SCHULZ PROJECT - REVIEWS +

We come in, following a man dragging a loaded sledge along a cobbled street. In a murky hall, a man in a gabardine appears , reading out excerpts from ‘The Cinnamon Shops’. Further on another one reads a different fragment, still another one on the first floor. Soft streams of words mingle with the nostalgic music of the piano. The darkness enveloping the stairs and corridors seems to annihilate the light of the burning candles and oil lamps.
That is how Project Schulz began. It is a joint project prepared by the ‘Mandala Theatre’ from Cracow, presented during the 2nd Festival of Jewish Culture.
We walk through a half-ruined house filled with people dressed in evening suits, long dresses, gabardines and bowler hats. Among them naked shoulders of the servants. There is no electricity; the walls are cracked, the stoves ruined, floors torn apart. We are in a dying house. People no longer live here. Those we have met - Jacob, Adela and others - are the ghosts of the past .
On the first floor a woman is sewing something, in the next room a man in a black suit is trying to get some sleep, in another room somebody is sharpening pencils at the table where Jacob used to do the accounts. We are surrounded by objects, props and items of clothing. The actors do not pay any attention to us; from time to time they stop, look into the distance, then nervously come back to their routines or start doing something else. They keep silent and so do we. We no longer know whether what we are experiencing is a realistic theatre pushed to the limits of probability, or life itself. Who or what is a ghost: the actors and props or we and the house? We sense the presence of pallets and lumber rooms , black lace appears in the cracks on the walls. The house grows - and becomes a mysterious maze of rooms, corridors, passages and a labyrinth of lost life.
I was looking for the piano and I got lost. Only later did I find out that it could be seen only through a dirty window in the courtyard.
Television crews appearing out of the blue and recording everyone and everything only enhance the absurdity of the situation.
I reach the second floor. A shock. There are some flats here. People still live in them. Is normal life possible in this dying house?
Another surprise. I find the kitchen. The abundance and beauty of the food bring to mind Dutch still lifes. After a while we help ourselves to the bread, cottage cheese, coffee and tea with raspberries. The fire is burning. Tomorrow Adela will be preparing dinner for Jacob’s family here.
So the house is still alive and lives its triple life: human, where all the people living in it are one big family, metaphorical, created by Schulz’s prose, and the absurd life of the people present here, who resemble both viewers and visitors to an exhibition and tourists trying to touch every single object in this exotic country but at the same time unable to distinguish between a living actor and a panel with cuneiform writing or an ornamented box which later turns out to be a music box.
The project lasts 24 hours. Time is kept by a clock which does not work but shows a different hour each time I look at it. The actors get hardly any rest. They never stop reading. Hardly anything happens; somebody is sprinkling the courtyard with water, others are grinding coffee or chopping wood - no theatrical condensation of events. Still, the atmosphere and uniqueness of the place make it very hard to leave. Especially when, at about midnight, the musicians from the ‘Węgajty’ theatre arrive. We sing and dance in the hall, in the courtyard, in Szeroka Street which looks like a square in one of Galician towns.
On my way back home I rejoice at the prospect of spending one more day in this house so wonderfully brought back to life.
Jacek Wakar, ELITA

REALITY IS PAPER-THIN 
The world of Schulz seen by Mandala Theatre finds its centre in a Jewish house brought back to life in Krakow's Kazimierz. It's a 24-hour happening of open structure, hardly any dramatisation, built around a series of coincidences, improvisations, aiming at mutual coexistence with the audience. We cross the threshold and experience a state of suspension between the real life of Kazimierz and the hermetic world of Schulz created by the actors. There is a brutal clash of what is alive with what is dead, of the past and the present. The sound of trains and trams passing nearby, voices floating in the still air outside constitute the 'objective' time. Here, in the courtyard, a slow rhythm of the grand piano, the voices and whispers of the visitors mingle with the excerpts from The Cinnamon Shops and The Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass slowly read out by the actors.
We enter the time that does not belong to us; the time dependent only on the rhythm of movements and gestures; we enter into onerous visions of deformed figures -they are neither Jews nor the characters from the stories, they are shadows, dumb people with motionless faces reflecting the secret suffering of their souls.The authors of the performance, Andrzej Sadowski and Edward Wojtaszek, have done away with the idea of recreating Schulz's biography or the events from the stories. They concentrated on the specific way of creating the character; there is no personality tracing, no pretending, no following the literary code. They created their own image of a Jew, drawn on the impressions left by Schulz's stories. There are a few indefinite characters: the translator typing a text, the Lady from a flat on the ground floor, the Jew in a bowler hat wandering all over the house. Project Schulz creates a unique type of characters.
The Jew from the Project still longs for the Promised Land, breathes in the time with a cigarette smoke or division sums, awaits the Messiah and manna from heaven. But at the same time a premonition of death paralyses him, he lives in constant fear, keeps staring into the distance, says his prayers and weaves the story of his obsessive fear and dreams into the thin strings of his violin.
