FIGURE OF THE LOST_CHINKON
Reclaiming the City means realizing that it is most ours when we notice how much of it is not ours, how much foreignness is hidden in the cracks of its history. (...)We regain the City most surely and fully by telling stories on behalf of those who lost it.
Przemysław Czapliński Sublime longings
there are such places in the topography of our cities...
places lost
buried
built-up
repressed from collective memory
grave sites
marked by human tragedy, but also
places where people lived
they worked
they loved
and created everyday life
here
in front of us
in various traditions
cultures
and denominations
we always enter the place after someone...
identity is a continuum
identity
inextricably linked with memory
Figure of the lost_Chinkon is a performative ritual of butoh dance that restores the memory of people and places not recorded in the landscape of collective memory. The figure of the lost person/place is the presence that appears in the act of ritual. This is a metaphorical concept referring to one of the most important elements of the drama No, in which the actor fills the void with his presence and at the same time compensates for the loss - chinkon - meaning the ceremonial of "embedding" the human soul in the body, which "came out" from the body due to some shock.
In the butoh dance ritual, space is opened for restoring and "setting" memory, settling what has not found peace, what is unsaid. Butoh reaches to the roots of identity, the truth that is originally written in the body, and which the body receives and transmits in the requiem ritual what a given place makes present.
Figure of the lost_Chinkon is a sequel. The first dance of remembrance took place in 2018 at the War Cemetery in Myślibórz. It emerged from the need of the heart, spirit, as well as the need to discover and love again the places that we have been living in these lands for only several dozen years.
We, as children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren of displaced persons and migrants, also carry many of our lost figures - people, houses, landscapes, things and traditions that we left "there".
Butoh, as a dance of "love and death", in its essence undeniably refers to the tradition of the Polish theater of memory of Tadeusz Kantor, as well as to the Slavic tradition of the Forefathers' Eve ritual, which are one of the most important foundations of Polish culture, identity and spirituality. “Though death ends life, love does not cease, and perhaps it is a new beginning.”
Lost figures are a common denominator that reminds us that people experience suffering, and remembering it in the ritual of sanctifying the cycle of life and death strengthens the human bond in a common fate that transcends political and geographical frameworks.
Figure of the lost - a concept used by Jadwiga Rodowicz-Czechowska in the publication "Inne No".
Theater of love and death – a term often used by Tadeusz Kantor to describe the essence of his theater
The Figure of the Lost_ Chinkon ritual has so far taken place at the "120 Leaves" monument and the military cemetery in Myślibórz.
„Only the dead who were buried too quickly and too deeply come back”
(Gillez Deleuze).
Photo: Mirosław Kwarta
MONUMENT OF 120 LEAVES
"Dona nobis Pacem" or "Give us peace" - this inscription was carved on a piece of red marble standing opposite the Social Welfare Home in Myślibórz. It was placed in a characteristic place. To here, on February 7, 1945, a mass execution took place by the Red Warmists on the inhabitants of Soldina.
Two days earlier, one of the Soviet soldiers was shot by a retired German officer during an attempted attack on his wife. In retaliation for Collein's death, the Russians shot 120 city residents - men and boys. In 1995, additional exhumation. During a symbolic funeral, the remains of six victims were placed in a grave at the foot of the monument. The boulder is entwined with 120 elements carved in metal ivy branches. On the same grave there is a marble slab with the usual bilingual inscription "To the victims of February 7, 1945".
“Only the dead return who are buried too quickly and too deeply” (Gillez Deleuze).
MILITARY CEMETERY
Today, 72 Polish soldiers are buried at the Myślibórz war cemetery, including 50 whose names are unknown, and 647 Soviet soldiers, of which 338 have not been identified. The graves of Polish soldiers were marked with crosses stylized as Valorous Crosses, and the graves of Soviet soldiers were marked with stars.
