Houses of Presence. Anamnesis
Concept and execution: Magdalena Jakubów
"Those who are on a 'wander' must find home and table in the darkness of their paths..."
Homesickness. For those who lived there. Nostalgia for the lost, homelessness and rootlessness. Is it possible to return Home, and what would it be...? Longing for the dead sent me on a journey of Presence, found in places, stories, scraps of objects, movements of the heart, in the mysteries of "death and love".
Every dance here is a ritual of anamnesis - in every movement, gesture, breath, flow of post-memory - a unification of the past and the present. The wanderer doesn't remember who he is. He walks through the wastelands. He sees light. He knocks on the window. He stands at the threshold of the "unspeakable house". (term from Samuel Beckett "None of them").
Anamnesis (Greek: reminding)
The opening quote comes from Martin Heidegger "Language, in: On the way to language" Warsaw 2007
Performance "Houses of Presence. "Anamnesis" is the result of a personal exploration of identity in the artistic, sociological and historical dimension, but above all, spiritual. The family stories of ancestors, such as displacements from Kresy territory (formerly eastern Poland, now Ukraine), adaptation in post-German lands (in 1945 Germans were displaced and Poles settled there) metaphysical inspirations arising from stories, histories, images, places, and deep work with body memory through butoh dance make up the process lasting over 10 years, from which the performance was born. . Working with body memory has had a special impact on the extraction of content that we often do not have access to due to broken continuity of memory caused by historical turmoil, trauma or simply the lack of intergenerational contacts.
Today, I consciously call this performance/ritual my Forefathers' ritual (slavic ritual of commemorating the dead held on 1st of November). The circumstances of the genesis of the whole story also took place at a specific time - a few days before November 1st, 2013. In this sense, for me it is a creative (not imitative) reaching back to the roots of Slavic culture, the ritual of meeting the Ancestors.
The performance is still expanding with new dimensions of identity, stories and movements, especially after the participation in the "Truths about Home" workshop run by VestAndPage which ended with a joint performance at the Festival of Performing Arts in Płock.
Photo: Krzysztof Fabiański, Filip Owczarek, Irmina Sadecka
The performance has been shown:
Butohpolis Festival, Warsaw 2019: premiere
Myślibórz 2019/2023
Kowary 2023
The Festival of the Slavic Mythology, Owidz 2023
The Festival of the Ukrainian Art, Poznań 2023
''I am very happy that I could take part in a performance that made me, not only, stop and reflect on who we are, where we come from and what emotions drive us. Every day we don't have time to listen to ourselves... and sometimes it's worth it...... ''
Czesława
''I experience it all the time, I think about it. What you showed was wonderful. It seems like a silent message, but it means so much. ''
Wiesław
''Few people realize the importance of feeling the body, both pleasure and pain. This answers why we have a body... How important it is. Thank you for the show, it was something important. Value, essence, encounter with the source. ''
Oliwia
''What you did with us today, you did for us and with us, is a bit of a valve that allows all of us who have something unconscious in us to come back to ..You invited us to it beautifully, '' you pulled the ghosts out of us"... It was obvious that you were not alone, but that this was a dance performed by many "more people". Thanks to your dance we may feel some relief.. ''
Małgorzata
''I remember every moment I encountered Art in my life. This meeting in my life always happens by chance. I mean, I read a book and it changed my life, I ran to the cinema for company and I was so impressed by the movie that I couldn't sleep for a week. I remember well my encounter with art in the theater. It was in one of the theaters in Kiev when I was studying in the first year of the theater institute. I remember how the audience stood and applauded the actors for 10 minutes, and when I had to leave the theater, I forgot where I was going, what city I was in now and why I was on this earth, I was walking through the streets of the capital and I couldn't go back to my dorm because I knew for sure I'm not the same as before. And everyone around me doesn't know about it. Of course, not every performance offers such an encounter, not every film and not every artist. But yesterday I had such a meeting with Art. Again.
Magdalena Jakubów and the performance "Houses of Presence. Anamnesis" Performance Day/Tydzień Sztuki Ukraińskiej w Poznaniu 2023.
I don't know how you do it, rather technically I understand that it is a combination of music, your plasticity, facial expressions, makeup, movement, video, story. But I, a person who has watched a lot of performances in my life, both in Ukraine and in Europe, have never seen anything like this, ever. This is mysticism, chemistry, energy exchange, this is true Art. This is something that will stay with me forever, it definitely changed something in me. And I couldn't sleep, I couldn't even go home, I was walking through the city streets and I couldn't contain my emotions.''
Rimma Tyshkevych
''It was a very powerful experience. Like a brush with the afterlife. Everything is spinning...''
Radek
