2020: The Tempest

EVENING WITH TR ONLINE

18:45 - start of the evening with TR Online, host: Rafał Maćkowiak
19:00 - live streaming of “2020: The Tempest”, dir. Grzegorz Jarzyna straight from the scene of TR Warszawa/ATM Studio, streaming direction: Nicolas Villegas
ok. 22:10 - live talk with TR Warszawa’s artistic director Grzegorz Jarzyna, host: Harald Wolff (Münchner Kammerspiele)
Meeting held in English
The event will not be streamed – please join in on Zoom [link]. We kindly ask guests to turn their cameras on.

Professor Tadeusz Sławek in his book “NICowanie świata. Zdania z Szekspira” [“Turning the World Inside OUT. The Phrases from Shakespeare“] writes that in an attempt to “think a human” one has to extract a person from his/her customarily assigned place and transfer him/her to a totally different place. This is also how William Shakespeare poses his questions; he repeats the act of expulsion: expulsion from paradise, expulsion from a city (“The Tempest”), expulsion from life, expulsion from a family (“King Lear”), expulsion from a country (“Coriolanus”). Without the circumstances of “being exiled”, one cannot “think a human”.

What does “to think a human anew” mean nowadays, when the only available tools to carry out this process are instruments created by humans in all their imperfection, based on knowledge and imagination – both having its source in the most imperfect instrument: human memory?

Is human perspective the only possible one?
2020: THE TEMPEST is a story of many variants. Artificial Intelligence (AI) – in a manner that imitates workings of a human memory – superimposes different possible scenarios of what could have happened on what really happened. This is a collective story about the end of anthropocentrism; a story that is also made up of stories and memories supplied by the audience.

Used in the performance:
Fragments of “Walden, or Life in the Woods” by H.D. Thoreau (translated by Halina Cieplicka).

Quotes from the following works are used in the script:
C. Malaparte, “Sodoma e Gomorra” (translated by J. Popiel)
St. Kubrick, P. Sellers, T. Southern, P. George, “Dr. Strangelove, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” (translated by Karol Ruciński)
F. O’Connor, “Mystery and Manners” (translated by M. Kołbukowski)

Post-performance live talk organized by Münchner Kammerspiele.