Idea

XIII International Theatre Festival Retroperspektywy 2024

AWAKENINGS

20 years of CHOREA Theatre

August 23^rd – September 1^st

CHOREA Theatre / Lodz

The next stage of our festival journey during the 13th edition of the RPS Festival will focus on opening up and seeking the new and fresh. It is the act of waking up from a dream — it is THE AWAKENING. It seems that we all reflect on making 2024 a time of turning points, rebirth, and rebuilding worlds full of goodness. Our intuition tells us that this is what audiences will expect from the arts in the time to come, especially theatre and the performing arts, the cornerstone of which is the direct contact between the viewer and the creator. We wish that, in the future, artistic themes will not only illustrate and analyse acts of destruction, but create starting points for the search for hope, new paths, and intriguing visions. This is what we ourselves expect from the theatre. This is the direction our spirits and our sense of humanity set for us. We want to rekindle our strength, believe in goodness, awaken hope, and touch all that is fair within us.

We believe that live theatre, which can only exist in the context of a real and tangible encounter with the audience, has an ever-increasing impact on the creativity and broadening perspectives of the viewer. It affects their choices, openness and clarity of vision. It puts a shy smile on their face, creates a sense of hope, and enables them to develop a broader perspective of themselves, other people and the world. Our aim is to create conditions in which one only has to wake up from sleep, rub their eyes, and open them very wide to find meaning and awaken to a living existence. This is how, through festival events — performances, concerts, our workshops and theatre trainings created in collaboration with young people — we want to interact and meet with our audiences during the next edition of Retroperspektywy.

On top of that, this edition will feature many elements related to CHOREA Theatre's 20 years of activity to celebrate the group's Jubilee. 

We create the programme of the 13th International Theatre Festival RPS 2024 according to its main idea and inspirations…

AWAKENINGS - mean waking up from a dream.

AWAKENINGS - mean reviving the body and the mind.

AWAKENINGS - mean opening your eyes.

AWAKENINGS - mean noticing the new.

AWAKENINGS - mean a discovery.

AWAKENINGS - mean a new journey.

They are about leaving one's old shells or discarding one's baggage.

They are about finding or discovering what is truly important.

They are about seeing new perspectives and unknown worlds through innovative tools and new artistic contexts.

They are about creating our own streams of hope and new algorithms of meaning.

They are a new way of understanding the world around us, the one that seemed impossible to grasp before.

Tomasz Rodowicz

Artistic Director of CHOREA Theatre

Artistic Director of International Theatre Festival Retroperspektywy

Manifesto for the 20 years of CHOREA Theatre

FOR A NEW METAPHYSICS IN THEATRE

CHOREA AFTER 20 YEARS

Twenty years have passed as if they were two weeks. When we started with Dorota Porowska, Elżbieta Rojek and Maciej Rychły, combining Gardzienice's "Dances of the Labyrinth" and the "Ancient Orchestra" groups, we did not plan for the collaboration to last for years. We were young, and we planned it to last forever. In our work, we wanted to sing, dance, and be close - close to each other, and close to ourselves. To reach out to the present day through ancient Greece and its vibrancy. And to reach out to ourselves, in rebellion against stagnation and human abuses in the previous parent formation. We felt power and joy. For almost three years we were nomads, a wandering, off-system theatre troupe, until I met Krzysztof Candrowicz in the run-down Scheibler factory in Łódź, who enthusiastically welcomed us into his artistic squat. As a result, in agreement with the city authorities and the vice-president Włodzimierz Tomaszewski, we created the Art Factory - the first public-private cultural institution in Poland, which is still active to this day.

Twenty years have passed at a mind-boggling pace. It has been a time of taming dreams, coming of age, exploring a multitude of paths, creating a variety of acts and ideas, witnessing human tragedies, surprising encounters and painful partings, and facing falls, mistakes and rises. These twenty years have been beautiful, complex, tense and complicated in terms of human plurality, their intricacy of action, and variety of direction. It is a time that today is not easy to define, nor is it easy to translate all of its experiences into common goals and tasks for everyone. It is difficult due to the diversity of development directions of each crew member of this theatrical boat. Dozens of premieres, dozens of concerts, performances, educational projects, exhibitions, panel discussions, seminars, and finally our international theatre festivals (which feel like an alchemical crucible for those in search of a new language in art). During these events, thousands of people in our Art and Life Factory bear witness to a permanently unsatisfied hunger and an unfulfilled dream.

MY QUEST

Maturity, knowledge and experience of my loved ones, my relatives and the members of CHOREA, who have always worked with me, have accompanied me throughout these twenty years of work, explorations, adventures, struggles, meetings and partings. Together we have created something that I consider to be my treasure and my opus vitae.

