June 27th

My journal for this day starts with an entry at 10AM,  recapping what happened the night before.  The next entry is at 1:55PM.  I’d have to conclude from this that it was a slow morning – probably just eating breakfast, checking email, and chatting with the others.

1:55PM

Apparently, tickets for the Guerilla Walk (an event that both Tamara and Peter praised endlessly last night) are sold out.  We’ve been put on the standby list though, so we’ll see if we can get lucky there.

I’m feeling pretty tired and incoherent.  Again, the bunks in this hostel aren’t very comfortable.  Not sure what I want to do today…

I’m in the Poznan square with Linn, Yev and Alexi.  We’re feeding pigeons.

My throat is still really sore, but Tara and Tom gave me some Robatussin, Alexi gave me some Polish cold medication, and Yev gave me some vitamin C.  And I’m constantly munching on Halls.

Hopefully it’s not a lethal combination.

4:35PM

I’m with Yev and Alexi, and we just watched a film called “Attempt of a Portrait of Jerzy Grotowski”.  Pretty interesting.  Next is another (rare) film on Grotowski, which demonstrates some of his rehearsal techniques.

I found a YouTube clip of the video:

The actor demonstrating it is ripped, and moves his body really violently…he’s snapping his neck around all over the place (see 4:00 onward).  It looks uncomfortable, but I guess he knows what he’s doing.

We’re going to watch a bit of it, and then leave to try to do the Guerilla Walk thing.

5:30PM

After watching a bit of the second Grotowski film, Yev, Alexi and I made a break for it and headed to the meeting place for the Guerilla Walk.

I wasn’t entirely sure what this Guerilla Walk thing was…Peter and Tamara had been (intentionally?) vague about it – saying that we just had to do it.

When we got there, we found out that some folks who had reserved tickets couldn’t make it – so we, the standbys, got the tickets.  Thank you drama gods!

We got into a lineup, and noticed that a bunch of other folks from the UCDP had also made it in.  We got closer and closer to the end of the line, and when we got there, a person asked for our passports.  Apparently, we would be getting a headphone set for listening to our tour guides (like at Auschwitz), and they wanted our passports as deposits.

Hm.  As a cautious traveler, this set off warning bells.  I had been instructed from the get-go to not let my passport get out of sight, and that Canadian passports are particularly valuable on the black market.  But, I watched my comrades fork over their Canadian passports for their headsets, and I eventually did the same.

So, I got my wireless headphones, and waited in the designated area for the “walk” to begin.

THE GUERILLA WALK – By Olliwood Productions

This might have been my favourite part about our trip to Poland.  I’ll do my best to describe it.

The tour group was about…I’d guess, 50 people.  All of us had wireless headphones on.

There were two tour guides.  One was decked out with an impressive portable DJ-ing rig and broadcasting system (large antenna out of his backpack).  The other guide had headphones similar to ours, but with a microphone to speak to us.  There was also some support guys walking around with spare batteries for our headphones in case we started to run low.  There was a camera guy filming us.

The banter between the two tour guides was absolutely hilarious.  It was something like morning-radio-show banter, mixed with highly-skilled freestyle rap.

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Our guides then took us on adventures in the city.  We walked through a town hall (?…seemed like some sort of administrative building…) that Hitler had once visited, and listened to Chaplin imitating him from The Great Dictator.  We were then led out of the “bowels” of the building on to the street.

And already, we were putty in their hands.  The guides were very skilled at making us all feel like a mob that was cooler than anyone else around us who wasn’t wearing headphones.  A strange feeling of invincibility seemed to sweep through us as we marched along, invading various parts of the city.

We would periodically stop to watch our tour guides complete some kind of “mission”.  For example, they would do some “Guerilla planting”, and plant a flower at a city park.  Other times, they’d climb up a portable ladder to second-story apartments and say hello to the people inside.  If they found a lady, they’d ask for a lock of her hair.

They would chat with interesting people they found on the street, and give them a microphone so we could hear what they were saying.

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And the entire time, there was a cool hip-hop back-beat, and periodic freestyle rapping from the DJ.  The entire tour group would dance sporadically.  I’m sure we looked silly or strange to people without headphones walking around us…but we just didn’t care.

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Eventually, our guides led us inside of a building.  We walked up a flight of steps, and through some dark passageways.  There was a lot of us, and it was getting cramped.  Our destination was a darkroom, and it was pitch black.  All of us, all of the tour group, was in pitch black.  And then suddenly, beer was being passed around, our tour-guide lit up his neon suit, and we were having an impromptu “darkroom disco”.  Most of the music was Michael Jackson.  And it was awesome.  We danced, blindly.  We held hands with silent strangers that we couldn’t see.  Whooping and hollering in the dark.  Very cool experience.

