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Jan Sawka: Theatre of Image and Metaphor

2023; The MIT Press; Volume: 45; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/pajj_a_00643

1537-9477

Kathleen Cioffi,

Digital Media and Visual Art

The visual artist Jan Sawka (1946–2012) is best known for his painting and printmaking: his works are in the collections of over sixty international museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. holds a collection of his intaglio prints, the largest by any single artist in the fine print section of the library. While interest in Sawka’s art has remained strong in the years since his death, it seems to have especially grown in the last two years, with solo exhibitions in 2020 at the Samuel Dorsky Museum at the State University of New York–New Paltz and at the Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art at California State University, San Bernardino. In conjunction with these two shows, a number of events have generated a continuing presence online. Some were among the earliest art exhibitions to respond to the Covid shutdown with virtual walk-throughs and an online symposium on the work of Sawka, a video of which can still be viewed on the CSUSB website. In 2021, the Ossolineum National Archival Institute in Wrocław, Poland, organized an exhibition of art from the earliest part of Sawka’s career. Moreover, in 2022, an exhibition at the Wende Museum of the Cold War in Culver City, California, on display from April to October, has featured works by Sawka.Interest in Sawka’s artwork, then, has been undergoing something of a revival as the ten-year anniversary of his death approaches. While his painting and printmaking have been the most recognized of his activities, he also created many other types of visual art, including book designs, drawings, sculptures, installations, and multimedia art. For Sawka, all design—whether of sets, installations, posters, paintings, books, sculptures, buildings, or multimedia productions—blended together into a single rich aesthetic. At the very foundation of this aesthetic was Sawka’s work in the theatre, work that he started as a young man in the late 1960s and early 1970s and continued in various forms until his death.Sawka’s theatre work may be most profitably viewed as in keeping with a European tradition of interdisciplinary collaboration between the visual and theatrical arts. In the late-nineteenth century, for example, the director Aurélien-Marie Lugné-Poë worked in partnership with painters such as Édouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec to create the symbolist Théâtre de l’Oeuvre in Paris. Early in the twentieth century, the Englishman Edward Gordon Craig sought to reform the theatre of his time in part by insisting that the visual aspect of the theatre should not be subordinated to a literary text. Craig’s ideas have been extremely influential on modern theatre practice, nowhere more so than in Poland, where he is called “the father of the Great Reform [always capitalized in Polish] of the theatre.”1 The most influential Polish director of the interwar years, Leon Schiller (1887–1954), a friend of Craig’s, advocated a “total theatre” to which acting, music, scenery, lighting, and costumes all contributed equally. Many of the most acclaimed Polish theatre directors of the late twentieth century started their careers as visual artists, as set designer Zenobiusz Strzelecki notes: “In Poland, there is an extremely large number of artists (mostly painters) who direct. … These artist-directors are creative seekers who penetrate the possibilities of the theatre, who wish to discover on the stage, as the painter does in his art, new means of expression and not only to produce but to create.”2 While Sawka would probably not have described himself as an “artist-director,” he fully participated in this effort to discover new means of expression on the stage.In a 1975 interview, several company members of STU Theatre in Kraków, Poland said that in the early 1970s their theatre had “turned into a theatre of image and metaphor.”3 They contended that this transformation had come about during the transition from their 1970 production of Spadanie [Falling] to 1971’s Sennik polski [Polish Dreambook], that is, precisely at the time that Jan Sawka had joined the company and brought his artistic sensibility to its productions. In fact, all of Sawka’s work for the stage might be characterized as an attempt to create “a theatre of image and metaphor,” a theatre that uses visual imagery to speak in a uniquely metaphoric way about the world around him. And although his theatrical endeavor originated in his early background as a set and poster designer for STU and other theatres, this background informed his later theatre work in New York’s Beckett and Cocteau Theatres, and eventually evolved