Justyna Biernat
In search of Atlantis[1]
I
The area of activity was thought of very broadly. We believed that the very creation of Pracownia (‘Workshop’) would open up possibilities for the fulfilment of needs and expectations already found. We believed in the existence of Atlantis. Hence, many of our activities involved preparing situations, spaces and the nature of mediating and connecting people seeking creative contact[ii].
The mythical Atlantis emerging from the pages of the Olsztyn Workshop’s programme was meant to be a space for art based on active participation, collectivity and courage. The young creators of the Interdisciplinary Creativity and Research Centre Pracownia (‘Workshop’) declared to adopt ‘an attitude of discovery and recognition of the issues embedded in the environment’.[iii] They intended to undertake activities of an exploratory nature and concentrate on creativity, rather than aiming for ready-made products in the form of performances or exhibitions. Their artworks were intended to be a form of ‘evocative gesture’, breaking away from the atmosphere of pompousness and moving towards simplicity and colloquiality. Yet the formulated postulates were gradually transformed in the course of the projects. The created circle started to close, which, according to the artists, resulted in the audience’s passivity. The symbolic Atlantis, hitherto understood in an affirmative way, began to be described as a threat of exclusivity and passivity. Signed by the creators of the Workshop – Krzysztof Gedroyć, Ryszard Michalski, Wacław Sobaszek and Ewa Wołoczko – the document entitled Geography of Action was the result of further reflections on art and community, on the category of ‘interpersonal’ and ‘living culture’. It highlighted young people’s conviction that acting in culture means renewing interpersonal contact. Living culture, on the other hand, should be inextricably linked to a place in the physical sense, because, according to the artists, it is in places that direct ties are realised: neighbourly, friendly, generational and sometimes also ethnic.
This perspective makes it possible to incorporate not only the memory of the inhabitants, but also the memory of the place or the memory of the landscape into reflections on living culture. The landscape would be seen, according to the anthropologist Tim Ingold, as a permanent record and testimony of the life and work of past generations, and not merely as a background for human activities[iv]. The artists of the Workshop discovered the Warmian landscape in their projects carried out in the villages near Olsztyn. In 1979, Ewa Wołoczko and Krzysztof Łepkowski carried out the action Journey Home. Their focus was on abandoned farms in Nowe Włóki, Plutki and Sętal. ‘We decided to prepare an event,’ wrote Wołoczko, ‘that would make others ask themselves: what is home? Not this particular one, my home. Home in general. What does home mean to me?’[v] During the action, wanderers traversed paths full of clay and mud, looked into ruined farms, looked at broken furnaces, torn-out doorframes, torn-up floors. Inside the houses, they found old newspapers in Polish or German, primary school notebooks, broken weaving tools, paintings and plaster figurines of saints. Close by were orchards, gardens, sown fields and abandoned machinery[vi]. The last house we visited was quite different – the windows were curtained and the floor was lined with linen. Candles were burning, and soup was cooking in the kitchen on a makeshift cooker. A shared meal concluded the wandering, which symbolically restored the abandoned place to its former life. It showed that the farm, as well as the whole of Warmia, was an area marked by a lack of continuity and permanence of tradition, it showed that ‘an abyss opens up between the past and the present.’[vii] Here, history materialised through ruins and relics, about which Aleida Assman, a scholar of remembrance, wrote: ‘Ruins and relics become detached from their surroundings as foreign bodies, remnants of a past time. Interrupted history is frozen in these remains and continues without any connection to the life of the local present, which has moved on and has furthermore come to terms with the relics of the past.’[viii]
For the ‘local present’, the abandoned farms are remnants, residues, traces of the life and migration of Warmians. At the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, when the Journey Home action took place, 30,000 of the 40,000 Warmians living there at the time left Warmia.[ix] This was the result of the 1970 agreement between the People’s Republic of Poland and the Federal Republic of Germany. Warmia, part of the historic region of Prussia, has been in the process of intensive cultural change since the end of the war, when it was incorporated into the Polish state. The cultural landscape of the Prussian lands was shaped over the centuries by German, Polish, Lithuanian and, to a lesser extent, Dutch, Russian and Jewish settlements.[x] It is a landscape that needed to be tamed by those who were resettled or who voluntarily settled the area. After the war, mainly Poles from the north-eastern borderlands of the Second Polish Republic, Kurpie and Mazovia as well as Podlasie and Lublin regions, came to Warmia and Masuria. The region was also inhabited by resettled Ukrainians and Lemkos.[xi]
The ‘cultural background’ of the newcomers contributed to the cultural diversity of the Warmian towns and villages and significantly influenced the adaptation problems of the newly arrived population. The cultural landscape they found was not interesting as opposed to the natural landscape, which was an important factor in integration and identity-forming processes[xii]. The newcomers initially felt that the landscape was ‘foreign’ and over time tried to find some similarities with the landscape of their homelands.[xiii] Their ‘landscape images’ were created thanks to the proximity and beauty of nature. Warmia and Masuria appeared to them as ‘a land of great lakes and beautiful forests’.[xiv] However, as Jacek Poniedziałek’s sociological findings indicate, in the first years of the resettlement there was no ‘symbolic incorporation of the iconic landscape of East Prussia, which could have created a sense of “rootedness in place”’ among the new inhabitants.[xv] As emphasised by Poniedziałek, referring to Marc Auge’s anthropological research, ‘rootedness’ is necessary so that a space seen as foreign or even unfriendly can become an anthropological ‘place’.[xvi] Consequently, the history of resettlement has made Warmia a space of unrootedness and of low social capital. It has also caused the individual and collective identity of the province’s inhabitants to become a plurale tantum identity, characteristic of borderlands.[xvii]
