About quantum physics and capsules
When presenting the premiere “Quanta” very broadly, and sometimes even abstractly, an attempt was made to grasp the theme of the performance, repeating over and over again that it will be “about quantum physics”. When watching the work, it seemed as if such a description was an attempt to avoid the presentation of the plot in the name of the viewer’s experience. It was hardly necessary to try so hard, because the story of the director and playwright Joanna Bednarczyk resembles a multi-layered sandwich, the ingredients of which fall over the edges, so you only get to eat it in parts, without feeling the full taste.
In “Republika” an important place was occupied by the ability of the viewer to move, thus creating a very individual experience. This time you are stuck in front of the screens that broadcast the image. Of course, the story experienced through the lens of the camera (the author of the video projections is Jakub Lech and the cameramen) is not new either in the works of this director or in modern theater. It wouldn’t even be worth mentioning if it weren’t for the feeling that the premiere had a long cast of live actors, most of the time locked in Fabien Lédé’s smart scenography. Like a capsule, it would coalesce into one, it would disintegrate into many individual particles.
When trying to “dismantle” a performance, the easiest way is to go back to the beginning. Ł. Twarkowski was inspired by Benjamín Labatut’s book “When we stop understanding the world”. Released in 2021 it became one of the biggest bestsellers of the year and was included in Barack Obama’s summer reading list published on social networks. Intertwining biographical, historical facts with fiction in such a way that the reader hardly understood where one ends and the other begins, the writer (popularly) talked about the connections between the evil of world wars and the creators of quantum mechanics and raised the question of responsibility.
These themes resonate strongly today in the context of the geopolitical situation, the circumstances of which are often compared to World War II. The possibility of a third nuclear war in the post-pandemic state also gives rise to new considerations, close to the questions raised by B. Labatut’s book. This is how Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” is born, whose epicness, seasoned with the fantasy of the same director’s “Inception” (lit. “The Beginning”), intertwined with the aesthetics of Baz Luhrman’s “The Great Gatsby”, echoes into the world of “Quantas”, where the most important things are not theories, and the random, real and fictional interactions of the people who created them. Here, everything serious is approached by recalling the formulations of “Popular Science”, as if secondary to the lightness of the script of the series “The Big Bang Theory”.
In essence, the director and the playwright create their own variation of B. Labatut’s book, introducing the writer-narrator Patrick Wonderland (actor Martynas Nedzinskas), cleverly creating Wikipedia for him as well page. It describes up to 1938 “written” books by Mr. Wonderland seem to reproduce the structure of the real book by B. Labatut, and on the other hand, they tell the stories of the characters heard in the play.
Streams of light by Eugenijus Sabaliauskas
The action begins as soon as the audience enters the hall, with the light flashing on the stage behind the huge screen (artist – Eugenijus Sabaliauskas). It will end with the same image, as if closing a momentary hole in time, through which we get the opportunity to move to the (un)happened 1938, when the most prominent physicists of that time (un)met in a Swiss hotel.
The frame of the stage, which is created from the screen of the hood and the fence-like light installations that replicate its shape, can remind you of the Large Hadron Counterflow Collider near Geneva. The director injects its own particles into it one by one and “turns it on” for the dance. A white square screen emerges from the darkness, like outer space, on which, among other images, two actors’ figures stand out, little by little starting to move, until they begin to spin in the seriousness of the dance. They are joined by the rest of the performers.
E. Sabaliauskas not only helps the story emerge from the darkness with lights, but also creates a vivid impression of a black and white film. It will later be replaced by a rich yellow color that not only decorates the mobile scenography, but also the atmosphere of the entire performance. It will take viewers from a black-and-white documentary to a sepia-toned parallel story of fiction and fact at the hotel, sometimes interrupted by the experiences of “real-life” influencers, aptly conveyed by Aistė Zabotkaitė (Alisa) and Mariaus Čižauskas (Bob).
Photo by Greta Skaraitiene/BNS/Aistė Zabokaitė
The art of E.Sabaliauskas, created from many light sources of various sizes and different textures, simultaneously serves as the lighting of the movie theater, divides and activates the scene, and supports the night vision solutions chosen by the director and the author of the projections. They also repeat black and white and yellow color solutions, in the second way recalling the image seen through a thermal imager, sharpening the echo of today’s war.
Between science, war and art
The most parallels between the recurring states of war can be found in the first act. The main part of the story begins with Nedzinski’s character’s bet “will someone do something?”, which repeats the seven hours of the characters’ life in the hotel. The number seven works here often. We can also see it on the start screen, where, as if watching an old video tape, a countdown from seven is taking place. Used in cinema to synchronize sound with image, in this performance this calculation becomes a mechanism for launching Ł. Twarkowski’s imagined realities, like the start of time travel.
Seven is also the number most often rolled with two dice, as well as the sum of the opposite sides of the dice. “God does not play with dice”, the famous quote of Albert Einstein is used by B. Labatutas and the creators of “Quanta”. The game, probabilities, mathematics, error, simple randomness and chaos are of interest to both scientists and artists. Such dice are thrown not only by the characters of the performance, but also by the director himself.
