Quit Smoking, Expand Your Soul: Folk Theatre as a Form of Therapy
'The countryside needs theatre’, wrote Zofia Solarz, believing that stage creativity would awaken not only creativity, but also a sense of subjectivity among peasant youth. The theatre was supposed to help get rid of complexes about urban culture, but it also helped to deal with addictions.
Let's sing how we can
She was one of the most important activists of the peasant people’s movement, a co-organizer of the first Polish People’s Universities and a pedagogue. Zofia Solarz (1902–1988) particularly appreciated the role of the performing arts in her work: of collective singing. 'Let's sing’, she urged in her texts:
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During the 17th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice, the curation & design team PROLOG +1, in collaboration with invited artists and six architectural studios, will present its vision of the Polish countryside. What was it once like? What shaped it? How does it change? And what are the possible scenarios for its future?
Singing is beauty, singing together creates social spiritual strength. [...] Let's sing however we can. [...] In a group, the shortcomings of our voice and hearing will be lost, our voice will be ennobled, our hearing will be perfected. [...] There is no full life without singing! Let's sing.
Theatrical forms were a unique educational tool for her, not only on the aesthetic, but also on the spiritual level. From an early age, Zofia, the adopted daughter of Maria and Władysław Symonowicz, had contact with outstanding figures of the Polish humanities. In the archival recordings of the Polish Radio, she recalled meetings with Tadeusz Miciński or Józef Kotarbiński, which took place in her parents' living room ('Mr. Józef Kotarbiński, an actor, recited beautifully for us. I vaguely remember him standing by the piano. It must have made a huge impression on a child’s imagination').
She craved working for folk youth since she was a child. As she admitted, she never wanted to be a 'great person' or a scientist, but she wanted to teach in agricultural schools. She was fulfilling her desire with consistency and commitment, gradually becoming an icon of folk pedagogy, and in the theatrical context – one of the most important promoters of folk theatre, liberating itself from its sense of inferiority to professional theatre, striving to develop its own, authentic (not borrowed) language and character. The theatre – which, as Solarz claimed, was to be the medium allowing for the artistic expression of the 'inner content of life'.
Therapy (θεραπεία) in Modern Greek is, as in Polish, a medical term that simply means treatment. At its ancient Greek origin, it is also synonymous with care, caretaking and worship. In this sense, this concept is undoubtedly connected with the idea behind creating a theatre with peasant youth: cultivating respect for the culture and aesthetics of the countryside, caring for it, taking care to forge folk cultural emblems into original dramatic and stage works. The sense of one’s own, unique symbols, texts and rituals being erased and replaced with the unifying elements of urban culture could, according to Solarz, arouse anger and rebellion among peasants; rebellion against 'the self-imposed role of a consumer of administratively dosed culture'. She expressed this, among others, in the Zarzewie magazine, a weekly publication for Polish youth:
[...] when the peasant women can only produce food and recreate the old songs and dances, already deprived of the living core and the pulse of life, then the patience of those who still feel like peasants runs out. [...] dressed to urban likeness they become consumers of others’ cultural goods, like any charitable or self-interested donation – cheap ones.
So what would such a theatre look like? Above all, it was to be created spontaneously and from the bottom up. It was the so-called self-generated theatre – usually not based on ready-made texts, but worked out using the method of collective creativity. 'As usual, no one had a written role, everyone created it as the action unfolded', recalled Solarz, referring to the spectacle staged on a football pitch, prepared by students of the People's University in Szyce for the occasion of the Kielce Voivode’s visit.
Theatre off the top of the head
The so-called 'off the top of the head’, practiced by Zofia Solarz with the students of the People's University (in the years 1924–1931 located in Szyce near Kraków, and then from 1932 till the outbreak of the Second World War in Gać Przeworska) reinforced the sense of agency and responsibility. In such a model, the work of a director becomes close to the practice of midwifery – stimulating and assisting in the hatching of an artistic work, supporting the creation process rather than the hierarchical management of students' expression and creative potential. In her published manuscripts, Solarz recollected that the theatre created with rural youth was an expression of 'everything they lived on in the family' – this is how she treated the university community. For the students of the school, she was the 'Godmother', and her husband (Ignacy Solarz, educator and one of the most important peasant activists of the interwar period) was called the 'Godfather'. Zofia Solarz thus wrote about the theatre created on her own initiative: 'We created it ourselves. I stimulated and organized the thoughts, ideas, imagination and feelings of the group, which, after all, lived on the content of rural, Polish and, above all, human affairs.'
It is hard to resist the impression that Solarz's practices conducted with students of rural universities were close to what today, in contemporary repertory theatre, is called collective or horizontal work. In the book Theatre of Songs, the pedagogue wrote that thanks to the exceptional director's attentiveness to rural girls and boys, 'the stagings revealed the joyful truth about the happiness that stems from getting rid of the artificial form of being.' 'Theatre from the head' emphasized naturalness and directness, especially valuing the issue of authentic experience. The process of jointly creating theatre from scratch, without an imposed scheme of action or a specific text, was conducive to mental health, and – although this term can be problematic today – personal development. 'It was especially the girls whom the sincere, cordial, simple atmosphere allowed to breathe joyfully and freely', wrote Solarz.
