Łódź of Four Cultures Festival 2011, Łąki Łan, photo by Radek Polak, EMI
Culture is not taken lightly in Poland. Being proclaimed by many as Polish culture's best kept secret makes Łódź a proud city indeed. With nearly 700 years of colorful history, it remains one of the most culturally diverse cities in Europe
Throughout its tumultuous past, Łódź has been called "The Promised land by Wladyslaw Reymont", a well-known Polish writer (1898), and has starred in critically acclaimed films such as Israel Joshua Singer's "The Brothers Ashkenazi" (1937) and David Lynch's in "Inland Empire" (2006).
In the early 1800s, thousands flocked to this small city to try their luck at cotton mills and steam powered factories. A steady influx of immigrants, entrepreneurs and workers from across the European continent turned it into a mecca of diversity. Łódź, becoming the heart of the Polish industrial revolution, was a world class phenomenon, bringing together people of all ethnicities and forcing them to coexist in chaotic harmony. Poles, Germans and Russians were breaking bread at the same dirty factory tables, attending the same synagogues and churches and shopping at the local farmers markets. Everyone was basking in the undeniable glory of their culture, yet inadvertently acquiring traits of their neighbor's customs, practically by osmosis. It was a symbiotic cultural relationship where each element both fed on and nourished each other while regurgitating integration and artistic beauty. By the mid 1800's, the city's population doubled each decade, and reached its peak around the start of the next century, beginning with 15,000 citizens and growing to nearly 350,000 in 1905. Despite the First World War and the crisis which it precipitated, Łódź continued its climb to greatness, and by 1922 it became the capital of the Łódź Voivodeship. The interbellum period, however, marked the end of economical growth for the area and it led to civil unrest, facilitating many worker protests and riots. Nevertheless, it had little impact on the city's diverse cultural attributes.
Łódź then met with dark times at the start of the Second World War. Nazi authorities set up the Łódź Ghetto, the second largest in Poland, holding 160,000 Jewish citizens, it became the final stop for many on their way to death camps. The war had wiped out more than a third of the city's population and the entire Jewish community. After the War, Łódź served as Poland's temporary capital city, hosting most of the government and administrative workers until 1948, when Warsaw's reconstruction began. Rebuilding the industry in Łódź was also a strenuous task, also under communist rule, utilising leftover factories from before the war, worked itself back into being a thriving industrial center once again.
Today, when strolling through the city streets, one can still hear the faint echo of its past. Historical brownstones, factories and cemeteries are but few reminders of its complex and fascinating story. It should come as no surprise then, that Łódź is hosting "The Festival of Four Cultures" an event celebrating the beauty of diversity by promoting art which directly reflects the city's colorful history.
This year's seven day festival encompasses theatre, film, visual arts, literature and music presented by a multinational collection of artists.
Festivities kicked off on the 10th of September 2011 with a city game, "Mosaic", which utilises the city's space as an integral element of entertainment. Drawing from role playing games, participants' jobs were to collect various hidden clues in various undisclosed locations in order to complete their final task.
The festival is jam packed with captivating attractions. The first day, 13.09.2011, initiates with a meeting entitled "My Poles, My Russians" hosted by Natalia Woroszylska, a linguist, translator of Russian literature and a journalist, who between 1993 - 1997 worked at the Polish Institute in Moscow. She is joined by Natalia Gorbaniewska, a Russian born poet, linguist, journalist and social worker, who discusses her relations with Poland and Poles, and whose literature she's has been translating. Natalia Gorbaniewska's life story directly reflects the nature of the festival. In 1968 she took part in organising demonstrations against the Warsaw Pact aggression against the former Czechoslovakia, which had placed her on the former Soviet Union's wanted list and eventually landed her in prison, followed by her expulsion from Russia in 1975. She shares the stage with Adam Pomorski (born 1956) a translator, essayist and literary critic who has recently finished translating Goethe's "Faust" and Dostoyevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov".