Art as a weapon
Following the connection between art and science, the performance features the legendary dancer and author of light illusions, Loïe Fuller. It is seen for the first time with a flash on the screen, then in the actors’ texts, and at the end through the composition performed live by A. Zabotkaitė (choreographer – Pavełas Sakowiszius). Together with the light score by E. Sabaliauskas (if the Golden Stage Cross Commission does not notice the “Quanta” artist, the history of the theater will not be able to explain it) one of the most impressive scenes of the performance is created. Suddenly, before the eyes of the audience, a historical shot of a filmed dance comes to life, in which all the possibilities and contingencies, form and matter that scientists have considered are interwoven, and the mesmerizing image really eliminates the sense of time. Art, like science, can be a weapon that changes the laws of physics.
The problem is that choosing constant narrative and time loops simply reverts to a circular structure instead of a straight line.
The director also draws attention to this, talking about the relativity of time, parallel realities on the stage of classical architecture. Time also does not exist on the stage of the theater and all possible time zones collide in it at the same time. Quanta’s dramaturgy and form are rich, even sprang, with themes, connections, quotations and inspirations from popular science, seemingly to the sidelines of theater itself.
It is understandable that this team does not focus on traditional models of stage creation, as the director himself said, the most important thing for him is the effect on the viewer’s subconscious, while at the same time consciously aiming to abandon a linear narrative. The problem is that choosing constant narrative and time loops simply reverts to a circular structure instead of a straight line. It’s like exchanging theatrical prose for poetry.
Remote actors
Gediminas Rimeika, Rytis Saladžius, Airida Gintautaitė, Rimantė Valiukaitė, Rasa Samuolytė, Nelė Savičenko, Vainius Sodeika, Algirdas Dainavičius and Arūnas Vozbutas – actors not yet mentioned in this text create real and fictional characters. Their existence, although broadcast so closely from various camera angles, expresses itself mostly through texts that sometimes repeat themselves on each other’s lips, in different situations and at different times, thus creating time itself. They are the quanta of this temporary and essentially fictitious world of performance, which connect this, this separates, creating worlds large and small, real and fictional stories, commenting on and choosing realities. As with particles, we only know one value of their presence at a time, but behind closed doors, invisible, they suddenly simultaneously lose and gain the reality of their existence.
However, it would be difficult to talk about individual roles. Trying to be in front of the cameras more than acting, the actors seemed too subdued. In the first act, this was secondary to the poor adjustment of sound levels, so we had to rely on English subtitles. However, I could not call the performance bad acting. Everything that seemed unnatural in the acting came from the texts themselves. It is not the first time that when working with international teams, there is sometimes a lack of a “local ear”, be it a playwright who knows the language of the performance or a consultant from the country who can objectively feel the sound of the live text.
Aušra Pociūtė’s photo/Rehearsal of Lukasz Twarkowski’s performance “Quanta”.
Fatigue mechanics
For many, I believe, the fatigue of the premiere did not help, which broke the stage technique itself. On the first night, the performance successfully started an hour later than planned, and on the second night, the audience had to evacuate due to an evacuation warning. I will not hide that while watching the performance on September 13, I did not forget the excitement, the feeling as if the performance put together by LNDT was bursting at the seams and not falling apart just by chance. This did not help to get into and feel the scene, although the work of the composer Lubomir Grzelak always brought me back to it, as if the soundtrack created for a full subway tape did not leave any holes in the sound fabric. Just like Svenja Gassen’s costumes, which helped to create the characters, are stylistically even. Admittedly, going into intermission with the sounds of fireworks/war explosives appeared to be a bit of an exaggerated poke at the viewer’s “leisure privilege”.
In the finale, it is difficult to describe the feeling after the performance of Quanta, except for the immense gratitude to the huge team of technical and service personnel who did everything to make the performance happen. The abundance of layers of content does not allow you to get bored while analyzing, but you cannot forget the feeling of boredom in the three-hour spectacle itself. All that I want to talk about the most is dramaturgical and stage forms, their variety, but the feeling that the actor “stole” them is always haunting me.
When I stepped away from the screens, I kept getting the feeling that the stage itself was too static, avalanches of scientific and philosophical texts began to lull me, sounding like recitations. I think what impressed the director himself the most in this process was the vastness of unfathomable contexts, which receive more attention than the sensations of the audience, or the human experiences of the depicted scientists. The more one wanted to put together, say and show, the less meaning remained in it. The state of limbo after the performance is not the best assessment in this case. “Let’s not mix science with politics,” ironically say the characters in the play, once again actualizing the themes of war. I wonder how the director will be able to continue mixing art with science in the trilogy started by “Quanta”.
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#Mixing #theater #science #Quanta #Łukasz #Twarkowski #Culture
2024-09-18 20:30:09
