I will save the evening in the Camaldole monastery cellar among the most important theatre experiences of my life. Imagine a group of teenagers bowed over the model of their hometown and spinning the story with the words of their ancestors. Imagine how they play the roles of old Sejny inhabitants and speak about beautiful Rachel who died of tuberculosis, about Gypsies' caravans that used to traverse the town before the war, about gees being smuggled through the border, about "dziady" (beggars) in the front of the church, and about a Jewish child saved from death. Lithuanian, Polish, Russian languages sound in the cellar of the Bielany monastery, and the songs of Old-believers mix together with the Chassid melodies and Polish lullabies. Awry little clay houses float in the air, carried on the children's hands, or maybe carried by the prayers of the town passed away inhabitants, as if they wanted to break through the skies.
You can deliver hundreds of beautiful sermons about the need of tolerance, about the meaning of tradition, about the respect for other cultures, faiths, and nations. But all of this will always remain just words in comparison with this spectacle, in which the dream of multicultural and tolerant Poland becomes true.
Danuta Kuroń who invited for this performance a group from Gniazdo (Nest) common-room in Żoliborz said that such spectacles should be created in every such place where local identity has been preserved. In Żoliborz, Praga, Targówek. If someone in this running towards nowhere city will dare to build such a theatre, I will be its first and most faithful spectator. Please have a seat booked for me today!
Warsaw Chronicles, Theater feuilleton by Roman Pawłowski, Gazeta Wyborcza, March 2, 2005
Sept. 29, 2011, 1:10 p.m.
Had I not met accidentally Krzysztof Czyżewski from the Borderland Center in the café, I would have not known that the children from Sejny would present Sejny Chronicles, a new version of the famous spectacle directed by Bożena Szroeder, at the Camaldole Monastery in Warsaw this Saturday. First time it was performed six years ago. The newspapers were silent about this event, TV did not even sacrifice it a minute. And I would give up each premiere in the capital just to immerse in a poetic aura of this spectacle. Sejny Chronicles is a story about of a multicultural town at the eastern border, an unusual story, because the children are its narrators. Already a second generation of Sejny youth is taking part in the unique project Ancient Time Memory, which is to save the past from oblivion and transmit it to the next generations. The children themselves were gathering data for this spectacle, they were recording relations of old people that still remembered the times when they would pray in four languages in the town: Lithuanian, Polish, Hebrew, and Old Church Slavic. Today their stories are taken over by their younger brothers and sisters.