DZIUBIELE BUS STOP THEATER

Shakespeare in Dziubiele

This marks eight years that I have been hanging a poster on the bulletin board in Dziubiele village at Lake Śniardwy: “Come to the July and August performances based on the plays of Shakespeare, Słowacki, Przybora, the brothers Grimm, Golding… Entrance free in evening dress.” I count the village inhabitants – young and old, volunteering to participate in rehearsals under the cloud at the playground. Everyone gets a copy of the script. It changes over the course of the rehearsals; I add jokes, anecdotes, and actors’ comments, as well as quotes from the local press. The performance for an audience is not a chance for local stars to strut their stuff, there are no leading roles. The aim is to read the text as a group, not to become a character in a drama. Artistic talent revealed itself at once, and we make use of it: in writing (Robert Sowa), props (Bartek Śliwa), acting (Justyna Zakrzewska), and voice (Wiktoria Pazińska). Guests from the city and villages watch their neighbors and hosts in an odd, ceremonial context. For the foreigners, we read fragments in English. After one performance, the German viewers told us that there was not much they could understand, but they admired the actors’ enthusiasm, and the fact that everyone was important on stage, that no one stood on the sidelines. Our theatrical sessions do not conclude with the final applause, no one goes home. The actors mingle with with the audience at a long table, set with treats prepared by the host actresses. Unlike a city banquet following a premiere – a review of the performance and the first reviews by theater buffs – in Dziubiele, this is a chance for a casual meeting. Thus concluded the performance we did of the Brothers Grimm’s Bremen Town Musicians; though the protagonists fail to start a career in the big city, they find joy in playing music with each other. For the first five years, our productions were documented and broadcast over television. Cameras accompanied the young village inhabitants for the Warsaw performance of my rock-opera, Deception Island. We have organized the tiny Dziubiele Film Festival for years, showing films featuring the inhabitants as part of the Playing Field of War and Peace project. Two of these films traveled to Warsaw, where they appeared on the screen during performances (e.g. The Margaret Collection at the Theatre Institute). The latest document, The Children of Jeromins, The Children of Jarząbeks, records a moving presentation; the audience visits various farmyards, where whole families read fragments of a novel by Ernst Wiechert and speak of their parents’ postwar migrations. We accompany their daily routines and watch the creation of a remarkable “harvest wreath” – a first-prize winner. At the playground in Dziubiele, as in an ancient Greek agora, under canopies instead of Athenian colonnades, we hear debates on priorities in urban investments, complaints against the city authorities and their unkept promises, the cries of volleyball players, disco-polo music from speakers handled by Mr. Pietrzak (Dziubiele’s mayor), and sometimes – between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m. – the powerful voices of actors.