Did you know, when you were starting your work in TEATR ÓSMEGO DNIA during your university studies, that you wanted to live on theatre, for theatre, and do theatre for a living? What was it that drew you to just that theatre?
Ewa Wójciak: It was clear that we wanted to live on theatre and for theatre, but it was not quite clear what it meant. In those years it was not being an actor or realizing some successful plays that we understood as the notion of theatre; what we did understand by it was creating a new social and artistic reality. We were looking for a new language, and a new world we wanted to create, an alternative one and quite different from the one in which we were functioning in those years of real socialism.
Tadeusz Janiszewski: We did not know it right from the beginning. Every one of us had come there for a different reason and at a different time. I was interested in theatre at the time and I wanted to be an actor. That was overlapped with Grotowski's initiations with our small revolutions connected with collective creation, with opposition to traditional drama and all the stage space. We started to be drawn to building an alternative group living together and creating things jointly.
Marcin Kęszycki: As for me, I also did not know at first where I was going. I was 19 years old, I was starting my university studies. I was a good boy from a decent house who found himself, quite accidentally, at the festival of Open Theatre in Wrocław; was there my idea of life and of myself was turned upside down. I saw a spectacle of TEATR ÓSMEGO DNIA, entitled "In One Breath" based on the poetry of Stanisław Barańczak and I got infected. I remember the moment when an actress's face appeared close to me, really perspiring. That perspiration was really something. On coming back to Poznań I was looking for posters of that theatre all over the town. I started coming to every performance, until somebody got interested and asked me who I was. I was offered tickets, and then I was admitted to scrubbing the floor before a performance. It was almost like cleaning an altar! I did not quite know what I wanted, I only knew that I could lose everything with those people and I wanted it.
Adam Borowski: I was 17 years old. What could a boy like that think? I was a young man who entered the strangest place in the world. Without any introduction terms I was offered something so unusual, something ruining my world order to such a great extent, something so fascinating, that one could only give himself over to it completely, or go away. I stayed.
Jacek Chmaj: It was the year 1978. In the Warsaw students' club " The Barn" there was a great nomadic gathering, because there were spectacles and artistic workshops of TEATR ÓSMEGO DNIA going on. It was all so intense and important for me that for a couple of months I could do nothing, because everything seemed unimportant. After about a year they offered me a chance to co-operate with them. I left Warsaw and came to Poznań. It was a hard time, there was no money, no flat. The tours we made a living on were often cancelled. I felt I was a burden. I could not function like that so we parted for some time. I helped and took part only occasionally in some activities. And at last, after the theatre had returned to Poland, there appeared new conditions for work, I am here, I have almost forgotten Warsaw.
What is the method of work for TEATR ÓSMEGO DNIA? What does collective work , improvisation, mean in your case. Where have you gotten your inspiration? And is it different today from what it was when you started?
E.W. It is not different. I have a feeling that we are among the few who have contemporary stuck to the concept of a theatre dispensing with the literature from centuries ago. We have been looking for our own language for everyday reality, without referring to the classics, from Shakespeare, for example. The hero of our performances has always been a human being of the times we live in, a human being of our everyday socio-political reality, a human being with a soul and a need to transcend, whom we have known from railway stations, streets, our own experiences. After our performance "No Man's Land", Adam Michnik said that we were a sort of an "archpolish theatre able to create a universal subject from the outlook greatly concentrated on Polish character." The basic pleasure of our work has been to write new quasi-dramas, spectacles which also carried a new text in them.
T.J.: There was a time, too, when, knowing great literature, we were not brave enough to use our own words. But finally the description of our improvisations quite accidentally appeared to be a sort of a poetic record which could be used in a spectacle. It meant we did not have to use Dostoyevsky or Camus, Miłosz or Herbert, because, in the description of improvisation, in our own notes after rehearsals we could find the texts which could serve us.
