25 x XXI | 25 Years of Iconic Polish Performances: Chronicles – A Lamentation | Article

25 x XXI | 25 Years of Iconic Polish Performances: Chronicles – A Lamentation

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'Chronicles…' was never meant to be a staging of an epic, but rather a theatrical composition in which musicality, poetic language, choreographically sculpted movement, and sequences of high-intensity acting combined into a structure defined less by signs than by energy and affect.

Chronicles – A Lamentation was the second production by the Song of the Goat Theatre, founded in 1996 in Wrocław by actors Anna Zubrzycki and Grzegorz Bral. Both had previously been members of the Centre for Theatre Practices “Gardzienice,” one of the most influential Polish alternative theatre groups of the late twentieth century, created and led by Włodzimierz Staniewski. Zubrzycki worked there almost from its inception, performing major roles in Gusła (1981), The Life of Archpriest Avvakum (1983), and Carmina Burana (1990). Bral joined “Gardzienice” during work on the latter production, taking on the role of Tristan. Together with Zubrzycki (the Elder Isolde), he developed an original choreography of love grounded in the company’s embodied training of reciprocity and “embodied musicality.” This physical technique later became the aesthetic bedrock of Song of the Goat’s earliest productions.

The founders’ artistic paths link them to a theatrical tradition of which Jerzy Grotowski was a crucial figure. Although neither Zubrzycki nor Bral worked with him directly – and should not be seen as his successors – they nonetheless situated themselves within a field of theatrical research connected to Grotowski’s later work on traditional song and “ritual arts” (undertaken during the Theatre of Sources project, after the closure of the Laboratory Theatre). Włodzimierz Staniewski brought these explorations back into theatrical practice. With their expeditions and research into traditional cultures, as well as performances using the results of this research to create special centres of affective energy, Gardzienice initiated a trend in anthropological musical theatre, which enjoyed popularity and recognition in the 1990s. Alongside “Gardzienice,” it was also explored by groups founded by former Staniewski’s collaborators who eventually, for various reasons, set out on their own. Among them – next to Tomasz Rodowicz’s Chorea and Jarosław Fret’s Teatr ZAR – Song of the Goat became the most significant.

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"Chronicles - A Lamentation', Song of the Goat Theatre, Wrocław, 2001, photo: Grzegorz Bral / TPK

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Zubrzycki and Bral began their independent activity with workshops held at the then Centre for Study of Jerzy Grotowski’s Work and for Cultural-Theatrical Practices in Wrocław. Their first performance, Song of the Goat, emerged from these workshops and was presented there beginning in October 1998. While it was appreciated within the alternative theatre milieu, the company’s breakthrough performance – its entry into wider public awareness, the moment that secured its institutional stability and launched its rapid ascent – came with Chronicles. Premiering on 24th November 2001 at the Grotowski Centre, the production soon moved into a new space with the ensemble – a former Dominican nuns’ refectory on Purkyniego Street. From March 2002 onward, Chronicles was performed in this pointed-arch vaulted, brick-walled room with its warm wooden floors; the 2006 television recording, still available online, was made there as well.

In keeping with the practices established by “Gardzienice” and other ensembles inspired by them – working with “source music” (theatre of ethno-musicality), the creative process for Chronicles – A Lamentation began with musical research. Building on experience from their first production, which incorporated Balkan songs, including Albanian ones, the company conducted an archival survey of Albanian music in February 2000, followed by a research expedition to Epirus and Albania. They focused particularly on traditional lamentation songs. Members of the ensemble attended funerals, observing mourning rituals and lamentation techniques, learning the style firsthand from professional mourners. They adopted bodily techniques and specific vocal gestures, all of which later shaped the performance.

The second major layer of the production drew on the ancient Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh in its so-called Standard Version (c. 13th century BCE), rendered into Polish based on various translations and supplemented with other texts by Robert Stiller (1967). The spoken and sung Polish passages (the performance also included English text, and Greek and Albanian songs) came from this text. Names of figures emerging from the actors’ chorus, as well as the events alluded to on stage, were rooted in the epic.

Chronicles was not a dramatic narrative presenting relatively clearly delineated characters entangled in a unified plot. Its structure resembled a musical composition, with themes introduced and interwoven like the polyphonic songs used in the performance. At its core stood the actors’ chorus, from which characters, gestures, and situations continually emerged and dissolved. The image of the seven-person chorus seated against bare walls opens the piece. Four men on wooden chairs with tall, narrow backs, symmetrically arranged around a central alcove where Anna Krotoska sits at a reed organ. All are dressed in simple violet costumes, meant to unify the group. Two women sit in front of Krotoska, with their legs spread wide apart, on low stools. The younger one (Maria Sendow) has a white lace veil over her face, while the older one (Anna Zubrzycki) has her face covered with a black veil.