Addiction therapy
Another goal of theatre work with rural youth was to create a new folk drama ('original drama for contemporary rural theatre'). One that does not replicate the stylistics and themes of texts originating from urban, so-called 'high' culture. It was about creating such dramas and designing such experiences that would correspond to local sensibilities, touching on authentic, rural problems. In her article for Teatr Ludowy (Folk Theatre) in May 1935, Solarz recalls how the audience cried and refused to leave after the spectacle in the village of Sietesz. It was an adaptation of Orka na ugorze (Plowing the Fallow), based on a text by Jan Wiktor because Solarz, when she did occasionally propose texts for work, chose dramas that were close to the everyday village life.
Her theatre groups mainly staged folk songs, but also such works as: Serce za tamą by Gustaw Morcinek, Dobra Pani and Cham by Eliza Orzeszkowa, Bartek, Nędza i Polityka by Władysław Orkan, Słowo o Jakubie Szeli by Bruno Jasieński, or the aforementioned Orka na ugorze by Wiktor. As Solarz wrote, together with young people she also created 'so-called off the top of the head plays on current issues'. In 1935, in the literary and artistic weekly Prosto z mostu, she stated that 'the village needs a theatre, a stage from which new, unknown, sensed words would be heard, breathing today’s life – burning current issues and matters'. The pedagogue was well aware of the educational power of art, of how creativity can support building subjectivity – she herself was a creator, author of poems and prose. Polish educator and specialist in andragogy and the history of adult education Lucjan Turos (1927–2017) wrote in the context of the educational activity of the Solarz couple that it contributed to the decrease in the number of people struggling with alcohol or cigarette addiction among the rural population. It was, as the author put it, 'a measurable effect of the self-reeducation process', i.e. active involvement in their own education on the part of the students of folk schools. Theatre classes were an important component of the curriculum, which was, of course, extensive and multi-faceted: Ignacy Solarz lectured in Szyce and Gać Przeworska, among others, on astronomy, natural and social sciences (his lectures were also attended by audience coming from Kraków), while Zofia Solarz lectured on Polish literature, ethics and, of course, artistic subjects. In her diary she noted:
The issue of theatre is the most important content of my life [...] theatre, artistic forms as a force that transforms people, reaching deep into emotions and influencing human consciousness.
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When in 2014 Poland celebrated 150th anniversary of abolition of the feudal system, Daniel Rycharski – an artist and activist working in his home village in Masovia – decided to create an artwork about the identity of Polish society.
Lecturing on life
The purpose of theatre as Solarz saw it was transformation and spiritual growth – not in the metaphysical and contemplative sense, but in a pragmatic sense, allowing for the strengthening of one's own subjectivity and a stronger 'embedding' in the world. Turos wrote that the broad idea behind the folk People’s Universities, in which the Solarz couple was involved, was 'to free the peasant youth from the pressure of the tradition of serf mentality and to awaken their sense of self-worth and responsibility for themselves and the world they live in'. Performative activities were undoubtedly an important part of the path to this. Especially that theatre is about action, activity, agency, nurturing courage, introspection and inspection – and Zofia Solarz openly expressed her mistrust in school as an institution providing knowledge about life.
In her diary, she noted that institutionalized (in other words: urban) education shapes a group of people called the intelligentsia and 'entitles them, in their opinion, to lecture other people, not covered by the school system, on important life tasks.' And the rural population, in her opinion, above all needed – through stage action and calling to life their agency – to build and strengthen their authentic identity. 'Young peasants [...] want theatre; finding themselves in it, they would also like to find the door to a great, unlimited life', she wrote quite loftily in the article O chłopskim teatrze (On Peasant Theatre), published in February 1939. In this sense, theatre was to be a vehicle for personal transformation, but also a means of cultivating dignity. Ignacy Solarz also claimed that awareness and will should be strengthened through care for spiritual life:
In order for the peasant people not to remain just an inert mass led by the 'top-down' will, but to become a life-changing factor with a conscious and determined will of their own, they must consist of [...] human individuals in whom the inner spiritual life has awakened [...].
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Leo Tolstoy once said that if you describe a single village well, you describe the whole world. This famous sentence fits Władysław Reymont’s novel ‘The Peasants’, written and published between 1904 and 1909. Reymont received the Nobel Prize for it in 1924, and the book went on to be translated into many European languages. Its theme was universal; the novel’s French translator called it a ‘testimony to European peasants’.
Thus, folk theatre can be perceived not only as part of aesthetic education and a sphere of creative development, but also as a practice boosting the growth of the sense of individuality, the awareness of authentic expression, and mitigating their inferiority complex. In this sense, folk theatre can be treated as a form of therapy through art.
Translated from Polish by Michał Pelczar
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