„Yesterday You Were Angry In Green” at the 31st Festival

Does community allow otherness? Can „otherhood” co-create community? Questions of this (and not only this) kind were asked at festival night. On Friday, 21 March, we presented „Yesterday You Were Angry In Green” by Eliza Kącka, directed by Anna Augustynowicz and produced by The Gustaw Holoubek Dramatyczny Theatre in Warsaw.  The house of our Small Stage was more than full, thank you for the ovation!

In a very tender narrative the main character faces not only her new social role – a mother – but also her daughter’s qujite different world, the world in autism spectrum. While trying to catch her daughter’s exceptional „I”, the mother exposes herself, and while looking at herself in her daughter’s otherness, she discovers her own otherness. Talking about Ruda, she actually talks about herself, joining and confronting two personalities. Two atypicalities…

After the spectacle Jacek Cieślak and Jacek Wakar moderated the meeting with its creators. Anna Augustynowicz emphasized that she had not wanted to adapt the novel for the stage because, in her opinion, it was not possible to tell, in a linear way, the story which was from the beginning non-fiction, based on subjective impressions and experiences. Just like the book, the spectacle is – in the director’s words – a for-part fugue in which actors do not impersonate certain characters but smoothly relay the narrative. The spectacle is organized like a piece of music for several voices/instruments which look for a way of communication, a way of constructing the whole.

„Yesterday You Were Angry In Green” is a way to find a new, non-verbal language of communication. If you want to reach Ruda and understand her, you need a different, non-verbal form of looking for an understanding. The spectacle is also a relations laboratory in a broader sense – a theatre installation with different worlds, personalities which try to hear each other (though it is not always  possible for them), crossing voices, languages we do not understand. Sometimes it is easier to establish a bond with a mirror pane than with another man… Are we all so different that we will never meet? Or does the spectacle give us hope for creating a new, common language?

Today (22 March) another presentation of the spectacle. See you then!

 

„Yesterday You Were Angry In Green”
Text and adaptation: Eliza Kącka
Directed by Anna Augustynowicz
Stage design: Marek Braun
Costumes: Tomasz Armada
Videoart, light: Wojciech Kapela
Music: Jacek Wierzchowski
Cast: Anna Moskal, Marianna Linde, Karol Wróblewski, Mirosław Guzowski
and Maria Wieczorek (violin)

 

Photos: Maciej Zakrzewski