conversations in ten questions 41 : Agnieszka Kazimierska

In this series of interviews we try to get to know the artists who performed in İstanbul Fringe Festival 2022. Our last guest is Agnieszka Kazimierska from the former Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards. 

 Ayse Draz, Art Unlimited Performing Arts Editor & Mehmet Kerem Ozel, Writer 

© Nikita Chuntomov

What is the essence of theater in your opinion?

A deep and meaningful, living - thus necessarily in flesh - nourishing encounter among human beings that is based on craft. It entails mastery of being in relation.

A space in which the quality of people’s attention becomes a gentle container for awakening what is hidden, for a common communal journey through ideas, ideals, dreams, desires, which are all rooted and living in the body and often kept dormant. A space of revealing and revelation.

A space of generous giving. Of giving up.

Do you believe in the transformative power of art? How?

Yes, definitely. Not all art, not any “art” has this power, but definitely all arts have this potentiality for transformation. I want to talk about theater, the living arts: the arts that take place in the here and now, in the shared space of physical presence, of attention.

This transformative power can act on many levels, the engagement with theater art can be very valuable for so many people, both actors and spectators, both professionals and non-professionals.

I am talking about something that I intuit has a high potency of transformation and healing in the context of professional theater arts. Potentiality is there, but it is not easy to meet truly transformative arts. Rather, it happens rarely, in my experience. But the possibility is there, so let’s keep threading!

How? How does that transformation happen? I will not pretend to know. I can, however, give some glimpses of ideas, images or insights that are helpful for me in my own thinking and understanding of how art can transform, and heal.

First of all, the artist needs to undergo a transformation, both in the process of creation and within the art piece they perform. This transformation, for me, is not about encountering new ideas or different perspectives. Or not only. That’s surely important, but the potentiality of transformation reaches much further. For that possibility to take place, the actress's work needs to reach and involve her body, her mind and her heart. They are interconnected, and perhaps this triadic division is a bit simplistic, yet it’s still the clearest way I can make this description. And the latter one is not only about feelings, it’s more than that, I intuit. Even if I cannot tell what that more is exactly. Feelings are important, and in the western societies I know we are so much formed to repress our feelings, especially those that are doomed to be negative, that even to feel together in a room becomes very important and transformative. Many times. And it is meaningful. But the transformative potency of living arts reaches far far more than that. Then we can ask further questions: To where? And how to approach that possibility? That’s a lifelong quest for an artist who wants to dedicate themselves to that quest.

I want to mention an idea that recently took root in my mind that speaks to the above mentioned understanding of transformation. In a way it is an attempt to describe what possibly happens during human interactions.

Recently a thought came to me that when two human beings meet, they are, we are, like two DNA sequences, two DNA strands that are “copying” (information) from each other, and thus building new strands, reinforcing the existent ones, and copying the ones perceived in the other strand, reaffirming them - the information, the building blocks of the strand - of a human being. And so, we keep building ourselves, and each other, of each other. To a large degree it happens by mirroring (by our mysterious mirror neurons?) what we perceive in ourselves and in others. By mirroring all the information: this consciously noticed pieces of information as well as all the ones that are not fully acknowledged.

In other words, when we interact with one another, there is a whole network of highways of communication running between the two of us - thoughts, ideas, perceptions, information, impressions, memories that are waking up. Some of those workings of these rapidly flowing highways we do notice, and others remain in oblivion. But the quality of the meeting, the overall impression of it and of the other person will be informed by both - the information we noticed and the information that we did not consciously acknowledge. So we are “copying” not only what we notice, but everything, even if it’s hard to pinpoint what this unnoticed everything is. Our whole human-being-organism is perceiving and “copying” everything of another human-being-organism. Not only thoughts, looks, elements of behavior, but everything: the most minimal contractions in the body that carry unwanted feelings, memories, dreams, states of mind, mood…. All those elements that are floating and living in our human field, in a marvelous mysterious psychic cloud we all carry around ourselves, or inhabit. We are “ copying” - which means perceiving (consciously and unconsciously), possibly feeling the other (empathy), but also! building ourselves from those copied information.

