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ANAMNESIS OF ART: VOICE / MEMORY / IDENTITY ——~<~o»—___ JAROSEAW FRET ANAMNESIS (written with capital letters) is the title of a triptych — a threepart performance “on the road to the theater,” which is not so much “only’a reading of past records, or also a voice of the present but rather an attempt to build up fields of memory thanks to the shared presence of actors and spectators. Its stage hic et nunc is to combine all of our effort together — anamnesis, recollection, an attempt to represent but also be part of the performance, as well as creating layers of active humanity, which we subconsciously pass to each other with and without cultural identity or belonging. Witnessing does not only mean to communicate issues based on facts, registers, records, but also having the power of incorporation, opposing the passivity of modern times, the passivity of voyeurism. In the case of being a spectator/ witness, it means having the power to oppose the universal, widespread derelict pornography of the media. The three-part performance, which comprises the following sections: “Medeas. On Getting Across”, then “Armine, Sister” (the second part of the triptych, which we devoted to the now fully EU recognized Genocide of the Armenians of 1915), and “Moirai” (the third part, dedicated to the Desaparecidos), explores the subject of witness-action, trying to restore to theater art its ethical dimension, not just constituting a new aesthetic form. ORIGINS Teatr ZAR came into being as a project of a group of people associated with the Grotowski Center, long after theater practice had moved out of the venue and even long after Grotowski’s death. The group actually began life in Brzezinka, the former forest center of the Laboratory Theater, which we relaunched as a workshop venue in the mid-1990s. Our first production, created in the years when the ensemble was coming into existence, was inspired, among other things, by the place where Jerzy Grotowski once worked. Its studio version was later moved to the space of the Laboratory Theater in Wroclaw. There, in the same space on which Apocalypsis cum figuris has left its unique mark, permeating it to the last brick and transforming it into a space with a unique presence, we created our subsequent productions.
