High Priests of the Arcane, Vaults of the Soul: Theatre as Temple

fotografia_modelu_scenografii_do_i_aktu_legendy_ii_stanislawa_wyspianskiego_mnw.jpg, default, Photograph of model for set design, Act I of ‘Legenda II’ by Stanisław Wyspiański, photo: National Museum in Warsaw

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‘I approached the theatre with fear and reverence’, wrote Emil Zegadłowicz, the interwar poet and playwright and one-time literary manager of the Polish Theatre in Poznań.

For he claimed that theatre is characterised by an ‘unexamined sense of the arcane’. Treating theatre as a ceremonial and mysterious place, the artistic ensemble almost as a religious community, and the performance as an event close to a religious epiphany have taken on various guises in the history of Polish stage art.

Temple of life

Thumbnail — ‘Słowo Polskie’, 1905, photo: Jagiellonian University Library / public domain

A theatre hall forged within the massif of the Tatra Mountains – that was the vision expressed by Tadeusz Miciński in his text Teatr-Świątynia (Theatre-Temple). The text was published in 1905 by Słowo Polskie (The Polish Word) and has remained to this day perhaps the most significant, and certainly the most direct and synthetic, message about theatre as a sacred space. Miciński wrote about the ‘Great Pan-Temple of Beauty’ (Olbrzymia Wszech-świątynia piękności), which also made his article an endorsement of Stanisław Wyspiański’s candidacy for the post of director of Teatr Miejski (Municipal Theatre) in Krakow.

After all, who could possibly be better suited to the role of the realiser of this monumental vision than the artist who used the lips of Konrad in Wyzwolenie (Liberation) to call out ‘Theatre, temple of art – arrive, oh soul!’ (Incidentally, it may be added that Wyspiański, despite such a rhetorically committed endorsement, did not become the director of the Kraków theatre). In Theatre-Temple, however, Miciński not only elaborated on his contemporary institutional and aesthetic problems but also reached further – to the very core of theatre, thus reminding us that ‘everywhere at the root of drama we encounter the Sphinx of religion’.

He linked the birth of theatre in ancient Greece to ‘man’s initiation into the depths and underworld of the soul’, claiming that audiences came to the theatre of that time ‘as if for a devotional service’. For him, Aeschylus was the ‘high priest of the arcane’, while Sophocles described the ‘heavenly harmony of man’. Miciński also perceived the dimension of what was holy in Indian drama and Persian performances and considered Elizabethan theatre to be ‘a temple of life liberated from metaphysical themes’. According to his logic, theatre was a place for ethical reflection and the development of national emotion – it was to sow the seeds of spiritual transformation rather than to offer an experience that ended when the curtain fell.

Theatre as transfiguration

Zegadłowicz, quoted in the introduction, is not one of the central figures of our native historical-theatrical narrative (he was linked to theatre by, among other things, his dramatic work and his post as literary manager of the Polish Theatre in Poznań, which he held from 1927 to 1932). But texts he published in the volume W obliczu gór i kulis (In the Sight of Mountains and Backstages, 1927) are an example of an original approach to stage art in the context of religion, sanctity and ritual. Fearful and reverent, Zegadłowicz, in ‘stepping up to the theatre’, was encountering its mystery: he claimed that theatre in this aspect resembled the transfiguration of Christ as an equally impenetrable phenomenon. He saw a clear parallel between stage art and faith, claiming, among other things, that the reformation of theatre (the goal of perhaps every era in which young artists come to tear down the old order – in 1915 Schiller wrote about the repetition of ‘the cliché concerning the decadence of theatrical art’) must be closely linked to the ethical dimension:

Even the noblest attempts to revive theatre, to over-engineer it, to emphasise its plasticity, to extend the sensory possibilities to the audience (the overflow of the stage) become an absurdity when they do not aim for an anewing religionization of theatre.

‘Anewing’ because it restores theatre to its mysterious, ritualistic character – the original potential to produce community on the basis of faith and metaphysical needs. Finally, Zegadłowicz proclaims the quintessential sentence of his view on stage reform: ‘only God can revolutionise theatre!’

Theology of theatre

Gościnne występy wileńskiego teatru Reduta z przedstawieniem "Uciekła mi przepióreczka" w Teatrze Starym w Krakowie, nz. Juliusz Osterwa, fot. Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe, audiovis.nac.gov.pl — ‘Uciekła mi przepióreczka’, guest performances of Reduta Theatre from Vilnius at Teatr Stary, Kraków, depicted: Juliusz Osterwa, photo: National Digital Archive, audiovis.nac.gov.pl

