Elżbieta Matynia - Between the Local and the Global: or, What Wroclaw Has Given Us

The movie was called "My Dinner with Andre", and I remember it because this was the first time I felt that I understood most of the conversational English coming from the screen. But what made me feel really at home with the movie was that at some point – when they were served the main course – the director, Andre Gregory (in fact an accomplished and well-known theatre director), told the story of his trip to Wroclaw. It had happened several years before, I imagine in the late 70s, and he had gone to Wroclaw to meet Grotowski and take part in a theatre workshop run by his Laboratory Theatre there. Andre Gregory talked about how this unusual place, its special people, had changed the way he thought and lived ever since. His dinner guest, the penniless playwright, Wally Shawn, tried really hard to understand the sources of gratification found by Andre in the entire experience, especially his interaction with nature and the strange pleasure he took in touching wet, moldy soil – and Wally responded by reflecting on his own pleasure provided by the extravagant purchase of an electric blanket the previous winter. The blanket was truly wonderful, he went on, and in the chilly winter nights it shielded him from the nasty drafts in his poorly insulated apartment building. 

Though I was not a privileged jet setter, but a poor post-graduate student stuck in New York City during martial law, I suddenly saw myself as a fortunate member of a very special community. I could have easily joined in on that conversation between the two quintessential New Yorkers, as I felt at home both with Wally’s poor housing and threadbare pleasures of the East Village, and with Andre’s cosmopolitan experiences, opaque to most of the audience. I seemed to know the way people know, their ways of knowing, in both places. 

I am not from Wroclaw, and only recently have I realized how much I – and many in my generation – owe to Wroclaw. You have probably already gathered that this will be a rather personal and subjective set of remarks, but before I go any further – I have to draw a thick line between the Wroclaw I got to know, and the Wroclaw of my father’s generation. My father saw Wroclaw in 1948, when he and his friends were brought here in canvas-covered trucks from central Poland – along with a million and a half other Poles – to visit the celebrated "Exhibition of the Recovered Territories", an event that signaled the completion of the forced migrations, a project euphemistically referred to as the “full exchange of populations”, and which also marked the final homecoming of the “ur-Polish” lands. 

I first came to Wroclaw as a student in the mid-1970s to see the Grotowski Laboratory Theatre’s "Apocalipsis cum Figuris", a spiritual and disturbing performance that left one feeling strangely anxious, a far cry from any orthodox state-sponsored production, prepared by two irreverent misfits, Grotowski and Flaszen. By then I’d been reading regularly the "Odra" monthly, a journal of critical essays, poetry, and cultural commentaries, which could not be published in Warsaw. By then I’d heard of the "Kalambur" student theatre, opened as a result of the October ‘56 thaw, with its already legendary staging of a bold Witkacy play on dictatorships, "The Shoemakers". It was "Kalambur" that had organized in Wroclaw the International Festivals of Open Theatres, which I and many of my friends from other parts of the country began to attend. 

In the monologic world that I and my friends grew up in, in a world with newly erected walls, a cleansed past, and increasing ethnic homogeneity (after 1968 officially cherished as a great achievement), in a world in which private passports belonged to the state – it was in such a world that Wroclaw of the 1970s and ‘80s emerged as a site of polyphony, plurality and dialogue. Or even – though I am not sure whether professor Bauman would agree – a certain liquidity. It was an uncanny site both for my father and for me, but for different reasons. For him it would probably have seemed unheimlich – as he knew that these streets had spoken German only a few years before he came here. While for me this was an unusual place of fleeting encounters with unfamiliar sounds, images, faces, ideas and projects, and we were so hungry for it. Wroclaw, a city far away from the power that was centralized in Warsaw, and perhaps because of that, functioned as a major scene of counter-cultural projects…as the de-centered center.

I do stress the social role of the theatre in those times, as theatre was above all a place to meet people and ideas, and a process that appeared to have no end in sight. In the decade 1970-80, for the generation of people in their 20s and 30s, born and educated under communism, it was this theater that provided a space for discussion and a sense of community. It was theater that instigated the surfacing of what Arendt would call the associational realm for appearance, debate, and eventually action. Unlike other forms of art, theater requires personal, live appearance and the presence of both actor and audience. Although the theatrical actions mentioned here were indeed limited in time and space, they provided a temporary residence for action and speech, and what I call an embryonic public realm. 

