Poetry performance “Song of wordsbirds” | Poland
Author of the text: Zenon Fajfer
English translation: Katarzyna Bazarnik
Video: Olga Rybacka, Ewa Kaleta
Cast / readers: Zenon Fajfer (Polish text) and Katarzyna Bazarnik (English translation)
Publication date of the poetry volume „Pieśń słowronka” / “Song of Wordsbirds”: February 2, 2023, 4th Mathrubhumi Festival of Letters in Thiruvananthapuram (Kerala, India)
Date: 20.08.2023 / Sunday
Time: 5 pm
Place: Room C_107, Art_Inkubator in Art Factory in Lodz
Tickets: 35 PLN (reduced) / 45 PLN (regular)
Tickets purchase: from July 21, 2023 / via kicket.com portal (online payment) / at the festival office (payment in cash and by card)
Duration: 60 minutes (no intermissions)
Viewers' age: no limitations
Performance in Polish and English.
After the event we invite the viewers to a meeting and discussion with the artists.
The discussion will be held in Polish.
DESCRIPTION OF THE PERFORMANCE
"Pieśń słowronka" / "Song of Wordsbirds" is a séance of visible and invisible poetry based on different periods in Zenon Fajfer's work - an authorial performance, intertwining voice with writing, the printed book with the poetry of the new media. It is poetry that prompts you from the screen to enter the depths of the word set in motion and to transcend its boundaries, to immerse yourself in the poems from which new poems will emerge, and from them even more poems...
Uncovering successive layers of text, peeling off its invisible shells, is a process of clearing the view. It is a special view - "The View from a Deep Tower". Reaching the meaning rarely appears as something permanent and stable, more often it is the opening of another door and another window, which reveals new reading paths. However, in this fragility, transience, fragmentariness and temporariness of our cognition smoulders a premonition of the existence of another dimension, somewhere “in the gifted time and gifted space.”
A constellation of various, often completely new forms and means of expression reveals a multiplicity of interpenetrating perspectives. This is a look both from outside and from an undefined inside, from the abyss of Eyelids, where movement and stillness, youth and old age, closeness and distance, visible and invisible things, complement each other.
Poems from the collections: “ten letters / dwadzieścia jeden liter” (2010), “Eyelids” (2013), “View from the Deep Tower” (2015), “The Song of Wordsbirds” (2023), and a bottle-book “Detect Ozone Whole Nearby” (2004).
FRAGMENTS OF REVIEWS
“Who knows if in the times of the post-literary (if one accepts such a diagnosis), it is precisely radical proposals, which demand devotion, maximum attention, discovering overt and covert precision, and simultaneously, capable of drawing the reader into the magical abyss of the word, that will attract the greatest interest?”
(Piotr Śliwiński on Zenon Fajfer's “Eyelids”)
“Odlot is a poetic drama, a project of impossible theatre, and simultaneously, a record of a finished show, existing not on the stage, but within the book, as if both actors and spectators entered into its space, as if history came alive there, as if literature were written there anew.”
(Łukasz Drewniak on Zenon Fajfer’s “Odlot” / “The take-off or the Trip”)
“When the performance is over, I get up to thank [all the actors] and all the co-creators. It is no longer just a matter of my faith in the sense of theatre, but of something as basic as the struggle to breathe.”
(Dariusz Kosiński on Zenon Fajfer’s “Odlot” / The take-off or the Trip” and Anna Augustynowicz’s performance of his play)
INFORMATION ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Zenon Fajfer - avant-garde poet, playwright and theatre director, creator of unconventional literary, editorial and theatrical forms. Together with Katarzyna Bazarnik, he developed the concept of liberature, a new literary genre that integrates the text with the material form of the book (from Latin “liber”) into a performative, organic whole. In his work, he uses both traditional means of expression and new media. His works are included in the world canon of electronic literature. Author of several books of poetry and theatre plays, for example “Odlot” / “The Take-Off or the Trip”, staged by Anna Augustynowicz, presented at the largest Polish theatre festivals, honoured in 2022 with the Swinarski Award and the Grand Prix for the Best Production of Contemporary Polish Drama. He has presented his work in many European countries, as well as the USA, Japan, Taiwan and India. He is currently working on “Zegar Bezczasowości” / “Clock of Timelessness”, a project combining poetry, architecture and electronic media, to be realised in urban space (the first presentation of the poem in New York in 2016).
Katarzyna Bazarnik - literary scholar, specialising in Joyce and avant-garde studies, translator, professor in the Institute of English Studies at the Jagiellonian University. Together with Zenon Fajfer, she developed the concept of liberature, and co-authored books initiating the liberature movement: “Oka-leczenie” / “Mute-I-Late” (2000) and “(O)patrzenie” / “Ga(u)ze” (2003), co-editor of the publishing series "Liberatura" Ha!artu, and co-founder of the first Liberature Reading Room (currently a special collection in the Jagiellonian Library). In the 1990s, they both ran Zenkasi Theater Company in Kraków, where they staged their original play “Madam Eva, Ave Madam” (1992), pioneeringly involving disabled actors, and “Finnegans Make according to the thoughts, words and deeds of James Joyce”, premiered in Dublin in 1996.
