The performance during the Divine Comedy Festival is a pre-premiere performance.

Moments before the January premiere of Les Emigrants based on Sebald’s prose at the Odeon in Paris, Krystian Lupa unveils his latest project at the Polski Theatre in the Underground in Wrocław produced with a troupe he had worked with extensively before political powers-that-be destroyed one of Poland’s paramount stages. Meeting on the stage is a cast that has now dispersed across various theatres: Halina Rasiakówna, Marta Zięba, Anna Ilczuk, Ewa Skibińska, Janka Woźnicka, Wojciech Ziemiański, Andrzej Kłak, Tomasz Lulek, and Michał Opaliński.

Krystian Lupa reflects, “persistently, ever again, and ever more poignantly, we find ourselves ensnared in the prisons of mental conventions, prevailing moral norms, societal taboos, the cages of generational paradigms, and so forth.

“These prisons deform our lives. Happiness? The meaning of life? To be a man? To be a woman? What does it mean to be yourself? Is it possible? And what, indeed, it means to be ‘yourself’? Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I heading? Moreover, I also must be a ‘Human’...

“Twentieth-century literature serves as a chronicle of the loss of the self. An identity crisis. Dispersion. Love and gender relationships become a particularly mysterious (experimental?) field in this increasingly process whose obscurity grows parallel with our consciousness. We initiate (conduct?) this experience, or does the process experience us?”

Two authors (Federico García Lorca with The House of Bernarda Alba and John Maxwell Coetzee with the novel Summer… and how did Elfriede Jelinek find her way to here? ??) – are two attempts at transgression → to stand on the other side of gender to see an image of yourself and the world you never knew.

fot. Natalia Kabanow