Zegadłowicz used a concept he coined, ‘outwork’ (wypraca), which he defined as ‘realising one’s attitude to fellow human beings, gender, family’, as well as to ‘faith, God, infinity and eternity’. In terms of authorial dictionaries, another outstanding figure was undoubtedly also Juliusz Osterwa, co-founder of the legendary Reduta (Redoubt Theatre). We wrote about his endeavour to create a new, indigenously Polish theatrical dictionary in an earlier issue of Culture. But what Osterwa and Zegadłowicz have in common – apart from their artistic neologisms – is also precisely the belief in the religious character of theatre. The former ventured perhaps furthest in this vision – from the laboratory-like methods of Reduta’s work, through the project of a para-monastic theatre group called Dal (Distance), to the concept of the Genesia brotherhood, which united artists who were also devout Catholics (the patron of the brotherhood was to be St. Genesius, actor and martyr). It is worth emphasising that Osterwa’s linguistic project of ‘cleansing’ the Polish language of words such as ‘theatre’, ‘drama’ and ‘actor’ was not so much a whim of the eccentric artist as a well-thought-out idea intended to support the ethical renewal of theatre. Spełnia (fulfillorium), which was to replace teatr, meant, in fact, the space for ‘fulfilling the word’ (spełnianie słowa) and thus realizing the special mission entrusted to actors (in Osterwa’s dictionary, spełniki [fulfillers]). In one of her sketches, Katarzyna Flader aptly calls the creator of Reduta a ‘theologian of theatre in it functioning’.

When the spirit wakens

Another authorial – rather mysterious – term referring to the religious dimension of theatre was used by Jan Nepomucen Kamiński, Lviv’s theatrical persona, sometimes referred to as the ‘father of the Galician Polish stage’. Kamiński contained the quintessence of his understanding of acting as both craft and calling in just two letters: he created and promoted the concept of the ‘um’. His interpretation of the concept was contained in his Myśli o umnictwie dramatycznym (Thoughts on Dramatic Umation), published in 1830. He emphasised the lofty nature of his understanding of stagecraft in the introduction: he quoted a stanza from Goethe’s ‘Sonnet’ referring to the unlimited power of the awakened spirit (‘When the vigorous spirit awakens, it heeds no dam…’). The author derives competence in acting and creative inspiration directly from an enigmatic encounter with supernatural forces, writing, among other things, about ‘seeing one’s face full of divine expression’. The actors are, according to him, ‘priests hidden behind a veil’ – doesn’t this phrase evoke the image of a torn veil in the temple at Christ’s death or the Hindu concept of the veil of maya which, once thrown off, allows the human being to experience the fullness of reality? ‘Um’ came from the word umiejętność (skill) or umnictwo (artistry) – while an actor was an ‘umnik [art-knower] of drama and stagecraft’. But Kamiński’s writings prove that he was far from having a precise explanation of the concept of um, for he dressed up the definition in lofty, exalted words:

Instinct and the um of man are in accord in that they are direct consciousness but differ in that one is more knowledge, the other more inspiration, a voice coming from the depths of the spirit. […] The human um is able to both feel and know and can, going through itself as the um through the um, um-ravel and recognise what it knows.

Consciousness is, according to Jan Nepomucen, ‘the knowledge by the um of all that is divine’ – the ‘dramatic umation’ would therefore be a mastery developed (acquired, discovered) on the path of religious awakening, in direct relation to the metaphysical presence.

Enthusiasm & ecstasy

All these views on the sacred nature of theatre are undoubtedly linked to a kind of entry threshold, a prerequisite, without which it is impossible for theatre artists to find their way in the ethical aspects of their work. Among the authors of the concept of the Polish monumental theatre who wrote about this was Leon Schiller. He linked the possibility of arousing the ‘latent energy of revival’ of stage art with the creation of a ‘festive, almost religious’ theatre:

The higher types of spectacles are those which have the power to arouse enthusiasm and ecstasy in the collective soul of the crowd; at the pass leading to the temple, almost beyond the limits of art, we can suppose the existence of a contemplative theatre: a theatre of initiates [emphasis in original, ed].

The affinities between the performing arts and religion have sometimes also taken the opposite vector: it is God, the world he has created and the people faithful to him who have been compared to the director, the stage and the actors, respectively. This is a metaphor present in, among others, the concept of theo-drama created by Hans Urs von Balthasar, one of the cardinals appointed by John Paul II. Topos theatrum mundi – God as director and man as a marionette in his hands – was realised by, among others, Jan Kochanowski in his famous epigram ‘Człowiek boże igrzysko’ (God’s Plaything Man) or by Wacław Potocki (in a work with the twin title ‘Man as a plaything of God’ [Człowiek igrzysko boże], although in a slightly different version referring to a chess game).

Animally-human

Boiling milk, closing and opening doors, looking out the window. According to Helmut Kajzar, it is everyday life and the activities that make it up that were supposed to help theatre ‘regain its ritual sense’. This is a different view of what is holy – not in monumental or national terms, not in the context of grand narratives. ‘I want to delight myself with that which surrounds me,’ he declared in a manifesto titled ‘Teatr meta-codzienny’ (Meta-Everyday Theatre). He went on to write that theatre can become ‘freedom, a dream, a fantasy, a magical gesture’, but it can do so precisely through its ordinariness. Theatre, as Kajzar put it, is ‘a light revealing reality’, something that produces a community of many parallel existences, many ongoing, small theatres. At the end of Samoobrona (Self-Defence), one of his dramas, he wrote: ‘sacred sacred / [is] our / animally-human’. Ritual and sanctity were thus to reside in the common, the close, the familiar – in the phenomenon of everydayness.

Translated from Polish by Michał Niedzielski

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