“Theatre is the Polish national sport.” Joanna Klass, Adam Mickiewicz Insitute.
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The sun beats down on the cobbled courtyard of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute in Warsaw. It pools on the paving stones and licks at the butter-yellow walls. It’s hot but a tree branch filigree of shade takes the edge off and there is a faint trace of breeze. A bright red metal stand, a contraption designed for the beating of carpets, stands in one corner of the yard. The Institute’s charismatic director, PaweÅ‚ Potoroczyn, points it out and explains how every Soviet era apartment block used to have one of these outside and how they would often become a local focal point, a site of congregation and connection, particularly for the children of the building, “an early version of Facebook” he jokes. For this reason, this simple metal stand – two verticals topped with a horizontal bar – became the logo of one of the Institute’s recent cultural programmes.
The Institute’s goal is to promote Polish culture abroad, to tell the world about Poland as it were. It will be presenting an ambitious programme of theatre, visual arts, jazz, dance and film across this year’s Edinburgh Festivals as part of the Cultural Olympiad and we have been assembled here to speak to three young Polish artists – Wojtek Ziemilski, Marcin Brzozowski, and Waclaw Miklaszewski – who will be presenting work at Summerhall during this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.
Wojtek Ziemilski will be showing two pieces, a solo performance, Small Narration, about his response to the discovery that his grandfather had been a long-time collaborator of the communist Security Services. In tandem with what he calls this “heavy performance” piece, Ziemilski will be presenting an installation, Relatives, which is also concerned with ideas of family and inheritance, “the question of heritage and what you do with it”. When a friend discovered that – unbeknownst it to her – her biological roots were Chinese this inspired Ziemilski to think about what family actually meant. He began to meditate on the intangible things that tie us together as people even when we’re scattered far and wide across the planet. To this end he decided to create a kind of family reunion for people with the surname Huang (the seventh most common surname in China). There are millions of Huangs in the world and Ziemilski sought to find some way of (re)unifying them. To do this he turned – of course – to the internet.
Wojtek Ziemilski’s Small Narration. Photo: K.BieliÅ„ski
Relatives takes the form of a video collage. Each sequence, sourced on YouTube, shows a person named Huang (or one of its variant spellings) singing John Lennon’s ‘Imagine.’ They are singing this song of togetherness on their own to an unseen and unknown audience. There are moments of near harmony but it always seems just out of reach, the voices never quite sync. In this way the ‘family’ Huang are reunited, their commonality and their distance from one another simultaneously emphasised through this act of juxtaposition.
The second artist I speak to, Marcin Brzozowski, a lecturer at the Lodz Film School, is directing a piece called We Are Chechens! Based on sections from I am a Chechen by German Sadulaev and A Small Corner of Hell by the late Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, the piece takes the form of a series of monologues which will be performed by a group of his students. As Brzozowski explains, the piece is an attempt to speak on behalf of those who are unable to, to give a voice to stories that have been forgotten by the world. He encouraged his students to do their own research, to “go everywhere, talk to people” and he hopes their relative inexperience as performers will bring a vital freshness to the piece and their approach to it.