At the same time, migration of the population from the former East Prussia, the German border country (Deutsches Grenzland Ostpreußen), has contributed to subjecting the local provincial landscape to numerous mythicisations. East Prussia represents something existing outside of time, always past, quasi-substantial and timeless. As the writer Siegfried Lenz emphasised: ‘In the perceptions prevalent outside their borders, they appeared as a rural region, reduced to the impressive landscapes that were its hallmark.’[xviii] The landscape of East Prussia as a landscape of crystalline lakes, boundless fields and dark forests was recorded in The East Prussian Song,[xix] and even then, Lenz emphasised, Prussia ceased to be a real place and became nostalgic, full of lyrical beauty for something lost that no one had ever possessed. It became ‘a world of bewildering images, dreams and metaphors, whose sacredness borders with the divine.’[xx] East Prussia resembling a green island transforming into a fairy tale is the topical image described by Lenz, while in the view of the researcher Jürgen Joachimsthaler it is the Atlantis of the North, the Grail hidden far to the east. He too inscribed these territories in the realm of imagination: ‘It is a texture saturated with dreams, fears and visions, like a torn papyrus with an illegible title, the remnants of which are stored in various places, where one fantasies of what the whole might have looked like.’[xxi]
The landscape of hills, forests and deserted farms seen by the action participants is first and foremost the landscape of a lost small homeland, a Heimat. The title journey home can be seen not only from the perspective of the ‘frozen past’, but also from that of the ‘local present’ and the significant impulses existing between the past and the present. The artists who appeared on the land of Warmia became part of its displaced history. Both their artistic and educational work in Olsztyn and their journeys to the villages near Olsztyn have been described by scholars as new-settlment activities strongly intertwined with the alternative culture movement. This culture was formed in Poland from the late 1970s to the second half of the 1990s, and its activists are described as ‘contesters of conservative, traditionalist visions of reality’.[xxii] They formed artistic, theatrical, esoteric and religious communities, characterised by a non-conformist attitude towards the socio-political order and a search for non-standard forms of expression. They left the urban areas to make rural areas the space for their daily activities.
The alternative settlement incorporates the participants of the Journey Home action, as the Olsztyn province will soon become a space for living and creating new settlements. Therefore, the time of the Olsztyn-based Workshop, and in particular the period of expeditions into the unknown, is a time of the search for Atlantis. The mythical land appearing in the young people’s manifesto, understood by them in terms of freedom and the collectivity of art, is firmly entwined in the imaginarium of East Prussia. The Warmian land was once again inscribed in the sequence of imaginations – this time it was intended to allow for the development of alternative forms of art in the communist era, for a relatively independent and harmonious compilation of cultural activities with private life. The rich and somewhat wild nature of former East Prussia stimulated the senses of alternative artists, for whom proximity to the land, nature and truth was fundamental.[xxiii] This triad created by Tadeusz Nyczek accurately defines the attempts of the young artists to explore non-urbanised areas, to search for spontaneity and authenticity. At the same time, it reveals the frequently romanticised attitude of newcomers to local culture. One of the key images, both in the Romantic tradition and in the topology of East Prussia shaped over the centuries, was that of the forest. ‘The forest took on the characteristics of a landscape, drained of people, of the marks of human actions’, wrote Hubert Orłowski.[xxiv] ‘The forest as an asylum, nature as an optimal anti-civilisational biotope – this is what emerges from behind this compact definition of its location’,[xxv] the researcher adds. The forests of Warmia opened up the promise of independent and experimental art for young artists, away from censorious centres and structuring networks.
II
Dusk, forest, forest paths. First uphill, then gently downhill. The forest space is calming, but also invigorating, tempting with the possibility of a richer movement. The feeling of being close to animals is enticing [...]. Although we have been running for years, we still find new paths in the same area of forest adjacent to the theatre. It depends more on our imagination than on what the forest is like.[xxvi]
Xawery Stańczyk, who researched Polish alternative culture, stressed that the new-settlement movement should not be reduced to ‘escapist and anti-communist behaviour’ only. According to him, the movement was mainly associated with ‘an attempt to break with the dominant socio-cultural system and with the production of alternative forms of community, not with an escape from state authorities’.[xxvii] The village, Stańczyk argued, made it possible to build community not only because of its economic or geographical advantages, but also because, in the view of new-settlers, it offered valuable cultural patterns. Although waves of alternative migration took place both in the late 1970s and in the 1990s, newcomers from alternative circles began to appear in the Polish provinces mostly after the introduction of martial law in 1981. One of the important destinations was the Warmian village.
When the Olsztyn Interdisciplinary Creativity and Research Centre Pracownia (‘Workshop’) was forced to cease its activities, its former members began looking for new spaces for themselves. Undoubtedly, the actions undertaken in the provinces contributed to their perception of the Warmian landscape from the ‘dwelling perspective’.[xxviii] This perspective was brought closer to the members of the Workshop and the participants of artistic undertakings by Krzysztof Łepkowski, who in the 1970s had lived in Plutki, not far from Olsztyn, and in the 1980s, together with his wife Dorota, created an organic farm in the village of Godki. The mesmerising potential of the village was also noticed by Wacław Sobaszek. He recalled his activity in the Workshop and Łepkowski’s rural initiatives. Back in the early days of the Olsztyn Workshop, Łepkowski organised an expedition to the village of Trękus, which was very memorable for Sobaszek: ‘Leaving the forest cottage at dusk and wandering until dawn. Through half-abandoned villages and completely empty village colonies. Fatigue was setting in, but Krzyś kept up the walking pace. In the morning we walked as if in a malaise, like ghosts among other ghosts, the owners of deserted backyards.’[xxix] The Journey to Dawn action and all the other wanderings proved to be the harbingers of significant transformations in the provincial Warmian landscape. In 1982, Wacław and Erdmute Sobaszek decided to move into an abandoned farmhouse on the edge of the forest in Węgajty.