into astonishing multimedia, visual theatre productions that he created with collaborators from several different countries.Sawka was a student of fine art and architecture in the 1960s and early 1970s when he began his design work for performing artists by creating posters and sets for musical acts, first at small clubs, then later for the Jazz nad Odrą [Jazz on the Oder River] Festival in Wrocław. There, he was given the freedom to experiment with music, light, and innovative arrangements of audience and performers. He also became affiliated with a Wrocław student theatre, Kalambur, designing many of their leaflets, programs, and posters, and eventually designing the set for Podpaleńcy [Firebugs], based on the Swiss dramatist Max Frisch’s play Biedermann and the Firebugs and staged in early 1971. In addition, he participated in the Festiwal Artystyczny Młodzieży Akademickiej [Artistic Festival of Academic Youth], or FAMA, held annually in the Baltic seaside town of Świnoujście. FAMA was a month-long gathering where cultural groups from universities and technical colleges participated together with students and recent graduates from the professional art and drama schools in a workshop setting. The groups presented their own productions, concerts, poetry readings, art shows, happenings, and cabaret performances, and they also collaborated together on an array of similar large events, including a four-day-long “gala concert,” held in the local 1,500-seat amphitheater. Sawka was a key participant in the collective creations presented at the 1970, ‘71, ‘72, ‘73, and ‘74 FAMAs. In his own words, “I was always in the middle of the mess, writing, conceptualizing, performing with the cabarets, and of course, designing the sets, or sometimes outrageous installations.”4 These early experiences honed his skills as a set designer and multimedia artist.Sawka moved from Wrocław to Kraków in January 1971, and throughout that year he helped to develop STU’s production of Polish Dreambook, which had its premiere in December 1971. Dreambook consisted of a series of fifteen dream images adapted from Polish literature. Subtitled “a vivisection of the Polish soul,” its text was a collage of literary works by the most influential verse playwrights of the Polish Romantic movement, Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Słowacki, along with snippets by writers influenced by the Romantics, including Witold Gombrowicz, Sławomir Mrożek, Tadeusz Konwicki, and Leszek A. Moczulski. STU wanted to show that contemporary Poles were under the influence of stereotypes formed in the nineteenth century and to question the power that these stereotypes still seemed to exert over Poles’ thinking about themselves.Sawka created Polish Dreambook’s visual look: the key piece of scenery was a “cage” made of metal pipes, which surrounded and defined the playing area while still allowing the audience to feel as if it was part of the action. Because this cage consisted of a three-dimensional, see-through frame, it constituted a kind of “invisible set” that defined the playing space within the theatre space. Lights were installed on the upper rim of the cage, so that the audience’s attention could be focused on certain performers while the rest of the space was engulfed in total darkness. The key element of stage equipment within the cage was a table, symbolizing Poland itself, which, assembled by the performers onstage, was then destroyed and rebuilt. The production opened with the image of Poland as the “Christ of nations” taken from Polish Romantic literature, and Christ’s cross was later used as the crosspiece supporting the boards of the table. In addition, the actors danced on the table and performed under it; sometimes puppets created by Sawka popped out from behind it. An onstage band—a violinist, guitarist, bass guitarist, and drummer—sat upstage left of the cage, and played the original music that accompanied the production. This set, consisting as it did of rather simple elements—a cage, a large table—was both eminently practical and a brilliant visual correlative for the verbal and gestural messages of the production.While Dreambook concerned Polish national myths, the second production of STU’s that Sawka participated in, Exodus (June 1974) was meant to concern humanity in general. Instead of being a collage of material from various sources, as Dreambook had been, Exodus was written by one author, the poet and lyricist Leszek A. Moczulski, who had written some of the poems included in Dreambook. Exodus began in the lobby, which Sawka decorated to create an environment where the audience could make the transition from their own individual worlds into the world of the play. In this case, he used Moczulski’s poems and arranged them in a kind of fence of poetry. While the audience was still in the lobby, in a prologue to the