Veteran Polish dramatist Wlodzimierz Staniewski directed Kolkata’s Padatik theatre group for Henrik Ibsen’s “The Master Builder” last year as part of the professional edition of the Delhi Ibsen Festival. However, it was only recently that the play was staged in Kolkata where we caught up with the experimental director, a Jerzy Grotowski alumnus and founder of the renowned Gardzienice Centre for Theatrical Practice. In this centre, founded in 1977 in a small village near Lublin, he practises the novel method of acting known as theatre ecology.
Excerpts from a conversation:
Why did you choose Ibsen’s “The Master Builder” and the Padatik actors?
This play symbolises problems very familiar to those which I am experiencing myself. I was asked by the Ibsen festival in Delhi to perform an Ibsen play with Padatik because the history and legend of their company and their founder, Shyamanand Jalan, corresponds in some ways to the history of my company in Poland. Actually it is the second time, with the same cast and it is a revised version. How did you bring out the best in the actors?
Working with actors from Padatik was easy for precisely the reason that they were not defending a particular form of training or ideology or stereotypes so I could easily persuade them to follow my method. I do use traditional means of expression but then I break them to break barriers and to awaken the actors’ awareness of their unlimited potential and energy. In this way you can unblock the actors and access their pure emotions.
Wasn’t the production cross-cultural?
The ‘cross-cultural’ aspect was manifest in the mixture of Chopin interludes with traditional Indian tabla and sitar. I wanted to combine Norwegian classical music, particularly Edward Grieg with traditional Indian music. However, I found finally that the music of the world-known Polish composer, Frederic Chopin, and Ibsen’s inner world are shaken by the same demons. Then, when I invited a sitar and a tabla player to interweave with the Chopin piano music I was blown away by the way the delicacy of Chopin’s music (Nocturnes, Preludes and Etudes) fit with the delicacy of the sitar and tabla. Maybe this is because Chopin was inspired by Polish traditional music in which violin and drum play a significant role.
What about the deconstruction process for preparing the performance text, especially dealing with the economy of the words?
I have a lot of respect for classical texts (for texts which have been time-tested). I treat such texts like a priceless ancient vase, so let me use a metaphor: I am dancing with the text as with a priceless ancient vase, holding it as a lover would hold his beloved. Then, invariably, the text — thinking of it as a vase — slips and breaks into pieces. Then I first pick up the smaller pieces which contain the essence of the whole text and I put them together again, but not as a museum item but in my own way.
To reassemble the shape, you need to fill the cracks with plaster. Those underspecified areas are places where the audience can make their own interpretations. That is my process of deconstruction and reconstruction of the precious text.
In this case, I was extremely tempted to select the Ibsen text almost to Beckett-ian phrases to make it laconically brief and condensed. I believe that Ibsen, in his characteristically Norwegian thrifty use of words, was a precursor to Beckett. I did not get that far because in so short a time I could not persuade the actors to enter into this dimension — to play more with the body than with the words. One of my innovations was to transform many dialogues into monologues to create a clearer and more condensed economy of words.
What are these hidden territories between the lines of the text of this play, that you talk about?
I have the character of an adventurer. Whatever journey I take — whether theatrical or otherwise — I always want to find a dimension other than the one written in the guide book: a hidden territory and a hidden agenda. Of course they exist and are more fascinating than where the guide book advises you to go. The so-called normal people and other directors are either too lazy or too scared to enter into hidden territories.
You practise “ecology of theatre”. Is it anywhere near the experimental style of anthropological theatre?
Theatre ecology is about actor and environment — but environment respected as part of the process of ‘play’. All the phenomena surrounding the actors can have the same significance as the actors’ body and voice in a performative act. Ibsen is a pure example of theatre ecology — he brings environment into his plays and gives all its elements a strong symbolic role. My performance is not experimental anthropology. It is more in the style of Renaissance chamber opera.
Do you always prefer to involve your audience in the process of interpreting a play?
The audience for me is a very important contributor. I work as a poet who believes that a sensitive and intelligent reader will see and read into my work more than what I originally intended. Maybe because of that, I have a love-hate attitude towards my audience. I am always putting my work through rigorous analyses at many levels — historical, anthropological, psychological, etc. The rational approach to the text is academic. But after this process I throw half of these results into the dustbin because they do not have any theatrical power. The result of greatest value derives mostly from intuition and — I am ashamed to say — from almost mystical brainwaves. At such moments I believe that I am no longer a director but a medium transmitting ideas from another power. To achieve such a level of intensity and concentration I need an actor to be totally devoted because she or he is the spark that lights the fire.