Their intention was to create ‘an alternative, independent facility, where ecology, art and counterculture would form a natural environment.’[xxx] Erdmute recalled: ‘We decided to go into the artistic underground, to practise guerrilla theatre in the woods. The former company of the Workshop rolled up their sleeves, we hauled manure out of the cowshed located in the brick part of the barn, we adapted the house, which was practically a ruin.’[xxxi] The mentioned cowshed was transformed into a theatre hall with an adjoining small foyer. In 1986, more artists came to Węgajty – Małgorzata Dżygadło-Niklaus and Johann Wolfgang Niklaus. After some time, they were joined by Witold Broda and Katarzyna Krupka. A few years later, together they founded the Węgajty Theatre Association, which set out to become active in rural communities.[xxxii] In the association’s statute, they noted that they wanted to convey ‘new cultural impulses’ to these communities, as well as ‘protect them from the negative influences of mass culture’.[xxxiii] The flourishing cultural activity was strongly coupled with the adaptation processes of the artists in the new provincial space. The Sobaszeks remained in a house adjacent to the barn-theatre, sheltered by numerous trees and distant from the rural buildings. Seen in landscape terms, this guerrilla gesture of seclusion is an immersion into the forest biotope, establishing a special bond with nature, which became a refuge for the activities they undertook. The artistic guerrillas-newcomers have formed an alliance with nature, their interaction with the natural environment can be called harmonious[xxxiv] and topophilic. The neologism topophilia, coined by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, describes the emotional connection (Greek philia) of a person with a place (Greek topos), seen as a living space.[xxxv] The term ‘place’ – topos – indicates the process of ‘rootedness’, making the forest not only a space for alternative theatre activities, but above all their home.
The Sobaszeks’ radical turn towards nature certainly allowed them to create the mentioned topophilic bond, which, in Tuan’s understanding, is a sensation combining simple sensual pleasure with the aesthetic perception of beauty. At the same time, the hiding and remoteness exposed them to loneliness. Beginning his guerrilla life – or ‘conspiracy’[xxxvi] – Wacław Sobaszek noted in August 1982: ‘Loneliness. I walk out onto the hill behind the house. Hares are running down the hill, but there are bigger animals there too. I see them after a while. Suddenly I notice a bird above my head. Ashy, noiseless. It’s flying in circles. Is it trying to land on me? A blind owl. “It flies out at dusk.” And immediately afterwards comes the shrill cry of a goat – a roe deer.’[xxxvii] The almost idyllic description of listening to the natural landscape is intertwined in the Węgajty diary with descriptions of intense participation in that landscape, such as Sobaszek’s runs through the forest. Their regular training as actors can be seen as opening up to a whole range of polysensory experiences, which Arnold Berleant, in his philosophical reflections, described as ‘being in the landscape’.[xxxviii] He contrasted ‘being in the landscape’ with a distanced visual experience, in other words ‘being towards the landscape’. His concept of ‘participatory landscape’ breaks with the receptive, contemplative attitude of the observer, characteristic of the ‘panoramic landscape’, in favour of the participant’s active attitude.[xxxix]
In Węgajty we can see how a transformation of thinking about the landscape is taking place through the daily rhythm of compiling life with art, with the landscape ceasing to be merely an object. Thanks to this, any new-settlement processes of adaptation did not take place by appropriating the space, either by ‘forgetting’ or ‘destroying’ it.[xl] The Sobaszeks did not disturb its natural structure; they only undertook the necessary renovation work on the ruined farm. They treated the surrounding nature[xli] not from a colonising but from a partnering perspective, which on the one hand entailed the tempting possibility of independent theatrical practices, but on the other hand carried numerous risks. The gesture of breaking with the theatrical canon and moving towards the periphery, although extremely attractive and common in the age of alternative activities, concealed the risk of creating artistic and ideological cocoons, as well as the danger of financial and administrative banishment. Węgajty was therefore not only an ‘artistic underground’ but also an ‘exile’,[xlii] especially in the autumn and winter, when an allied relationship with nature required a lot of economic effort. In October 1983, Sobaszek noted: ‘Sprinkle your path with fallen pine needles, let no one know that anyone lives here.’[xliii] The experience of isolation and loneliness of life on the edge of the forest was intertwined with the experience of emptiness in the Węgajty theatre hall.
The former East Prussia, the mythologised ‘land of crystalline lakes’ was at the same time a ‘land of dark forests’, and it may seem that the Sobaszeks recognised the dichotomous nature of this space. The road to Węgajty led them through other provincial spaces which, in a way, determined the direction of their further journey and which were subject to significant questioning in their reflection. The formative landscape for Polish alternative theatre, one might say the ‘founding landscape’,[xliv] was Brzezinka, a forest base which in the 1970s was used for the paratheatrical activities of Jerzy Grotowski. The destroyed farm building, together with the surrounding forest, was intended as a space for the constitution of a new kind of artistic community. Brzezinka allowed young artists to reformulate their thinking about both theatre and the rural landscape.[xlv] However, by contributing to strong new-settlement processes among theatre artists, it also forced them to reflect on the category of utopianism. Years later, Wacław Sobaszek described the events at Brzezinka as ‘isolated from reality’, and Brzezinka itself as a space ‘sunk in amber’.[xlvi]
Despite his critical attitude to some of Grotowski’s activities, Sobaszek considered the Laboratory Theatre to be an important experience on his artistic path. Likewise Erdmute, who as a teenager watched the performance Apocalypsis cum Figuris[xlvii] in Wrocław. Years later, she recalled: ‘For me, this encounter was something that I could not describe in aesthetic terms, only in terms of being. It was an experience which made me certain that I would never return to where I came from, not in the geographical sense.’[xlviii] Paradoxically, the geographical sense is special in the mapping of Erdmute Sobaszek’s experiences and the landscape of Węgajty. For her, Warmia is a symbolic homeland. Erdmute was born and raised near Berlin, but her father came from near Königsberg, the capital of the former East Prussia (at the end of the war the family fled to the west).[xlix] She declared herself a Prussian, belonging to ‘a nation that no longer exists.’[l] After leaving East Germany, she very quickly ‘soaked up the Polish world.’[li] The Warmian destination, or the destination of East Prussia, therefore seems natural in this case. The Warmian landscape was not a hostile or foreign landscape for Erdmute, nor was it for Wacław. His grandfather came from the Prussian historical region of Łukta, while his uncle was described in his recollections as a ‘monumental Warmian’ who ‘used a very strange language, he was an open book of Old Polish.’[lii] Thus, Warmia functioned in the Sobaszeks’ thinking at an imaginary level, much like Brzezinka or the mythical Atlantis. Węgajty became a space of confrontation with their imagination; a confrontation based on many years of consistent ‘rootedness’.
