Agata: The second project with Capella was "Bar.okowa feast" where Monteverdi's madrigals sounded again while eating.
Cezary:As they were performed in the original, during the feasts of the Florentine Camerata - meetings of intellectuals. Poets, artists who ate, naturally, various things, performed music for pleasure. Madrigals written for the unique difficulty, complexity and beauty of music and poetry required a sophisticated listener. As an anthropologist, I attempt to recreate this situation. Where is this modern intellectual elite? I think that the people who knew music those twelve years ago dined in milk bars because they could not afford anything else. Milk bar culture was key. In Poland, it was the place where we feasted. The paradox of Kraków is that the Pod Temida bar where we played is located in a tenement built in Monteverdi's time. We tried to build a context that would actually allow the music to be received in an optimal way. The intimacy of the message of the piece performed by a singer sitting at one table with the audience, very close, suggests what a madrigal is - a kind of embarrassed eroticism, intimacy, whispering, seduction. All this made these strange connections seem natural.
"Bar.okowa feast," Capella Cracoviensis
© Capella Cracoviensis archives
Agata: What do you think made the music sound different in these particular spaces?
Cezary:Space is history, programmed memories, behaviors, moods, psychology. We walk differently in a park, differently in a cluttered apartment, differently in an empty space, which, by the way, is never empty. Each of these places sounds different. It resonates differently. I'm not just talking about the acoustics, but all the things I mentioned earlier that make up the overall experience of a piece, alone and in a group.
Agata: As part of the Malta Festival, you played "Turnus Passes and I'm Nobody" on a block party. Did it make a difference to you that in some sense folk operetta has once again come under thatched roofs?
Cezary:Musical is a much more blockbuster art genre than operetta. Operetta has always been something incredibly entertaining and intellectual. It was a very frivolous, erotic play between words. In its heyday, it operated in codes that allowed for a lot, and musically it is much more sophisticated than a musical will ever be. I was very curious to see what such material could mean on the block. Because such a setting seems quite specific. It turned out that the people hanging from the balconies gratefully participated in the event until the very end. However, I would not connect the block party with the operetta. Especially since it is material still to be discovered, especially in Poland. It is a brazen, perverted play, steeped in political allusions and disjointed queer erotica. Historically, it was censored by Hitler, who couldn't control what went on in theaters, and loved "The Merry Widow," for example. So he relegated the major works to the canon of, say, opera, and truncated them to the kind of show that is enjoyable, silly and sanatorium-like precisely. On the other hand, this idiocy of operetta that Gombrowicz wrote about is precisely the space of social criticism. Only eminently clever people could afford to play with blocks in such a brazen and virtuosic way. On the block people caught on too, thanks to great actors and a surreal script. I think it was surprising to the audience that it wasn't just a medley of well-known hits. It was indeed amazing. I myself come from a block of flats. I spent my summers in the backyard, by the arbor with other kids, grandmas sitting on benches, neighbors walking their dogs or loafing around the endless block. Letting theater into this space transforms reality, creates memories. Everyone, even those who caught a few seconds of our performance, will remember that something like this took place. And this is in a place that is already so tarnished for him that it is forgotten.
"The turnout passes, and I'm a nobody. A sanatorium operetta", Juliusz Słowacki Theater in Krakow
Photo: Monika Stolarska
Agata: You are starting a collaboration with Aleksandra Wasilkowska. Does the fact that she is simultaneously an architect matter to you?
Cezary:The big stage of the Capitol Musical Theater in Wroclaw has trapdoors, overhangs, a revolving stage and the ability to let the scenery down from all sides, so you can run different spaces on it. At the same time, it has only one backstage pocket, which is not so obvious. I dreamed of working with Aleksandra Wasilkowska, because as an architect she thinks about space in an optimal and efficient way, like a kind of building. I will be lucky to work for the first time with an architect and set designer at the same time, who achieves great results in both fields.
Agata: The premiere of "Pharaoh," in which you combine Verdi and Prussia, took place in Bielsko-Biała on June 4. The theme itself suggests staging momentum, meanwhile you say it is surprisingly simple.
Cezary:Prepared by Grzegorz Niziołek, the adaptation introduced a fair number of didascalia from the novel. Following the idea that a story is created in words, we thought with the BRACIA duo, Agnieszka Klepacka and Maciej Chorągi, to clean up the space as much as possible, leaving only a large golden curtain at the back of the stage and a printed floor, which is the double (this is an important theme of the show) of the theater plafond, which any viewer can see by looking up. There is only one brief moment when the scenery appears on stage, the kind that a viewer, going to see "Pharaoh" or "Aida," expects, i.e. palm trees, a temple, sculptures of Egyptian cats with big penises and so on. This is the moment when the priests try to manipulate the heir to the throne Ramses with theatrical splendor, thus gaining power. When the prince guesses that he is being tricked, everything disappears. In a word, the theater machine is used in a political function, a power machine for seduction and manipulation, which it usually is. The viewer is always manipulated by what we make him watch.
Agata: Thank you for the interview.
