Битеф

The Trial. Is he Oedipus as well? Or is he the anonymous man who expects fate to listen to his questions? Can words carry the burden of the questions? In the background, a girl hums a piece of a banal song. As she is singing about Her heart’s dispatch, the ballet master spurts out isolated words, names of ballet pas, and a ballerina tries to adjust her dancing to the rhythm of his words. She takes off and falls to the ground, constrained by the mechanical movements of the apparatus, a flightless, mechanical ballet dancer. On the right, a couple of mysterious jugglers practise juggling for juggling's sake. Futility - running on the spot, and the Consul-Bloom's convulsive outcry A fig, a fig act as the symbolic quintessence of the overture. Part 11, The Street of Kisses, is separated from the overture with a black act curtain and a short interval of darkness. It would be pointless to describe all the images of the show. There is no linear na ; rration in this part either, which the very composition of the stage indicates. As is usually the case with Grzegorzewski, events recede towards the frames, they hide in the shadow of the wings, this being a telling proof that the world has no longer centre and continuity. Yvonne's return (Teresa Budzisz-Krzyżanowska) is reduced to a snapshot near the right wing, a scrap of conversation. The prostitute Maria (Anna Romantowska) looks out from behind the Indian door, says in Spanish Quiero Maria? and the Consul follows her. The musical accompaniment to this scene is a sequence of kissing noises, sensual, expressive, bordering on the distasteful. It reaches sublimation with Grzeother favourite symbol, nudity, which may be identified both with eroticism and death. If an image may have a sonority, the silhouette of a nude girl withdrawing to the horizon of the stage to the accompaniment of the kisses, resounds with purest, nostalgic lyricism. The bottom of the horizon begins to shine with a blue narrow strip of neon light. This is a little like the „Devil's Mill", an obsessive symbol of falling into the abyss described in Lowry's novel. This is also a symbol of the inseparable nexus between the sensual, murky and low in each of us and the supersensual and light - of what in man's imagination and dreams is Maria and what is identified with Yvonne. This part of the produc-