III
In the village, there is still no anonymous behaviour that people from the city treat as normal. I remember experiencing a cognitive shock when, on one of my trips to the Hutsul region, I noticed that the people there were looking straight into the eyes of complete strangers while talking to them. This made me realise how important it is to have a flow between people, a flow of feeling.[liii]
In the process of rootedness, both the natural landscape and the cultural landscape are gradually tamed. This happens through everyday activities which, for Erdmute and Wacław Sobaszek, are inextricably intertwined with theatrical work. This work, so different from agricultural work, must have strongly influenced the way the local community was built. According to the sociological findings of Alfred Schutz, there are two community modules. One can form a purely time-based community as ‘co-residents’ or a time-based community and a spatial community, then becoming ‘companions’. ‘Companions meet directly and know each other's characteristics, while co-residents may never encounter each other, remain anonymous and undifferentiated to each other.’[liv] Howwever, the kinship of time, as emphasised by researcher Justyna Laskowska-Otwinowska, ‘does not take away their human characteristics, as in the stereotype of “one of us-stranger”’.[lv] Referring to Arjun Appadurai’s research, Laskowska-Otwinowska added that ‘the thesis of local community as a necessary condition for building a sense of social connection’ is an anachronism, as locality today is not created ‘on the basis of people’s physical proximity, but on the existence of an ever richer range of imagined communities, grouping themselves beyond spatial conditions’.[lvi] Today’s locality is not so much a spatial-scalar locality as it is a contextual-relational locality. From this perspective, it seems understandable that misunderstandings and conflicts arose between the rural population, focused on ‘physical proximity in a shared geographical space’, and the new-settlers, who referred to their community as ‘spatially distant villages of a similar type’.[lvii] The artists who came to the province, focused on building this imagined community, often remaining only co-residents of the local community. They made themselves companions within their developing mythical Atlantis.
The island as an idyllic image exposed the new-settlers to the risk of exclusion. It also sharpened neighbourhood boundaries, of which Erdmute Sobaszek was aware. She said: ‘Thinking in terms of an island is dangerous, because when our island turns out to be a utopia, we lose everything.’[lviii] Although the Sobaszeks, along with other artists from the villages near Olsztyn, had the opportunity to develop their communities on the basis of ‘contextual-relational locality’, they remained somewhat isolated from each other. ‘Moving here,’ Sobaszek recalled, ‘we hoped that by having neighbours who understood our different lifestyle, it would be easier for us to live. But on the other hand, we created a kind of expectation from which nothing creative emerged.’[lix] The alternative island life brought unexpected difficulties. It turned out that what united the artistic community was not strong enough to ‘process reality’. ‘And even though we belonged a bit to this community,’ Sobaszek admitted, ‘we lived on the periphery, dealing with our theatre’.[lx]
In Węgajty, the focus was on theatre activity. The language of theatre became the language of bond-building, although this bond was not of a local nature at first. The proposed workshops and performances attracted interest beyond the Wegajty circle. The first performance of The Vincenz Stories. Strange, dreamt of, but immeasurably clear stories..., about the True Jew, the Antichrist and the Metropolitan, directed by Wacław Sobaszek, premiered in 1988. The performance was based on short stories: Rarytas from the cycle Na wysokiej połoninie. Barwinkowy wianek and Echa z Czerdaka by Stanisław Vincenz, with a premiere cast: Erdmute and Wacław Sobaszek and Wolfgang Niklaus. In 1992, another performance, The Inn Towards Eternal Peace, was presented. The first cast included Erdmute and Wacław Sobaszek, Małgorzata and Wolfgang Niklaus and Witold Broda. The story of Magdalena from Czesław Miłosz’s The Issa Valley became the background of the performance, as well as texts by Johannes Bobrowski and Mikołaj from Wilkowiecko. At the same time, the Sobaszeks and Niklaus began theatrical expeditions, which allowed them to further explore the Warmian landscape and many other landscapes.[lxi] The wanderers were keen to reach out to old ritual traditions and dying out folk practices. One such expedition was described by Erdmute Sobaszek. It was 1987, the village of Ostre Bardo, populated after the Operation Vistula by people of Ukrainian descent.
A landscape, no one knows where it leads.
This landscape - where did it come from?
Here you can see meadows, with old willows growing on them, swamps overgrown with reeds.
Over there are forests,
the horizon.
[...]
An unnecessary landscape, like grass growing on cobblestones, crumbling concrete,
a rusty barrier thrown across the road.[lxii]
In the anaphoric description of the landscape of old willows, swamps, reeds and woods, one can see the experience of loss. The poetic landscape is an unwanted and disturbing landscape, in which what is old and forgotten blends with what is new and still untamed. The poetic formula is in a way a repetition of the performative gesture once made by the Olsztyn Workshop. At that time, each house encountered during the wandering was marked with a blue flag and the walls of the houses were painted with ‘objects-echoes /a pot, a jug, a chair, a bed, a fragment of a child's pram/ and figures-shadows /children, a pregnant woman, a bird, a dog, a cat, a hen./’[lxiii] These walls and objects, like echoes, return in another place and time, hypnotise passers-by once again and bring them closer to their incomplete history.
Within these walls -
order built stone upon stone,
in red bricks and in a quadrangle of vast courtyards.
Knowledge was written in these walls.
Unnecessarily.
[.]