We eventually left the darkroom disco.  The beer had really loosened up the tour group, and we were all getting pretty silly and dancy.  We waited for a streetcar, and danced until it finally showed up.

There were a few other missions after the darkroom disco…we put up some QR Codes around the city, saying things like “Something from nothing”, or “I love you”.

We gathered at a public, indoor swimming pool, stood around it, and sang a song about amoebas.

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We intercepted a wedding party and talked to the newlyweds.

We saw Stormtroopers.

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It was 3.5 hours of amazing.  And it ended in fireworks and a huge Michael Jackson dance off in the middle of Poznan square near one of the impromptu shrines:

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Onlookers without headphones gawked as we danced our buns off to music that only we could hear.

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But why just tell you about it, when I can show you?  They filmed the whole thing.  I pop up a few times in the video, along with my comrades.  This will give you a good idea of what we were doing.

After the tour, and after we’d calmed down a bit (the whole experience had really pumped us up), Jiv and I had an interesting conversation about the meaning of the piece.

While it could simply be viewed as a fun tour, Jiv noted certain patterns in its design and content.  Patterns like the amoeba song, the Hitler speech, the blind darkroom dance.  He said that it was an interesting study in mob mentality – and that it really only takes a charismatic, likable leader (our tour guides), and direct 1-way communication (the headsets) to create a mob.  We had become a benign, dancing, adventuring mob.  But violent, dangerous mobs could be created in the same way.  I think Jiv is right.

After the Guerilla Walk, we grabbed some food (we were starving), and then went to go see Caligula.

Caligula was being performed outdoors.  It was becoming a chilly night – I hoped the actors would be warm enough.

As an interesting aside:  outside of the theatre space, there was a monument to the Polish men and women who had worked on cracking the Enigma cipher:

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I studied that for a bit, and then we went inside to see the show.

CALIGULA by Tomaž Pandur

Here’s the description of the show from the Malta! Festival website (though it looks like they just pumped the Polish version through Google Translate):

Caligula is a spectacle based on the Albert Camus’ drama but that spectacle suggests a different look at a history of Rome third emperor. It’s the story about the clash great ideas with the narrow-mindedness of the world and about the price that has to be paid by those who strive for perfection. This is the story about little people distroying, with the stubborness, everything that made them aware of their triviality – Caligula was brutally murdered and – what’s worst – he was slandered for ages. Pandula teared the shroud of the lies weaved by the Swetonius, duplicated later by historians and writers, and tells his own version of life and tragical Caligula’s end – the great visioner.

With his theatrical manifesto Caligula proclaims: ” Exciting illusion of the truth, the most beautiful spectacle in the world, the perfect place for the acts of God in the Earth, wonderful and attraction uncompared with anything, the thunder and lightning, destiny in the triumphal march… it’s the art of drama… people make mistakes because they do not believe enought in theatre.” This way the Caligula life became a living theatre, the journey without limits to the galaxy of everything what is invisible and unaware. The crowned poet with the divine clairvoyance of a hermit.

Hm.  Not the clearest description I’ve ever heard.  I’ll do my best to tell you what I saw.

Remember how I hoped that the actors would be warm?

Well, guess what?  The actors performed the entire time wearing next to nothing.  In water.  It wasn’t just a wet stage…it was…like, half a foot of water that the actors were standing and performing in.  I was freezing just watching them.

So, this was another take on the story of Caligula, the third Roman emperor.

And it was visually stunning.  I already told you about the flooded outdoor stage, but the rest of the set was this series of gray towers that looked like stone.  The towers would silently rearrange themselves in order to change the scenery.  The precision and expertise in the transitions was absolutely fantastic.  A marvel.  It was magic.

Once again, I think a lot of the story was lost in translation for me.  Plus, it was outdoors, and the actors weren’t mic’d (mic’ing would have been a nightmare in all of that water).  So hearing was a bit difficult.

There were certain points in the show that really caught my attention, visually.  The reflection of the water was used liberally to create some neat rippling effects on the set pieces.  Some additional “magic” was done with the set pieces – a stone tower would glide in front of an actor, and after it had passed, two more actors had joined the first.  Neat things like that.

So, visually, this show was stunning.  I also give full kudos to the actors for working in the freezing cold, naked, in water.  I can’t say much for the story or plot.  Still, an interesting show.

Here are some super blurry photos of the cast bowing:

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After the show, we all went back to the hostel.  As usual, reactions to Caligula were mixed.  Eventually, I landed on my lumpy mattress to try sleeping again.  We’d be heading back to Wroclaw the next morning.

Click here to go to Part 15: Back to Wroclaw, Suzuki, FRAGMENTS, and NEFÉS

Click here to go back to Part 13:  First Day in Poznan, Still Sick, and LA MENZOGNA