Experiencing synergy: An Interview with Ewa Podgórska about Diagnosis

 Ewa Podgórska

Nurtured and developed at some of the most prestigious film schools in Europe, documentary filmmaking in Poland remains a strong and ever-evolving component of the country's cinematic production. A unique city symphony, both intimate and monumental, in which the metropolis and the human psyche become indivisible, Ewa Podgórska's new film Diagnosis takes a distinctively stylised approach to the documentary form. A haunting sound design, slow zooms and some stunning overhead shots create a hypnotic, multifaceted portrait of Poland's prime cinema centre, former industrial hub and revitalisation success story, Łódź, one that might be described as an investigation into the city's subconscious.

As the title indicates, Diagnosis fuses elements of psychoanalysis with urban studies, as questions such as "If the city had parents, what would they be like?" and "If the city was a colour what would it be?" yield answers at once poetic and direct from a range of diverse interviewees, Łódź inhabitants whose insights create a deeper, more impressionistic vision of the city than one made possible by a focus on demonstrable facts. By turns moving, funny, surprising and disturbing, Diagnosis unfolds stories of caring and compromise, loss, disappointment and resilience, and clearly speaks to audiences outside of Poland, given its successful presentations at festivals in the UK, Egypt, the Netherlands, Singapore, Russia, and elsewhere. Here Podgórska discusses the approach of the film, the use of urban psychoanalysis theory, her collaboration with the crew and the protagonists, and her views on the current condition of Polish cinema. 

Alex Ramon: What was the inspiration for Diagnosis and why did you want to make a film about Łódź?

Ewa Podgórska: The idea of making Diagnosis came from my producer Małgorzata Wabińska. She wanted to do a film about the city.  During her research she found the 'urban psychoanalysis' theory. Knowing that I have a strong love/hate connection with my hometown she invited me to work on this project.

Why was it important to incorporate psychoanalysis into the film? 

The energy of a city has enormous influence on its citizens and at the same time its citizens have a great impact on the city itself. Urban psychoanalysis theory was a great starting point to explore this connection and to making the film. It was a useful tool because it allowed me to show something subtle that is difficult to translate into film language.

On the other hand, I've always wanted to explore what people experience when they "fall into themselves," for example during a tram ride. Why they are sometimes not aware of their surroundings. Why they don’t speak about it. To find the answers I had to expand the original 'urban psychoanalysis' to include my own ideas. 

You've written about documentary-makers. Did you have any particular models or inspirations in mind, in terms of other films, when making Diagnosis?

I like documentary films and I’ve seen a lot! So subconsciously I must have had some kind of inspiration, but consciously I didn’t. Although I encouraged the Director Of Photography, Marek Kozakieiwcz, to watch Atlas by Antoine d’Agata and The Sound of Insects – Record of a Mummy by Peter Liechti.

In both films, the narration is based on interior experience which is very difficult, some say even impossible, to show in documentary film. For me this makes these two outstanding films.

How did you find the people to appear in the film? What was the process like?

It was a long and hard process. I was looking for protagonists in different places like nightclubs, markets, streets, churches, etc. Members of the crew contacted me with their friends and family. We even made an announcement in the local newspaper. I spoke intimately with several hundred people - I am not exaggerating! Of course only a small group agreed to take part in the movie. Often people would withdraw just before the shooting began. It takes enormous courage to lie down on a couch in front of the camera and talk about feelings that have often never been shared with anybody beforehand. 

Yes, the participants reveal some very personal and sometimes painful things about their lives. How was the process of working with them in this very intimate and exposing way?

During the couch sessions I just listened to them. Without judgment, interruption, and, most importantly, I think, without any expectations. They knew that they could talk about everything, and that they could also be silent. I spent a lot of time with most of them before filming took place, so the actual shoot was just another meeting but with a camera present. There was just one protagonist that came to the set without knowing me. Of course, all "opening questions” like "If the city were an animal, which animal would it be?” were very useful. 

After shooting scenes on the couch, the protagonists would sometimes want to continue talking. We would speak on the phone days, sometimes weeks later and they would want to finish the stories they had begun.

What was your collaboration with the sound designer, composer, cinematographer and editors like?

