EP 2024: JaWa

The artists Janek Turkowski and Iwona Nowacka established the social enterprise JaWa in the Polish town of Szczecin in 2021 together with Jan, who was battling homelessness, and Waldemar, who had just been released from prison. As with all social enterprises, the focus is not profit, but the resolution of social problems. In a hybrid form of intimate drama and performative reading, Turkowski and Nowacka share the outcomes of eighteen months of joint gardening and carpentry work with the audience. JaWa illuminates the complexity of collective endeavours and poses questions on how to organise social activism. It is a moving story about dignity, addiction and freedom, poverty and wealth, numerous crises and successes.

4 / 8 / 9 / 10 June, 7 and 9 pm,

5 / 6 / 7 June, 5.30 and 9 pm

Volkstheater, Dunkelkammer

English and Polish

English surtitles 65 min.

Please note

Age recommendation 14+

Q&A

8 June, following the performance

By and with Turkowski & Nowacka On-screen performance Jan Rozpędzik, Waldemar Wieczorek, Artur Czechowicz, Alina Gałązka, Olga Kozińska, Grzegorz Laszuk, Dorota Kwinta, Dariusz Mikuła, Piotr Szczygielski, Szymon Olbrychowski and others Scenography Piotr Szczygielski Costume Iwona Nowacka Production management Warsaw Olga Kozińska / Komuna Warszawa Curator of Tough Love season Anna Smolar International management Dorota Kwinta Video translation into English Sean Gasper Bye

Production Komuna Warszawa (as part of the residency programme) Coproduction Noorderzon / Grand Theatre Groningen Supported by Stowarzyszenie Teatr Kana (Szczecin), social enterprise JaWa

Co-financed by The City of Warsaw within the Culture Hub project

executed by the team of the Wiener Festwochen | Freie Republik Wien

Premiere November 2022, Komuna Warszawa

IN CONVERSATION WITH JANEK TURKOWSKI AND IWONA NOWACKA

All of your works are long-term projects that deal with the history of places and people. How do you choose your projects and what role does the research play in your works?

We would rather say we don’t choose them. They choose us. We are aware that his can sound embarrassingly esoteric, but it is how it is. We never plan in theory to make a project about this and that. Instead, we are touched by something in reality and try to receive the signals from there. That might be an encounter with somebody or just a motif from the history of a place we keep coming back to. Most of the research is the process of analysing what reality has delivered. We film the situations and then look into their details. And out of those details, out of a number of points, there gradually emerges a line of the story and then we start to see what kind of experience we have all been part of and how it has positioned us towards our first ideas. The reality is so complex that our small human brains wouldn’t be able to generate something like that. So we rather rely on reality as a source.

For JaWa, you work with people who live on the street or who have just been released from prison, struggling with addictions. What’s the reason? And would you consider your work as activism?

This is a good example for the choices mentioned above: our paths crossed and then many things just came together. With Jan, we had been neighbors for some time, so the relationship had been growing for a couple of years. Then the theatre where Janek was working had the opportunity to apply for money to fund a social enterprise and they wanted to help Waldemar, who was a colleague from before, and coming out of prison at that moment. These facts came together with an invitation for us as artists to a residency in Komuna Warszawa, where we were supposed

to make a project for their Tough Love season. It just made sense to connect those parts. Projects that are defined as ‘art’ allow all participants to find common ground: we are a creative species, we like to create fiction and be part of some action, even if it sometimes looks very real, like hard work at carpentry, gardening while recording endless monologues. This cooperation in an artistic project is making a real change when it comes to the self-confidence of our colleagues-participants. It also makes a change in the audience – not only those in the theatre, but also our very first audience, the people watching us in action on the street: pedestrians, drivers, neighbours. Being together in public and working, filming, talking for hours is something that has an impact on community –people start to act differently towards those with whom they usually do not try to get in touch. Maybe it’s activism in a small dimension. Maybe its artivism.

In your performance, we see many moments of collective laughter, of solidarity but also of struggles and conflicts. At the end of the performance there is a scene on video where you ask ‘What is happiness?’. Did you find an answer in this project?

