Magic Mountain

No one has yet interpreted isolation in terms of magic. In Tomasz Mann's novel, which is a metaphor for the crisis of European culture, the mountain sanatorium allowed patients to separate themselves from socio-political reality and focus on the internal processes triggered by the disease. Immersed in the spa everyday life and focused on themselves, they succumbed to the magic of isolation. In Michał Borczuch's play, the lockdown makes the tenants of the tenement house, like the patients of the sanatorium, indulge in conversations and philosophizing and practice silent rituals of self-care. Wrapping themselves in blankets, they carry out various control protocols and delve into the reading of Magic Mountain. Under the influence of magic, they function in a suspension between seemingly contradictory desires for the state of suspension to last as long as possible and for life to return to normal as soon as possible.

Breaking down the Magic Mountain of Mann into two seasons connected by a narrative line with different dynamics and different casts, allows the audience to feel the time of the show in its different densities, in its materiality and conventionality at the same time. It also reveals the fragile structures of fiction on which we build our reality and which we allow ourselves to be enchanted.Under the influence of magic, the protagonists of the Magic Mountain of Borchucha also gain an awareness of their own privilege. They begin to see individuals and entire social groups that they have not seen before. They notice class differences and class aspects of human labor. How sanatorium patients have long conversations about time, subjective sense of public space, sense of agency, changing social relationships and new ways of doing work, practicing care and caring. They wonder how to make it possible for all human beings and more-than-human beings to live together.

Attention!

In the show there are scenes of drug use and herbal cigarettes are used.