I loved them and they loved me. I am deeply grateful that I could meet all these beautiful people and that we could experience this adventure together. During the process of making Diagnosis we experienced synergy. This film is something that happened between us, particular members of the crew, the protagonists and me. The DOP, editors, sound designer and composer are all are very talented, my role was to stimulate them and then stream their creativity. I am especially grateful to Marek Kozakiewicz, who helped me in many different ways. 

What has the reaction to the film been like so far, and how was it to screen the film for a Łódź audience at Transatlantyk Festival in July? 

I'm very happy because Diagnosis is communicating with foreign audiences. I remember one screening in Amsterdam, during which the audience was so focused and glued to the screen that nobody even coughed. It was amazing!

To make Diagnosis more universal we decided not to translate Łódź - the name of the city - in the subtitles. It’s just 'The City'. And what makes me happy is that nobody is interested which city is it. Viewers treat it as a symbol of the mental state of contemporary townspeople.

Of course screening at Transatlantyk Festival was special. It was the Łódź film premiere. I was very stressed about how citizens would react. But it was good. It is not an objective film about the city and they understood that. Much of the so-called "lodzermensch” identified with Diagnosis. That’s our success.

How was your experience of studying at Łódź Film School? What were the most important aspects of the training there for you?

Schools are very important. The Film School in Łódź is excellent. But my main teacher is life. I learned my craft mostly on film sets after school. 

Following a rather controversial edition of the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia, do you think that now is a good moment for Polish cinema? Are there some new directors whose work you particularly admire?

Polish cinema has never been in such a good position historically. It's hard to find an important international film festival without Polish films. It is a wonderful time for new directors with a fresh approach to the cinema. I hope that the people who are responsible for Polish culture understand this. There are a lot of new Polish directors, which I admire: Agnieszka Smoczyńska, Paweł Ziemilski, Jagoda Szelc and many more. 

What is your next project? Would you be interested in making a similar documentary about another city, or was Diagnosis a "one off" project of this kind for you? 

Diagnosis is a universal project and I don't need to do another film like that in a different city. However, if there was an interesting proposition for a town situated, for example, near the ocean…

I am already working on my next film. I hope it will be a surprise. 

Diagnosis screens this month at the Człowiek w Zagrożeniu (19-23 November) and Cinergia: European Cinema Forum (22-30 November) festivals in Łódź, and at HumanDOC festival in Warsaw (22-24 November). 

Diagnosis on my Favourite Films of 2019 list.

Theatre Review: The Antipodes (National Theatre, Dorfman)

The National Theatre's Dorfman has become the de facto British home to Annie Baker's plays over the last couple of years. Co-directed by the author with designer Chloe Lamford, The Antipodes becomes the third of Baker's works to premiere there following Sam Gold's production of the Pulitzer-awarded The Flick in 2016 and James MacDonald's staging of John last year. I missed John but quite admired The Flick, which, across a generous (for some, much too generous) three hour running time, highlights changing patterns of cinema presentation and consumption via the interactions of three employees in a small Massachusetts movie-house, as they mop floors, chat about films, and make ill-advised passes at one another. 

The Antipodes continues The Flick's concern with workplace dynamics - up to a point. The play presents a group of characters involved in a series of vaguely defined creative brainstorming sessions overseen by the slippery Sandy (Conleth Hill) in a corporate room that Lamford's design renders in all its swirly carpeted hideousness. Among the participants (who are played as an Anglo American crew here) are Arthur Darvill's Dave and Matt Bardock's Danny, for whom this project isn't their first rodeo with Sandy, and newbies Eleanor (Sinead Matthews), Adam (Fisayo Akinade), Josh (Hadley Fraser) and another (very different) Danny (Stuart McQuarrie) - plus note-taker Brian (Bill Milner)  and Sandy's endlessly sunshiney secretary Sarah (Imogen Doel).

Sandy's "method" is to get the group to tell personal stories, on topics ranging from loss of virginity to their biggest regret. As such, the dynamics of the group are again the focus - watch out for Darvill's Dave sidling up to Matthews's Eleanor to gleefully point out a phone-related faux pas she's just made - and suggestions of exploitation and inequality percolate within the interactions; witness the unceremonious removal of a participant who dares to raise questions about the whole premise of the endeavour by articulating the ways that personal "revelation" can mislead. 