On these walls
paintings carefully brought in cattle wagons,
just as holy water is brought home.[lxiv]
Sobaszek closes his poem from the expedition with a rhetorical question: ‘The stream of life humming./ Where?’, thus showing the emptiness that former Prussia is surrounded by. This lyrical image is far from the topology of enchanting forests; it breaks with the tradition of aestheticising the provincial landscape in favour of showing cracks and revealing the history of forced resettlement. Sobaszek noticed these cracks in many of the spaces she entered during her artistic explorations. In 1990, the Sobaszeks arrived in the village of Dziadówek. She noted at the time:
Painful oblivion,
The burden of nameless things.
My back is bending,
Steps getting shorter, breathing getting heavyi.[lxv]
This time, the landscapes were replaced by the author with the figure of a bird ‘stunned by swaying in the openness of space’, who, as the lyrical subject, asks the question: ‘What to sing about?’[lxvi] Sobaszek’s poetic world brings the experience of a wandering aoido closer, travelling many roads and homes, filling these homes with music. The images that emerge from her journey like Homeric reminiscences are saturated with loss. Sobaszek seems to leave a few sounds of her own in her wanderings, but she also, or above all, takes in the sounds she heard, meticulously recording them in her memory. The aim of the wanderings embarked upon by Sobaszek was to reach old rituals. ‘We became present in the villages, inviting people to the performances with dancing, singing. At grandfather Tkaczuk’s house in Kawkowo, who taught us carol singing according to patterns brought from the vicinity of Lviv. In the oldest house in Węgajty, we found carol singing props, a white horse, called Szemel, and a goat. Suddenly the doors of the houses began to open by themselves. Szemel remembered the times of Ostpreussen!’, wrote Wacław Sobaszek in a text with the characteristic title Building a place.[lxvii] Rooting oneself, ‘building on a place, in a place, around a place’ and creating a ‘theatre farm’ were, in Sobaszek’s case, linked to the history of the local landscape. The found Szemel seduced the explorers, like a trace brought them closer to the hidden past.
Beata Frydryczak, who researches the polysensory dimension of landscape, pointed out that ‘traces as sensory data can refer beyond themselves, suggest something else, something more [...] a trace needs to be read: it means discovering similarities, relations between what is and what is hidden, or – between what is and what is not there. Its meaning, therefore, does not depend on the intention of giving a sign, but on the ability to read it.’[lxviii] The Sobaszeks made an effort to read the trace that was given to them. This means that Szemel was not just an attractive prop in their artistic work, but a valuable materialisation of the past of the Warmian land. ‘A trace is a manifestation of proximity no matter how far away the thing that left it may be.’[lxix] ‘Walking along traces’ means reconstructing a specific whole on the basis of what is left, Frydryczak added. Reading the traces, deciphering meanings and symbols acquired for the Sobaszeks the formula of carolling. There is no doubt that the discovery contributed to their relationship with the ‘inherited place’[lxx] and at the same time started to distance them from the mythical, imaginary island.
The island was strongly transformed in 1996. At that time, it split into the Węgajty Schola, run by the Niklaus couple, and the Węgajty Theatre / field project, initiated by Wacław Sobaszek.[lxxi] He explained: ‘this duality is interpreted by some as a separation, disintegration or an unclear situation. That is why I take this opportunity to explain: we are working in a common centre, I have also indicated what the common feature is. Theatre does not have to be a monolith, theatre is first and foremost a workshop’.[lxxii] The Niklaus family moved to Nowe Kawkowo, not far from Węgajty, while the Sobaszeks continued their theatrical work in the Węgajty barn.[lxxiii] Their theatre, although not always close to the Węgajty community and understood by it,[lxxiv] turned out to be a space for meeting with the local community. Respondents in a field study conducted in 2002 by Justyna Laskowska-Otwinowska’s student team described the Węgajty Theatre in the following way: ‘they go around and ask what used to be done here, so that it doesn’t completely disappear [...] Through this theatre of ours, I think a lot of this tradition has been preserved. [...] There would be something missing, if they were gone. [...] They seem to have such a good influence on the youth.’[lxxv] The presence of the Węgajty Theatre in the cultural landscape of Węgajty is considered valuable: ‘There is always someone from the Theatre who comes and takes care of these children, they make garlands [...]. For years now, these garlands have been set afloat on the water on Saint John’s Eve. But that's mostly due to the theatre’; ‘now our theatre takes care of it [...]. And at Epiphany [...] they teach the children what it’s like there, and they come and present it.’[lxxvi] One might add that the theatre has become a permanent component of the landscape: ‘And a lot of people associate these areas with the theatre’.[lxxvii]
As Wacław Sobaszek confessed, the creation of the Wegajty Theatre was also concluding ‘the stage of a forest refuge, perhaps even an escape from the world’.[lxxviii] In the early 1980s, when the young artists arrived in the Warmian countryside, they saw destroyed ‘farmsteads, abandoned and half-collapsed houses with the remnants of household equipment.’[lxxix] It was an image of ruin, which they chose because of the forest.[lxxx] The former East Prussia revealed itself to them as a mythical Atlantis, which was part of the many processes of mythicising this area. Shaped for years by the Sobaszeks, the Węgajty landscape began to function as a utopian ‘landscape-phenomenon’[lxxxi], in other words, a landscape that manifests itself to people in a certain way. It is a space of synergy between art and nature, where one leads a life in harmony with nature[lxxxii] and where the boundary between work and life disappears. ‘The problems associated with the institutional world disappear,’ Sobaszek emphasised, ‘you search for yourself, that’s what theatre is for.’[lxxxiii] Erdmute added that at one point their ‘dream of a completely natural life’ faded away. It was the moment when she stood in her garden in 1986 and
Justyna Biernat
Translation: Michalina Stańdo
[1] The text is the result of research funded by the National Science Centre, application number 2017/26/E/ HS2/00357.
[ii] Krzysztof Gedroyć, Ryszard Michalski, Wacław Sobaszek, Ewa Wołoczko, Interdyscyplinarna Placówka Twórczo- Badawcza „Pracownia”, [in:] Parateatr II. Sztuka otwarta, ed. Ewa Dawidejt-Jastrzębska, Kalambur, Wrocław 1982, p. 63.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood and Skill, Routledge, London-New York 2000.