It wasn’t even our idea to bring the subject of happiness into it. We would probably be too afraid of its kitsch potential. So it is one of the protagonists, Waldemar, who asks Artur, whom we met in Warsaw, in a situation that very naturally developed into some kind of interview. Of course we found some glimpses of happiness that emerged from the feeling of being able to help somebody, also from watching how a person gets better, even if just for a moment. We were also thinking a lot about how much we project our understanding of happiness onto others, as well as about the complexity of this term and

how impossible it is to understand it the same way as somebody else will. Which is a big issue when it comes to the subject of helping. When we help others, we often, even subconsciously, resort to our own concept of happiness and our view of what will improve their lives. So the answer to your question is different for every human on earth. And we should never think that we know how it feels for the other. But we can always ask, like Waldemar did.

JaWa does not have a ‘happy end’. Would you say that the concept of ‘everyone working at her/his own pace’, of a social enterprise, failed? Is social engagement, activism, as well as the arts a rat race?

It is very hard to answer this without getting the feeling that it is impossible to work at your own pace anywhere, especially today, when we are just before our next premiere and not working at our own pace at all ☹. Of course it is already a big success to negotiate this tempo with others all the time, but maybe especially so with yourself. But we wouldn’t say that the concept failed. First of all, the primary aim of the social enterprise was never to generate financial profit, but to provide some kind of springboard to people in a crisis, to give them a possibility to start a new chapter. And this was successful. Waldemar is trying to battle his addiction, he has now done two courses of therapy and before he hadn’t even wanted to hear about such things. Jan tried out this stable life with a regular job and regular income and working hours and he saw that it does not suit him, which is also his good right, because, as we said before, we can’t decide what is best for him. And one huge success of the enterprise was having met another person who was also able to benefit from it, which hadn’t been part of the plan at the beginning at all.

One last question: Are you still in touch with Jan, Waldemar and Artur? Do you know what their situation is like today?

We are in touch with Waldemar and Artur. Unfortunately, we have no contact with Jan, he simply left one day, leaving behind his work, place and belongings, as he had already done many times before during the last nineteen years. We miss him, but we respect his decision. We have often looked for him in different cities, but it seems that he doesn’t want to be found. He said many times that he misses the independence and unlimited freedom he had before starting this work. So we suppose he returned to his previous way of life. Artur had a period of stability with a job and a flat he shared with his girlfriend, but when they broke up he returned to the street. The last time we spoke, he said he is the president of the parking space in front of the Warsaw casino, earning money by directing drivers to the best places to park. Waldemar has just got out from another round of rehab after eight weeks of therapy and is trying to start a new chapter again. We always update these information at the end of every performance so you will find out more after the next one.

Janek Turkowski and Iwona Nowacka are artists based in Poland who have worked together since 2013. They are theatremakers working with video-storytelling performances, which result from long-term projects. During the live acts on stage they use archive recordings as well as previously recorded footage. Their performances are distinguished by investigative methods, reflection about the creative process itself, humour and self-irony. They focus on repetition and re-enactment of crucial events for the location and its community. Previous works by Turkowski & Nowacka include: it’s happening in norwich (2016), Smalfilm (2018), Klosterhof (2017), Carte Blanche (2018), ^ (2019), Do Not Worry (2019) and were shown throughout Europe.

PUBLICATION DETAILS Owner, Editor and Publisher Wiener Festwochen GesmbH, Lehárgasse 11/1/6, 1060 Wien P + 43 1 589 22 0, festwochen@festwochen.at | www.festwochen.at General Management Milo Rau, Artemis Vakianis Artistic Direction (responsible for content) Milo Rau (Artistic Director) Text credits The interview was conducted in English and in written form on 11 May 2024 by Carmen Hornbostel (Dramaturgy Wiener Festwochen | Free Republic of Vienna) Picture credit Cover © Piotr Nykowski Produced by Print Alliance HAV Produktions GmbH (Bad Vöslau)

Anna Smolar, Dialog Magazine