Yoga

Sometimes it happens that we are busy with something, and suddenly someone approaches us who carries painful news. And sometimes it happens that we ourselves become eyewitnesses to very difficult events. In such moments, consciousness is extremely sharpened, every detail is recorded in order to be able to reconstruct the course of events in a laconic way in the future. Unless she refuses to cooperate and the memory turns out to be disobedient. It also happens that the story is transformed when the narrator takes control of it and adds his own details. The yoga of Emmanuel Carrère appears to us precisely as an unpredictable reconstruction of pain — our own and that of others. As an attempt to get closer to moments that are difficult to talk about, which, however, we need to tame.

Yoga in the Old Theatre is a performance based on an autobiographical novel by Emmanuel Carrère, originally intended as a serene meditation manual, which, influenced by the political events that shook France in 2015 and the personal problems that shook the author's inner life, transforms into an intimate story of experiencing an acute mental health crisis.

For Carrère, literature is a place where one does not lie about oneself or about others. The author opts for a non-fiction pact believing in his cognitive power. It raises the question of how far you can go in art. Talking about himself, Carrère has for years also drawn controversially intimate portraits of friends, partners, acquaintances, people he meets by chance, often abusing his power as a writer. He also tests the price he is willing to pay for radical honesty himself, but at the same time he subversely refers us to our — readers and viewers — desire for truth: by rooting his work in an autobiographical gesture, he simultaneously plays with fiction, invites us to judge for ourselves what really happened and what was distorted in the literary process of transformation, and how it affects the experience of the story itself. The purpose of this ambivalent pact is to ask fundamental questions about whether we are able to create space for pain, endure it, and live on? How do we deal with loss? What role do we play in the lives of others? Are we able, against irony and cynicism, against the apocalyptic aura, against the loneliness of man of the 21st century, to bow down together to our spiritual needs?

Note: The show is for people from 16 years of age. The play deals with the issues of mental health crisis and death. There is a strobe light effect.

The title (...) suggests associations with the flexibility of the body, bliss or psychophysical balance, but the director has reversed the meaning of the word. (...) We participate in the study of the limits of the human psyche — both the characters who sit interchangeably on the zafu and the audience. The process can not be interrupted, the burden and emotional exploitation, becomes at some point the way to balance. Anna Smolar's yoga is a complete work in which the characters, scenography, music, choreography, costumes constitute a perfect figure of relativism.

Agnieszka Loranc, “The New Critical Force”

2023 — 16th International Theatre Festival Divine Comedy, Cracow

Mirrored Roles:

27, 28, 29 November — Alicja Jurkowska

Family in the theater:

The event was created with parents and carers in mind who want to go to the Old Theatre but are having a hard time finding childcare. While adults watch the performance, children take part in theater, movement and art workshops. Classes are conducted by experienced educators and artists. We provide care and a safe, inspiring space to play and act.

Rules of the event Rules of the event Family in the theater