play proper, one of the characters, an angel, recited political slogans as another indication that the audience’s world, the world of Polish everyday reality, was to be left outside the theatre.When the audience entered the auditorium, they encountered Sawka’s Exodus set, described in the student journal Itd as follows: “The place of action is a rectangular area, which the spectators border on the two long sides. … At the end of the one of the short sides of the rectangle is a small platform for the musical group. In the central point of the rectangular area stands a big, wooden washtub.”5 The visual imagery the production made use of included archetypical symbols: nudity, fire, and water. One of the most famous scenes occurred when a curtain made of newspapers fell between the two main characters, the Boy and the Girl, who were naked. Another character set the curtain on fire in such a way that it looked like a huge, burning vagina. The Boy crossed through the gate of fire and married the Girl. Clothed in white, they went to the washtub, which was full of water, and washed each other’s eyes and the eyes of the others onstage. Later, the actors set fire to the water in the tub. The juxtaposition of newspapers—which summon up the lies and deceit of the Communist regime’s propaganda machine—with the naked purity of the young couple was a metaphor for STU’s optimism about the ability of young people to change their world despite great difficulties. The use of standard images of fire and water, usually associated with cleansing and renewal, suggested the need to see things anew, without illusions or preconceived notions. Sawka’s poster for Exodus, a picture of a half-burnt match with a human head, became an emblem of the student culture movement, and today is included in the collection of MoMA.While Sawka was still working with STU, his career as a poster artist began to gain momentum, and this eventually led to his emigration in 1976, first to Paris, and then in 1977 to New York. There, after several years working as an op-ed page illustrator for the New York Times and establishing himself as a painter and printmaker with gallery shows in Manhattan and elsewhere, he began to work in the theatre again. He first created posters for the Harold Clurman Theatre, and then, when the Samuel Beckett Theatre opened in 1983, as supervisor of all the visual aspects of the Beckett’s productions. Beckett himself had very definite ideas about what sets for his plays should look like, but he delegated Sawka to translate his instructions into reality. Sawka and Beckett would collaborate over the phone, and, according to Sawka, the playwright trusted him to make sure that “the ugliness, colorlessness, and claustrophobia” of his settings was not “improved” or “enriched” by the directors or set designers of particular productions. In addition, Sawka created all the visual elements surrounding the productions: posters, postcards, and program covers for an evening of Beckett’s one-act plays Ohio Impromptu, Catastrophe, and What Where at the Harold Clurman, and for the full-length plays Rockaby, Endgame, and Krapp’s Last Tape at the Samuel Beckett. For the 1986 production of Krapp’s Last Tape, Sawka returned to his STU practice of making an elaborate lobby installation, this time using giant paintings of Krapp to surround the door leading to the auditorium.In 1987, Daniel Gerould, the English translator of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy), asked Sawka to design the set for Witkacy’s play The Shoemakers, which was to be staged at the Jean Cocteau Repertory Theatre in New York. This production served to initiate Sawka’s American career as a set designer. Later the same year, Eve Adamson, the artistic director of the Cocteau, asked Sawka to design the set for an adaptation of The Trial by Franz Kafka. For this production, he revisited some of the ideas he had used for the set of Polish Dreambook at STU. Like the multifunctional table in that production, for The Trial he constructed a portable, boxlike structure that could be transformed into a podium, a jail, and a wall, as needed. It also possessed the same space-defining characteristics of the metal cage in Dreambook. Walter Goodman’s New York Times review of the production notes the way the set created an atmosphere of oppressive confinement: “Joseph K. sleeps on a narrow plank, the size of a coffin, between two high walls; he works in an equally confined space.”6 The most striking characteristic of this set, however, was a motif that Sawka would later make central to his multimedia creations: a pair of glowing eyes that floated above the stage, watching Joseph K. and the audience. Sawka also designed the set for Eve Adamson’s 1989 production of Macbeth at the Cocteau, in which he tried to utilize the brutish atmosphere of the homeless shelter in the rough