In the midst of all that, our minds have this incredible capacity of giving direction, of giving orientation to what we perceive and interpreting it. It has this amazing orienting capacity - where we put our mind, how we frame our thoughts influences the way we read reality around us: how and what! we perceive. And it also influences the way our body and our psychic fluids work. Some ideas, some ways of thinking, some realizations nourish us, are healthy, are creative, are life-bringing, are opening horizons for our capacity to think, to understand, to envision, to perceive. Other ideas or ways of thinking are deadening, deafening, unhealthy, stuck, infertile, sick. And so to witness a performance where the actrxs (actress, actor, non-binary actor), perfromxr aligns themselves to healthy, nourishing, transformative ideas and ideals, where the performxr let’s their mind, body and feelings be in touch and in communication with one another, to experience a living human thought process on stage, during which the actrxs’s pathways of feeling and sensing are free and reactive to that living unfolding thought, then - wow, what a rich nourishment for me to “copy” from - as a spectator, as a DNA building strand constantly re-building itself of itself and of others.

It’s all just a set of metaphors, of imaginations that play with me these days.

And, as a spectator, when thinking about the transformative power of arts I want to say also that there are some themes that are touched with the language of theater that are important to be addressed, and that is transformative. And also, good quality work of acting, singing, dancing - good quality of actrxs’s work gives me an aesthetic experience of pleasure, sometimes awe, sometimes admiration , at times the mixture of them all - and that also transforms me, it changes the quality of my witnessing of a human being in action in front of me. It shocks me, in a way, and provokes to be there, facing them, spectating more accurately, more presently within myself towards their presence and their doing.

When you are working on a piece, what sources inspire you? Do dreams play a role in your works? Dreams, yes, sometimes, life myths and play of different psychic forces that manifest in dreams. And in relationships. But also texts, songs, textures, sounds, fits of imaginations, sometimes accidentally heard words that bring ideas, winds, nature and her behavior, challenges that people I encounter are facing, my own challenges. Seasons.

When I’m working on a piece and I enter a creative flow, it feels partially that I’m a wicked hunter that discovers bubbles of treasures around her. Like a hunter - dream catcher. I love this experience. Even if sometimes it’s really wild - the ideas come anytime and I rush to write them down or to take care of them in some sense… And, I’m sure many artists, creators, everybody who is seduced by an idea, or took a decision to do something - knows this: that you go to sleep, and you are very tired, but the idea comes, and it would be such a pity not to take care of it, not to interact with it, not to unveil what it hides within itself. And so I stand up and write it down, or draw, or vocalize… I love it. It’s like being in a dialogue with a creative process, or in a dance rather. It feels beautiful and rich, and fascinating. So many surprises. And often - it’s like a season that comes. Spring, let's say, where all the seeds and buds start to blossom, and you want to know them, and see them unfoil. Those creative moments are like gifts. It would be a pity to waste them. And as they come, they go away as well. And there are periods of silence, and barrenness even. Which sometimes makes me sad. But as I mature as an artist and as a human being I more and more learn to embrace those moments of barrenness and appreciate their wisdom as well.

When do you decide to give a title to a work you are working on if it already does not have one?

When I need it. Or when the work needs it. When a work starts to have a certain characteristic field, or set of themes - I give it a name. Even if later on that name will change, this initial name is already a certain range of reference for me. It helps me to give direction to further work and to develop my relation to that particular work.

Are there any artist whom you can describe as "my master", or any person whom you think influenced your art most? And if there is such an artist or person, who?

It’s a challenging question for me these days. And for a number of reasons.

One is that I try not to look up to “masters” at the moment. The “master” evokes an “apprentice”. And even if this “master - apprentice” relationship can definitely be rich and full of creative potency, it is not for me at the moment. In the past there were people towards whom I was looking up to, who were an immense source of inspiration for me, whom I held as rich sources of knowledge, even wisdom perhaps, but now I can’t and don’t want to do that. At the moment my own unique deeply personal intuition is my compass. My great Mastress. And I want her to influence my personal choices and my artistic directions.

One source of this challenge is personal then: in the current phase of my creative life I reject any outer authority. I desire to keep discovering and nurturing my own unique artistic language and voice. And there is yet another reason to this challenge, which is perhaps not only personal but also cultural: the cultural, historical perhaps, tendency to pick one hero (master, genius, bad guy, devil - all male, because it’s still the way majority of us “think” and what the language still suggests when talking about heroes or masters) and to dismiss all the complex “back-ground” that fed them, the ecosystem inside which they grew and stand, often proudly. Of course, there are extraordinary individuals in this world. I don’t want to disagree with that. Rather, I want to recognise that there is not one person that makes an influence on and of themselves - or if there is - they don’t exist all by themselves, on and of themselves. Their acts do not exist on and out of themselves alone. Neither the “good” nor the “bad” ones. Neither the admirable, nor the despicable ones.