The ambiguity of theatre as a genre, operating on the borders of art and reality, art and social life, art and social cognition, makes it a particularly apt system for supporting, facilitating, and channeling communication. The fact that it was taking place within the framework of theatre, an artistic genre, made it somewhat more tolerable, and less threatening for the authorities. (In another place I argue that a closer examination of the activities of the young theatre movement of the 70s and 80s may help us to understand how under the constraints of political hegemony, the establishment of a public space could take root, preparing the way for a breakdown of the structures of domination.) Kundera wrote that the Prague Spring began 8 years earlier with the Ionesco plays staged at the Little Theatre in Prague. And the only thing I want to say is that Wroclaw was the caretaker of that movement, and the host of these early interactions, encounters, meetings with the other, with different ways of thinking, different ways of being, new publics. 

There was always a visible crowd of foreigners here: colorful pilgrims who came to study with Grotowski for longer or shorter periods time: actors, directors, journalists, thinkers or writers – Andre Gregory was one of them. And finally there were the World Festivals of Open Theatre, hosted by "Kalambur" every two years, and there were foreign theatre groups invited by "Kalambur" between the festivals. 

Just to be clear: the encounters I am taking about were temporary, tentative, fleeting, since theatre itself is a fleeting art. But the message of openness was a powerful one. The artistically provocative and politically audacious theatres came from all over: from Canada, Argentina, Portugal, Japan, Brazil, the "Bread and Puppet" came from Vermont, "Katakhali" from India, "El Teatro Campesino" from Mexico, and "The Performance Group" with Richard Schechner from Manhattan’s Lower East Side. (And I remember how striking for me their diversity was, as they had two African-American and some Latino actors.) Once the performances were over, we all – that is the actors, their crews, and the mostly Polish audience – sat long into the night in the smoke-filled Kalambur Club, talking, trying to figure out how to outsmart the system to get a passport, and pretending that we were living in a normal society and engaging in real plans to refurnish the world. But also this was a place that made it possible to discover that one’s identity is also, at least partially, a personal work-in-progress, and that it does not have to be constrained by any standardized kit of cultural resources. 

That’s what Wroclaw was all about: the yearning for plurality, the high-spirited conversations utterly disrespectful of any center, and the openness to difference, while struggling against prefabricated and imposed forms. That was our carnival, with its built-in, temporarily sanctioned, dissent, and it was here in this de-totalizing counter-site to Warsaw’s officialdom, that a non-state (meaning non-official) public space emerged with its all too visible plurality. This tentative sphere of association and dialogue facilitated the surfacing of networks of civility, and prompted the recovery of an embryonic public sphere. 

I am not trying to explain here how under existing conditions this was at all possible. I am only saying that for the generation growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, Wroclaw managed to open the gate to a larger, and clearly much more diverse world. 

Now, three decades later, almost everything is different. The bipolar world with its walls and curtains is over, but sharp new conflicts have emerged, and – as I understand it – our question here is: how to make our lives livable in this new world that is tightly interdependent, yet riddled with all sorts of conflicts? What – in today’s world – are the conditions that generate dignity rather than humiliation, trust rather than suspicion? 
I know that I am an odd optimist, as I always look for sources of hope, and I do not want to sound hopelessly naïve, but I’d like to suggest some directions in thinking that – I believe – could actually be translated into social practice. 

I think that we ought to look locally, on the ground, in the places each of us knows best – the sites and narratives that have helped each of us to transcend political or cultural divisiveness, ease tensions, mend fences, launch friendships, and sustain what turned out to be realistic dreams. The projects or practices that I have in mind and that I have experienced myself – not only as promising, but also as fulfilling the promise – are of a kind that create a public sphere where there is none, or activate it where it has become taken for granted. 

And today I’d suggest that we look into the city, or the urban idiom in general, and its potential for engendering a public sphere, where encounters can take place, where matters can be disputed, a plurality of voices generated, and a sense of choice secured. The mediaeval message was city air sets you free; once you’re within the city walls, no master can claim ownership of you. The city also furnishes the possibility to step out, to exit, to move between communities, to explore marginal spaces. Diogenes Laertios did not care much about Athens when he stated, I am a citizen of the world. Yet to voice that statement, to make it effective, he needed that city, its public space, to deliver his message, its Agora. 

The discursive quality of cities is provided by the fact that they furnish what Hannah Arendt calls a space of appearance – the necessary condition, according to Arendt, for an actual public realm to emerge. And cities were punished for displaying this potential. They were destroyed, as the destruction of a city is the destruction of civility as in the case of Troy, Warsaw, Dresden, or even Wroclaw. A peculiar form of the destruction of the fabric of a city was the cleansing of Cape Town’s famous District Six, the forced removal of a thriving colored and Indian community, the demolition of its physical infrastructure, and the removal of its people to the sandy flat lands outside of the city – a particularly graphic instance of the implementation of the policy of apartheid. 

