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The Polish Year in Israel is chiefly designed to foster Polish-Israeli rapprochement and understanding by promoting cultural and economic ties between the two countries. contacts on scientific level as well as tourist exchange. Moreover, the venture is aimed at starting long-term cooperation between institutions of both countries.
The cultural events to be held during the Polish Year are targeted particularly at those members of the Israeli public who have not been interested in Polish arts and culture so far. Hence a careful selection was made of projects that would meet the interest of Israelis with stress put on Poland’s present-day culture, as potentially the best platform to promote understanding between the two societies.
Bogdan Bernaczyk–Słoński, head of the Adam Mickiewicz Insti-
tute, says that in preparation for the Polish Year, Israeli cultural event managers were invited to Poland last year to draw up a detailed programme of events taking into account what Poland has to offer and what might in particular interest the Israeli public. It follows from what these managers said that interest in Polish culture in Israel is immense and one may expect that the Polish Year events will stimulate that interest even more. The organizers wish to address the Year events in particular to the young generation. While not refraining altogether from touching sensitive topics related to Polish- Israeli relations, the organizers do not want the past to overshadow the Polish Year events, Bogdan Bernaczyk–Słoński points out and concludes:
“The cultural programme of the Year events consists of several dozen concerts, theatre performances, exhibitions, publications, film projects and contemporary dance appearances. Everyone in Israel will be welcome to partake in this big encounter with Polish culture, to attend Polish film festivals, theatre performances, clubs, art galleries, and museums, concerts in Tel-Aviv, Jerusa-
lem and Haifa”.
The Polish Year in Israel will be launched by a special ceremony in the Israeli Opera in Tel Aviv on April 9 featuring the premiere performance of Giacomo Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly” played together with local soloists, orchestra and ballet, produced by the world famous Polish theatre director Mariusz Treliński to the stage design by Boris Kudliček. This Polish-Israeli co-production will be shown for ten evenings (up to April 22). It will also mark the beginning of Treliński’s regular co-operation with the Tel Aviv Opera. After the roaring success won by his productions of “Madame Butterfly” in Warsaw and Washington, its performance in Tel Aviv will hopefully become a highlight of the theatre season there as well.
The stage performance of “Cosmos” based on a novel by Witold Gombrowicz, regarded as one of the most original Polish writers of the 20th century, will be another major theatre event planned during the Polish Year in Israel. This adaptation of the novel for stage directed by Jerzy Jarocki at the National Theatre in Warsaw will be shown this summer during the interdisciplinary “Israel Festival” review in Jerusalem. Witold Gombrowicz once pointed out that “Cosmos is not an ordinary novel. It is a novel about history and about reality forming itself clumsily and inexplicitly out of our associations. Cosmos brings us in an ordinary way into an extraordinary world, in a sense into the backstage of the world. And since a detective story is just that, that is an attempt at organizing chaos, hence Cosmos has in some way the form of a detective romance”. Jerzy Jarocki, a veteran master of the Polish theatre, has adapted the novel to the stage cleverly and wittily.
As honourary guest of the ”Israel Festival” Poland will for the first time present the Israeli public with an highly interesting stage production of “Dybbuk”, one of the best theatre performances directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski, which has already been shown at the Festival d’Avignon and Bouffes du Nord in Paris. Warlikowski juxtaposes Szymon Anski’s “Dybbuk”, the tragic love story of Chanan and Lea based on old Jewish folk tales, with Hanna Krall’s short story “Dybukk”about an American tormented by the spirit of his half brother, who was killed in the Warsaw ghetto during WW2. The protagonist does not want to get rid of the spirit nor does he want to forget the Holocaust and the culture of his Polish Jewish ancestors. Polish theatre and opera director Krzysztof Warlikowski is generally regarded as one of Europe’s most prominent directors of his generation.
Polish chamber music ensembles and a contemporary dance theatre will appear during the Polish Days in Israel as Honorary guests of the 8th International Spring Festival in Rishon LeZion. The “Polish Dance Theatre” from Poznań, Poland’s best known contemporary dance ensemble, will appear at the Festival with its latest production of “Carpe Diem” to be subsequently shown between April 5th and 9th in Modi’in, Petach Tikva and Herzelii. The “Polish Dance Theatre and Ballet” from Poznań was set up in 1973 and is run since 1988 by renowned choreographer Ewa Wycichowska, once the prima ballerina of many years of the Great Theatre in Łódź and juror of many ballet competitions.
The programme of the Polish Year in Israel includes an impressive Polish film repertoire. This will include retrospective presentations of productions by acclaimed Polish film directors Krzysztof Kieślowski (1941-1996) and Wojciech Jerzy Has (1925-2000) during the “Icons of the Polish cinema” festivals in Haifa and Jerusalem.