[v] Ewa Wołoczko, Podróż do domu, [in:] Materiały o Pracowni: sierpień 1978 - marzec 1980, typescript, Socio-Cultural Association ‘Pojezierze’, Interdisciplinary Creativity and Research Centre Pracownia (‘Workshop’), Olsztyn 1980, p. 40.
[vi] Maciej Łepkowski, Podróż do domu, [in:] Parateatr II. Sztuka otwarta, op. cit., p. 69.
[vii] Aleida Assman, Między historią a pamięcią. Antologia, ed. Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska, The University of Warsaw Press, Warsaw 2014, p. 169.
[viii] Ibid, p. 169.
[ix] Andrzej Sakson, Changes in social ties in Warmia and Masuria, „Polish Western Affairs. La Pologne et Les Affaires Occidentales” 1989, No. 2, p. 149.
[x] Izabela Lewandowska, Trudne dziedzictwo ziemi. Warmia i Mazury 1945-1989, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Warmińsko-Mazurskiego, Olsztyn 2012, p. 10.
[xi] Jacek Poniedziałek in his text on the landscape of Warmia and Masuria distinguishes several types of migration: voluntary migration of an economic nature (newcomers from central Poland), situational compulsion (newcomers from the borderlands), administrative compulsion (Ukrainians and Lemkos). Jacek Poniedziałek, Od uosobienia wroga do poczucia swojskości. Postawy mieszkańców Warmii i Mazur wobec krajobrazu przyrodniczego regionu, ‘Borussia’ 2012, No. 51, p. 43.
[xii] Conclusions of both Jacek Poniedziałek and Zbigniew Mazur, researching the areas of Warmia and Masuria. See Zbigniew Mazur, Dziedzictwo wyłączne, podzielone, wspólne, [in:] Wspólne dziedzictwo? Ze studiów nad stosunkiem do spuścizny kulturowej na Ziemiach Zachodnich i Północnych, ed. Zbigniew Mazur, Instytut Zachodni, Poznań 2000, pp. 813-850.
[xiii] In his research, Poniedziałek pointed out that ‘foreignness of the landscape’ accompanied all new inhabitants of Warmia and Masuria. Adaptation processes were strongly correlated with the type of migration - in the case of forced resettlement and traumatic experiences, newcomers showed hostility towards the landscape, while voluntary migrants perceived ‘the beauty of the landscape’; Jacek Poniedziałek, Od uosobienia wroga..., op. cit., pp. 43-45.
[xiv] Ibid, p. 45.
[xv] Ibid, p. 49.
[xvi] Marc Auge, Nie-miejsca. Wprowadzenie do antropologii hipernowoczesności, translated into Polish by R. Chymkowski, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, Warsaw 2011.
[xvii] Hubert Orłowski, Rafał Żytyniec, Wstęp, [in:] Prusy Wschodnie. Wspólnota wyobrażona, ed. Hubert Orłowski, Rafał Żytyniec, Adam Mickiewicz University, Wydawnictwo Nauka i Innowacje, Poznań 2019, p. 86.
[xviii] Siegfried Lenz, Muzeum ziemi ojczystej. Wstęp, translated into Polish by E. Borg, M. Przybyłowska, [in:] Prusy Wschodnie. Wspólnota wyobrażona, op. cit., p. 246.
[xix] The anthem of East Prussia was the 1918 song by Johanna Amrosius Mein Heimatland. In the 1930s, Herbert Brust composed Oratorium der Heimat, and Erich Hannighofer added four verses to Ambrosius’ piece and The East Prussian Song was created.
[xx] Siegfried Lenz, Muzeum ziemi ojczystej, op. cit., p. 151.
[xxi] Jurgen Joachimsthaler, Podwójna przeszłość. Prusy Wschodnie jako fikcja, translated into Polish by J. Kałążny, [in:] Prusy Wschodnie. Wspólnota wyobrażona, op. cit., 242.
[xxii] Xawery Stańczyk, Macie swoją kulturę. Kultura alternatywna w Polsce 1978-1996, Narodowe Centrum Kultury, Warsaw 2018, p. 15.
[xxiii] Tadeusz Nyczek, Studencki, alternatywny, otwarty. Rzecz o teatrze, [in:] Kultura studencka: zjawisko, twórcy, instytucje, ed. Edward Chudziński, Fundacja STU, Kraków 2011, pp. 75-102, p. 96.
[xxiv] Hubert Orłowski, Rafał Żytyniec, Wstęp, op. cit., p. 27.
[xxv] Ibid, p. 36.
[xxvi] Wacław Sobaszek, Spiski życiowe. Dziennik węgajcki 19822020, ed. Justyna Biernat, Joanna Kocemba-Żebrowska, Stowarzyszenie Węgajty, Węgajty 2020, p. 77.
[xxvii] Xawery Stańczyk, Macie swoją kulturę, op. cit., 186.
[xxviii] Tim Ingold’s term dwelling perspective; cf. Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, op. cit., p. 189.
[xxix] Wacław Sobaszek, Spiski życiowe, op. cit., p. 238.
[xxx] Tadeusz Kornaś, Schola Teatru Węgajty. Dramat liturgiczny, Homini, Kraków 2012, p. 194.
[xxxi] Ibid.
[xxxii] The Wegajty Theatre Association was founded in 1990 at the Centre for Education and Cultural Initiatives in Olsztyn. It was a continuation of the Węgajty Village Theatre. Since 2001 the Association has been called Węgajty. Its management board includes: Erdmute Sobaszek as president, Johann Wolfgang Niklaus as vice-president, Małgorzata Dżygadło-Niklaus - treasurer, Monika Paśnik-Petryczenko - secretary since 2004, members: Wacław Sobaszek, Izabela Giczewska since 2014.