The meeting is followed by an unprecedented event, a vernissage of works by Jacek Sempolinski, author to thousands of paintings. What makes this exhibition exceptional is the fact that Sempolinski doesn't allow for his works to be exhibited publically. It provides a unique opportunity to view the fruit of the last 5 years of Sempolinski's creative output. Among other exhibitions, attendees are also able to view works by Łódź's own graphic artist, Artur Szyk, featuring an exhibition of miniatures and posters and later that evening a screening of "Artur Szyk – Illuninator", a documentary starring the artist. The exhibition is open to the public at the City of Łódź Museum. This year's visual art series is complemented by the "Architecture of coercion", a photography exhibit arranged in a nuclear fallout shelter on the premises of EC4 power plant. It is a multinational show, featuring shots by Polish, Belgian and Portuguese artists.
The film section this year is dominated by the "Born to Kvetch" project, which explores the complexities of Jewish humor in a vast array of films by some of our best-known Jewish directors and producers in the industry. Titles include of Mel Brooks' "History of the world Part I", "The Producers", and "To Be or Not to Be"; Billy Wilder's "A Foreign Affair", and "One, Two, Three"; Bob Foss' "All That Jazz", Woody Allen's "Broadway Danny Rose" and Pierre-Henry Salfatiego's "Jazzman from the Gulag". Screenings of the films on various days is accompanied by panel discussions on the presence of Jewish influence on popular interwar culture and intercultural relations in Poland the philosophies of Jewish humor led by curator Tomasz Majewski.
Students from the Academy of Fine Arts also present their own works inspired by the Nobel Prize winning author, Czesław Miłosz. Artistic visions include a variety of mediums such as photography, drawing and video projects. Some are interactive and invite audience participation, promising to deliver along the thread of true poetic inspiration. The main literary event of the festival are meetings dedicated to poetry by Miłosz chaired by Andrzej Franaszek, the author of Miłosz's profound biography, "The Eternal Light of Stopped Time", along with Nobel Laureate and editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, Adam Michnik. Other literary workshops feature discussion panels and meetings with authors such as Etgar Keret with translators: Adam Zagajewski and Zdzislaw Jaskula divulging the influence of German culture on Polish literature.
Led by students of the Academy of Fine Art in Łódź, many creative festivities are designed for children of all ages. Children between the ages of 5-12 and 12 and up take the stage during several workshops in traditional Isreali folk dance while learning about the influences on Jewish dance from several regions, including, Yemen, other Arabian countries and Europe. A concert performance by the S. Moniuszko Music School Orchestra in Łódź conducted by theatrical pianist and singer Piotr Salaber, perform songs to poems by Peter Julian Tuwim and is a must see for school age children. Also for younger audiences there is a workshop for creating traditional paper cut outs used for illustrating fairy tales, featuring stories by Hans Christian Anderson and many others. The marvelous caricature work of Artur Szyk acts as a springboard for an interactive Introduction to Caricature workshop for young graphic artists age 12 and older.
Music enveloping the festival is equally diverse and reflective of the multicultural façade and includes such acts as folk musician Vitaly Podolsky's Agit Drive Ensemble, a group from Tel Aviv who presents an exotic compilation of traditional klezmer and Hungarian czardas with Serb, Macedonian, and Gypsy sounds spiced by the sounds of Jazz and Tangos. As part of the opening night concert, sharing the stage with Podolsky, an alternative band with a twist, Czesław Spiewa, songs created by his online fan base and Michal Zablocki. Their debut album went double platinum while walking the thin line between mainstream pop and far out alternative sounds. Also on the edge, La-der plays an evening concert later in the week, led by guitarist and song-writer, Olaf Deriglasoff Dantzig, playing solid rock sounds with punk rock and psychedelic element.
Those who have a taste for the theatrical stage have a few choices. Among them are "Where the Currants Grow", written, directed and performed by Leo Kantor, a Polish publicist of Jewish origin. A monodrama illustrating tales of the author and his family's fate during the war, featuring at Akademicki Ośrodek Inicjatyw Artystycznych. "Murder" playing at the Nowy Theatre, written and originally directed by Hanoch Levin (1943-1999), now directed by Norbert Rakowski, tells the story of the crime made to humanity over many generations; not about killing a specific person. It was created as a protest against ongoing war in the Middle East (Israeli-Palestinian conflict). "It is dramatic satire of three different stories seemingly unrelated to each other", Levin was quoted, "…we focus on the themes of socio-existential and moral attitudes".
Tickets to the festival are available online, in the ticket zones and at locations of particular events. However, most of the events are free of charge.
For detailed information regarding locations of events, please see: 4kultury.pl.