Gospels of Childhood by Teatr ZAR

Gospels of Childhood by Teatr ZAR

28 September, 2009
by: John Ellingsworth

There's no lights down at the end of any of the three pieces in Teatr ZAR's Gospels of Childhood triptych, currently playing at St Giles and the Barbican Pit. Instead, the active performers exit and the audience are left with the aftermath of their actions: a closed book, a dug grave, broken bread, turning lights; spills of oranges and wine, discarded shoes, scattered glass, a sapling with a noose tied to one of its branches; five bodies and the entire stage covered over by a sheet.

Teatr ZAR come from a sub-genre of Polish ensemble theatre that researches polyphonic song and extends its harmonies and rhythms out into movement and, usually, theatrical narratives that are either explicitly religious or else use the language of religious symbolism with relatively little mediation or dissonance. They use candles for light; they use glass and wood and earth and wine as blood, and no tool more sophisticated than a spade. I can only give you a thin idea of what happens on stage – the performers sing beautifully, moving together and apart, clustered and strung out, and sometimes they do more: contact dances where a man and woman roll over one another, and pull each other across the floor with hands and feet; a woman dancing and scattering beads of broken glass from her upraised shoes; a man standing and falling repeatedly.

It creates beautiful images. At the beginning of the final piece, Anhelli, a white sheet is suspended over the stage, lit from above, faintly, by lights, and two performers use long poles to set it gently roiling. They sing and the light intensifies, but only for a moment, like the sun coming out, the canopy so bright it imprints an afterimage on your retina. Physically I didn't find it all as engaging as I suppose was intended. The aesthetic of the whole production is one of wholeness – the actors are pure, egoless Grotowskian vessels – and for me the smooth, sheer surfaces of this kind of work don't really admit (in both senses) an audience. It's the product of an intense and involuted creative process, and when you engage it's difficult to know what you're engaging with. The audience clapped at the end of the final piece, Anhelli, when the women left the church and the men lay as five bodies covered by the vast sheet – but I felt certain they wouldn't come out, and they didn't. The applause died down and the audience left and it was very queer. I thought: What are they doing under the sheet and what are they thinking? Are they unhappy? How long will they stay there? Do they feel like themselves or like someone else? Whose funeral has this been?

I can't possibly answer any of those, although I can say that the whole evening left me queasy and a little miserable. Here's what the last two paragraphs from the programme text have to say: 'We live in cathedrals of our own bodies, with ornamentation and gilded facades, where placement and relations with others are of the utmost importance. But Anhelli calls for small country wooden churches where we can remain enclosed in aloneness. Closed within. Instead of cathedrals – small temples of the heart; small churches of the body; chapels and meeting halls. […] We need to involve our entire inner being, our entire life force to create a vast space inside, create a void as empty as a Siberian abyss. So empty that it sucks in.'


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John Ellingsworth