Memory of the body in Akademia Ruchu’s work
Teatr przedstawia ciała i jednocześnie posługuje się nimi jako swoimi najważniejszymi znakami. W funkcji znaku teatralnego ciało wszakże nie znika: na scenie pozostaje wartością samą w sobie. (Lehmann 2004: 273)
(Theater simultaneously shows and uses bodies as its most important signs. In its function of a theater sign the body does not disappear however: on the stage it remains a value of its own.)
Akademia Ruchu (eng. Academy of Movement) is a creative collective, founded in 1973 in Warsaw. It worked at the intersection of different disciplines of art: theater, visual arts, performance art and film. “They searched for a new language and means of expression, (...) but also maintained the tension between an artistic experiment and political engagement. Increasingly their actions were more geared towards not creating art, but rather creating a situation, which was supposed to be a starting point to an open public debate” (Kosiński 2010: 480). Paraphrasing Kosiński, the group established their own unique language and aesthetics, which their leader – Wojciech Krukowski, included in the formula of visual narration theater. The group was also the initiators of the innovative art happenings in open city spaces in Poland. The artists felt the need to tear down the theater walls and go to the streets, where they created several actions, from anonymous interventions and participatory projects to grand street performances.
The collective presented their work throughout the entire Europe, North and South Americas and Japan, among others at the World Theater Festival in Caracas and Nancy, Kaaitheater Festival in Brussels, International Theater Festival in Chicago, Live Art Festival in Glasgow. They performed during the Documenta 8 in Kassel and Performa 2013 in New York; at the Institute of Contemporary Arts ICA in London, MoMA PS1 in New York and Museum of Arts in Yokohama.
After the street happenings, the Academy returned to theater performances in 1979. Already in 1982 they put out two shows: Inne Tańce (Different Dances) and English Lesson. Thanks to the street happenings they established a close relationship with the audience, which allowed them to address social issues in theater performances. Their social activism introduced a new type of relationship between the performers and the audience, which despite the still existing theater wall, had the ability to understand actors actions better.
In order to understand their audience better, the artists had to study it and get to know it beforehand. They created a new kind of theater, one that was dynamic, one that studied gesture rather than words. That is why the body and movement became crucial elements of the dialogue with the audience for them. The viewers seemed to easily adapt to the innovative narrations. “The contemporary avant garde (...) drifted towards a maximum exposure of the carnality, materiality of the voice, effectiveness of the gesture by treating the immediate presence
as the only and the undeniable value of meeting between the actor/performer and the viewer/witness of the happening” (Sajewska 2016: 62). Probably thanks to that, every single viewer was capable of not only understanding the actors’ hints, but also thanks to the familiarity with the gestures, was not indifferent to the spectacle they were watching.
I would like to look at the Academy of Movement’s actors bodies through a category of body as an archive, which has become “a form of writing, storing and updating the history and a reflection of such culture manifestations, in which it is uncovered as a space to forward actions from a body to a body, as a space for embodied and incarnated history” (Sajewska 2016: 73).
There is only a four minute clip available from the English Lesson spectacle, showing a sequence with the music of polish post-punk band Brygady Kryzys Travelling Stranger. The clip shows a “plan of a foreign language lesson (with the use of a tape recorder, improvised word exercises and dances). This show also suggested lessons of adapting to an artificial reality – and creative interpretations its restricted abilities” (Borkowska 2006: 103). The actors with little mirrors in their mouths, wearing dark sunglasses and elegant outfits, seem to be far away from the audience. Their bodies are no longer conventional and social, their bodies turn into stage, performing bodies. The artificiality of the language shifts to the artificiality of the carnality. Their lips do not say anything, their eyes do not express anything. In their hasty gestures of smoking cigarettes, adjusting the clothing, is hidden a great deal of stress, as if the actors were anxiously waiting for a stressful conversation – they are placed in an oppressive space. The show presents a language lesson, that is why the audience becomes alert and suspicious towards the speech, but also gestures, which are its parts. The Academy shows a dumbstruck language, the actors are not capable of expressing words, they turn into figures, from the song they become alien travellers.
The borders between the truth and the false, between the art and the reality, between the actor and a human being are blurred. The theatrical situation is no longer obvious, because it is so familiar to the society and its everyday. The Academy carries the political situations to the scene through the body and embodies the experiences of those situations through the movement.