But Baker twists the play into stranger, more surreal territory this time around. This is a piece concerned not just with storytelling and communication but with time, which gets not only discussed in the dialogue but dramatically distorted, for protagonists and audience alike. As always in Lamford's clever designs, details such as a circular light fixture and that swirly carpet function as expressions of the themes, and the thrust-staged production makes us complicit as observers around the conference table, as the tone shifts from relatable, awkward-funny revelation to a night-time sequence that digs into mythic and ritualistic aspects of story-telling. ("This is a sacred space," Sandy tells the group at the beginning, with his suspicious earnestness.)

The weirdness here, like Baker's mumblecore-influenced naturalism itself, can feel self-concious and calculated. But at their best her plays achieve effects that other writers don't get near. Though much shorter than The Flick, The Antipodes challenges and, with its increasingly apocalyptic undertone, unsettles at times. Yet watching the production I felt drawn into a state of relaxed, quite benign immersion that's somehow different from my experience at any other drama: a combined, overlapping sensation of boredom and rapture. 

This has to do with the particular mood that Baker creates, the absence of conventional dramatic tension, and, here, with the qualities that the actors bring "to the table." The company is much more assured than the cast of The Flick was, filling out the somewhat sketchy characters with details that, along with a marvellous late flourish which literally alters our perspective on them, variously complement or contradict their story-telling.

As Dave, Darvill pops his mustard coloured socks up on the table in a way that encapsulates male confidence and entitlement. Burly Matt Bardock pipes up with an excruciatingly graphic, finally moralising STD story, while Hadley Fraser plays Josh as buzzing and animated when he gets philosophical and touchingly apologetic when asking why, umm, he hasn't been paid for three months. 

Fisayo Akinade delivers the most challenging speech - a bizarre, elaborate creation myth for stories - beautifully, while Stuart McQuarrie makes a reminiscence involving a chicken a centrepiece of the show. Conleth Hill suggests a ruthless streak under Sandy's geniality, and Sinead Matthews, always a glory, delights as Eleanor recounts her first sexual experience, curls up on a pile of boxes to sleep, and takes to knitting - a detail that provides a supreme punchline. As the assistants, Bill Milner moves from unassuming note-taker to disturbing participant while Imogen Doel's Sarah loses not an ounce of her perkiness as she recounts a childhood experience that's apparently straight out of a Gothic fairytale. A primary pleasure of the evening is watching these actors interact.

Some bits of physical business don't feel fluid enough yet and Baker's writing has a random air at times, the relay of narratives sometimes smacking of research that feels half-digested. But the conclusion - which juxtaposes one character's loss of faith with another's reconnection with their first foray into creativity - blindsides you with its understated beauty, delivering a memorable, humane ending to this enigmatic exploration of the multiple stories we tell.

The Antipodes is booking at the National Theatre until 23 November.

Photos: Manuel Harlan. 

Film Review: Us Among the Stones (dir. Hood, 2019)

From the superb (Tom Browne's sensitive, profound Radiator [2014]) to the dire (Ben Wheatley's entirely bogus Dogme derivative Happy New Year, Colin Burstead [2018]), the rural family film has started to become a staple of independent British cinema in recent years. Director D.R Hood already made a contribution in 2011 with Wreckers, a Kent-set tale of brotherly tension and marital secrets starring Claire Foy and Benedict Cumberbatch, and she returns to the form with Us Among the Stones, her complementarily themed, but formally more radical, second feature. 

The premise may be perfectly conventional: the clan of a dying matriarch (Anna Calder-Marshall), including sons (Laurence Fox, Jethro Skinner), spouse (Oliver Cotton), his two brothers (Greg Hicks, Bill Thomas), partners and assorted grandchildren - gather for a celebration that unearths family resentments and deceptions. But the telling isn't. Hood mobilises a range of different formats in Us Among the Stones, combining pinhole camera, 35mm stills camera and iPhone footage, expertly edited by Claire Pringle, to give an exciting visual dissonance to the piece.

Nature shots combine with intense close-ups, placing place and protagonists in dialogue. The ramshackle Dartmoor farmhouse itself becomes a character, full of the history and personality of its inhabitants. Most evocative of all is the use of photographs - a device employed to dazzling effect in a single sequence of Christophe Honoré's great Making Plans for Lena (2009) - but one that here forms a consistent, integral part of the film's fabric. As pictures of the past are presented - and the present-day scenes are occasionally freeze-framed, becoming memories in the making - a sense of the family's history is made tangible, while also prompting the viewer's own reminiscences.

