Odin zero: Poland, Brzezinka, Gospels of Childhood

This one is not about the Odin, but the ghost of their forefather, the Grotowski Center in Wroclaw, Poland. That's why it is numbered "Odin zero." This post was entered in the blog after the fact, postdated to when it was written.
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My last evening in Poland, the gods were kind. I had one free day, and the Grotowski Center said I should see Teatru ZAR. Come at 6pm, they'd have a bus to the theatre.

I get on a bus with 25 other people and we head out into the night. Everyone else is Polish, most are young. I figure the theatre is across town. Wrong. It's like driving up to go skiing, completely black, heading out into the country. An hour and fifteen minutes later, we pull over in the middle of nowhere. "Where are we?" I ask Stefania, Grotowski's administrative assistant for years, and still a pillar of the Center. "In the forest," she said crisply, and herds us out.

Two men with yellow kerosene lanterns were waiting in the blackness. They led us through a path in the forest to eventually emerge at what looked like a monastery in a clearing. A substantial flat-roofed brick dwelling with thick walls, arched doors, and a stubborn plainness. It would have looked at home in Ladakh. Biting icy cold. Stars. Silence.

We went in, chuffing and stamping our feet. Inside, a high-arched room with a rough wood floor, rough table, and a fireplace for a king's hall, whose opening reaches almost chest-tall. Inside the cavernous fireplace, 16 full-sized logs are burning goldy-red, and they don't even fill it a third of the way.

Heat.

The table looked like a woodworker's -- thick-hewn, built for use. On it sat two plain bowls of olives, a plate of greek cheese, a pile of bread. And programs for tonight's show, stapled printouts in English, Polish, Czech, and Italian, the languages of the guests they knew were coming.

Curtain was at 7. We arrived at 7:30. At 7:40, five Czech guys who had wildly taken a taxi all the way from Warsaw in order to arrive on time, got there. Only after everyone had had ample time to warm up -- seven people could stand ringed around the mammoth fireplace with ease -- use the restrooms (a walk through the cold around to the back of the building where there were shining stairs up to the living quarters) -- eat, and read our programs, did they usher us into the next room to begin. It is almost 8:00. There is no sense of tension or rush. It is just a peaceful night in the forest, and now we are all fed and warm and ready.

Ewangelie dziecinstwa, Gospels of Childhood.

The next room is low ceilinged, comparatively -- maybe 12 feet high, and much wider. Like a Skokomish longhouse. On the far side are two rows of low wooden benches for us to sit on. There are over 90 slim candles lit, all over the space. As we enter, seven actors stand in a tight circle, facing inwards, singing. We walk past them to get to our benches.

After we were seated, as they continued to sing, two of the barefoot women walked unhurriedly through the space, blowing out candles. Eventually there were seven left... then two... then, blackness.

Blind, in a silence you can only find in a forest at night, in a room from last century, listening to creaks and breath -- and seven voices singing.

Ahhhhh...

On they went. Eventually they lit the candles. Eventually a few -- no more than three -- stage lights came on. The great gash in the wall was revealed to be another fireplace. The troupe was, except for the man who was the director/lead singer, young, performers in their twenties. It was, as expected, energetic; a woman leaping on another woman; water, bathing, kissing; men and women, women and women, men only, men singing while women act.

I was left with an immense feeling of peacefulness and joy at having been granted this experience.

Even under perfect conditions, it's hard to make good theatre. This made me feel relieved.

It felt like a prayer service, on a night when you had dutifully gone to church. The gods didn't come. There were no epiphanies. But you left with that pleasant lightness and rightness. Something correct had transpired, and the world was a little cleaner.

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This is what I have always pictured as my perfect theatre -- in nature, an old building, spiritual surroundings, silence, peace, deep shaping of the experience, beautiful conditions for the actors and spectators.

If you make people ride a bus for over an hour, you had better have something splendid at the end. The longer you ride, the higher your expectations. You don't want to find a place in the country, you want a temple.

Which is about what this was.

Stefania gave me a tour, when she saw how taken I was with the building. "This is an old flour factory," she said. "Grotowski bought it in 1972 from an old man who had lived here for years. We finally bought it. It had no electricity until last year. The conditions were very... sharp." She showed me the pond, the creek, the trees out back.

"The government told us we had to plant something here." She shrugged, grinned. "So, we planted a forest."

I asked where Grotowski had sat. She took me around back to show me his room. It was sizable, the size of a small living room, all bricks, with an arched ceiling and fat walls.Room for a bed, a large table, and at the far end another mammoth fireplace. Windows set high, so we were looking down into the room.

"You can stay here," she offered to me as we walked back through the blackness. "Or bring your theatre and work here."

Teatru ZAR is directed by Jaroslaw Fret, assistant director of the Grotowski Center, who will become the director in 2004 when the current director retires. I think the facility will mostly be used by his own troupe, who currently live there.

But still, I filed that away.

This old flour mill building is in Brzezinka, or rather, that's the nearest village. The nearest town, also small, is Olesnica.

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It occurred to me, months later, that this was the building Gabriel Gawin had meant, when he said Teatr Piesn Kozla had worked for years in the forest in Poland.

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Among the guests that night were Thomas Richards, the American whom Grotowski formally designated as his heir and who now runs the Grotowski & Richards Workcenter in Pontadera Italy; and Mario Biagnini, the associate director. They were in town to give a workshop and show some films.

Afterward, the Pontadera guys and ten others were standing around the great fire, in no hurry. "The bus is leaving," I said. I studied their bodies. Even without language, it was clear none of them were going anywhere. "Okay," I said, happily, lightly, like a commedia zanni in my BEAUTIFUL costume, wheeling at the door to leave. "Bye-bye," I said in my light happy voice. Like a rustle of wind, something rippled through all the men and they softened, lightened. "Bye bye" they said, laughing softly.

It's all winds, blowing us across the stage.

I read about Strehler's Cherry Orchard the other day. Not his first production, which was fairly standard. His second one, where he realized this play was as large a portal for the gods as Lear or The Tempest.

There is something aweful and inspiring at the same time, reading about those great cracks in the earth.

I could feel how Cherry Orchard could be a great play, one that thundered and shuddered and cracked. I have a new appreciation for why Bart did his Servant of Two Masters as an homage to Strehler's Servant,

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At the time, Bart was searching frantically for a video of Strehler's production which he had once seen. We couldn't find one anywhere. Years later, at 1:00am at the Odin, unable to sleep, I wandered into their tiny video room. There on the shelf was the video. In the middle of the night, in the heart of one of the most physical and most Italian theatres in the world, I watched Strehler's light-blurred actors caper and roll. I thought Bart's production was better. But Strehler's had an elemental intimate power, that reverberated.

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For now, let's leave the men by the fireplace in the cold Brzezinka night, me on the bus riding back to town, and those singing actors in the incredible cold, washing up and going to bed. Overhead, stars. As always at the end of a fine commedia.