Massacre in Theatre: ‘The Boy Is Coming’ by Marcin Wierzchowski
The management of the Korean Namsan Arts Center was very surprised that a Polish director decided to stage a novel about a piece of Korean history completely unknown in Poland. It was also astonishing that Han Kang, the author of the book ‘Human Acts’, previously reluctant to stage adaptations of her works, agreed to holding the world premiere of the performance based on her novel in Poland.
Two approaches to tragedy
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the tragic events in Gwangju. In 1980, between 18th and 27th May, the city saw mass street protests and riots against the dictatorship of General Chun Doo-hwan, participated mainly by young Koreans. The protests were brutally supressed by the army resulting in at least 165 deaths. This is the official data, according to many experts heavily underestimated, as in fact up to 2,000 protesters were killed in the massacre.
In October 2019, Marcin Wierzchowski’s performance The Boy Is Coming premiered at the National Stary Theatre in Kraków. The first part of the script, developed by the director in collaboration with playwright Daniel Sołtysiński, was based on Han Kang’s novel; the second one was a futuristic fantasy about Poland in 2028. One month later, the premiere of the Korean adaptation of Human Acts took place in Seoul. The formal show titled Human Fuga performed by Performance Group TUIDA (directed by Bae Yo-Sup) presented a completely different approach to the topic. In Wierzchowski’s adaptation, the essence of the performance was narrative, dialogues, history and verbalised emotions. In Human Fuga, the artists focused on movement, embodiment of affect, dramaturgy built with music and interaction with objects.
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Scene from the performance 'The Boy Is Coming' directed by Marcin Wierzchowski, 2019, photo: Magda Hueckel / Helena Modrzejewska National Stary Theatre in Kraków
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Wierzchowski together with stage and costume designer Anna-Maria Karczmarska had the opportunity to see the Korean performance as part of their study visit in Korea. The director admitted that the perspective adopted by Perfomance Group TUIDA was radically different from what can be seen in The Boy is Coming:
I was tremendously impressed by this adaptation. [...] It is a very impressionistic performance. It maintains the structure of the novel, but is also poetic, which brings it closer to the essence of Han Kang’s work. I have noticed incredible intuition and sensitivity in guiding actors as well as in the use of props with which they form a unity.
Karczmarska in turn describes the show as ‘very precise, focused and minimalist in form and character’, regretting that during her visit to Korea she could not fully experience the performance at the intellectual level due to the lack of translation (subtitles):
I would love to see this performance again with the subtitles. That was the plan: the production was to be staged at Stary Theatre in Kraków. I hope that the Theatre will resume collaboration with the Namsan Arts Center in Seoul and we will have the opportunity to see ‘Human Fuga’ here in the future.
Wierzchowski’s performance was planned to be staged as part of the celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the tragic events in Gwangju. However, the COVID-19 pandemic thwarted the plans and The Boy Is Coming eventually did not appear on the stage of the Namsan Arts Center in Seoul. The Korean-Polish collaboration also provided for the presentation of Human Fuga at the National Stary Theatre in Kraków, but unfortunately this project was also suspended due to the pandemic.
What has Korea got to do with Poland?
Scene from the performance 'The Boy Is Coming' directed by Marcin Wierzchowski, 2019, photo: Magda Hueckel / Helena Modrzejewska National Stary Theatre in Kraków
Why exactly did the Polish director decide to adapt Han Kang’s novel and, what is more, to juxtapose it with his original narrative about Poland of the next decade? As it turns out, he followed his intuition and... a product recommendation from a popular online bookstore. Having read the earlier novel by the Korean author, The Vegetarian, Wierzchowski decided to buy a copy of Human Acts. The gym motif appearing in the first few pages of the book instantly brought to his mind his previous work, a diploma performance created with the students of the Puppetry Department of the Theatre Academy in Białystok which he directed in 2016. In the show, titled Pospolite Żywoty Martwych Polaków (Common Lives of Dead Poles, trans. AW), the director combined inspirations from Marcin Kącki’s book Białystok. Biała Siła, Czarna Pamięć (Białystok: White Power, Black Memory, trans. AW) with the reflection on deepening divisions in Polish society, which in this artistic fantasy lead to a real civil war and fratricidal bloodshed. Wierzchowski admits that thematising the socio-political rift was at that time his way of dealing with anger and fear:
In this kind of situation you have two choices: either say ‘I hate all of you on the other side of the barricade’, or use art to understand what is happening. The first choice is tempting, but I persistently try to make the second one.