What's pleasing, too, is that, while the film explores the generational divide between a Bohemian 60s group - ones too stoned to make a family visit to Stonehenge a smooth trip - and their fractious offspring, that conflict avoids the obviousness that accusatory Boomer-baiting plays like Mike Bartlett's Love Love Love and Alexi Kaye Campbell's Apologia succumbed to. Hood's characters are too idiosyncratic to be mere representatives of their era, and the actors' inventiveness further ensures that this pitfall is avoided. 

The younger cast members come up with less that's fresh (though Sinead Matthews, who featured in Wreckers, brings her customary vibrancy to her scenes as a disparaged step-mum, brandishing a doll for a baby). But Hicks, Cotton and Thomas vividly inhabit brother characters as different as real-life brothers can be. Best of all is Calder-Marshall as the mother. Always a magical stage actress, Calder-Marshall hasn't necessarily had film roles to do her talent justice. But with her mesmerising vocal rhythms, plaintive looks and sudden, surprising humour, she seizes on all the opportunities offered here.

I'd be hard-pressed to say why her first scene with Hicks - it involves him quoting Tennyson and she responding with a rasped "They've locked me up! Save me!"  - gives me such pleasure, but it has something to do with the theatrical gusto that both actors bring to the moment. The party scene, which finds Calder-Marshall singing the prime piece of bawdy "Blow the Candles Out," achieves a similar effect: a deep English eccentricity that draws on our literary, folk and theatre heritage. (In a lovely touch, the film concludes with a shanty as the credits roll.) It's a shame that, as in Wreckers, Hood sees fit to take the proceedings in a somewhat shrill, melodramatic direction towards the close, with a spot of fisticuffs that doesn't add much. Still, ultimately it's not the soapy revelations but rather the fine performances, experimental elements and distinctive texture that make this family portrait resonate. 

Us Among the Stones premiered at the 2019 London Film Festival. Further information here. 

Interview with François Ozon

My interview with François Ozon about By the Grace of God is up at Film International. You can read it here.

Theatre Review: Nie jedz tego! To jest na Święta! (Teatr Studyjny, Łódź)

Bravo, bravo, bravissimo! If I had to choose one theatre production, of those that I've seen so far this year in the UK and Poland, to watch again now, today, tonight, my choice, without a shadow of a doubt, would be Pomysłowe Mebelki z Gąbki (Fever), Mariusz Grzegorzek's exhilarating extravaganza which was the first of the Diploma Shows to feature the 2018/19 contingent of Łódź Film School graduating actors. Leaping from gaiety to the grotesque, gleeful reality TV parody ("Nabrzmiałe probleeemy!") to haunting folk ballad expressionism, the show offered a rollercoaster ride through contemporary culture (and Polish history) that essentially provided all the shows you could require in one gorgeously baggy, unruly and inclusive package - one held together by the talent, commitment and energy of the young performers and by Grzegorzek's visionary genius. 

The first of this year's three Diploma shows starring the 2019/20 graduating group, Nie jedz tego! To jest na Święta! (Don't Eat That, It's For Christmas!) continues the precedent set by Mebelki. Constructed without a text, through improvisation, research and an exchange of ideas with the actors, and including some of the same creative team - Tomasz Armada (costumes), Iza Połońska (vocal coaching) and Leszek Kołodziejski (music supervision) - Grzegorzek's latest provocation again mobilises a collage structure that mixes diverse dramatic scenes, song and dance interludes, the silly and the (very) serious.

The show is audience-inclusive from its opening moments, in which dynamic Dominik Mironiuk ushers us into the auditorium, where he serves as a magical combination of MC, cabaret artiste, preacher and hypnotist, first introducing us to his colleagues: Sylwia Gajdemska, Irmina Liszkowska (who also serves as the show's assistant director), Janek Napieralski, Wiktor Piechowski, Dorota Ptaszek, Aleksander Rudziński, Julia Szczepańska, Dominika Walo, and Michał Włodarczyk. As was the case in Mebelki, this 10-strong collective switch up and share roles throughout the performance, with identities helpfully indicated by velcro labels attached to Armada's marvellous white costumes, which variously suggest hazmat or space suit, straight jacket or hospital uniform.

