The work of Lina Lapelytė has for several years attracted sustained attention from audiences drawn to experimental, interdisciplinary forms that transcend the framework of conventional theatre. Her invitation to create Kosmiczny dom / Cosmic Home at TR Warszawa came after she won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for her opera Sun & Sea. Together with dramaturg Birutė Kapustinskaitė, Lapelytė has created in Warsaw a piece that is part installation – with the audience seated around a revolving stage – and part concert with choir, soloists, and instrumental music, even if the focus keeps shifting between the artists. What is the titular Cosmic Home? Perhaps it is the Earth itself: the planet of people who – while busying themselves with countless more and less important matters – meet, worry, rejoice, reflect, speed up, and slow down. In any case, they remain in constant motion, mirroring the spatial concept of Lapelytė’s work. Its sculptural–musical form and breaking the text into songs make Cosmic Home a tale of the human condition: the condition of a creature that is always part of a larger whole, which we hardly ever perceive, especially on a cosmic scale.

Cosmic Home is a display of superb and much-awarded actors of TR Warszawa, notably Justyna Wasilewska, Tomasz Tyndyk and Sebastian Pawlak, who perform in a collective creation that moves the audience in ways quite different from the ones we are used to. The hour spent with this production is a time for experiencing fleeting moments of beauty, glimpsed momentarily before they’re gone. And even as more come to replace them, they, in their distinctiveness disappear as well, equally delicate and transient.

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The performance takes place on a revolving stage and features flickering lights.

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Photo by Adrian Lach