Tracing the lines of phantasmatic maps and colliding a semi-ficitious past with a possible future, the Polish-German production evokes ghosts of Poland’s history in an imaginative German interpretation
As part of the international Artists in Transition project - a series of residency programmes coordinated by Teatr Nowy in Kraków, the Polish-German theatrical cooperation kicked off with work on the Fasada 1/2 performance in 2011. The young German directing duo, Mirjam Schmuck and Fabiana Lettow created the script of the play over a course of four months. They based its story on their own experience of Poland and the city of Kraków in particular, creating a narrative of Poland’s first non-communist generation.
Three young Polish actors became the voice of this new generation - Weronika Wronka, Zbyszek Stryczula and Łukasz Stawarczyk. All of them were born in 1989, the year that marked the beginning of democracy. As children brought up in a "new Poland", the three were naturally distanced from the country’s painful martyrological tradition of the post-war communist period. In Fasada 1/2, the three explored Kraków’s meandering alleys, searching for elements and traces that would help them define the city’s identity and its living experience. The title of the play was drawn from the architectural structure of the experience - Kraków was seen by the artists as a town of facades, hiding numerous fascinating historic verities alongside the stories of individual people. Following the Polish showings of the perfomance earlier this year, the present stagings in Dusseldorf become an apt occasion for interrogating the presence of Polish heritage in the Ruhr region. Fasada 1/2 is remodelled and finds its continuation in a piece entitled Kortländer saga.
The theatrical journey gradually becomes a seance, as Schumck and Lettow use the medium of theatre to pierce through what is on the outside and grasp the ethereal and ghostly truths about what made up the tissue of today’s Ruhr region. Fasada 1/2 was a performance about Poles, written and directed by two young Germans, and performed by Polish actors. Kortländer saga is a play about the identity of a region and the repressed presence of Poles presented in unsorted and upsurging fragments of memories.
Coproduced by Teatr Nowy from Kraków, Ringlokschuppen Mülheim an der Ruhr and the Forum Freies Theater Düsseldorf. The performance benefits from the financial support of the NRWKULTURsekretariat.
For more information, see: www.ringlokschuppen.de
Kortländer saga
Directed by: Mirjam Schmuck, Fabian Lettow
Set design: Agnieszka Lewandowska
Cast: Weronika Wronka, Zbigniew Stryczula
The performance premieres on the 14th of December, 2012 at the Ringlokschuppen theatre, Die Broich 38, 45479 Mülheim an der Ruhr
Editor: SRS
Source: Polish Institute in Dusseldorf, Teatr Nowy, press release