neighborhood surrounding the theatre to add to the sinister atmosphere of the play in a kind of “Birnham Wood meets the Bowery” take on Shakespeare’s play.In the meantime, Sawka had embarked on the next stage in his development as a set designer/multimedia artist. In the summer of 1988, through Harold Kant, the Grateful Dead’s lawyer and an art collector who had been acquiring Sawka’s work since the artist’s 1979 gallery show in Los Angeles, Sawka was commissioned to design an art installation that served as the stage set for the Dead’s twenty-fifth anniversary tour in 1989–91. This installation allowed Sawka to utilize all the multidisciplinary skills he had built up during his years designing theatrical and musical productions both in Poland and in the United States. In Sawka’s words, “all my skills and experience of so many years of interdisciplinary work—music, performance, installations, theatre—or a gigantic FAMA—came to a great climax.” Needless to say, the installation for the Dead tour was a much larger undertaking than anything Sawka had attempted before, for FAMA or anywhere else. The design was ten stories high and included fifty-two banners painted in acrylic and dyes on canvas; twenty-two spare banners used for variations of the installation in different performances; 380 lighting instruments; and two computers synchronizing 180 different light cues. Sawka also managed to incorporate moving images into the installation, something he had experimented with in his days in Kraków although never implemented in the STU productions. Moreover, the installation also represented a return to Sawka’s background in architecture since its scale resembled that of buildings rather than mere stage sets; it turned out to be the largest concert set ever designed for any band. More than its sheer size and complexity, however, the Dead tour installation embodied, with its bold colors and psychedelic imagery, both the sensibility of Sawka himself and that of Jerry Garcia, the lead guitarist and best-known member of the band.The Dead art installation initiated a new line of thinking in Sawka’s theatrical imagination. Now he began to explore the idea of creating multimedia works that combined art, architecture, music, moving images, and theatre. Over the next few years, Sawka would look for sponsors for these works and develop a slow-dissolve image projection technique that would be an essential element of the projects, while still continuing his active schedule of gallery shows and exhibitions. In 1992, Sawka found the collaborators he was looking for when he was invited to Japan by designer Yusaku Kamekura to present his ideas at Kamekura’s Creation Gallery in Tokyo. On this trip, Sawka met many Japanese artists and technical people, and they introduced him to new and experimental technologies and materials, including UMU glass, a type of material that transforms in opacity and color when an electrical current is run through it. Soon he was collaborating with Japanese companies to develop multimedia projects that utilized these materials in striking ways.Sawka’s first project in Japan was the 1993 multimedia spectacle The Eyes, produced at Art Tower Mito by theatre director Tadashi Suzuki, who had visited Wrocław in the days when Sawka was a student there. As in his work with STU Theatre in Kraków and the Beckett Theatre in New York, Sawka created an elaborate installation, called The Banner Garden, which consisted of four forty-two-foot-long banners mounted in the theatre lobby that were thematically related to The Eyes. The Eyes thematized an image that Sawka had used in his design for The Trial at the Cocteau Repertory: the huge, glowing eyes watching the protagonist, and, by extension, all of us. However, the eyes in this production were not nearly as menacing as in those he had used in The Trial. In the first part of The Eyes, a live actor sat on a set of stairs, his back to the audience, while paintings representing episodes of his life dissolved one into another. In the second part, the actor faced the audience, rose to his feet, and mimed motions in which he seemed to be, perhaps, searching for something. Then painted banners were raised slowly from the trap door downstage of the actor and stairs to the ceiling; on the banners a landscape gradually revealed itself as the body of a flying man. When the banners were in place, the projections of eyes began, first on two screens, then four—two on each side of the flying man. The eyes were not static, however; sometimes they transformed into faces or parts of faces, sometimes to portholes looking at birds flying in the sky. The fifty-seven-minute theatre piece, which was accompanied by music composed and performed by Polish jazz pianist Adam Makowicz, suggested a dreamlike life journey of the hero played by the live actor. Sawka said of this production, “This