“No man is an island”, right? None of us exists, does great acts, create formidable works on and of themselves. We are all supported by a whole complex ecosystem that feeds us and allows us to do and be what we do and are… That allows us to grow. And I think that still in our “thinking” about culture, about our heroes, about creation, about art and artists this is something that is so often dismissed or forgotten. If this is a triviality, it is a triviality that is very important to me right now. To name, to recognise, to acknowledge the support of all the elements of the ecosystem (of relations and influences) that holds and nourishes me. All the people that hold me: living and dead. They hold me, my fellow artists, or the heroines and heroes of my times, or of times past.

An important question I carry with me is how to keep relating to that recognition that everything emerges from within a complex ecosystem. A piece of art is living. It’s a living “thing” that emerges from within a living environment of relationships. Desires and needs that are nurtured by this environment; and also the ones that are not satisfied. Both abundance and lack shape us. Lack is often a call for us to react to and to create - to provide for that missing abundance. Our task is to give our answer to the calls that we hear and which we see or perceive that are not answered.

There are several people in the world of arts who have directly influenced my craft and my notion of theater that I can name. But there are so many others who influenced my art from behind the curtain - members of my family, my elders, some friends. Who are my important teachers who influenced me? The earth I was born into, the peoples, the nation I was born into, the family I was born into, my ancestors and their life stories. Their lacks and abundances. Their dreams, their limits, and cherished desires.

There are few people I can name that influenced my work. And there are so many more invisible influences that I am unable to name. And because of how our history is and has been told, because of the learned tendency of naming the heroes, naming the geniuses as singular individuals, as if they existed on and of themselves, I almost want to refuse to name who my very important teachers were. Because they were not the only ones. Or because if I name them, their names will be repeated and remembered. Again and again. And those of others will not be known. And in this way I will participate in maintaining the way of telling the history with which I do not agree.

But yes, definitely there are and have been singular people who have strongly influenced my work and notion of possibilities of living arts. Their influence helped me to see art as a living practice, as a living inter-human event, as an exchange, a precious treasure that bears a potential of human communal transformation. That helped me see art not as a commodity but as a life challenge, as a privilege, as a personal language, as a way to talk to the universe about the universe - to reflect the universe to itself.

There are really many many people who have influenced me as a person, as an artist, a creator. Many brilliant women, men, … - humans I learned from , I worked or walked along. Some of them are artists, others are occupying themselves with other important matters; some of them I consider artists of living. To name just a few: Grotowski, Weil, Chagall, Gaugin, Złotowska. One important person in the process of creation of this work and my formation as an artist is the director of the performance I’m bringing to Istanbul, Katie’s Tales. I am very grateful to him for all I discovered and learned while being at his side. And I learned from him in both positive and negative ways. I also want to say that all my colleagues in theater, along with whom I worked for many years, have been a source of inspiration for me for those years and had an influence on my artistic work.

When you consider the current state of the world in every sense, what is the most important and urgent issue for you as an artist?

Creating pools of peace, beauty and deep human connection. Healing. Love. True love of the complex diversity we all are. Saying “STOP” where it’s needed.

If you had to translate Katie’s Tales into a single sentence, what would that sentence be?

Woman’s desire in the Whirlwind of History.

What are the challenges of having a text-based performance with surtitles? What is the nature of the relationship you establish with the audience when you are performing in a language other than their native one?

Good question. I’m not sure if I have the answer. But I want them to understand the piece beyond the language. I think it’s an ongoing question to be investigated together with the members of the audience who do not know English. Another thing I can say is that, even though there is a lot of text, the way that the narration is built is not based on text only, it’s carried by actions, behaviors, There is lots of movement, lots of interactions. There are also songs, which introduce another realm in itself. So the way the narration is drawn has several layers towards which people witnessing the piece can refer to.

What does ‘Fringe’ signify for you?

Wild Encounter. Determined dedication to personal visions or art. Community of support that wants to jump high while learning how to use its legs. And “Istanbul Fringe” - a long, beautiful, colorful wave of creative energy. All the people I’ve interacted with so far (virtually) were so sympathetic and kind, welcoming and helpful. So prompt to respond. From outside it seems that all the team creating the Istanbul Fringe have worked a lot and succeeded in making a very beautiful arts encounter and international cultural reality in Istanbul. I’m happy for them, proud of them, and I’m very glad to be part of it.

Why did you decide to participate in the Istanbul Fringe festival particularly with this work of yours? 

Simply because at the time when I was applying, that was the only full-length theatrical solo work of mine that I could propose.

[The Turkish version of this interview was published in unlimited]