[xxxiii] Statutes of the ‘Węgajty’ Association, http://teatrwegajty.art.pl/pliki/statut_stw.pdf, accessed: 17.01.2022.
[xxxiv] Bolesław Schmidt used the term 'harmonious interaction' to describe the agreement between man and nature, meaning human presence in space that is neither autocratic nor competitive towards nature; Bolesław Schmidt, Ład przestrzeni, Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, Warsaw 1998, p. 9.
[xxxv] Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia. A study of environmental perception, attitudes, and values, Columbia University Press, New York 1990, p. 93.
[xxxvi] Wacław Sobaszek entitled his diary, published in 2020, ‘Spiski życiowe’ (Life Conspiracies). This verbal treatment, combining the act of writing down his experiences with conspiracy, harmonises perfectly with the term ‘forest guerrilla’ once used by Erdmute Sobaszek.
[xxxvii] Wacław Sobaszek, Spiski życiowe, op. cit., p. 21.
[xxxviii] Arnold Berleant, Art And Engagement, Temple University Press, Philadelphia 1991, p. 62.
[xxxix] Idem, The Aesthetics of The Environment, Temple University Press, Philadelphia 1992, p. 169. For an in-depth analysis of the Węgajty Theatre’s landscape, see: Justyna Biernat, The Landscape of Węgajty Theatre, Theatre Research International 2021, vol. 46, No. 3, pp. 303-321.
[xl] Jacek Poniedziałek wrote about various types of space appropriation in relation to Warmia and Masuria.
‘Forgetting’ or ‘destroying’ was described by the author as the ‘elimination’ of individual spatial forms. Jacek Poniedziałek, Od uosobienia wroga…, op. cit. p. 40.
[xli] The Sobaszeks’ ‘growing into the space’, to use Poniedziałek’s term, took place through the creation of a vegetable garden next to their house. The artists did not interfere with the natural architecture of the forest. It is worth noting that, according to Poniedziałek’s research, the taming of space in Warmia and Masuria was often associated with a disruption of the natural landscape. For example, newly arrived residents cut down old trees and planted new ones in their place ‘according to traditional patterns brought from their native lands’. In a narrative interview that Poniedziałek conducted in 2007, one can read: ‘Dad used to cut down lilacs and jasmines because there were none of them in our area. In their place he planted apple, pear and plum trees that he had brought from his parents’ house. Dad said that when these trees grew and bore fruit, it was as if we were already at home’; ibid, p. 44.
[xlii] A term noted by Magdalena Hasiuk: ‘Wacław Sobaszek mentioned the depressing aura of the chosen location, which could be troublesome in late autumn and in the pre-spring period’. In a conversation with Leszek Kolankiewicz accompanying the celebrations of the 35th anniversary of the Węgajty Theatre on 29 October 2017, Sobaszek called Węgajty an ‘exile’. While Kolankiewicz referred to the theatre's premises as an ‘institution’; Magdalena Hasiuk, Spojrzenie na wskroś. O wybranych plakatach Teatru Węgajty, [in:] Nauka (płynąca ze) sztuki. Sztuka (uprawiania) nauki, ed. Mariusz Bartosiak, Grażyna Habrajska, Primum Verbum, Łódź 2018, p. 127.
[xliii] Wacław Sobaszek, Spiski życiowe, op. cit., p. 32.
[xliv] The term foundational landscape was coined by me in the course of my research on the landscape of the Węgajty Theatre; Justyna Biernat, The Landscape of Węgajty Theatre, op. cit.
[xlv] For considerations surrounding the landscape, the spatial dimension of the activities that took place at Brzezinka is important. This dimension, as Julia Lizurek has rightly noted, remains secondary to the metaphysical dimension in many publications. ‘The unexplored theme of Brzezinka’s importance as a place of remembrance (feelings, emotional experiences) for paratheatre has, in my view, contributed to the production of a narrative about this place that brings out metaphysicality rather than the much more important materiality’; Julia Lizurek, Wytwarzanie tożsamości miejsca: Brzezinka Jerzego Grotowskiego i Teatru ZAR, [in:] Retelling: strategie przestrzenne, eds. Dominika Ciesielska, Magdalena Kozyra, Aleksandra Łozińska, scientific ed. Małgorzata Sugiera, Wiele Kropek, Kraków 2019, p. 111.
[xlvi] Wacław Sobaszek in conversation with Magdalena Hasiuk, 14 December 2018, Węgajty Theatre Archive.
[xlvii] Wacław Sobaszek and Erdmute Ilse Maria Henkys met in Erdmute's hometown of Petershagen. The couple went together to see a performance of Grotowski presented in Wrocław.
[xlviii] Erdmute Sobaszek, Wacław Sobaszek, Rozmowa 05, [in:] Wolność w systemie zniewolenia. Rozmowy o polskiej kontrkulturze, interview with Zofia Dworakowska, ed. Aldona Jawłowska, Zofia Dworakowska, Institute of Applied Social Sciences of the University of Warsaw, Warsaw 2008, p. 248.
[xlix] Kułakowska Katarzyna, Erdmute Sobaszek, Prusaczka z krainy Rachmanów. Rzecz o współzałożycielce i aktorce Teatru Węgajty, [in:] Polki za granicą, cudzoziemki w Polsce. Literackie i pozaliterackie obrazy doświadczeń życiowych, ed. Beata Walęciuk-Denejka, Aureus - Scientific Publishing House of Siedlce University of Natural Sciences and Humanities, Kraków - Siedlce 2020, p. 62.
[l] Małgorzata Szejnert, Na gościńcu, ‘Gazeta Wyborcza’ 1993, No. 112, p. 15.
[li] Kułakowska Katarzyna, Erdmute Sobaszek, Prusaczka z krainy Rachmanów, op. cit., p. 65.
[lii] Wacław Sobaszek, To trochę donkiszoteria, interview with Magda Grudzińska, ‘Didaskalia. Gazeta Teatralna’ 1997, No. 17, p. 31.
