To Share the Best of Poland - An Interview with Paweł Passini | Article

To Share the Best of Poland - An Interview with Paweł Passini

14._img_4239_damas.jpg, small, Pawel Passini (turned back) during rehearsals to Halka/Haiti. 18°48’05”N 72°23’01”W, 2015, photo: Damas Porcena (Dams), Haiti, To Share the Best of Poland - An Interview with Paweł Passini

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I wanted Polish Gorals from Haiti to stand on the brink with Halka, to catch her hand - Agnieszka Sural interviews Paweł Passini, the director who staged Stanisław Moniuszko's opera in the remote Haitian village of Cazale. A documentary of the performance is now being shown in the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Agnieszka Sural: Your performances have been shown on the most important theatre stages in Poland and around the world, in some vague, atypical settings, such as flats, playgrounds, and the Internet, within the project of Polish first theatre on the Web. Now you appear in the world of visual arts. Artists Joanna Malinowska and C.T. Jasper invited you to take part in the Halka/Haiti 18°48’05”N 72°23’01”W project realized by them for the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. How did it happen?

Paweł Passini: This is something more just than coincidence. I was on my way to Poznan for a meeting about the staging of Halka in the Grand Theatre in Warsaw (premières 26th June, 2015). Together with my sister Zuzanna, a stage designer, we read an article on Halka in Haiti. We started to laugh at the idea, but I also felt that it would set our thinking about Halka for the near future. At that moment, I didn't yet know that I would be part of it. When we arrived in Poznan it turned out that the Grand Theatre was one of the partners who discussed the possibility of staging Halka in Haiti.

At the time I was working on the performance HIDEOUT/Kryjowka within the project The Songs of My Neighbours realized in co-operation with theatres from Poland, Italy and Cyprus. One of our joint actions was a walk with people who used to live in the Cypriot village of Paramala. Today it is a ruined village, in which the British army practices manoeuvres. During the walk short events which recalled Paramala’s past history were staged in various theatrical techniques.

When I first talked to C. T. Jaspers on Skype about the trip to Cazale, I told him that it’s not only interesting, but also close to what I was doing at the time, that I need them to define what part I'd play in this project. How much this realization of Halka could be something that I myself wanted to say to the Haitians.

What did you want to tell them?

I believe in the theatre. I think it is a very special way of spending time together in our civilization. We usually play the roles of observers, onlookers, and we convince ourselves that nothing depends on us. In the meantime we stubbornly repeat slogans about positive thinking that change our reality. Eventually, we’d rather know everything about each other than understand each other. Compassion begins from the moment in which we start to see and hear others. And theatre is just about that, although it may sometimes seem that it’s about some “performances”.

C.T. Jasper, Joanna Malinowska, "Halka/Haiti. 18°48’05”N 72°23’01”W", 2015. Kadr z wielokanałowej projekcji wideo, fot. Barbara Kaja Kaniewska, Mateusz Golis — C.T. Jasper, Joanna Malinowska, Halka/Haiti. 18°48’05”N 72°23’01”W, 2015. Still from the multi-channel film screening, photo: Barbara Kaja Kaniewska, Mateusz Golis

In the theatre, being present, a witness, a conscious participant in somebody else’s story, creates a bond. The bond created between us, which wasn’t there a few moments ago – it’s like new connections between neurons. The shared community concerns not only the audience, but also the characters – those who can reveal themselves through actors and the audience. I wanted Polish Gorals from Haiti to stand on the brink with Halka, to catch her hand, but most importantly, I wanted to share what's best in Poland, which is theatre.

What approach to Halka did Joanna and C. T. Jasper offer?

They were pretty open. Their only suggestion was to have traditional costumes. Nobility in kontushes; highlanders in their traditional attire. In our case it was five opera singers from the seven characters who appear originally. They, in those costumes, against the background we found there, looked as if they were taken from an old textbook or postcard.

What we hadn’t arranged with Joanna and C. T. was whether the stage production had to be contemporary, if they expect from me any interpretation of the story. It turned out very quickly that the libretto needed to be considerably shortened. We had to adapt it to the project, which had the rules of an opera staged outdoors. Eventually, we started to simplify everything.

What I found exceptional was that we went to people who had no idea what opera was, who had never been in a theatre. They asked me to explain what it's like it to be in the theatre. I had shivers up my spine, because you just seem to bring an opera – something old and obvious, yet it’s not. Also, you should ask yourself a question: what could you do for the audience to make the most of this opportunity? I thought that it would be great if the audience were close to the singers. It doesn’t happen very often in the opera.

The singers had no resonator, nor sound system, they sang as much as they could by themselves in the full sun, on a road with motorbikes with screaming goats riding by all the time. In the rehearsals we had to move, because, for example, a lorry drove by. Life went on there continuously.

