Polish performances at the Avignon Festival
Performances by Krzysztof Warlikowski and Marta Górnicka were presented in the program of the 78th edition of the world's most important theater festival. Audiences saw nine shows by Polish artists in the Main Courtyard of the Palais des Papes in Avignon.
The 78th edition of the Avinion International Theater Festival has come to an end, and I owe you a story about how Polish performances were received at the event. Hélène Kuttner in Artcena magazine, in an enthusiastic review of Mothers at War, directed by Marta Górnicka, reports: refugee women from Ukraine, Belarus or those who have opened their homes in Poland are far from the ancient chorus of women. Marta Górnicka, standing in the middle of the audience, directs them with the precision of a conductor. Children's poems, pop songs, Ukrainian lullabies, excerpts from Sophocles and Euripides, and individual testimonies are the material for a total, deeply moving performance that the women perform with their voices and bodies, choreographing movements that are at once martial and delicate.
In the pages of Le Monde, Fabienne Darge, in her text “Elizabeth Costello, or the existential lessons of Krzysztof Warlikowski, writes ” after several years of absence, the great Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski, beloved by theatre lovers, has returned to the Festival and the new production is absolutely wonderful. Elizabeth Costello is a fictional double of the great South African writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. There is nothing spectacular about Elizabeth Costello, even compared to the director's other productions ( here the reviewer refers to the particularly enthusiastically received Apollonia), but the words spoken from the stage in the Palace of the Popes have a special meaning. The reviewer drew attention to the creation of Maja Komorowska, “an actress of Jerzy Grotowski,” who gave a lesson in theatre as the art of speaking.”