If a distinctive feature of the previous show was its Polishness, with Czesław Niemen songs rubbing up against Disco Polo parody, then Nie jedz tego! - though somewhat more distilled - casts its net wider for its main reference point. Sure, Polish songs are sung and Prez Duda get namechecked (in a hilariously mournful dirge delivered by Włodarczyk) but the principal inspiration here comes from Skye Borgman's 2017 documentary Kidnapped in Plain Sight, about the abduction of Idaho 12-year-old Jan Broberg in the 1970s. 

Grzegorzek and company use this text as a jumping-off point for an exploration of family dynamics (look how easily those "Matka" and "Ojciec" labels can be peeled off, after all) and social breakdown through the experiences of the kidnapped girl (Suzi, here), her siblings and manipulatable parents and the perpetrator (one Brajan - seldom a name to be trusted). Described as "too strange to seem real," the most sensational aspects of the Broberg case - from the culprit's Theorem-ish seduction of both of his victim's parents, to his convincing Jan that they were meant to marry and have a child who was prophesied to be the saviour of an alien planet - are preserved; indeed, a principal fascination of the show is the way it transforms real-life, documentary-derived material into theatrical phantasmagoria, mixing up genres from sci-fi to detective story under the wryly-deployed "Documentary Film" banner. 

Grzegorzek is the kind of director who can get a mood to shift lightening fast, and here abrupt lighting changes and surprising musical cues whisk us from the playful to the deeply disturbing. Bringing different facets to the character, the actresses convey Suzi's confusion, trauma and fortitude; from Szczepańska's confrontation with alien apparitions pitched somewhere between Dr. Who and the Ku Klux Klan to a touching, simply staged moment in which Gajdemska beautifully performs YouTube "bathtub ukulele singer-songwriter" Abbey Glover's "Please Don't Go". 

Around this through-line, the show throws several other elements into the mix, whether developing its concern with the mediatisation of crime through a very funny parody of a "Traffic Cops" TV series ("National Roads") or offering a memorable moment for Piechowski with his wonderfully rude accordion rendition of "Cipuleńka." Meanwhile, Daria Szymańska's distinctive choreography is at its most amazing in a powerful atomic interlude. 

The actors modulate brilliantly, whether offering heightened physical clowning - dig Janek Napieralski's epic drunk display! - or achieving subtle, sensitive effects. If the end result is not so all encompassingly great, nor as galvanising in its transitions, as Mebelki, there are still more perverse pleasures and terrors here than can be taken in on one viewing. As the actors gather close to the audience for a cathartic and bewitchingly sung finale, you may find yourself reflecting that, while winter holidays come but once a year, Grzegorzek and company have produced a show that's for life, not just for Christmas. 

The next performances of Nie jedz tego! To jest na Święta! take place from the 3rd to 17th October. Further information here. 

Photos: Aleksandra Pawłowska. 

Related reading:

Reviews of Polish theatre:

The Nether (Jaracz Theatre), 

Fever (Pomysłowe Mebelki z Gąbki), 

Angels in America, 

Slippery Words (Teatr Studyjny)

      

Top 10 Theatre of 2018

Film Review: Nic Nie Ginie 

Łódź Film School Actor interviews: 

Piotr Pacek
Anna Paliga
Paweł Głowaty
Ksenia Tchórzko
Karol Franek Nowiński
Matuesz Grodecki 

Theatre Review: For Services Rendered (Jermyn Street Theatre)

(Photo: Robert Workman)

A tea service set out on the table of a garden terrace decked with climbing roses... With a fine set by Louie Whitemore, Tom Littler's production of W. Somerset Maugham's For Services Rendered exudes Autumnal Englishness even before a word is spoken. When Diane Fletcher, elegantly grey-haired and clearly carrying an emotional burden or two, enters the scene and takes a seat, the picture is complete.

As in many Maugham plays, though, biting insights and tough ideas belie the cozy, decorous surface of the drama. Written in 1932, when Maugham was at the peak of his power and popularity as a writer, For Services Rendered follows such works as The Breadwinner (which firmly defended a parent's right to leave their family) and The Sacred Flame (which endorsed euthanasia - a theme that returns here) by offering a perspective on WWI that makes clear the damage that continued to be done to former soldiers (and their loved ones) after their return home.

Maugham accomplishes this through a situation that owes a self-conscious debt to Chekhov. Three sisters, Eva, Lois and Ethel, and a brother, Sydney, are the children of Leonard and Charlotte Ardsley. Sydney has returned from the war blind and cynical, and Ewa, who lost her fiance in the conflict, has - increasingly begrudgingly - become his carer. Ethel is unhappily married to a tenant-farmer and the younger Lois has attracted the attention of a an older, married family friend.