But now I’m not entirely sure what to do, now that all these people around me have mastered everything. Should I protect them? Watch over them? Guide them? Define their work? Correct it? Or perhaps just watch from the sidelines and be on guard to point out and foresee the dangers that threaten anyone who has turned twenty? To serve those who need it, and when their paths become too dangerously forked, to summon everyone to a joint project, performance or concert. And for myself, to keep drilling - drilling like a drop of water through a rock, and sometimes like a miner at the face, following what Witkacy called the Mystery of Existence.

Over the years, it has been my credit and skill to set a common direction, to bring these people together in the most unpredictable settings, face-to-face with each other, with me and with all kinds of outstanding artists. To set the scene and find a language that would be our own way of interpreting people and the world - our own, that is, organically developed by us. And then, to give them space to embark on their own path and to make their own choices and take responsibility for their works. From my perspective, the current stage, which is quite difficult, if not the most difficult for me personally, is about handing over the reins and ceding grounds. I believe this is a consistent stage in the development of the group. For a long time now, I have consciously given the CHOREA crew the tools and space for independent actions, limiting my own field of creation to organising projects and performances once a year that allow the whole team to come together for a completely new artistic challenge. It is important that each successive meeting is significantly different from the previous one and that it puts us all on a solid ground in the face of a new task, a new artistic perspective, and a new partner - a director, composer, choreographer or pedagogue, who will lead us to confront the unknown questions and mysteries of life and theatre.

Today, CHOREA is a team, a working group permanently anchored at the Art Factory in Łódź, and at the same time a group of friends and professionals who work within and outside the structure of this cultural institution. We seek non-institutional solutions within a very open institutional framework. Together with Maciej Trzebeński, the director of the Art Factory, we have developed a model that minimises bureaucracy while maximising artistic, educational, and social outcomes for all three parties: the Factory, CHOREA, and the audience and participants of our projects and activities. The latter continually verify the relevance and effectiveness of our work.

The transformation into a collective, where we make the most important decisions together, naturally requires significant self-work on my part (believe me, I am committed to this and strive to be consistent). Especially since this "collective" has no hierarchy, and when disputes reach a critical point, it is up to me to resolve them. Nevertheless, we continue to strive for complete communal decision-making in all matters, and the fact that we are already achieving this on such a broad scale is a testament to the team's maturity, competence, and the complete trust I place in my corpus vitae. Of course, this does not mean there are no tensions and conflicts.

ART AND EDUCATION

In our activities, we have always consistently combined artistic and educational work. The interaction of these two aspects is natural to us for three reasons. First: we all learn at the same time and in the same way as the participants in our projects, but we start from a different level. Second: the participants often provide us with new perspectives and new tools - we are mutual teachers for each other. Third: the final result - the so-called work of art - is developed collaboratively, but the ultimate form, dramaturgy, quality, and context are the responsibility of the leader, director, or animator, whose knowledge encompasses the entire process and who has developed the necessary perspective for evaluation.

However, in reality, every project, performance, programme, and every work process looks different. And this is also our unquestionable value. On the one hand, it prevents us from falling into a routine, on the other, it exposes us to the risk of mistakes and artistic uncertainty. Nevertheless, it always leads us toward new challenges. Whenever the CHOREA's team develops a new performance, we raise the bar very high. For all projects, we strive to maintain the same ethos and common ground, which consists of the tools we have developed for working with groups of various ages and levels of advancement, as well as the body and voice techniques developed both for individual actors and for actors in general. (In 2015, CHOREA Theatre, in collaboration with the Łódź Film School and with the support of the National Institute of Music and Dance, published the handbook "Trening fizyczny aktora - Od działań indywidualnych do zespołu" / "Actors physical training. From individual to group actions".)

A PERSON IN THEIR DIVERSITY

The multidirectional activities of all CHOREA members in individual and collaborative projects, working with guest artists, collaborating with theatre and music groups, working with children, young people, adults and seniors, with people with special needs, regular team trainings - all these elements define the current focus of our activity. It is as if we have entered a multi-lane highway, which I see as a shared stream of exploration of new humanities and practice in theatre. The main focus and reference point of most of our artistic and educational activities is the particular individual human being with whom one works, and the group that they contribute to and create. We put them in front of the Unknown and open a path to their own dreams within them, giving these dreams form and repeatability - so that they can share them with others. And sometimes, these are great discoveries and huge surprises. And imprints that these people leave in us for a long time.

In order to bring together the diversity of our activities and the multitude of themes we have been working on over the years, we need to define the working area of our artistic and non-artistic research. I see it as a search for a new metaphysics in theatre, a search for the function of humanity with its existential diversities, their transgressions, and the non-human and superhuman…

We have been searching for this for years, journeying from Dionysus to Grotowski, from Sophocles to Schulz, through epic, dithyramb, traditional song, opera, and rap. But today, in the face of all the threats, the incredible human injustices, the cynicism of the rulers of the world, and the perfection of AI, theatre must return to the metaphysical. It must ask fundamental questions again.

