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Polish director
Daniel Jacewic at the panel session
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By Helen Musa
UNDER the watchful eye of Lieder Theatre director Chrisjohn
Hancock, a lively cross-section of local identities practitioners, students,
community members and teachers gathered last weekend to engage with and learn
from members of Poland’s Teatr Brama, a company located in Goleniów, roughly
the same size as Goulburn and about 180 km from Berlin.
This writer spent a day learning new things about theatre’s potential
for relating to society.
Evol McLeod, former director of Tuggeranong Arts Centre,
formally opened the festival titled “Periphery”, which could be defined as
“away from the mainstream“.
McLeod welcomed the Polish guests—director Daniel Jacewicz,
Ola Slusarczyk, Jenny Crissey and Patrick Bednarski—as practitioners of a
theatre style that was “participatory, not spectator-oriented”, describing how
Teatr Brama was part of a project that now involved nearly 30 European
countries and 21 countries outside of Europe which viewed theatre was as a
force for positive social change.
A lively and sometimes argumentative panel session followed,
which involved Jacewicz, Crissey, along Ben Drysdale and Cara Matthews from
Canberra’s Rebus Theatre and Rauny Worm from Tuggeranong Arts Centre—Rebus and
TAC are both working in the area of theatre for social change.
Jacewicz explained the emergence of Polish theatre practice
from dictatorial society of the '50s to the '80s, before Polish independence in
1989.
He had been one of the "lucky ones" in a sense,
starting theatre work in 1996, but, likening freedom to the instant exhilaration
of Coca-Cola, he noted that in the early days they’d had to ask themselves: “we
are all free, but what do we do now?”
Theatre in Poland, he said, reaches deep into the community,
with 800 independent groups and 125 national theatres – every small town has a
theatre.
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| The 'Periphery' mascot |
Although they are peripatetic in practice, Goleniów became
their home after the local mayor closed local disco and gave it to Teatr Brama
as a centre.
But often they worked outside that space. Some years ago,
for instance, they closed a town bridge and created an ‘artificial border’ that
required passports to cross—25,000 people did so, willingly. This year they
built a 4m high ‘Colosseum’ from hay-bales that had locals exclaiming, “Wow.”
Jacewicz said he had met Hancock in Belgium at a time when
he was looking for an Australian collaborator – and the rest is history.
Goulburn seemed like a parallel community, yet after seeing a fire show performed
by Lieder Youth enjoying local
hospitality, it seemed “so different
from what I imagined,” in a good way.
His colleague, Jenny Crissey, originally from Chicago but
now living in Goleniów, outlined the work of their EU partners in the ‘Caravan
Next’ project, notably Odin Theatret in Denmark and the Social Community
Theatre Centre at the University of Turin.
That university’s academic methodology, which quantifies how
theatre can engage with society, at first worried them and Jacewicz initially
said, “but we are already doing this,” yet in the end the studies affirmed what
they did.
“Wherever you are, you should feel like you’re the centre of
the universe,” Crissey told those present at the panel session.
The festival continued with a workshop run by Jacewicz
focusing on concentration, body contact, body-memory (‘Like Grotowski’, he
called out, conjuring up a famous Polish theatre guru from the past) stamina, rhythm and trust.
The first day of ‘Periphery’ concluded with a pair of
performances.
“Monochrome, “by Lieder Theatre, won multiple prizes this
year at the American Association of Community Theatre International Festival in
Venice, Florida. Playing with questions of exclusion, it coincided with
President Donald Trump’s pronouncements on immigrants and drew enthusiastic
applause from audiences there.
The evening wound up with Brama’s “Ghost Dance Impressions,”
where local actors joined their Polish counterparts to perform a work built
around the famous ‘Ghost Dance’ of the late 19th century, which led directly to
the Massacre at Wounded Knee and the decimation of Native Americans. A
musically- driven presentation that
expressed anger at the way dominant cultures destroy others, it had the entire
audience rising to its feet and to shout in the words from the movie ‘Network,’
"I'm as mad as hell!”
A spot on the periphery, it seemed, was not going to daunt
this gathering of passionate theatre practitioners.