M.K.: What is important in the method of our work is being a community, is collective improvisation. Today, after years of practice, we are able to formulate complete scenes built on marks or metaphors which are sometimes very precise. It is from improvisation that all our poetic theatrical language emerges. Sometimes audience may witness that, but usually not: the improvisations go on in almost laboratory-like conditions. Has anyone inspired you in a theatrical work of that kind?
E.W.: To some extent it has been Jerzy Grotowski and The Laboratory Theatre. We have learned the method of work from his actors, Cieślak and Ścierski, but the method has undergone a significant transformation and has served the development in quite a different direction. To some extent our masters have been Dostoyevsky and Artaud, but it has never been an undiscriminating acceptance of patterns.
T.J.: As for me, I was greatly impressed, side by side with "Apocalypsis cum figuris" of The Laboratory Theatre, by Tadeusz Kantor's theatre, first "Lovelies and Dowdies", and then "The Dead Class".
J.Ch.: From the very beginning, your strength is in the fact that you work together. It is not a theatre made by one person helped by others. The truth lies in collective creation.
E.W.: You are right. It has always been a theatre strongly opposed to subordination to a leader. We all have strong social temperaments. Out of our natural discussion about the world, out of a necessity to participate in it, has been born a discussion in the theatre, on the stage. We have always been exceptionally sensitive to the world, wherever we have gone. In Russia, for example, during the common caravan of theatres from all over the world, our colleagues from the West organized football matches on The Moscow Red Square, and we, completely by ourselves and out of the official programme, visited railway stations, private flats, streets. We have been fascinated with reality and life. I daresay that is from where collective creation has emerged. From sympathy, as someone has put it nicely, speaking about Bertolt Brecht's creative inspiration.
In the '70s TEATR ÓSMEGO DNIA went along a very difficult track. You had your political guards, the theatre was controlled by the authorities of the Communist party, you were constantly surveyed by The Safety Service, searches, arrests, fake trials in economic and criminal cases were an everyday routine. You were forbidden to go abroad and to some towns, to act during some festivals. The Polish Students' Association, which was the theatre's patron, sometimes called off all Polish festivals only in order to prevent your theatre from performing. The attempts at liquidating you carried on. There was a constantly conspiracy of silence. It was not permitted to write or speak about the theatre. Did all these experiences influence what you are doing today, or do you rather try to erase those sad recollections from your memory?
E.W.: These experiences cannot be left out, although I think it is useless if we want to speak about what is going on now and about the modern world. When we think about a performance today, the pictures from those times do not come to our minds, and what is more, sometimes I have a feeling that it is uncommonly far away. It is simply hard to believe it is only a couple of years that divides us from those times. It is a shocking discovery that it all seems as if it were not from this life. All that must have shaped us somehow, must have had an impact on our lives, but I have no feeling of the burden of that past.
In 1979 you found yourselves in the Poznań "Estrada" (Dais), an agency dealing with the promotion of professional artists. You became professionals.
M.K.: It was a trap for us, because they had enough of us in those student organizations. There was a Machiavelli-like idea behind it: if we professionalize them now and give them money, they will have more to lose and will calm down. In that situation we were rescued by ... socialism. The manager of "Estrada" was so afraid that he would ruin his career that he left us as almost a completely independent unit, having even its own accountant. So, holding regular state jobs, we were free, without any repertoire obligations and other restrictions. Such a comfortable situation lasted for a year, but at that time we managed to make one of my favourite performances, "More than One Life".
T.J.: From documents we have seen later, the authorities were greatly concerned that it was impossible to blow us up from the inside, that we could not be made to quarrel with one another, that it was impossible to send the manager to Switzerland on a scholarship. They were thinking about splitting the group up and "Estrada" was one of the attempts of the kind.
Then there came a time of the so called "solidarity carnival", that is, the happy years of 1980-1981 ...
M.K.: For us, it was mostly a time of travels, which penetrated deeply inside us and on which we survived for many later years of blockades and impossibilities of travelling. The most important travel of our lives was the expedition to Mexico. Since that time some references to that voyage have appeared in almost every one of our performances.
