful area of experience, so one builds some strategies for himself. A bit like a pearl coming into being. There is sand, this grain of sand, and around it, mother-of-pearl grows. But in the case of Ms Irena, she wasn't aware that was a pearl, that it was something precious. A lot of time it took me to slowly, slowly convince her that it can have meaning for a bigger number of people. Both the residents of the DPS and people afflicted with SM. That exactly thanks to what she says we, the healthy ones, will have a chance to approach those worlds, which are, after all, other worlds. If we are interested in otherness, how do we approach it if not through meetings and talks? Another step was bringing those worlds closer, thanks to the stage. On the stage. To the girls the participants of the workshop and the makers of the performance a very touching and important moment was meeting Ms Irena during Theatre Autumn. Later on I was exchanging emails with Ms Irena. It turned out that to her it was important, too, that she saw how much her experience can matter to other people. Before, she was not aware of it. Of course, before me there is still another confrontation, another test, because I have promised her to show her the performance documentation. I asked her if she would like, after we have made the show, if she would like to see it. She told me then: I am not so sure. So, I told her: All right, so let us give ourselves some time for it. I am interested in this element of being in between. In that sense I can be a link or I can try to build links between worlds which it seems do not fit together. For example, the world of the fully able and the disabled. I am trying, knowing disability, also my own disability, to make those borders less rigid, to give them a touch of watercolour, to wash them over a bit, so they permeate each other, so we start thinking differently about them.
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The discussion we held after the performance proved that the show really evoked reflection. We spent two and a half hours talking about what so-called ability and disability are, what function and dis-function are. W.S.: I would also like to ask you about group work... Did you ask them questions, like what kind of art is actual, When does an act become an actor's act, What does it mean to be active? Z.B.: I think many motifs are actual at the same time, but recently I am having a closer look at one of them. Namely, I am thinking about performances and artistic forms of action to which one invites people who previously had nothing to do with art, at least with practising art. The thing concerns different people from marginalised environments, but this tendency seems to encompass wider and wider circles. First, there were performances outside of theatre spaces, and now more and more performances are co-created with performers who never went to acting schools. This makes me aware, that it is actual that more and more people are creatively active, have contact with art, that in art there is some power, that people have a chance to discover and realise their potential, cocreate culture, that it is important and very current. During each of the workshops I was making notes. I wrote down all the questions and doubts that the girls had on entering the project. For example, Is it ethical when a fit person sits in a wheelchair and can a wheelchair appear on stage at all?, Is it ethical when an actor starts acting, pretending, a disabled person, Do we have a right to do it? I said that I am not going to answer any questions, that we will be working and at a certain point they can come back to their questions themselves. I asked only: Why is it that we can watch an actor who assumes the role of someone with cancer and this doesn't evoke such questions, whereas lots of questions are evoked by disability, by physical disability?

Photo by Agnieszka Pa

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I understood that the subject was still niche. It turned out that when they sat in the wheelchair, they started taking away the spell, because in Polish there is only one association: disability, because it is called an invalid chair, invalid meaning disabled - it is a bit different than simply wheelchair. W.S.: What stays in memory after seeing Transgressions are the texts. Texts which are spoken in many different ways. Do they come from the homework the girls had to do? Z.B.: Homework was for example to ask around what people think about disability, what is the first sentence that comes to them concerning the subject, how people react to persons on wheelchairs, to disability. Or the task for Kasia, a request actually, (one of her close friends goes on wheelchair), that she asks what the perspective of that person is, what she thinks about us sitting in the wheelchair and showing a dance with a wheelchair on the stage. W.S.: Right, it is interesting, the sphere of individual path. Well, and research in everyday life, so I understand it. Z.B.: Yes, the aim was to attune ourselves to the subject. To tune ourselves. W.S.: I can't help the impression that in this recent work of yours there is something new. To me it is also the presence of a group. Could you say something more about the group's contribution? Z.B.: I am glad you speak about it, because this subject came up also in the talks after the show. Many people noticed that the girls on stage are really a team, that it shows. I am very happy about it, because as we well know, this is not easy. They really do react wonderfully to each other, they support each other all the time, they feel each other, react organically, intuitively. We talked about nakedness, about the body, about discovering the body, about naked legs, about whether to wear the bra or better not to have it on stage because of the straps... and so on, and how they feel about it all. And this scene with the tape, the scotch tape, when the girls dancing are more and more immobilised, stuck over with the tape. When I wanted to try it out for the first time, I did it with Emilia Hagelganz in Germany. We had such a rehearsal when she was simply naked. And that suddenly had a completely different feeling about it when I started immobilising her naked body with this tape, constraining it. At the same time, she was saying a text, her childhood memory. She was in her grandma's house, and her

Photo by Agnieszka Pa

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Photo by Agnieszka Pa

grandma was baking for here a delicious roll, especially for her, then she was saying the recipe for that roll. During the dancing, when I was binding her. W.S.: Right, I see. You were telling me a bit about the after-show talk in Warsaw. Do you remember anything important come up then? Z.B.: There was, for example, such a question: Why aren't there any disabled persons here? I answered that it so happened that I was working with the disability of people who are to a very large extent immobilised. And that I wanted, thanks to the intermediating bodies, the bodies of the performers to externalize their internal, independent world. That I was interested in the qualities and values that can come from motionlessness, from being immobilised. But there was also someone, who had this sort of reflection: I am disabled, although you can't tell by the look of me. I am DDA, an alcoholic's child and in some areas I feel entirely disabled, even powerless. So we talked about feeling powerless. But I was completely dumbfounded when a young woman came to me who had been to the show and she said they are with her husband trying to get an adoptive child and that they are after all the preparatory courses and now they are awaiting an important moment, because they must fill in a special application. And there is such a question in the questionnaire: Do you wish to adopt a healthy child or it does not matter for you? You have to answer that. And this woman said that after the show she is ready to accept a disabled child. When I heard something like that, I simply couldn't speak.

Photo by Agnieszka Pa
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Photo by Agnieszka Pa

Photo by Agnieszka Pa

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Organizer:
Stowarzyszenie Teatr Wgajty (Theatre Wgajty Association)

With the financial support of:

The Foundation for German-Polish Cooperation (Stiftung fr deutsch-polnische Zusammenarbeit) The Marshall Office of the Warmia-Mazurian District The Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage The Fund for Theatrical Activation of the Stefan Jaracz Theatre in Olsztyn

Special thanks for Jeannine Pitas.

Designed by Grzegorz Kumorowicz