Academy of Movement’s focus on the repeating movement sequences resulted in drifting away from the theatricalism, which was associated with dramatic texts, plots, and costumes. Thanks to the minimalism in set design and movements, and the absence of text in their shows, they presented a simple critical reflection. Their technique could be compared to the concepts of postmodern dance, which creators proclaimed the omnipresence of dance – each movement is a dance, and every person could be a dancer.
In English Lesson one group of actors stands close to the audience, and a second group sits still in the background. The group closer to the audience slowly starts to move. The Academy often uses a repeating gesture of adjusting clothing in their shows, which can be interpreted as deeply rooted social habit in those times. The performers smoke invisible cigarettes, they perform the gesture of pulling out documents and showing them to an invisible authority, another repeating sequence consists of adjusting, taking off and putting back on sunglasses. After a while the groups change places. In the rhythm of striking music by Travelling Stranger, a new wave band, the actors repeat their agitated movements in oblivion.
An important aspect of this part of the English Lesson, are the little mirrors placed in actors’ mouths, making their faces look unreal. One can read from them horror, astonishment, and even boredom. However, in this case the mirror is placed within the body, it starts to dance on its own, it seems to be a commentary on the lyrics: “I see the fallen structures/dead broken shapes/there is nothing to regret/there is only a giant falsehood”. Contrary to the movement, stemming from the everyday, the mirrors, which are the visualization of the language, become synonymous with falsehood in this case. Not only the language, which is empty and foreign, but also the lips speaking words with no meaning. The words themselves are the cause for which the actors are immobile from within. They only use gestures, which they had to embody in order to adjust to the false reality.
Todays attempts to analyze the Academy of Movement’s work can be problematic as there are very few available recordings of the shows in poor quality. Despite that, the viewer enters a completely different space when watching their work, maybe even experiences the same type of trance as the original audience. Thanks to simple set design, which was just a black box with modest props, the audience focus is concentrated at the bodies present on the stage. Despite the time passing, when watching one still feels amazed by the innovative and eerie works of the Academy of Movement. The collective’s leader used the dialogue with the reality as his main medium, he therefore used a very contemporary language. He mainly attributed it to music, which commented on the current social situation and at the same time was expressive and had the ability to induce trance. The viewer was transported into a completely different space, having an impression of being completely isolated from the outside world, but was also at the same time entering a new convention illustrating an exaggerated everyday conditions. The viewer starts noticing the pathology of the social behaviors, usually stemmed from increasing tensions on the scene, stemming from incarnated system, or the fear of it. The spectacles put on by the Academy of Movement become collages of stories about social choreography and the network of communal relations.
When Dorota Sajewska writes about the necroperfomance, she understands it “as the study subject, it does not have one point of reference and a passive object of historical reconstruction, but an active body-archive – which has its own historical matter, which appears and disappears, which in turn means that it changes” (Sajewska 2016:71). In Academy of Movement’s works there is a lot of material, that places the history on the performer’s body. The actors themselves were the carriers of gestures, but they had to embody them as new in order to present them in a way understandable for the viewer. In the case of Academy of Movement it is the repeated trauma of the community in the communist Poland, which personally touched every single person in the country. The show was about being stuck in a system in which the society has to be subordinate. Krukowski himself said “The everyday in our shows is contained in gestures, behaviors – taken from the reality without «play», with the highest possible level of naturalness” (Plata 2016: 11).
While observing the choreography in English Lesson one can see, what was the reality of the times. People stuck in oppressive situations, which caused stress induced tics in the body, constant tension even in domestic situations, military presence in the streets, constant, pointless waiting for everything and nothing. The theater scene has become a place to play the real dramas, which were edited to be more dynamic – through changes in rhythm and repetition.
The shows created by Academy of Movement reveal their own paradoxical place in the memory archive: as the forgotten past, constantly working right under the skin of the polish culture, but not by anticipating the processes happening in the contemporary performing arts, but rather by consistently building them.
video: https://artmuseum.pl/en/filmoteka/praca/akademia-ruchu-english-lesson
music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbT4GkbhG1M
Hans-Thies Lehmann (2004), Teatr postdramatyczny, Kraków.
Dariusz Kosiński (2010), Teatra polskie. Historie, Warszawa.
Tomasz Plata (2016), Akademia Ruchu. Teatr, Warszawa.
Dorota Sajewska (2016), Nekroperformans. Kulturowa rekonstrukcja teatru wielkiej wojny, Warszawa.
Akademia Ruchu : miasto - pole akcji, red. Małgorzata Borkowska, Warszawa.
