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Monika Wachowicz
Studio Ciała i Emocji |
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| email: | |
| facebook: | @studiowachowicz |
| telefon: | +48 515 921 993 |
| adres: | Katowice, Poland |
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B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B
O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O
R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R
D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D
E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E
R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R
B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B
O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O
R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R D E R B O R
Idea: Monika Wachowicz
Cooperation: Jarosław Fret
Realisation: Antonina Romanova and Monika Wachowicz
Texts: Antonina Romanova and Monika Wachowicz
The project uses excerpts from Antonina's activities from the "Text" project.
Space arrangement: Jarosław Fret and Monika Wachowicz
Film editing: Maciej Mądry and Jarosław Siejkowski
Duration: About 40 minutes
Production: The Grotowski Institute and Body and Emotions Studio by Monika Wachowicz
Premiere: 2nd of April, 2023. Laboratory Theatre at the Grotowski Institute, Wrocław
Previously presented in:
Antonina Romanova: director, actress, performer. Creates original projects, plays the ukulele. Non-binary person. She was born and grew up in Crimea. Russian nationality, Ukrainian citizenship.
Olena Matoshniuk: (she played in the performance during the premiere in Wrocław, DIVERSITY/EQUALITY FESTIVAL. Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, The Seminar: Theater in a conflict zone. ITI. Grotowski Institute, Week of Ukrainian Art in Poznań and BWA Gallery of Contemporary Art in Katowice. Art in the Service of Spirit and Body) interdisciplinary artist's working in the fields of painting, performance and video art. Her works are in the collections of the Korsakov Museum of Contemporary Art of Ukraine, Krupa Gallery Foundation and private collections.
Initially, THE B O R D E R performance was to exist as a document about Antonina Romanova. The war kept the performer at the front line, but that doesn't mean she couldn't still be with us in another guise. Working on THE B O R D E R took me to a totally new place, to which I invited Olena Matoshniuk, a painter, a woman who strongly supports Ukrainian female artists living in Poland. All of this was accomplished thanks to Jaroslaw Fret, who, having heard the story of Romanova, convinced me to bring her back, to make her present.
THE B O R D E R is about the creation of a new, intimate language of the [Not]Present, where the proverbial "barbed wire" disappears. When I write "barbed wire," I want to evoke the image of a prisoner/prisoner's dialogue with the outside world, or the refugees behind that wire.
There is a voice coming out all the time that talks about us wanting humanity, and not a barbed wire.
THE B O R D E R oscillates on the edge of performance with ritual and ceremony. In our eyes becomes the "rite of passage" that is, the moment of "receiving and bestowing" simultaneously. Creates a new field, where time is already just a moving image of eternity
The project was born out of the need to give voice to those whose voices are silenced.
In the summer of 2024, together with Jarosław Fret, I started working on the final shape of THE B O R D E R.
Monika Wachowicz
To come to taste everything, you can’t be willing to taste something in nothing.
To come to have everything, you can’t be willing to have something in nothing.
To come to be everything, you can’t be willing to be something in nothing.
To come to know everything, you can’t be willing to know something in nothing.
To come to what you don't like, you must go through what you don't like.
To come to what you don't recognize, you must go through what you don't recognize.
To get to what you don't have, you must go through what you don't have.
To come to what you are not, you must go through what you are not.
When you focus on something, you stop pursuing everything.
For in order to completely come to everything, you must completely deny yourself in everything.
And when you come to possess everything, you must possess it without desiring anything.
The path of perfection to Mount Carmel. The Way of St. John of the Cross.
AWARDS:
The Scotsman FRINGE FIRST 2024 and nomination for The Brighton Fringe Excellence Award at Edinburgh Fringe Festival
REVIEWS:
"There are many shows on this year's Fringe that touch on the bitter debate going in some western countries over the future of trans people and their rights: but none, I think, that cuts to the heart of the matter as swiftly and poignantly as The Border, presented by the Grotowski Institute and Studio Wachowicz-Fret of Poland in a windswept tented pavilion behind the EICC. As the show opens, a gentle face appears on screen, dressed in the battle- worn military fatigues of the Ukrainian army, and delivering a simple self-tape filmed somewhere on the front líne.
The soldier introduces themselves as Antonina Romanova, a non-binary artist who was living in Kyiv with their husband, a fellow theatre-maker, when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Romanova had already been forced to flee from their home region of Crimea when the Russians annexed it in 2014 and so after a single night in a Kyiv bomb shelter, the couple decided they would neither flee again nor live underground, but would sign up for the Ukrainian armed forces, and fight for their freedom and way of life. This is the starting point for Studio Wachowicz/Fret's beautiful tribute to Romanova, which in 45 minutes conjures up the pressures both of the war and of the long journey towards full rights for gay, trans and non-binary people - as well as insisting on the right of artists like Romanova to continue to be heard, even when the ongoing war prevents them from fully practising their art.
As Romanova speaks on alm, stunning solo performer and theatre-maker Monika Wachowicz moves around the warehouse-like stage. unfurling the barbed wire that symbolises war and division, and setting out on the floor page alter page of paper or script.
When the film finishes, she moves through a series of rituals. while her recorded voice remembers her conversations with Romanova about artistic collaboration across the Polish-Ukrainian border, now interrupted by war, she serves the audience with wine glasses that hold ash rather than wine, sets up a small altar of candles and remembrances.and embraces the condition of transition and change that defines non-binary lives by declaring "I am the border". And in the end, she constructs an image of human beauty and vulnerability that imprints itself unforgettably on the mind; while a final candle is lit, and the audience slowly moves away into the Edinburgh night"
Joyce McMillan. The Scotsman. Festival FRINGE 2024 in Edinburgh/Scotland
"The second Fringe First-winning show I managed to see was an equally deserving Border at the Grotowski Institute’s temporary Edinburgh venue the Cube. Created by performer Monika Wachowicz and director Jarosław Fret, the piece was a raw and laudably unsentimental ritualised homage to Antonina Romanova, a queer Ukrainian theatre and performance-maker currently fighting in the war against the Russian aggression. As Romanova’s alter ego on stage, Wachowicz gives us a brief intro into the genesis of this piece and then proceeds to gradually arrange the stage space into a sort of live installation that will serve as a set, an altar, and eventually as a frame for a searing final image that will gradually emerge in order to uncomfortably haunt our memory on departure. In the meantime we watch Antonina’s materials on screen: a vox pop in which she speaks simply and without pathos about her and her husband’s life as soldiers – a testimony punctuated with sounds of explosion in the distance and enhanced by a brief appearance of a stray dog named Orlando whom the soldiers have adopted (together with another stray called Bloom) to shield them from the terror of war as much as they can. This is later counterpointed by Antonina’s angry manifesto about theatre and truth which we read on screen, and eventually a video of her naked in a deserted room, writing with her own blood onto a paper installation similar to the one Wachowicz is replicating on the stage in front of us. The Border is a poignant piece that asks urgent questions about the purpose of art at the time of war and also very subtly but uncompromisingly about our own agency in it"
Duška Radosavljević | 29th Aug 2024 | Edinburgh 2024, Review, United Kingdom
“Border” And “Sheol/שאול” – Wachowicz/Fret Studio At Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2024
thetheatretimes.com/border-and-sheol-שאול-wachowicz-fret-studio-at-edinburgh-festival-fringe-2024
Written by Klaudia Święcicka (Klaudiusz Święcicki) | 10th Oct 2024 | Edinburgh 2024, Poland, Review, United Kingdom
Background photo: Małgorzata Wachowicz