spectacle was the result of my whole life experience in theatre and painting as well as architecture.”In 1993, Sawka also started work on developing a production with the British theatre director and scholar John Russell Brown (1923–2015), whom he had met years before through Samuel Beckett. Although Russell Brown was primarily known as a Shakespeare scholar, he had studied medieval literature with J.R.R. Tolkien at Oxford after World War II. He brought this background to the multimedia spectacle that he and Sawka worked on together, entitled Creation, which was to be an adaptation of medieval mystery plays from the fifteenth century and was in the planning stages for over a decade. The production was to use the same type of outdoor stage configuration as the Grateful Dead sets, as well as the projection technology that Sawka had used in The Eyes. Two live actors were supposed to appear in the production with their images blown up on side screens, and the spectacle was also to incorporate an array of giant puppets operated by master puppeteers, kinetic images that would be projected on a system of huge screens, and music by Handel and Haydn. If this production had come to its envisioned fruition, it might have had the potential to reinvigorate the medieval sensibility of the mystery play: it would have used twenty-first-century technology to illustrate the grandeur and vastness of creation itself in a way that would superficially resemble 3D photographic projections such as those used in IMAX film theatres yet, because of Sawka’s artistry, powerfully transcend them. Unfortunately, Sawka did not live to see this project to completion.In 1994, Sawka received a grant from the Japanese Ministry of Culture to spend time in Tokyo developing projects, and he was able to create a team of Japanese artists, engineers, architects, and technical experts to assist him in realizing his visions. He also at that time began his collaboration with Toho Studios, the producers of Akira Kurosawa’s films. From that time until Sawka’s demise, Toho was intimately involved in developing all of Sawka’s multimedia projects. Also in 1994, Sawka designed a large stadium-sized set for the tour of Steve Winwood and his band Traffic. Sawka’s paintings, shot as slides, were enlarged and projected, using slow-dissolve, high-resolution technology, in order to provide animated backdrops for the band’s songs.In 1994, together with his collaborators in Japan, Sawka began to work on his multimedia spectacle The Voyage. The Voyage, like Creation, spent over a decade in development and is thematically and visually related to The Eyes and also to images used in the Grateful Dead installation. The core element of the spectacle is 1,200 handmade images by Sawka, which transform one into the other, using the slow-dissolve technique. In a stream-of-consciousness style, The Voyage moves from personal images of a man’s hopes, dreams, disappointments, and loves to universal images of human civilizations: it shows the rise and fall of both the East and the West—the rise of temples, great buildings, urban centers and their fall in war or other catastrophes. Finally, we observe the planet Earth from space, as a peaceful blue sphere. A key image is, once again, that of large eyes, floating in space—observing, changing shape, and transforming into portholes through which other images are visible.Besides Sawka’s Japanese partners, he worked with some additional associates on The Voyage. The spectacle was originally supposed to be accompanied by music by Czesław Niemen (1939–2004) from two albums that that he had recorded in the 1970s, as well as some other pieces from the composer’s backlist, which he gave permission to use in the production. Before Niemen’s death, he and Sawka collaborated on a standalone seventeen-minute excerpt of the full Voyage, which received the Lorenzo il Magnifico gold medal at the 2003 Florence Biennale, with Niemen timing the display of the images to his music. After Niemen’s death, work on The Voyage stalled for a time but picked up in 2010 when Sawka contacted Mickey Hart, the former drummer of the Grateful Dead, who was then performing with the Mickey Hart Band. Sawka and Hart began working on the project together when, in 2012, Sawka unexpectedly died. He had finished all the images for The Voyage only five days before his death.Jan Sawka’s daughter, Hanna Maria Sawka, a film and theatre director, was also one of the collaborators on the spectacle. She made a pilot with slow-dissolving images accompanied by the Mickey Hart Band, and still intends to produce the full project in some form. Sawka’s Japanese team designed a flexible set that can be used in several different size venues: concert halls, amphitheaters, cathedrals, and stadiums. It consists of at least three surfaces, placed at different angles, on which the