A friend of mine has just published a wonderful book on the friendship between two poets, Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky, a Lithuanian Pole and a Russian Jew, two poets who lived in the United States, and who – as American poets – were awarded several years apart the Nobel Prize in Literature. Irena Grudzinska, the author of the book , calls their work in the English language poetry with an accent, as it enriches the tones of American poetry, introducing into it new elements, and opening it to the rest of the world. 

I believe that there are cities with an accent. New York is clearly one, Cape Town makes its own miraculous recovery, Sarajevo was such a city, and so was Wroclaw of the late 70’s. Those are virtual borderlands, places from which one could see the world beyond. In the past, such lookouts used to be the harbor-cities of Gdansk or Odessa, full of different flavors and voices. Today we should try to identify such places and note the practices of the local communities that maintain and support their respective accents, their impurity, and their hybridity. These are the best places for rich and effective encounters. 

As a person who studied theatre once, I am of course a big partisan of face-to-face interactions, but I admit that there are other, mediated forms of communication, in which the negotiation of differences and learning from each other can take place. One can meet over dinner and have a private conversation with Andre, but one can also make a film of that conversation, so that others can identify with the issues, discuss them in class, publish and read the reviews, arrange extra screenings, interviews, give awards… 

The key task is to take care of a healthy public sphere, to furnish it, set the stage for conversation, and cultivate forms of communication so that we can get to know each other better, and perhaps even to understand each other better. And I believe that the city has the capacity to facilitate and stage encounters and conversations between people of different backgrounds, or generations, or genders, or locations, or religions. “Conversation” here, of course, is a figure of speech, the presentation and recognition of different paths taken, of available and viable choices, of elements and positions that familiarize us with the unfamiliar, and that dialogize culture. The very objective and challenge of such a “conversation” between strangers, or people who have little in common, who may nurse wounds, or hold grievances (vis-à-vis each other), is not to seek an agreement, but to listen, or learn how to open up in order to listen. That is as far as the engagement with strangers has to go. Everything else is a bonus. We do not have to agree, but we need to try to understand the other side. I like Anthony Appiah’s golden rule of cosmopolitan philosophy (even if I am not crazy about the term itself): we should take other people’s interests seriously; take them into account, we should learn about other people’s situations, and then use our imaginations to walk a while in their moccasins. 

There seems to be a consensus among various thinkers dealing with the issues of intercultural dialogue that the kind of agreement in which one party is expected to give up its position – especially when it concerns deeply embedded values – is not necessary, and in fact is rarely possible. Perhaps an ecumenical approach is something to learn from, a readiness to de-totalize the truth. 

But what is necessary is an initial assumption of hospitality and generosity. And neither has anything to do with how lavish the context of the encounter may be. Hospitality is crucial for people to come, to be ready to open up. And the generosity I have in mind is of an epistemological kind. I would like to suggest that one should listen carefully and try hard to understand practices rooted in unfamiliar, locally inspired, perhaps even parochial initiatives that are founded on provincial local knowledge – knowledge often discredited by sometimes presumptuous foreign centers of scholarship and culture. To appreciate such initiatives even more fully, one should try to walk in their moccasins, sneakers, espadrilles, sandals, or valonkas. And again, following the generosity and imagination of Andre Gregory, we should pay attention to local knowledge, to “knowledge with an accent”, as it could be for us a source of new arrangements and solutions addressing the issues that divide communities and societies. 

And a final question that I will treat here very superficially, as I talked about it last year in Sarajevo: How to make sure that we can actually meet, and listen effectively to, a stranger? How to meet and how to facilitate learning from each other? Is there any available design, something that could help to envision and implement such a dynamic encounter? 

The Agora is of course one model of such a civic architecture, as it is a space of appearance and a dialogue. The civic architecture is motivated by a desire for a kind of hospitality and openness that nurtures dialogue in all its variety. One talks about arranging tables, constructing roundtables, and about building bridges. My own favorite is a special bridge designed with a kapia, a widened space in the middle, as described in Ivo Andric’s novel, "The Bridge on the Drina". The kapia is a place where those who would otherwise not meet can look at each other, sit next to each other, enjoying the view, the breeze, a cup of Turkish coffee, and get to know each other. Not a market place, not a temple, not a court, not a school, the kapia was a place that people did not have to stop at, or come to, but they did. 

Kapias can be real or virtual: they could be plazas, or carefully designed activities for crossing various borders with the principles of hospitality and generosity in mind: scholarships, joint study projects, theatre workshops, or festivals. 

And now a final disclosure: I was delighted to learn that the mayor of this very town, the City of Wroclaw, is exploring the possibility of creating such a kapia right here, tentatively called the Wroclaw Fellows Program, a residency for distinguished intellectuals from different parts of the world who are committed to dealing with the challenges of cultural diversity and difference in a globalized world.