"Still Life"

"Still Life" directed by Elsa Revcolevschi is a performance about different memories connected to one space. A hotel room transforms from a crime scene investigation site into a film set, then becomes witness to a love affair, a space in the ghetto in 1942, and a museum established by state authorities. The cast includes Bogumiła Bajor, Lidia Duda, Natalia Kaja Chmielewska, and Karolina Staniec/Paulina Puślednik. The performance asks what memory objects produce and how they become a trace, relic, or "still life." It also asks what individuals do with memory, how they appropriate it and create it anew. Individual and collective memory shifts here between the private and public, between the hidden and the top-down imposed, and between the improper and the politically correct. The work was inspired by writings of Rachela Auerbach and Imre Kertész. Elsa Revcolevschi is a French director of Polish-Jewish heritage. She graduated from the directing department at the state theatre school of the French National Theatre in Strasbourg (TNS), the only such school in France with a directing department. She is also a graduate of literary studies from Université Paris X Nanterre. She was an assistant to, among others, Lorraine de Sagazan and collaborated with Julien Gosselin. She is the first foreign resident at the National Old Theatre. The performance is co-produced by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, and the director received financial support through the French program Le Jeune Théâtre National. Performance creators: Elsa Revcolevschi – scenario and direction; Louison Ryser – dramaturgy; Salomé Vandendriessche – scenography and costumes; Julek Płoski – music; Monika Stolarska – lighting design; Urszula Pietrzak – choreographic consultation; Łukasz Musiał – scenario translation; Aleksandra Rudnicka, Monika Lichowska-Płonka, Jakub Guzik – translation