THE FUTURE

It has been two decades. From my perspective, the present time is an important, if not the most important, stage for the next (twenty?) years. I stop being indispensable, I don't have to oversee everything anymore, I can focus solely on theatre and support my colleagues in their endeavours. It's time to hand over the reins to those who already know how to navigate this multi-lane highway without my supervision. To those for whom working with people, creating areas of shared meaning, spaces of human and non-human experience, working on our dreams and desires, is the most important message of these 20 years. 

There is no single method, idea or fixed programme here. There are numerous original tools that we have developed for working with the body, voice, word and song, and for unleashing group creativity and energy. However, humility and sensitivity are always paramount and need to be exposed with each new encounter. 

All the more so since the world, with its ever-increasing tensions, multitude of wars, migrating tribes, scorched earth, hunger and suffering, makes us either helpless and paralysed, or inclines us to retreat into various kinds of bubbles. These bubbles are not armoured, they are soap. Therefore, we cannot refrain from asking these questions (to ourselves and others): What is our species? Who are we, individually and as a whole? Why are we here?

The question "What for?" is the path to a new metaphysics. If something happens on stage that transports the actor, along with the viewer, into another dimension - it opens up the possibility of transcending the conventional reality and touching the Other. It really happens sometimes. Today, I call this my main need in theatre - a return to metaphysics. To a new metaphysics that requires creating a new language for it. Even though I have graduated (with distinction!) in philosophy and know how to ask these questions - I can only answer them in practice. For my CHOREA friends and me, that practice lies in theatre.

These questions are intrusive and increasingly provocative, but if we do not answer them in action, able to define and save something in our lives and the lives of those we work with, we will involuntarily follow the chaos of the world, with all its fascinating soullessness. This world, with its computational powers, will define us, determine our dreams and all our needs. Having access to all our reflexes, weaknesses, desires, longings, and secrets which our soul is woven from, it will create an appropriate algorithm. An algorithm of a man devoid of values, with a precisely calculated resultant of our desires.

In our theatre and theatre-related activities, we have well-developed tools for practising genuine human encounters. Only in real-life meetings, face to face, body to body, emotion to emotion, in uncertainty and courage, can one truly experience oneself and capture, for a moment, the afterimage of humanity. Only here can one experience the human and try to touch the non-human. This is also what I call the search for a new metaphysics in theatre.

My theatre – the one that is personal, constantly insatiable, and wanders around the meanders of the Mystery of Existence - meets the theatre of my colleagues, an individual, social, intergenerational, children's, and youth theatre, at the stop called hope. It is a stop with transfers available in various directions. A stop for those who don't treat theatre as a workplace or their actions as a profession or ego-feeding, but as a way of working on themselves and getting to know themselves and others.

Tomasz Rodowicz

Artistic Director of CHOREA Theatre

Artistic Director of International Theatre Festival Retroperspektywy

Information about Retroperspektywy Festival

The International Theatre Festival Retroperspektywy (RPS) has been held cyclically since 2010 in Fabryka Sztuki at 3 Tymienieckiego Street in Lodz.

Having the form of a festival, it offers the most attractive theatre and dance proposals from Poland and other parts of the world. The event can be characterised by high professionalism of performers, uniqueness and coherence of the programme, availability to a wide and diversified audience, rich offer of workshops and meetings with eminent authors of theatre and music arts.

Over the past 14 years (during the 10 editions of the RETROPERSPEKTYWY Festival and the 2 editions of the PERSPEKTYWY Festival), more than 180 performances, performances, video-performances, concerts, accompanying exhibitions, and more than 50 workshops have taken place. Approximately 1,180 invited guests from 25 countries (including the USA, India, Sweden, Great Britain, Norway, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Portugal, Belarus, Ukraine, and Israel) attended, with 43,600 viewers and participants visiting the festival's venues, both online and in person.

We want to consistently continue with our development, which has been occurring for a couple of years now, and organise yet another edition of the international festival to invite outstanding artists with their theatre, dance and music performances. We will make it possible for the audience to take part in the World of Theatre whose main aim is a discourse on contemporary reality as well as a search for original means of artistic expression. Long-time consistency of getting through to various social groups (intellectuals, people from underserved communities, elderly, students, youth, families with children) and building festival audience development contributed to the event being popular and widely recognized on the cultural map of Lodz. Festival goes beyond regular undertakings of CHOREA Theatre and it allows performances by Polish and international artists who deal with the art of theatre and dance. It is an excuse and an extraordinary chance for performances that CHOREA Theatre co-creates with international theatres and artists. An important idea, that promotes the festival from the very beginning, is creating a bridge between searching novices and stage masters, between tradition and avant-garde.

Project financed from the funds of the City of Łódź.