In one of the rooms there is a faded mark left on the wall by a picture, a ruined stove, an earthen floor. As if someone had left not long ago and left the traces of a long existence. Evening suits hanging on the walls haunt you like bats. Uncle Karol sleeps, as usual, almost till noon, clutching a warm quilt in fear of being robbed of his only possession. A 'straw widower' (...) has sent his family on holiday" and now lives austerely. He might as well be an actor sleeping on the stage but then he would have to pretend. In Project Schulz he really sleeps, with his back turned away, locked up in his own solitude, distant and forgotten.
"Polda and Pauline, the dressmakers surrounded themselves with the artefacts of their craft" They gracefully needle the fabric believing that scraps can be turned into a work of art. The room full of hats, gloves, tulle and crinolines is a room of a feminine fantasy and traces of an old-fashioned elegance/ an elegance long gone. Now the hats are covered with dust, torn or sewn up. And although the girls sit at the sewing machine with the same enthusiasm they are sewing up old rags, mending dresses, trying to save themselves from poverty. The room next to the kitchen is empty. We look at the props carefully. Piles of paper and some sharpened pencils on the table. Father, this man of 'mean and ironic look', a merchant, shop owner, mathematician spends his days here making diagrams. He filters and estimates time through profit. Perhaps that's why he is indifferent to the view from his window. He locks himself up in calculations and accounts because to him the purpose and meaning of the world consist in persistent repetition and counting.
In the basement ' the room of my childhood' straight from "The Solitude". This is where Joseph plays solitaire and flies paper planes. "the room hardly ever visited, still forgotten, not to be lived in”. It is, in fact, damp, musty and mouldy ; the tap is leaking. Flying planes and burning paper models are Joseph's sole occupation. His actions are calculated and cold-blooded, there is a conscious destructiveness in them, desire to destroy one's own work and to hurt.
Adela is sitting in the courtyard. On a Sunday morning she is wearing a white dress and white shoes. Deep in thought, she looks ahead and tries to seduce Joseph; she provokes the other boys in the house, too. The longing for sanctity blends easily with her physical desires. Nobody is watching her, nobody is jealous of her beauty. Mother is cooking, Genia is cleaning the kitchen. The characters are lonely, busy with their own affairs, isolated from the rest of the world. They live next to each other, just behind the wall, but pass each other in silence, locked up in their interior monologues. Still, they have one face - hollow cheeks, grey complexion, misty eyes. "T³uja crouches by the basement window. A red geranium on the window sill, a dog nearby. "Her face contracts like the bellows of the accordion. Every now and then her cry pulls the accordion of her face into a thousand horizontal wrinkles". T³uja from "August" is a lunatic. She hides madness and wild desperation behind a smile. A whirlpool of wild fantasies helps her forget the gloomy atmosphere of the house and the wasted life. Misery, internal 'waste land', secret silent rebellion are the key to understanding the essence the whole performance.They complement the depressing sight of the abandoned house which, for 24 hours, becomes a real, though poor Jewish house. What does it mean? The women are preparing dinner, the cat is basking in the sun, the corridors are filled with the smell of freshly brewed coffee and the washing is drying in the courtyard. It is homely...
The spectators watch the performance, or rather theatrical meeting from very close, there is no distance of the conventional theatre. You can look the actors straight in the eyes, you can touch the props, ask for coffee, sit on the balcony. There is no artificial division into the house and the stage, because the house itself becomes an important element of the happening. People walk along the corridors and floors, enter the rooms, leave the house and come back...They walk back and forth, look for the exit, get lost as if in a labyrinth, as if hemmed in, as if they were the shadows of the actors, the shadows of the shadows. It is difficult to tell which of us are more real. The theatrical illusion vanishes, and so do the high and low tones, only whispers remain.Their eyes are full of fear.
Jews died, vanished in crematoria.They must have run away from this very house in Szeroka Street chased by Hans Frank's orders. You cannot return to the past that easily. Jews are gone, there are only a few left. The actors are meagre shadows of history - half-dead and half-alive.They are static symbols of the millions that died, of figures frozen in a gesture of fear from long ago, with a silent scream of despair on their lips. They are a personal extensions of our memory. Each move, each gesture is a gesture of the defence from the past, an expression of longing for freedom. Project Schulz offers an artistic insight into Jewishness; it is a theatrical contemplation of death presented in the form of a happening which, in this context, seems to be the most appropriate. The happening makes us sensitive to other people, makes us feel responsible for the fate of others and refreshes our memory. Project Schulz brings art closer to life . Instead of showing imitation on the stage it introduces the stage into reality, and therefore makes it more credible. On our way out we notice the Narrator. He is sitting among old, dusty books proud and haughty with a light forehead. His hand on a walking stick, his head turned towards the window; "Reality is paper-thin" he says. Indeed, the world can be destroyed in a minute, thousands may vanish in a second, files can be destroyed, pictures burned, lives annihilated. There is no point in believing that a sheet of paper is white and that it shall survive.
Reality, like the world of Project Schulz, is a combination of shattered words and events. There is no integrity, no synthesis. Only memory remains.
Bożena Gierat / Szkice