“Border” And “Sheol/שאול” – Wachowicz/Fret Studio At Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2024

At this year’s Edinburgh Festival in the Grotowski Institute Residence Cube at Fringe 2024 Wachowicz/Fret Studio presented two performances: Border and Sheol/שאול. Both are extremely interesting, touching on important contemporary issues. Performed with great energy, they were met with understanding and applause from the audience. Border was recognized by journalists after the first performance, who awarded it The Scotsman Fringe First 2024. This is the oldest award given at the Fringe Festival. The performance also received the Excellence Award Nominee ad Fringe 2024.

Created by Monika Wachowicz and Antonina Romanova, Border is a play that deeply touches on the issue of crossing borders. External borders, state, ethnic and religious borders, violated by war aggressors. Border walls and barricades. Crossed by immigrants who want to get across the sea, wilderness or desert to a better world. To the countries of the European Union, Great Britain or the USA. However, the wealthy north turns out to be unfriendly to them, the border guard and the army push their dinghies away and even sink their boats. They throw immigrants through barbed wire to the other side of the border. The play also concerns internal, existential borders, concerning sexual and gender identity. Both groups, immigrants and LGBTQ+, are often still considered aliens. They are perceived as a threat to the traditional political, social and cultural system.

Monika Wachowicz is artist, actress and performer. She coordinates theatre and social projects and lectures at the Academy of Theatre Arts in Wrocław. Antonina Romanova is a director, actress, performer, and author of manifestos. She creates original artistic projects. She is also a non-binary person. She was born and raised in Crimea occupied by Russian troops. Her ethnic roots are Russian, but she feels a citizen of Ukraine. As an immigrant and LGBTQ+ person, she is particularly sensitive to the problem of violating borders. Both geographical and existential. A similar problems of exploiting human identity, performative visualization of existential traumas, also interests Monika Wachowicz. Inspired by Jarosław Fret, director of The Grotowski Institute in Wrocław, they decided to prepare a performance Border. They invited to cooperate Olena Matoshniuk, a Ukrainian artist involved in painting, performance and video performance.

Border. Photo credit M. Wachowicz.

At the entrance to Cube, Monika Wachowicz, dressed in a long red dress, hands out glasses to the audience entering. Next to the door, on red velvet, there are rows of glasses. Opposite, there is a table covered with white tulle– an altar. When the audience takes their seats, the Artist turns on the video projector. She takes off her dress, puts on black trousers and a white shirt. She is no longer a lady greeting guests. She becomes a performer.

Antonina Romanova appears on the screen. She begins her story. She is currently operating a mortar at the front. On the screen, Romanova stands in uniform, with a rifle slung over her shoulder. She talks about the war. In the trenches, she feels fear, anxiety, cold, and sometimes hunger. Fatigue, nerves, little sleep. Antonina talks about dogs. Her military unit took in a dog named Orlando. There are a lot of them after the evacuation of civilians, they run around as strays. The soldiers take them in, feed them, and take care of them. It is somehow more enjoyable for people and animals to live together. More like at home. In the distance, we can hear the sound of sirens and artillery explosions.

Monika Wachowicz divides the stage space with barbed wire. In the playing space, next to the candles placed, she arranges sheets of paper. This creates a labyrinth. She lights the candles, the dying matches burn her fingers. She begins the story of Antonina. About the meeting, the invitation to a joint project, the impossibility of Romanova’s arrival due to the outbreak of war. The Ukrainian artist’s consent to participate in the performance in the form of a video transmission. Monika calls Antonina a presence and authenticity artist. Antonina talks about her performance TEXT. It consisted of three parts, created in different places in Ukraine. The first hundred pages were written in Lviv, at the west of the country. The next hundred pages in the east of Ukraine, in Severodonetsk. She wrote the last hundred pages with her own blood in a tent, at the front. Then she burned all the pages. She performed an act of authorial annihilation of a literary work. The Master did something similar in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita novel. It is not worth saving the poems when people die in the war. For the performance Border, Romanova wrote Manifesto. This text is not only about war, it is a manifesto of cross-borderism. Romanova is not only a soldier. As a non-binary person, she does not fit into the traditionally understood identity and sexuality. Her ethnic identification is also not simple. She identifies as a Russian non-binary person fighting in defense of Ukraine, her country. She also does not like unambiguous definitions in art. She writes about herself:

I am NOT a theatre director.

I do NOT need intermediaries in a dialogue with a spectator.

I’m NOT an actress as well.

I’am NOT an instrument to express other people’s ideas.

I’m NOT a playwright.

I DON’T need theatre to communicate with a reader.

I’m NOT an artist.

I DON’T need a help of aesthetics to talk about problems.

If I a estheticize a problem, I parasitize it.

Border. Photo credit M. Wachowicz

The viewers of performance hears a text about how there is no boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and space. Wachowicz takes a canister and pours sand from it into glasses held by the audience. When he returns to the stage, he says, pointing to the canister: Here are five liters of sand in canister. I have six liters of blood in my body. Then he moves a table on which there is: a megaphone, white tulle, candles, a needle, a metronome. He sets up an altar, lights candles, like in the Orthodox Church. Wachowicz pierces his finger, blood flows into a glass. Rite de passage. Theatrical, Monika’s. And warlike, Antonina’s. Areas of sacred or heresy? Or maybe human corporeality, hiding the interior. Liters of pulsating blood, sustaining life, stimulating the brain’s ganglia. It’s easy to sever arteries. Kill a person.

