Creators: CHOREA Theatre, Earthfall
Direction: Jim Ennis, Jessica Cohen, Tomasz Rodowicz
Music: Maciej Rychły
Choreography: Jessica Cohen, Jim Ennis, Cai Tomos, CHOREA Theatre
Premiere cast: Anna Dąbrowska, Paulina Matuszewska, Dagmara Nakonieczna, Elżbieta Rojek, Agnieszka Szablewska, Elina Toneva, Katarzyna Tadeusz, Piotr Furtak, Tomasz Krzyżanowski, Sean Palmer, Grzegorz Pawłowski, Maciej Rychły
Premiere: 21.11.2003 (St Donats Art Centre, Wales), 14.02.2004 (Modern Art Centre - Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland)
The most important impulse driving us to create "Hode Galatan" was the question about the sense and meaning of the Antiquity and its music for the modern, 21st-century audience. We attempted to answer this question from the artistic, anthropological and historical perspective, which resulted in the fact that we invited Earthfall, one of the best British dance theatres, to participate in this project. The Earthfall artists’ task was to ‘read’ and express the Ancient Orchestra’s music using the language of modern dance, the poetics of movement of a modern performer. The combination of the oldest songs of the world with the newest techniques of body movement was a brave experiment which bore fruit in the form of the Hode Galatan… performance. The leading role in the performance is played by the chorus, a metonymy of the society, which repeatedly falls apart and melds anew around the remains of the ritual which nobody is able to recreate these days. Chaos, helplessness and aggression grow in the modern man deprived of tools to organize the world. The only thing left are traces of the songs, whose primary functions and power have almost entirely faded away. Their remains give birth to a destructive power.
Cooperation with Earthfall for this project was a real, though informal, beginning of CHOREA.
The performance was created within the framework of the Culture 2000 European project: Unknown sources of European music – Ancient Greece
When I couldn’t sit in one place anymore, when I felt the pressure and readiness to go my own way, particularly the readiness to escape from the thing that seemed to drown me, I met Jim Ennise and Jessica Cohen in Gardzienice, and cooperation with them proved to be a turning point for me. An opportunity and chance came up. We’ve been searching for one another. The fact of meeting them and working with them (first on Hode Galatan and then on Po Ptakach/After the Birds and Bakkus/Bacchus) made me realise they spoke a language I wanted to learn. It is a language of body and images, and it has a truly powerful message. Creating the solid post-industrial theatre of movement, they gave me the impulse to hit the town. Personally, I think this encounter was a strong stimulus for me to find my own path in the theatre. It significantly defined my artistic direction. Finally, I started working with people who said what they thought, admitted not knowing things, said what they wanted to say and knew how to retreat when they failed or didn't know what to do next. However, when they knew something, they knew it for sure. It was really recuperative for me to find out that it is possible to meet somebody in art on such a high level and to establish such clear relations with them.
Tomasz Rodowicz, Łódź, 20.04.2010.
Watch the trailer
