Captured, or perhaps ‘caught’, ‘reclaimed’, ‘pulled ashore’, but also ‘interrogated, full of questions’ about a meeting between Jerzy Grotowski and Tadeusz Różewicz; questions that are brimming with conjectures, hypotheses and understatements but are also full of certainty and insolence necessitated by the veil of time that flows like urban sewage. Did the Poet, after moving to Wrocław in 1968, finish writing his Captured while watching the first performance of the Laboratory Theatre’s Apocalypsis cum figuris? Our piece could just as well be titled Tadeusz Różewicz Watches ‘Apocalypsis cum figuris’, Tadeusz Różewicz Leaves the Theatre after Watching Apocalypsis cum figuris, or Tadeusz Różewicz Writes ‘Apocalypsis cum figuris’ while completing his poem ‘Caught’.

Captured owes its existence to Różewicz’s poetics of the fragment: it incorporates extensive images from Różewicz’s play The Trap and excerpts from his prose poem Caught, snippets from the poem Recycling: Gold as well as many other excerpts of Różewicz’s poetry, which we both ‘catch’ and ‘sink’ in connection with a meeting of two Wrocław-based giants of 20th-century culture, which did not take place but can still materialise ‒ we move it from a past that did not come to be to a future.

One of the central ideas of Captured is the notion of reminiscence, which links Grotowski with Różewicz. Reminiscence, which is not a passive, involuntary look back at the past but a peep into our growth and time in a spherical way ‒ which means not just a return, but the right of constant reclaiming, reworking of what remains with us as valuable and at the same time a way of building values.

The core of Captured is a unique sonoric installation ‒ a kind of drama of sounds/voices where everything that vibrates, everything that produces sound, every action, including actions performed with words, is composed, creating a new, unique whole. Images but also dramatic micro-sequences from Różewicz’s texts are woven into a new vibrational identity.

If this name did not grate on our ears, we could look at Captured as a sonoric poem for the stage.

Jarosław Fret