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"Chronicles - A Lamentation', Song of the Goat Theatre, Wrocław, 2001, photo: Grzegorz Bral / TPK

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The performance begins with the two women sobbing, gradually unfolding into musical lamentation, then into an increasingly intense dialogue, and even a wordless argument. Out of this emerges the chorus’s song introducing the beginning of the Gilgamesh story. It is performed statically, drawing on Balkan melodic structures with their distinctive irregular rhythms, culminating in a polyphonic invocation of the hero’s name. The chorus then parts to reveal Gilgamesh (Rafał Habel), Enkidu (Marcin Rudy), and Gilgamesh’s mother, the Wild Cow (Anna Zubrzycki). While these roles remain relatively stable, other actors embody multiple epic figures; tracking these shifts through the cast list would be misleading. Thus, in the opening choreographed love scene with Marcin Rudy – strongly reminiscent of the Isolde-Tristan body dialogues from Carmina Burana – Anna Krotoska appears as Enkidu’s lover Shamhat; yet in a later sequence she is Ishtar, rejected by Gilgamesh. Meanwhile, characters designated as the Shaman (Christopher Sivertsen) and Death (Maria Sendow) merge several epic roles.

Chronicles was not strictly a staging of an epic, but rather a theatrical composition that combined musicality, poetic text, choreography, and sequences of intense acting combined in a structure defined less by signs and meaning than by energy and affect. Direct performative impact mattered more than deciphering meaning. A prime example was the love scene between Shamhat and Enkidu: without knowledge of the epic, it read as an intense love dialogue or a charged combat of bodies – an unmistakable analogue of sexual union, underscored by the chorus’s song – and elicited visceral audience responses independent of Babylonian mythology. A similar effect was evoked by Zubrzycki’s childbirth sequence.

Seen as a relatively autonomous composition, the production suggested an archetypal tale of a doubled male hero confronting a female deity who conflates mother, lover, and death – the giver and taker of life, the object of desire, and the longing for union, but also terror rooted in the fear of annihilation. The composition’s rudimentary narrative began with the integration with one’s shadow/double (the struggle and birth of the friendship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu), leading to a confrontation with the lover-mother-death figure, climaxing in the Gilgamesh and Enkidu battling the underworld deity (Maria Sendow). Its culmination was Enkidu’s death and Gilgamesh’s lament. This symbolic structure was realised through a series of intense scenes by the actors, underpinned and framed by traditional songs and choral sequences that formed a kind of gestural “liturgy”. The actors employed gestures that evoked associations with rituals (raised, pleading arms) and religious iconography (gestures and body positions familiar from Byzantine icons). The quasi-sacred “mystery” was intensified by the monastic space, strict and minimalist objects (wooden chairs and tables), the use of the reed organ and Tibetan bells, and added ritual-like actions.

The apex of the performance, synthesizing its themes, is the lament over Enkidu’s death and the sequence of his “revival”. His limp body is placed upon a wooden table. Two women, their faces veiled like at the start, begin a song of lament. After a moment of stillness, Gilgamesh enters the lament with a dynamic dance, as if drawing energy from each woman, then approaches the table/tomb and suddenly – striking it with his hands – breaks the lament’s flow. The chorus’s song shifts into a gentler tone, built around a recurring, memorable motif. To its rhythm, Gilgamesh and the Shaman began leaping over Enkidu’s body in acrobatic figures resembling cartwheels. The physical technique reaches extraordinary mastery here. Actions demanding considerable effort are carried out with remarkable ease, as if the actors’ bodies are weightless. Soon Enkidu is lifted up, allowing him to join in a dance of semi-nude, muscular bodies gliding harmoniously above the now-empty table. This image, interpreted as a resurrection or the departure of Enkidu’s spirit, is without a doubt the production’s most important scene: a moment of transgression beyond the boundary of life and death.

The piece concludes with a brief monologue by Gilgamesh on a collapsing city, ending with the image of bodies drifting downriver and the recognition that he too will share that fate. Darkness falls, and the final song continues as the chorus exits – lingering in the audience’s ears long after the last sound fades.

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"Chronicles - A Lamentation', Song of the Goat Theatre, Wrocław, 2001, photo: Grzegorz Bral / TPK

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Chronicles – A Lamentation remains the most acclaimed work by the Song of the Goat within the tradition of the theatre of ethno-musicality. The company received the Grand Prix at the Kalisz Festival of Acting Art in 2003 and multiple awards at the 2004 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, including a Fringe First and the Herald Angel. Their next production in a similar vein, Lacrimosa (which premiered 23rd June 2005), did not achieve comparable success; afterward, the ensemble shifted direction with an original rendition of Macbeth (premiere: 14th November 2008). Following Anna Zubrzycki’s departure, the company evolved into Grzegorz Bral’s auteur project of musical-dramatic theatre.

^{Written by Dariusz Kosiński}

Song of the Goat Theatre
'Chronicles – A Lamentation'
Directed by Grzegorz Bral
Set design by Grzegorz Bral, Rafał Habel, Stanisław Kral
Costumes by Cristina Gonzalez
Premiere: 24th November 2001

Language English

polish theatre

polish theatre directors

song of the goat theatre

gardzienice

grzegorz bral