The performance is created within the framework of the Wrocław 2016 European Capital of Culture programme and features twenty-five musicians, dancers and actors who speak and sing in Polish, French, German, Russian, Ukrainian, English, Yiddish, and Japanese. Roman Kołakowski stated:
It has been a while since I started to think about creating a play about the Lviv School of Mathematics – Stefan Banach, Hugo Steinhaus and their legendary friends: mathematicians, artists, intelligentsia – and the artistic ambiance that dominated the city in the interwar period. Wrocław greatly learned from Lviv’s best traditions.
The leading character of the opera is the famous Polish scientist Stefan Banach (portrayed by Damian Łukawski), a genius without a diploma, one of the greatest Polish talents in the world science, whose name is still the second most commonly mentioned (after Euclid) in popular mathematics. The history of his incredible life is interweaved by the director with the tumultuous history of the 20th century.
The narrator of the story is another charismatic scientist – Hugo Steinhaus (Andrzej Seweryn). Mathematics owes to him probability calculus and before genetic testing was possible, courts decided on the issue of fatherhood based on Steinhaus’s probability method, deciding on how possible it is that a particular man is the father of a particular child. The director recalls that one hundred years ago, these two great minds of the Second Polish Republic accidentally met.
Hugo Steinhaus became a citizen of Wrocław shortly after the war and started to create (together with many professors, engineers, teachers, tram drivers, etc.) the contemporary legend of the ‘microcosm’. I read Mateusz Urbanek’s Geniuses with pleasure and recommend it to all those who are interested in my opera… The book is a guide through the uneasy divagations on ‘Banach’s space’, but also on the complicated relations between Poles and Ukrainians, Jews, Russians, and Germans. I hope that the story, full of funny anecdotes about the Scottish Café, will simultaneously raise reflection on the still present danger of nationalism and totalitarianism, on wars and common people who are their victims.
The whole city of Lviv used to talk about the mathematicians from the Scottish Café. Now, the turbulent fates of the scientists are recalled by the ‘Impart’ Festival Bureau and Song Theatre in Wrocław.
The premiere of The Paradoxical Distribution of the Sphere (Paradoksalny rozkład sfery) took place on October 18th, 2016.
Script, music and direction: Roman Kołakowski
Arrangement and music management: Grzegorz Bukowski
Choreography: Romana Agnel
Costumes: Agata Klimczak, Alina Baranowska
Animations: Piotr Marcin Stapiński
Production: Krystian Andrzejewski
Multimedia: Marcin Kocik
Source: press materials, ed. AL, ‘Genialni. Lwowska Szkoła Matematyczna’, Iskry, Mariusz Urbanek
Author: Anna Legierska, October 2016, translated by AW, October 2016