E.W.: Mexico was really fascinating, because never before had we come so close to our spectators, and it was not on the principle of shallow emotions, resulting, as it were, from the Latin temperament. They were fascinated with our performances and the Polish reality. Never before had we been able to have such wonderful talks with people about what kind of a society we would like to build, how people should organize themselves, what to fight for, how to avoid party domination which is the enemy of social uprisings. It was a series of deep and motivated relationships, spiritual and intellectual adventures. Fantastic experiences, stopped tragically by the martial law in Poland.
Tell us about your experiences of acting in Polish churches during the time of Solidarity. You have always said that you were the only true people's theatre, because you acted for working-class people, for people who never went to the theatre. Then you were presenting the spectacles " Wormwood", " Ascent" (based on Mandelsztam), "A Small Apocalypse" (based on Konwicki) and your first street spectacle "The Report from the City under Siege" .
E.W.: It was the adventure of all the society, not only ours. Solidarity was built by workers together with intellectuals. We acted for people who did not go to the theatre, didn't watch television, and maybe that is why, paradoxical as it may seem, they understood so very well our theatre we were coming to them with. On one hand it was accompanied by a positive emotion that we belonged to the same camp, and, on the other hand, our viewers, because they did not have any ready-made ideas, accepted everything spontaneously and with a deep understanding. After two years it fossilized slowly: this patriotic, stereotypical reception was becoming a burden as anti-communist only. Besides, more and more artists were barging into this sphere and there was more and more artistic trash.
Then came 13th December, 1981, the introduction of the martial law in Poland. What was happening to you then?
E.W.: On the day when martial law was introduced, we were presenting the spectacle "More than One Life" in The Old Theatre in Kraków. After the performance we were sipping at some brandy with our friend the singer, Leszek Długosz, who formulated the thesis that our role was finished, because everything was permitted. There was decadent in the air, and freedom was unbridled. At the same time arrests were already going on and one could see live the scenes which were presented in that performance.
T.J.: While still employed in "Estrada", we performed officially in the church in Żytnia street in Warsaw. And it was that which lead to the official liquidation of the theatre, that is, to the statement that that theatre did not exist in Poland. This statement was in force until 1989. Wherever we performed in Europe in the years 1985-89, the Polish Embassies said that theatre like that did not exist and that did were not represent Polish culture. When we received the first prize in Edinburgh, the Polish Consul protested violently.
In Poland during the martial law the only places you could perform were in churches. Then came the period of exile.
E.W.: The departure in 1985 was not meant to be a long-term one. Simply, there came some new invitations to festivals, and we needed contact with the world. We could not leave together, because only a part of the troupe got passports. What happened then resulted in changing that departure to a quasi-emigration. We had to persuade our colleagues not to come back, because we were beginning to feel that the situation in churches was changing. Perhaps because of some political decision, the Church wanted to have that period of culture patronage behind it. And there were no other places in Poland then, in which we could perform.
What did the experience of being in the West mean to you? Did it influence the shape of the next productions, your thinking about theatre ?
T.J.: Those four years in the West were difficult years, a real school of survival. Nobody gave us money. We learned how to organize performances, how to make a living on theatre. In the '70s we were not thinking about it at all. But there came a moment in which we said to ourselves that if we believed in it and if we did theatre only, we would make a living. And it is so. But with no compromises from our idea of theatre.
E.W.: The experience of the West was mostly the experience of functioning in the conditions of a free market. We learned how to function on our own and how to defend ourselves against mass culture of American origin. And so, everything that started in Poland after 1989 was very well known to us. That is why we have been looking at it in peace and from a distance, but also with anxiety, because we know what the results are of being subject to such influences without creating a certain resistance to them.
When 1989 came, you received an official invitation from the Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki and the Minister of Culture Izabella Cywińska to come back to Poland. But the return did not appear very easy...
M.K.: Maybe we imagined too much. We were very impatient then and it seemed to us all that, all the organization, it was neverending. But it looks different from the distance. In the end we became a state theatre in two weeks time.