Littler's production plays up the Chekhovian echoes, creating a buzz of overlapping funny/sad activity that gives the play's portrait of generational divides and the wider societal damage wrought by war believable human contours. The characters are drawn with Maugham's customary intelligence, and, if this production isn't ideally cast across the board, several of the actors come through with memorable performances.

(Photo: Robert Workman) 

Sally Cheng, Rachel Pickup, Leah Whitaker and Richard Keightley compel as the contrasting siblings and Jotham Annan underplays effectively as a cash-strapped naval hero struggling to make it as a businessman. Fresh from the success of the Orange Tree's Rattigan revival While the Sun Shines, Michael Lumsden brings ardency and pathos to undercut the absurdity of a character who is not adverse to offering a girl money to elope with him, while Viss Elliott Safavi moves beyond comic caricature to convey the desperation of a wife who realises she's about to be ditched.

And the velvet-voiced Fletcher is exceptional as the matriarch, bringing a lifetime of technique to create a performance of great naturalness, one that's restrained and economical but full of feeling. The astute Charlotte, whose reaction to a terminal diagnosis is not the expected one, suggests a relative of the equally surprising Mrs. Tabret in The Sacred Flame: an older female character whose conventional demeanour masks unorthodox views. The same goes for the play itself. Littler's production occasionally looks a bit cluttered on the small Jermyn Street stage, but it succeeds in capturing both the sensitivity and sharp subversiveness that defines Maugham's writing at its best.

For Services Rendered runs at the Jermyn Street Theatre until 5 October.

Interpersonal Situations: on Retroperspektywy Theatre Festival, Łódź, 2019

The ill-informed might scoff at the notion, but Łódź's boast of hosting "more festivals than Rio" often feels entirely accurate. No sooner has one arts event finished in the so-called "Manchester of Poland" - Transatlantyk's film, food and music extravaganza in July, say - than another one is starting up. Occurring just prior to the Four Cultures event, last week saw the latest edition of the experimental international theatre festival Retroperspektywy. This festival brings together CHOREA Theatre, a company based at the city's Art_Inkubator venue, with a range of practitioners and companies from across the world for eight days of shows. 

Presenting work from Greece, Ukraine, Sweden, Russia and the US as well as Poland this year, the programme - and indeed the whole atmosphere of the festival - is inclusive. Plays, dance performances, concerts, kids shows, and Q&As make full use of the flexible spaces of Art_Inkubator - and also spill out a little into the city beyond. In addition, the festival had further occasion to mark this as a special year - the celebration of CHOREA's 15th birthday. 

ja, bóg  (Photo: Rami Shaya)

As diverse as the programme is, most of the shows presented, bear, to some extent, the influence of Jerzy Grotowski's Poor Theatre, mobilising what the director/theorist called "the principle of reduction, to find the essence of theatre: actors and audience, fundamentally an interpersonal situation". That influence was emphasised not only in the form but also in the subject matter of the opening show "ja bóg", an investigation into the metaphysical questions underpinning Grotowski's texts, created by and starring CHOREA director Tomasz Rodowicz and Joanna Chimelecka.

After the Birds (Po Ptakach) (Photo: Rami Shaya)

I wasn't able to attend the opening performances, which sadly meant missing the acclaimed likes of Tragedia Jana  (John's Tragedy) and Akty (Acts). The first show I did see proved a vibrant and compelling introduction to the festival, though. After the Birds (Po Ptakach) is a collaboration between CHOREA and the Welsh dance company Earthfall, which was first presented in 2005, and retains the same company of perfomers today. Following Grotowski's tendency to base work on classical narratives - the better to tap into mythic resonances and evoke a collective, internal response in viewers - the show, co-directed by Rodowicz, Jessica Cohen and Jim Ennis, takes off from The Birds, using Aristophanes's comedy as the inspiration for a distinctive piece of physical theatre that dynamically combines the ancient and the contemporary.  