Monika prays a litany similar to the Catholic one. She names women through a megaphone: (…) Antonina, Ivory Tower/Monika Ivory Tower/My name is Monika/I AM THE BORDER/My body is the border. Then she undresses, hangs her pants on barbed wire. She starts the metronome. Naked, she lies down on glasses filled with sand. An act of sacrifice. The artist’s body, a woman’s body, a human body. On the screen, the text Livor mortis, about a decomposing body, post mortem stains. The viewers slowly approaches the table, puts candles in a glass filled with sand. Then they bend down and lie down in front of the artist’s naked body. In the silence, you can hear first the steady rhythm of the metronome, then the growing roar of alarm sirens. Ite missa est, the sacrifice is over.

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Sheol. Photo credit M. Wachowicz

The second performance by Wachowicz/Fret Studio, shown at the Edinburgh Festival, is Sheol / שאול. A layer of ash was scattered in the performance space. The stage is extended by a glass cage containing a white table and a stool. The music sets the next chords of pain, going deep inside oneself, a cry of despair. The idea for the performance was inspired by the III. Symphony by Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, a Polish composer. This piece evokes a metaphysical shiver. Through aesthetics, it encourages reflection on existence. Musical sensitivity is also directed by religiosity in Misserere by Gregorio Allegri and Quartet for the End of Time by Olivier Messiaen, performed by Jan Skopowski playing the cello. Kamil Grabowski accompanies him on the piano in Edinburgh. Piano, cello, ukulele, Oskar’s tin drum from Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum novel. That’s not all. There is one more instrument, the most important: However, the sound of the trumpet towers over everything-drawing and cutting through the zenith and nadir of sound (M. Wachowicz). The sound of the trumpet heralds change: a rite of passage, birth, the bugle call marking the hour from the town hall tower. It evokes the freedom of jazz improvisation. But there is also ambivalence in it. A fire brigade or military band cannot do without the trumpet. Finally, its sound amidst the silence of a cemetery means the final farewell.

Departure to the land of shadows, to the titular Sheol, where souls wander awaiting the final resolution of their fate. It is a sad and gloomy land. Just like the stage ritual that the audience witnesses. Monika Wachowicz enters the space of the game. She changes into a white blouse and a dark suit, like an orchestra conductor. Because she will also be conducting the instruments of her own psyche. Changing her outfit means entering the space of Durkheim’s sacrum. She stands in front of the microphone, gives a sign to the musician. The sound of a trumpet resounds, acting as a metronome to set the right tone. The actress tries to extract her voice from her interior, to articulate her pain. The attempts are in vain, the viewer hears only wheezing, air being expelled from the lungs. The impression is strong, it is difficult to translate it into written language. The face changes color, reflecting the state of the interior. The inability to work through the traumas of the past. The pain that we inflict on ourselves. But also the pain that comes to us from outside. The pain of loss. The loss of a brother, the loss of a friend. Those whose shadows wander in Sheol and wait for us. And the living cannot come to terms with this loss of people dear to us. It is not yet time for them to immerse themselves in the soothing currents of Lethe, the river of oblivion. They must descend deep into themselves, their own abysses, into the successive circles of Dante’s hell. The guider is Monika Wachowicz, touching on the idea of acting by Antonin Artaud. Musical symbols, through which the anxieties of the interior are revealed. The feeling of unprocessed loss. When a close young person passes away, then the feeling of injustice screams. It comes out of the Artist’s throat. The longer the performance lasts, the clearer the sounds come from her entrails. Trauma must be shouted out. The pain of loss, dissatisfaction, loneliness, unfulfillment. The Dybbuks of the dead are still in the body that trembles, that bleeds; whose psyche reaches the edge of madness. The ghosts have not yet said goodbye, have not completed their earthly journey. Stripped of their corporeality, they enter the recesses of memory.

Sheol. Photo credit M. Wachowicz.

Monika Wachowicz hits the drum. She faces her fears. And not only her own. The family trauma of women needs to be worked through: grandmothers, mothers. Experiences of family post-memory. Strict upbringing by the grandmother, the mother’s despair after losing her son. An attempt to break the vicious circle of suffering by the daughter-artist. So that the next generations would be free. Marianne Hirsch writes that in the fourth generation, post-memory fades away, it stops influencing the decisions made by the living. The performance Sheol/ שאול shows that this applies not only to the children and grandchildren of the Shoah Survivors.

Wachowicz falls into the ashes, her suit turns grey. Her body is cut by sharp grains of gravel. The artist leaves the performance space and returns to it. She gives the musician a sign to start the rehearsal on stage, only to interrupt it a moment later. She shows the infernum of existence. Monika Wachowicz makes us realize that Sheol is also others. Exploiting us, manipulating us, intentionally evoking a sense of fear in the other person. Using physical and psychological violence. Spreading fake news. The performance Sheol/ שאו makes you think.