AB: It didn’t really matter. What mattered was the creation of Dom Tańca [‘House of Dance’, created in 1994 to channel the learnings and needs of the aforementioned young musicians, led by themselves – ed.]. The collapse of communism was not important because communism in Poland was already decomposing. There was no censorship and other things like this.
For many years I hosted a radio show, it started under communism, near the end of it, and continued in free Poland. Now I have a radio show too, for the last 6 years. So it’s been 12 years of hosting a radio show. So the collapse of the communism didn’t matter, believe me. The creation of Dom Tańca was important, it was something incredible for me, I was acting totally unsupported. Even those radio shows, just recording, broadcasting and that was all.
My community’s reaction to what I was doing was really bad. I mean the elite of the painters, great painters and my friends, they thought that all the things I was doing deserved to be ridiculed. And I accepted it with humility. And they continue with this, you know they are really great painters, their works are exhibited in museums, they are my friends, professors, and now, like me, retired. So on one side there is our friendship and on the other there is ‘This is crazy! Why do you keep doing this? You’re wasting your time!’ So that’s how it is.
EG: From the moment you started recording to the moment you met a group of young musicians with Janusz Prusinowski as band leader (Bractwo Ubogich), 20 years had passed…
AB: Less than 20 years. It was a dozen or so years. I don’t remember when Bractwo was created. You know, there’s a difference between when were they created and when we met, but it was several years.
EG: And for all those years had you thought that what you’d been doing was not interesting for other people?