A blow to the heart
Scene from the performance 'The Boy Is Coming' directed by Marcin Wierzchowski, 2019, photo: Magda Hueckel / Helena Modrzejewska National Stary Theatre in Kraków
Reading Human Acts reminded Wierzchowski of his earlier show staged in Białystok. ‘I had the feeling I had already been there’ recalls the director. He adds that he had no idea where Gwangju was or what happened there between 18th and 27th May 1980. ‘I gradually started to reconstruct the image’ he says of the early stages of his new performance’s concept taking shape. Another familiar motif was the figure of the boy present in the Han Kang’s novel who resembled a character from the Białystok’s performance about the civil war in Poland in 2028. ‘Despite factual differences, these two things began to exist side by side in my head’ says Wierzchowski adding that the final ‘blow to the heart’ that made him follow the initial idea was the voice of the author herself in the epilogue of the novel. In the last chapter, Han Kang tells her own story: in 1979, as a nine-year-old, she moved with her parents from Gwangju to Seoul. Their house passed into the hands of a teacher’s family with three sons. A year later, Han Kang found out that the youngest of the sons had been killed in brutal suppression of the riots. The event became a kind of ‘innocent sin’ that haunted her for several dozen years. This confluence of events led Wierzchowski to create a four-hour mesmerizing show about trauma and the affective dimension of history.
‘“Koreanness” or “Polishness” didn’t matter to us’ says stage designer Anna-Maria Karczmarska, pointing to the transnational, existential dimension of the show in which realistic characters coexist with phantoms. This ghostly nature of the performance is emphasised by the stage design of the part taking place in Poland:
The flat where the action takes place is old, filled with furniture from the 80s and 90s. It is also vandalised, with rubble on the floor and visible burn marks. However, the protagonists don’t notice any signs of destruction. I think that such elements create the effect of strangeness and duality, building tension between what is real and what is imagined.
The director’s letters
Scene from the performance 'The Boy Is Coming' directed by Marcin Wierzchowski, 2019, photo: Magda Hueckel / Helena Modrzejewska National Stary Theatre in Kraków
To persuade Han Kang to allow him to adapt her novel for the stage in Poland, Wierzchowski engaged in an extensive correspondence with her, using emotional arguments. In his long letters, he honestly and clearly declared that his performance would consist of the Korean and Polish parts, of which the latter would also include the perspective of the perpetrators. Wierzchowski notes that Han Kang’s novel is almost exclusively focused on the victims (direct and indirect) of the Gwangju massacre, as it is very difficult for Koreans to open up to the perspective of the abusers. ‘They see it as relativism. I understand this point of view’ says the director, while stressing the role of Hellinger’s family constellations therapy in changing the perception of the victim-perpetrator relationship:
According to Hellinger’s model of family constellations, the perpetrator of abuse in the family becomes part of the family. This process leads to reconciliation between the abuser and the victim and their family. This is the image that brought a huge revolution in my life, although I know it can be very difficult to accept at a rational level.
A ‘walked’ performance
The Boy Is Coming is another production by Wierzchowski that is performed in motion and in a non-standard space. During the performance, viewers have to take ‘non-theatrical’ positions, i.e. move to subsequent ‘stations’ and watch most of the show while standing. This staging concept is of great importance for the reception and presents a huge challenge for the stage designer. Anna-Maria Karczmarska describes her work on this kind of show as ‘infinitely more massive than on productions performed in a single stage design with static audience’. The artist also notes that this solution contributes to a more intense emotional perception of the performance resulting from close contact with the theatrical situation, a sense of being inside the story. ‘I like being a viewer of this performance. I think it’s a really great experience to be able to participate in it’ admits Karczmarska.
As Wierzchowski says, the decision to invite the viewers to participate in this kind of ‘walked’ theatrical experience results from his reflection on the role of the audience in theatre. It is important for him that the construction of the show adds subjectivity to the audience, instead of inducing them to maintain their distance while sitting in comfy chairs:
I could imagine the journey between 1980 and 2028 as stationary [i.e. shown in a single traditional theatrical space – editor’s note], but I had a prevailing feeling that we are somewhat like souls who move in time and belong to specific spaces in which attempts are being made to reconstruct events. [...] I couldn’t imagine, for example, not being in the gym where the story told by Han Kang and the one we are telling about Poland begins.
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Scene from the performance 'The Boy Is Coming' directed by Marcin Wierzchowski, 2019, photo: Magda Hueckel / Helena Modrzejewska National Stary Theatre in Kraków
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Wierzchowski also points out the real dimension of the space in which his performance takes place. He notes that the contractual and theatralised spaces of Kraków’s Stary Theatre could in some tragic circumstances be turned into a makeshift morgue or a place of corpse identification. What would otherwise seem like a distant fantasy, in today’s time of the coronavirus pandemic appears disturbingly real. Further realism was to be added to the performance by smells. Therefore the opening scene of the body identification in the gym is accompanied by a peculiar odour of steaming vinegar. Upon the second ‘entrance’ to the gym, when the action has moved to Poland, viewers can smell burnt palo santo wood. The balancing between the intense realistic dimension of the story and its metaphorical meaning can also be seen in costumes. Although the identification scene in the gym is literal, not poetic or impressionistic, the bodies of the victims are represented by costumes placed on the floor. Karczmarska emphasises, however, that they have been selected based on historical accuracy: ‘These are clothes from the 70s and 80s which could have been worn by participants of the Gwangju protests’. The Boy Is Coming is a performance in which the meanders of history and trauma, facts and affect merge into one.
Originally written in Polish, translated by AW, 18 May 2020
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