What was your vision of the set?
My vision was that of a black cavity, a theatre of shadows, something which takes place inside a cave. The vertical section of a pyramid was an inspiration, long corridors leading inside the tomb chambers, or to put it more organically – a molehill.
It was important to determine the gesture which the stage design would enact. This Beckettian, Camusian, existential gesture was an inversion, a collapse. A healthy body falls over, and is then defined as an ill or dead body. I wanted the stage design to also collapse.
It turned out that following the gesture of collapsing, corridors previously used for vertical communication in act I can be defined as trenches. The story of "The Magic Mountain" was thus additionally interpreted, with the lurking shadow of the First World War. It was a peculiar war, rather sluggish in terms of movement that consisted mostly in the shifting of trench lines, which were occasionally poisoned with gas. In this strange timelessness, soldiers were dying.
A molehill, a collapse, and trenches are the three words, the three elements through which I can speak of my stage design. The fact that I could clearly define it was important to me. The naming of what I wanted to do was an important part of the work, as well as the simple defining of the concept.
How did you collaborate with the other authors of the opera?
It was a difficult process, because while the set was being designed, the work was not yet completed. One could get a sense of some kind of vision, but its complete version was known only to Paweł. The voices of singers were substituted with electronic imitations, which for me as a non-professional were impossible to hear. It resembled a Beethovenian composing of a stage design, where the deaf designer composes for a piece that only the musician can hear, deep inside of his own head.
Of course, certain elements were given and known: the presence of electronics, a great presence of silence. These were the signals that I could observe. Discussion with Andrzej Chyra was also important, because he gathered all kinds of images that seemed important to him, for example, visions of purgatory. The presence of a real stage designer, Magda Maciejewska was also important: she is responsible for the costumes.
I was able to discuss a lot of things with her. My knowledge of stage design was rather poor, so her participation in all the talks was significant.
What kind of images were gathered by Andrzej Chyra?
They inspired Magda in her work on the costumes. For Andrzej, the Belgian painter Michaël Borremans, exemplary of the Antwerp school, was an important figure. It was about his vision of colour tones, the fragmented depicting of figures, and the vision of an empty space, which is also something that is close to me.
Magda Maciejewska made the costumes which you were initially meant to take care of.
Yes, at first I courageously said that I could do them. Luckily, Magda joined the project.
Creating the stage design for "The Magic Mountain" was a good experience and an educational one. It turned out that, for example, one has to know what each singer can physically do on the stage. I did not take this into account at first, but we managed to correct this. This is where the very innovative use of simple, comfortable white office chairs comes from in act I, chairs which substituted the original minimalist and delicate half-seats. Health and safety. I gave up aesthetic considerations in favour of a human gesture. I broke from my own aesthetic vocabulary in this way.
Apparently, you wanted to create a set which would have a low temperature. How did you manage, faced with the artificiality of the theatre? In your art, you are devoted to the material truth.
While working, I came to realise that a lot of synthetic materials emerge as one works on a stage design. It was an inversion of what I engage in in art, and in the beginning this constituted a certain problem. The world of theatre is a world where everything can be made out of paper, and I have been shaped by the honesty of employed materials, I have built my art upon this, and I continue to do so until today.
The important thing for me was to get rid of all the soft elements such as the theatre curtain, the rags lying about on the stage. I chose the simplest materials which seemed to me to be the most honest – a steel construction and plywood, painted black with gloss paint rather that the matte that is usually used in the theatre. This gloss paint was meant to be vibrant, to catch light.
We conjured up the element of snow together. First, there was the concept of black snow, but in the end we came up with real, white snow. It is not an element from the dictionary of magic, but one of the stage's truths.
What was your approach towards props? There are few of them in the performance – tea cups, thermometres, and a newspaper.
I fought the props.
The anaconda is a significant motif of the opera, while it does not appear in Mann’s novel.
Previously I was sceptical, but then I came to understand that the anaconda is a very important figure. A strange animal, something outside of our understanding of the world, something wild and unimaginable, it can chew up, spit out, or devour. A fantastic animal from the zoology of Borges, but also an animal that is present in the political and social sphere. Małgosia Sikorska-Miszczuk, who created the anaconda, prefers not to explain it.
For a moment, our anaconda was an earthworm. It appeared on the cover of a book about the performance. It is a shot from a recording of an earthworm which I had in my video archives. Everyone gets the anaconda that they deserve.
The anaconda also appears in the stage design in act II – lyrics from the aria about the anaconda move across the entire back wall. It makes it hard for the spectator to read the projected text, because it moves very slowly. It reminded me of a landscape with a crawling anaconda.
The text begins with Die Anakonda. The German Die is also the English die, to die. The last word is Menschen – people. After the word Menschen everything ends in the performance.
The conversation was conducted on 13th July, 2015 in Warsaw.