Poland in a Haitian Village: An Interview with Joanna Malinowska and C.T. Jasper

I wanted to keep it very simple. I wanted them to understand the plot. What was fascinating for me is that, in modern Haiti the story of Janusz and Halka, who cannot marry due to the fact that they come from two different social groups, is very present.

If we show them something like the theatre for the first time, we should show them also that it is something that tells a story. I asked my actors to repeat gestures from the opera illustrations as created by Moniuszko, so that it would be all played out.

First of all, there was an introduction of all the characters – this moment appears in the beginning of the film – and the explanation of relations between particular characters. I thought about recreating Halka, that maybe someone would tear Halka’s clothes off, and the death would appear on the stage. But the longer we stayed in this community cut off from the rest of world, the sooner we found out that the fact that Halka would commit suicide was a matter of persuading the audience that if one cannot marry somebody, they commit suicide by jumping from a rock.

When Moniuszko wrote Halka, he had nobles as the audience. Only Janusz’s side was present in the audience. But the main character is Halka, a peasant, as is Mloda, the central figure in Wyspianski’s The Curse. The one world gives the other world voice to say something. Haitians understood it, for they have their own poem, Choucoune, about a woman who deserts her fiancé for some French mulatto.

C.T. Jasper, Joanna Malinowska, "Halka/Haiti. 18°48’05”N 72°23’01”W", 2015 Soliści Teatru Wielkiego im. Stanisława Moniuszki w Poznaniu, Orkiestra Filharmoniczna Świętej Trójcy z Port-Au-Prince oraz tancerze z Cazale podczas spektaklu. Cazale, Haiti, 7 lutego 2015, fot. Damas Porcena (Dams), Haiti — C.T. Jasper, Joanna Malinowska, Halka/Haiti. 18°48’05”N 72°23’01”W, 2015. Soloists from the Stanislaw Moniuszko Grand Theatre in Poznan, the St. Trinity Philharmonic Orchestra from Port-au-Prince and dancers from Cazale during the performance. Cazale, Haiti, 7th February, 2015, photo: Damas Porcena (Dams), Haiti

You’ve already worked with people who have never been to the theatre.

Actually it happens more often in our world than we think. I'd worked in the countryside previously, and with deaf people, and on a daily basis I meet foreigners who have various levels of understanding what is theatre, especially Polish theatre. The difference is that in Haiti we had to find words to describe to the audience that there’s a technique that is called “opera”, because they’d never had any contact with any form of theatre.

We lived in the village for ten days, trying to introduce the people there to what was going to happen. In the meantime we had to find a place for our “stage” – and we found it – in the middle of the road. Polonez rehearsals also took place in an old common room, something more like a shelter, in the Cosmos hotel – the only hotel in Cazale – we learnt on the day of our departure that it is used by the locals for so-called “rooms by the hour”.

While rehearsals lasted, people would come and chat with us. We were always accompanied by a rabble of kids, whose drawings I took home with me. My previous experience in working in villages helped me a lot. There’s a big difference in working with people for whom theatre is not something obvious or clearly desirable. At every step you need to justify and explain what is going to happen, because it is not your space.

Suddenly, it started to be our shared celebration. We managed to talk Cazalians into appearing on the stage beside us. At some point motorbikes even started to bypass our stage in the middle of the road. They rode through bushes and potholes instead.

There was something that I could say crushed me. There were two boys, Wesly and Wilson, who really helped us. One day we were talking about theatre, which they completely don’t know, and voodoo. One of them said “The theatre is something that if you can play it well, you can release it”. I realized to myself that I think about theatre in the same way, yet I dare not say it like this, as it would sound too pompous.

The artists and curator Magdalena Moskalewicz emphasize the colonial plot in their comments on Halka/Haiti.

We did not want to be those people who come and make Haitians dance something or think in some way. We didn’t want it to work only one-way. It worked, because we worked together on the performance. From the beginning it wasn’t all about the performance itself, it was about working with Haitians in the process of preparing our event. That builds a bond.

What impression did Cazale itself make on you?

Cazale is a big village in the mountains with a school attended by a few hundred students, and with six churches of various denominations. There’s no electricity in the village, yet everyone has their own cell phone in their hands, and chargers hung around their necks. In a booth in the middle of the road, the same man always stands, who brings out a tube with sockets to charge the phone for a fee. What you experience there is darkness. It’s so dark in the night there that sometimes you start to see things that you don't want to see. Also, the poverty there, everything is scarce, yet people are very caring towards each other. I could move there.

C.T. Jasper, Joanna Malinowska, "Halka/Haiti. 18°48’05”N 72°23’01”W", 2015. Podczas warsztatów tanecznych z mieszkańcami Cazale, fot. Bartosz Górka. — C.T. Jasper, Joanna Malinowska, Halka/Haiti. 18°48’05”N 72°23’01”W, 2015. Dance workshops with the residents of Cazale, photo: Barbara Kaja Kaniewska

Nevertheless, a strange thing happened to me once. I took a photo of a group of school kids with our choreographer Weronika Pelczynska between them. The facial recognition system turned on, so small green squares with faces scattered on the screen of my camera, and they started to wander. Eventually, only one was left. For my camera, their faces weren’t faces. You see a crowd of people, yet the camera shows only one square, one person. Apparently – a trifle.