Sawka images can be projected, which would fill the total field of vision of audience members. These projections are to be accompanied by either live performances or prerecorded music. This multimedia spectacle moves further away from theatre than Creation or The Eyes, in that there are no live performers involved, yet it is still theatrical in that it can only be appreciated fully when viewed as a live event in the company of other audience members who are similarly immured and engulfed by Sawka’s imagery.Sawka’s multimedia projects have their roots in his early student days in Wrocław and Kraków. He himself acknowledged as much: “The Voyage is the result of my dreams of ’visual theatre’ that took root in a small garage where in 1970–72 I was experimenting with animated films created with a series of intaglio prints, at the same time working with STU Theatre.” He carried his dreams of “visual theatre” far beyond anything he might have imagined in that small garage in Kraków in the early seventies. Yet the skills and habits of mind he developed in those years of working with other budding theatre artists were part of his artistic repertoire from then on. And even the aura of those years permeates The Voyage and other monumental multimedia works that Sawka worked on or planned before his death. Elena Millie, in her essay on Sawka for the reference book Contemporary Designers, writes, “As an artist who developed during the 1960s, Sawka reveals the influence of the psychedelic in both his compositions and his use of colors.”7 The visual style of Sawka’s multimedia projects indeed does remind one of the sixties and early seventies, as do his thematic preoccupations with peace, freedom, and humankind’s ultimate purpose in life.His multimedia productions also partook of a trend visible in theatres all over the world: the use of video in live performances. This trend is now relatively common in mainstream Polish theatre, with works by Krystian Lupa (1943–) and his former student Krzysztof Warlikowski (1962–) making extensive use of video. Works by Robert Wilson and such New York-based companies as the Wooster Group and the Builders Association also utilize multimedia prominently. “In my work, technology is a performer,” proclaimed Marianne Weems, the director and founder of the Builders Association, in a statement that could also have described Sawka’s multimedia spectacles.8 Organizations such as CultureHub, which bills itself as “a global art and technology community founded by SeoulArts and LaMaMa,” are devoted to exploring the intersection between live and mediated performance. Where Sawka differed from both Polish practitioners, such as Lupa and Warlikowski, and American ones, such as Wilson, the Wooster Group, the Builders Association, and CultureHub, was in the unique combination of his own hand-painted or intaglio-printed images with the very latest high-tech animation techniques.Sawka always had a knack for finding visual metaphors that brilliantly sum up what a playwright or an author has to say. This is what made him so successful as a poster artist and an illustrator of op-ed pieces and books. Such images as the table in STU’s Polish Dreambook, the burning newspaper in Exodus, and the eyes in the Cocteau’s Trial brilliantly encapsulated the themes of those productions. In his multimedia spectacles, he strove to create a whole theatre out of such metaphors, from the eyes that transform into windows looking at birds in flight in The Eyes to images of civilizations being built up and destroyed in The Voyage. It is a pity that he died before he had a chance to bring either Creation or The Voyage to full fruition. He also talked about a multimedia production inspired by the historic U.S. highway Route 66 that winds through America from Chicago to Los Angeles.It is certainly true of Sawka’s spectacles, as a fellow avant-garde theatre director says of the Builders Association productions, that they are “a hybrid, a new genre entirely.”9 In fact, though this new genre may not be “theatre” in any conventional sense, it participates in the search for new forms of theatre that avant-gardists from the fin de siècle until now have engaged. For example, The Voyage induces in its audience precisely the experience that, according to theatre historian Frantisek Deak, the symbolists expected from a theatrical production: “a state of reverie in which they could self-consciously contemplate analogies and glimpse the ideas suggested by the artist.” 10 Sawka’s theatre of image and metaphor achieves both the dreams of the symbolists to create a theatre of symbols and moods and that of Gordon Craig to create a stage where a master artist creates an autonomous art form without the medium of a literary text. It embodies the stage of Jan Sawka’s imagination and attains to performance art that shows us a new way of seeing.