[liii] Erdmute Sobaszek, Na ścieżkach tradycji, interview with Dariusz Matusiak, ‘Dzikie Życie’ 2001, No. 7-8, https://dzikiezycie. pl/archiwum/2001/sierpien-2001/na-sciezkach-tradycji-z- erdmute - sobaszek-rozmawia-dariusz-matusiak, accessed: 8.11.2021.
[liv] Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, Heineman, London 1980, p. 181; as cited in: Justyna Laskowska-Otwinowska, Globalne przepływy a obecność nowoosadników na wsi polskiej, Tempus, Łódź 2008, p. 65.
[lv] Ibid, p. 65.
[lvi] Ibid, p. 65.
[lvii] Ibid, p. 65.
[lviii] Erdmute Sobaszek, Na ścieżkach tradycji, op. cit.
[lix] Ibid.
[lx] Sobaszek recalled that the moment of confrontation with the imaginary ideas was when the children of the new settlers entered school age and when the idea of setting up a community school came up. The idea was not realised; ibid.
[lxi] In 1986 expeditions were made to villages in the Łomża province and Kurpie, while in 1987 expeditions were made to villages in the Olsztyn province: Assuny, Łęknica, Ostre Bardo. Since 2000, Węgajty has from time to time staged performances which had an open-air formula. More about them is written by Magdalena Jasińska, Teatr Wiejski Węgajty jako teatr antropologiczny, [in:] Polski teatr alternatywny po 1989 roku z perspektywy Akademickich / Alternatywnych Spotkań Teatralnych KLAMRA, eds. Artur Duda, Emilia Adamiszyn, Bartłomiej Oleszek, Nicolaus Copernicus University Press, Toruń 2012, pp. 219-236.
[lxii] Erdmute Sobaszek, Zapisy z wypraw teatralnych. Ostre Bardo, ściany, ‘Borussia’ 2001, No. 24-25, pp. 109.
[lxiii] Ewa Wołoczko, Podróż do domu, op. cit., p. 40.
[lxiv] Erdmute Sobaszek, Zapisy z wypraw teatralnych., op. cit., p. 109.
[lxv] Idem., Zapisy z wypraw teatralnych. Dziadówek, wędrówka, ‘Borussia’ 2001, No. 24-25, p. 113.
[lxvi] Ibid, p. 113.
[lxvii] Wacław Sobaszek, Spiski życiowe, op. cit., p. 226.
[lxviii] Beata Frydryczak, O zacieraniu śladów: Walter Benjamin i Fryderyk Nietzsche, ‘Nowa Krytyka’ 2003, No. 15, p. 234.
[lxix] Ibid, p. 235.
[lxx] ‘Building a place? Rather, building on a place, in a place, around a place. Of course I understand the intention of the phrase, but I start with an objection, because this has to do with the attitude I had at the time, the time of the beginning, that there are given places, inherited places, which should remain untouched. They are already equipped with everything we need. Adaptation is therefore, at this stage, only a reconstruction. This is how it was at the beginning, when we started to move in here with our theatre farm in the early spring of 1982’; Wacław Sobaszek, Spiski życiowe, p. 225.
[lxxi] The Węgajty Schola was founded in 1994 and began operating independently in 1996. A field project existed in the years 1996-2011. See: Magdalena Hasiuk, Joanna Kocemba-Żebrowska, Stowarzyszenie, szkoła, spółdzielnia - wielogłos Teatru Węgajty, ‘Didaskalia. Gazeta Teatralna’ 2020, No. 156, https://didaskalia.pl/pl/artykul/stowarzyszenie- szkola-spoldzielnia-wieloglos-teatru-wegajty, accessed: 14.01.2022.
[lxxii] Wacław Sobaszek, O schodzeniu na ziemię, ‘Gazeta Łódzkich Spotkań Teatralnych’, 10-12 December 2004, p. 41.
[lxxiii] Living in dissipation has yielded the expected results over time. Since 2016, the action Sztuka w obejściu has been held regularly, of which the artists write: ‘It is an undertaking prepared jointly by the people living and creating here in Warmia in the neighbouring villages of the Olsztyn area’.
http://sztukawobejsciu.eu/wydarzenia/, accessed: 10.01.2022.
[lxxiv] ‘Sometimes they stage difficult plays which are hard to understand’ Justyna Laskowska-Otwinowska, Globalne przepływy..., op. cit., p. 185.
[lxxv] Ibid, p. 185.
[lxxvi] Ibid.
[lxxvii] Ibid.
[lxxviii] Wacław Sobaszek, Spiski życiowe, op. cit., p. 225.
[lxxix] Podcast Wolne Ścieżki, Odcinek 4: Wacek i Mutka Sobaszkowie. 26 August 2020. Węgajty. https://wolnesciezki.pl/odcinek- -4-teatr-wegajty/, accessed: 29.12.2021
[lxxx] ‘We chose this place in Węgajty because it was in the forest. This is exactly why [...] We could do what we liked, we had a hall here’; ibid.
[lxxxi] Mateusz Salwa, Krajobraz jako doświadczenie estetyczne, [in:] Krajobraz kulturowy, eds. Beata Frydryczak, Mieszek Ciesielski, Poznań Society of Friends of Learning, Poznań 2014, p. 44.
[lxxxii] ‘I’ve heard that it's some kind of open community that lives in harmony with nature’ - that is how one of the participants of the Theatre Village Festival, organised by the Węgajty Theatre since 2003, motivated her presence in Węgajty. Interview conducted by Justyna Biernat on 22 June 2018. Węgajty Theatre Archive.
[lxxxiii] Erdmute Sobaszek, Wacław Sobaszek, Wolne Ścieżki, Odcinek 4: Wacek i Mutkai Sobaszkowie. 26 sierpnia 2020. Węgajty, interview with Martyna Wojtkowska, https://wolnesciezki.pl/odcinek-4-teatr-wegajty/, accessed: 29.12.2021.
Text published in 'Konteksty. Polska Sztuka Ludowa' 2022, no 1-2, p. 340-348.