Page 218 [218]
OCR
JAROSLAW FRET When I study the history of the masters’ achievements, I attempt to discover the questions they asked themselves. To understand what they worked on and what directions they followed is to understand what questions drove them. The crucial thing in referencing their practice is not the ability to quote their answers but to translate into one’s own language and time the questions that motivated them; and also, to decipher their personal metaphors, to place a double question mark, like a child, “What if all they wrote should be understood literally, without inverted commas?” This perspective required us to be attentive. At the same time, it gave us the tools to create our piece — we found all we needed in Brzezinka. When we arranged the songs and created a musical dramaturgy from the material gathered during our expeditions, with all its dynamics of revealing and concealing various musical energies, we had no foundation until we got to know the space in Brzezinka. We heard its soundscape throughout our work and we needed, like when you sculpt, to take off layer after layer until what was left was silence — not just the absence of sound, a digital zero, but the silence of the profound presence of the world. This is how Brzezinka affected us, giving us further direction for our work — the revealing through sound. This was the genesis of Teatr ZAR — the theater born of the spirit of song. The theater that wants, at once, to remain song and to release from it a visible, airborne particle — a movement, a gesture; to put song on like a mask, to let oneself be led by it into the most intimate dimension, to the merest flicker of an eyelid. We work in the belief that we are not even able to transfer to the stage our own experience of the journey, of our singing together with the Armenians, Georgians, and Sardinians, without slipping into stylization; and this isn’t something we want to do. A more important aspect is the practical transposition of our experience based on completely different principles that will not diminish its value but create a new quality. We use sources through documents, traces, ethnomusical research — joint singing, liturgy, even singing at funerals. This changes our understanding of art, and we change our skin. The musical material is subject to the same processes. Yet we stay close. We practice four-part singing in groups of four. The Sardinian tradition that interests us most is a cuncordu; we keep in touch with the Santa Croce Confraternity from Castelsardo and the confraternity from Orosei; our production incorporates material from these two traditions; it is as endemic as zar from Svaneti, from Latalia, or kwiria sung only by the Pilpani family in Svaneti. Yet we do not treat everything as material — our expeditions are a part of our life. When something is to become material for theater, we try to process it at a high temperature. Sometimes, like in our performance piece “Anhelli”, we run two parallel processes. What is enacted — the movement, the gestures — becomes a parallel layer, independent of the vocal component and its energy. A field of voltages, of potentials, is generated between the two layers, and we hope that + 216 +