E.W.: Those first two years after 1989 were very energetic in Poland, it was a good period of democracy. We, of course, had to struggle with various problems, using even the help of mass media, asking them to intercede. But at last we got our theatre and we still have it. To some extent we were serviced very quickly by the new reality.
In that period there happened a very significant thing - you parted with Leszek Raczak, one of the creators of TEATR ÓSMEGO DNIA, for many years the company's managing and artistic director. How did you get on without him?
E.W.: The first production after the separation was "The Sabbath", a street spectacle, easier in that situation, because it required less improvisation, and more thinking in the terms of a big form of street theatre. It was more difficult with the next production, "Dance As Long As You Can", rehearsing by ourselves, without any help from the outside. What is important is that we were still faithful to our idea of theatre. Leszek's departure did not cause a revolution in our thinking about theatre, about what we wanted to do and who we wanted to reach. Rather it was so that Leszek had changed his interests and the areas he wanted to. We consistently stick to the same - we try to name somehow those contemporary subjects which touch us and which require expression. The origin of "The Sabbath", for example, is connected with an unusual adventure in Milan, when, on a narrow street, we came across a great exhibition of Mediaeval torture instruments. A performance originated resulting from the necessity of defending tolerance, the right to different opinions, from the conviction that, in this new reality, dissimilarity must be defended even if it is extreme or represented by a small group of people. And in the performance "Dance As Long As You Can" we tried, not on a great social level, but on a very personal human level, to chase that demon of mediocrity, dwarfing of great ideas for which we had been fighting for many years. Now the conquerors rest on their laurels and justice runs away from the winners' camp. A very personal performance was created, but I think it expressed the experience of a whole generation of Poles who had believed very deeply that it was possible to create a decent, beautiful social reality. Who experienced a grave defeat, bitter fall or just went impetuously into all that was offered by the world of power and politics, who sold their convictions, their ideals, without looking back. That is what the production is about.
Is it the same theme for the performance you are creating to open in Stockholm?
E.W.: "The Summit" is another performance resulting from the same need to speak about what touches us very personally and hurts. Today we have an impression that the world we are living in has gone mad, that money and mass media manipulation have never dominated the world to such a great extent. One of the specific inspirations for us is the famous summit meeting in Essen, devoted to the problem of famine in the Third World. As is was written in the press, it was one of the most distinguished meetings of the rulers of this world. "Essen - trinken" - said the headlines of newspapers and what we want to say is contained in it. We are concerned with it too. It is alarming that the gloss of the great world is so uncritically accepted in Poland. Balls organized for the benefit of hungry children by the Princess of Monaco, during which Rolls-Royces drive out of pies, make people happy. And the truth is that the world is bloody. Perhaps today the number of nations and people who have lost their motherlands, their own spots under the sun, their identity, who starve and look for shelter, is greater that ever. There is a passion in us to snap at that subject.
M.K.: There is also a picture which has been very strongly rooted in us for many years, a picture recorded by some film camera in the Tiananmen Square, when tanks moved against people there. It is the picture of a man who appeared before the tanks, the picture of a lonely man in a white shirt, with two shopping bags, who - it seemed - stopped the tanks by dancing. It is an important motif of many of our performances, also of "The Summit".
Many people wonder how your theatre, in spite of all the changes, still exists, that you still live in a community, you work together, you live together, you spend your holidays together.
E.W.: A lot of communities which were created in the '60s, split up one day in a natural way. People went away to their occupations, to banks, insurance agencies, etc. It is still nice to meet old hippies, the people of those times. In the West they form the theatrical audience today. We are united by theatre. But it will never be a theatre at any price. We will never be selling or commercializing ourselves or putting ourselves on the market. It is dominated by a very deep tradition which is impossible to part with. It is ours and resulting from ourselves in too great an extent to make it possible for us to change into people who do theatre for money and, in connection with that, interpret the trends and the market perfectly. I daresay it is not for us and even if it means that our attitude is already very exotic in modern times, we will most probably remain like this.
April 1998.
Translated by Ewa Stąpór