Opening in playful, clowning mode - three men and a ladder greet the audience and soon have us participating in a Mexican wave - the show ultimately runs the emotional and stylistic gamut. The performers flock together, form duos, or break apart via choreography that is breathtaking in its range and expressiveness. Live music and folk song, as well as bespoke compositions by Maciej Rychły - including a deeply moving growled Tom Waits-esque number - add to the intensity of the event. The show inspired a rapturous standing ovation, indicating that this is a piece that audiences would like to see return very soon. 

Othello/ Ukraine / Facebook (Photo: Rami Shaya)

Shifts between the absurdist and the serious also characterised Othello / Ukraine / Facebook, a piece for seven actors from Kyiv Academic Theatre "Golden Gate" directed by Stas Żyrkov, which uses elements of Shakespeare's text and the context of the current "fake news" climate to investigate Ukraine's present, past and possible future. The show is physical - with the cast variously donning fat suits or stripped to their pants - but also verbose, and, presented without English subtitles (something that the festival might consider adding in future years), some contextual elements inevitably remained obscure.

Other moments communicated powerfully, though, not least a homoerotic interlude in which shouted slurs give way to embraces, and a haunting sequence about the Holodomor - the famine that Stalin inflicted on Ukraine in the early 1930s which is the subject of Agnieszka Holland's fine new film Gareth Jones. The show renders as expressionist nightmare what Holland's film presents in an observant, straightforward, classical-filmmaking style. The absence of any female presence feels like a lack,  but Othello / Ukraine / Facebook remains a powerful and subversive piece at its best. 

(The End, The Beginning - SOMA)
(Photo: Tomek Ogrodowczyk)

Male and female energies combined to exciting effect in Koniec, początek - SOMA (The End, the Beginning - SOMA) which introduces its five brilliant performers moving insect-like in separate relays across the floor, before Marta Bury's choreography brings them together explosively for a series of by turns playful and dramatic encounters. Video projections and the dynamism of bodies in motion also distinguished the outdoor performance of Właśnie tu. Właśnie teraz (Right Here. Right Now), created by CHOREA and Laboratorium Kreatywnego Działania. Presented in the social space between the buildings of the former factory, this piece addressed young people's hopes, struggles and dreams through movement and words, also inviting audience members to take to the mic. 

Pygmalion (Photo: Tomek Ogrodowczyk)

Meanwhile, Wojtek Ziemilski's Pygmalion soon subverted any notion that the performance would have anything to do with a certain George Bernard Shaw text. Instead, the piece found the personable Rozalia Mierzicka genially asking for the assistance of a volunteer from the audience to join her - in order, as it turned out, to help her move and manipulate a large piece of cardboard around the stage. Said cardboard is gradually revealed to be a container into which performer and volunteer disappear, moving it from the inside.

Stated themes of socialisation, education and training - of performer or child - gradually emerge and the show retains interest as a kind of minimalist spectacle, especially when its cardboard "creature" is making its way across the space, suggestive at times of fortress and tank, prison or playpen. 

Miasto (Photo: Rami Shaya)

With exciting, challenging concerts by the Kukła Żywa Collective and Magos Makriyannis ("Pythagoras Meets Euclid") closing the event, another surprise highlight of the last day of performances was the morning show Miasto (The City), a delightful piece devised and developed by CHOREA's kids theatre group. The show presents a day in the life of the city, taking us through various spaces - park, airport, museum, cinema - which are all creatively embodied by the young performers. As the group take their seats at the movies (hand-drawn posters for Frozen 2 and Moana to the fore!), the film they watch turns out - wonderfully - to be a document of the research that inspired the show itself.

The scene served as a synecdoche of sorts for the festival as a whole, uniting not only actors and audience but also the theatre with the world outside which it draws on, evokes and transforms. In our divisive, harshly judgemental times, and with Brexit looming, the vibrant "interpersonal situations" experienced at Retroperspektywy offered a timely reminder of the power of performance to unite and connect us across borders of language, culture and nation. 

Retroperspektywy Festival 2019 ran at Art_Inkubator between 23 August - 1 September. 




Related reading:

Reviews of Polish theatre:
The Nether (Jaracz Theatre), 
Fever (Pomysłowe Mebelki z Gąbki), 
Angels in America, 
Slippery Words (Teatr Studyjny)
      

Top 10 Theatre of 2018

Film Review: Nic Nie Ginie 

Łódź Film School Actor interviews: 

Piotr Pacek
Anna Paliga
Paweł Głowaty
Ksenia Tchórzko
Karol Franek Nowiński
Matuesz Grodecki