Polish Dance Theatre: Wedding. Afterparty

We have the pleasure of inviting you to a performance within the 33rd Modern Art Days festival

Polish Dance Theatre: Wedding. Afterparty (Wesele. Poprawiny)

May 27th, 2018, 6:30 PM
Podlasie Opera and Philharmonic, 1 Odeska Street
tickets: 15 PLN (presale) / 25 PLN (on the day of the event), available at the Forum cinema’s box office (5 Legionowa Street), BCC/LZC’ box office (19 Warszawska Street), online and at the event venue half an hour before its start

It’s quite simple in the synopsis. An intellectual from town marries a country girl. Then things got complicated. Communities in which people lived all their lives fell apart, farmers moved to cities, their children went to college. More change followed as democracy arrived, bringing capitalism along, while post-modernity was busy with “here and now”, undermining the role of tradition and continuity.

Various Polish generations meet on stage. Those of our grandparents’ and parents’, whose experience drove the tectonic plates of history and social transformation. They are the medium, living chains between us and the past. Their private “wedding stories” mirror the fortunes of Poland and its people, as family myths become part of a greater historical narrative. The generation of twenty-somethings, who do not share the experience of war, industrial action by Solidarity, sleeping on Styrofoam. Known as the Millenials, the Y generation. The dates they find important are not in distant history, but rather focused on consumption and pop-culture: the rise of social media, fast-food outlets on the streets, new drugs, ever thinner laptops, passport-free travel, music from all over the world in your pocket.

The littlest ones are also there. We don’t know yet what will shape their experience.

What does this intergenerational dialogue with Wyspiański, this collective memory event, tell us about ourselves and the Poland of today?

What do we fear, what are we ashamed of and what do we wish for?

We like to think about Poland as a lost community project, straight from the frolic tavern in the epicpoem Sir Thaddeus, where people of different social strata, religious affiliations and wealth listen attentively to the Jewish cimbalom player’s music in a shared moment.

Wyspiański debunks this illusion, and the subsequent stagings of the “Wedding” that accompanied Polish transitions and dramatic events over the years only prove the fiasco and utopia of thinking about Poland in this way.

Is our fate to always start again in a circular, melancholic cycle of ever returning for the golden horn, like Jason for the golden fleece, with a hangover from unlearnt lessons from history, repression of guilt, hidden fears, in a hope that this time we’ll make it?

Welcome to the afterparty.

Magdalena Zaniewska

Director: Marcin Liber
Stage design and costumes: Mirek Kaczmarek
Music: RSS B0YS
Dramaturgy: Magdalena Zaniewska
Choreography: Iwona Pasińska
Folklore advisory: Leszek Rembowski
Lighting: Mirek Kaczmarek
Production executive: Natalia Gorzelańczyk
Support costume designers: Adriana Cygankiewicz, Krystian Szymczak
Cast: Urszula Bernat-Jałocha, Fabian Fejdasz, Julia Hałka, Paulina Jaksim, Jerzy Kaźmierczak, Zbigniew Kocięba, Katarzyna Kulmińska, Paweł Malicki, Marcin Motyl, Marta da Pinto, Michał Przybyła, Adrian Radwański, Katarzyna Rzetelska, Sandra Szatan, Dominik Więcek, Emily Wong and members of the Movements Factory group