As regards Krzysztof Kieslowski, few figures in the international cinema were more prominent during the 1990s than the director of The Decalogue (1988), The Double Life of Véronique (1991), and the “Three Colours Trilogy” of Blue (1993), White (1993), and Red (1994). Those works saw Kieślowski acclaimed, with much justification, as the most significant European filmmaker of the 20th century’s last two decades. His later works reveal an increasing fascination with the mysterious roles of chance, choice, coincidence and fate, culminating in the moody, strangely metaphysical quartet of films (Veronique and the “Three Colours Trilogy”. Throughout his career Kieślowski was a humanist with a deeply pessimistic stripe, an artist fascinated with the inner life of human beings, spiritual dimensions of existence, the deeper truths hidden beneath the surface realities and the ethical and moral dilemmas faced by individuals in life.
On his part, Wojciech Has is best known for film adaptations of The Noose” (a short story by Marek Hłasko, ”The Hour-Glass Sanatorium” (a short-story by Brunon Schulz) and ”The Saragossa Manuscript”, an adaptation of a novel by Count Jan Potocki, a great work of European literature written in 1805. The latter has been the most unusual and amazing film in the history of the Polish cinematography. Martin Scorses, Francis Ford Coppola, Luis Bunuel and Jerry Garcai have at various times described “The Saragossa Manuscript” as their favourite film. The plot centres on Alphonse van Worden, a young Belgian captain of the Walloon guards (played by the late Polish cinema star Zbigniew Cybulski) travelling through the arid landscapes of 17th-century Spain to Madrid. The film made in 1965 has a very modern, labyrinthine, story-within-a-story structure. Its absurdist black humour and mockery of aristocratic pretensions predates Monty Python and Stanley Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon” by a few years. The intriguing stylistic flourishes sit against the wonderful soundtrack, composed by the world famous Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki.
Polish film-related events will also include ‘Israel-Poland. New gaze” workshops to be held for young Polish and Israeli directors. Israeli participants will be expected to produce documentary films about Poland while films about Israel will be made by their Polish counterparts. Moreover, interdisciplinary workshops under the theme of “March 1968, Farewells and Returns” will be arranged for Polish and Israeli students to make them find their own, personal perspective in unveiling painful events of 40 years ago which nowadays have become part of common Polish-Jewish reminiscence.
Polish jazz will also be high on the agenda of the Polish Year in Israel. Poland’s “Simple Acoustic Trio”, generally considered as one of the world’s most important jazz trios of the new millennium, will participate in this year’s prestigious Israel Festival event. The “Trio” is working regularly with Tomasz Stańko, Jan Garbarek and Manu Katché. It is composed of pianist Marcin Wasilewski, double bass player Sławomir Kurkiewicz and drummer Michał Miśkiewicz. The “January” disc recorded this year by Marcin Wasilewski, the leader of the group, for the German ECM Record Company has become a major jazz publication event in Poland on account of its beautiful music, poetic climate and masterful rendering of the piece.
In the field of modern art, about ten Polish exhibitions focusing in particular on experimental cinema, video art and performance, will be shown over the year starting as of April at the Contemporary Arts Centre in Tel Aviv. Residences for artists and workshops for curators will be held. Poland will attend the Videozone 2008 video art festival as special guest. It will be represented there by Łukasz Ronduda (author of more than a dozen Polish experimental cinema and video exhibitions), Sebastian Cichocki (author of an unconventional “Kronika Art Gallery” project in Bytom and a lecturer at the post-graduate curator studies at the Jagellonian University in Cracow), Cezary Bodzianowski (one of Poland’s most interesting performance artists), Waldemar Tatarczuk (curator of the Performance Art Festival at the Centre for Contemporary Art in the Ujazdowski Palace in Warsaw), Wilhelm Sasnal (an icon of young Polish arts) and the Azzoro group (famed for its provocative films on contemporary art and artists).
An interesting Polish industrial design exhibition will be on at the Artist’s House in Tel Aviv under the heading:”Made in Poland. New design from Poland. The best goods designed and produced in Poland after 1989”. This exhibition was a hit when it was shown in Berlin’s Kunstgewerbemuseum in May 2007. The exhibition, to be set up by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, is to highlight the high level of Polish industrial design on the example of more than 100 items including furniture, white goods, glassware, ceramics, interior decorations, lightning equipment, graphic art products, transportation means, packaging and computer games. The display will also reveal what distinguishes Polish designing art in present times of progressing globalisation and when simultaneously the need is growing for emphasizing manufacturers’ national identity in design.
Two Polish photo exhibitions will be on show in the Artist’s House in Jerusalem from May 3 to June 7. These will be arranged by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of its campaign commenced last year to promote ” Photo Poland” covering works by young photographers. One will be the “Hydroclinic” exhibition by Mikołaj Grospierre and the other “UFO” by Szymon Rogiński. Both artists were born in 1975. Mikołaj Grospierre is a French-Polish photographer working in Warsaw since 1999. His works were shown during collective Polish photo exhibitions in the Polish Embassy in Tokyo, during the “New Documentalists” show at the Centre of Contemporary Art in Ujazdów Castle in Warsaw and in the National Gallery in Bratislava. Szymon Rogiński from Warsaw, a graduate of the Artistic Photo Study Centre in Gdańsk, has been involved in photography and particularly in photo advertising, for ten years. Both exhibitions will be worth seeing.
maciej Proliński