The current inhabitants of Haiti come from Africa, brought there by colonists, who had earlier exterminated the locals. In Haiti you constantly feel that nobody is “native” here, besides the ghosts. I very often felt like a representative of all those evil whites who did horrible things, although Poles in Haitian textbooks are presented as those who changed sides. They, taken to pacify the locals, left the colonists’ side to join the local revolt. They plunged their bayonets into the sand and refused to shoot the insurgents. Poles didn’t have their own homeland, so they changed sides and stayed there. Supposedly, three hundred Poles settled down in Cazale. Now we have to change sides all the time.

To this day there is a provision in the Haitian constitution that Poles and Germans are the only white people who can purchase Haitian land. Creole, the official language of Haiti, looks like French written down phonetically by Poles.

Haiti is also the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. Emblematic is that people eat soil pancakes. It is supposedly healthy, yet I don’t believe that many of us would change our diet to start eating soil pancakes. A children's sweet is a piece of sugarcane, a kind of stick to chew. Oh, in Cazale nobody smokes cigarettes. For us visitors, it is something positive, for them – the poverty.

At the turn of 70s and 80s Jerzy Grotowski visited Haiti and invited a local voodoo priest to Poland. Later, the anthropology professor Leszek Kolankiewicz visited Haiti. In 2012 Bartosz Konopka directed a documentary, The Art of Disappearing, in which he recalled the history of Grotowski’s voodoo priest. How do Cazale’s inhabitants treat the Poles that come there? Do they have any expectations?

One boy, black as the night, came to me and said “Why did you forget us?”. There live people who describe themselves as les polonais – Poles. Indeed, there are elderly ladies who have a lighter skin complex and blue eyes. When we visited the school, we were asked to dance the polonaise, in the head teacher’s office stood a small Krakow szopka. One of the teachers came to us asking, “What will we have from it? We want our students to go to Poland”. Other asked “For what? Like Professor Leszek – you’ll come and go?”, The question “What’s next?” comes back constantly – something more has to be done.

Apart from the shopka – are there any Polish accents?

Practically none – there is an icon of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, who is also a very envious voodoo character, in one of the churches. I remember a 100-year-old woman sitting somewhere along the road. She looked almost like an elderly lady from the Lublin region. All wrinkled, blue-eyed, sunburnt.

By the end of June 2015, the premiere of your next Halka in the Grand Theatre in Poznan will take place. How does it vary from the Haitian one?

The orchestra from Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince played in the Haitian Halka. After some time it turned out that this orchestra could only learn two pieces. What is more, it also turned out that these two pieces sound quite unlike how we know them. They played the polonaise and the mazur; the first time I’ve heard them played so slow. At first sight, it sounded like a drunken brass band. The musicians have very old, damaged instruments, but these are their treasures. They didn't have enough time to practice. Also, the Haitian approach to working is different. Someone would leave the rehearsal all the time, and when he came back, someone else would go. There’s no strict discipline, everything is more fluid there, with more improvisation.

The next performance will be Dziady in Brest, Belarus. Similarly to Haiti, a context of Poland and Poles will appear.

Something weird happened on the occasion of Dziady. The director of the Brest theatre asked me to prepare a premiere of some kind of Polish classic. When I proposed Dziady, I heard “But it’s a Belarusian classic!”. That was fascinating.

Together with Patrycja Dolowy, we are preparing a Dziady that will have fragments played in Polish, Belarusian, Russian, and Yiddish. All those languages functioned these areas. And, like in Haiti, there are also expectations for Poland and Poles not to forget. There is a feeling that the bond with Poland must be kept. Also, I was asked why Zosia in Pan Tadeusz speaks so little.

You know why? Because Zosia spoke better Polish than the language that was used where she lived, that is Belarusian, so she was ashamed of it. Dziady in Belarus can be something like Halka in Haiti. We go there to create together with people who have a sort of image of Poland and Polishness. What we consider to be “ours”, someone else considers it too, yet he sees it differently. And you haven’t considered him to be “yours”! This is fascinating and, I think, much needed by Poles who are learning that the identity is dynamic. Bearing in mind that we’ve got compatriots in Belarus or Haiti is raising our awareness, and make us, Poles fuller – however pompous it sounds.

The interview was conducted on the 13th May 2015 in Warsaw.

Polish version published on the 5th June 2015

Agnieszka Sural/translated by Barbara Bedka

Halka/Haiti by C. T. Jasper and Joanna Malinowska – Image Gallery

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Magdalena Moskalewicz

halka

stanislaw moniuszko