Witness

Witness is an artistic inquiry into how a performative action can have the power of memento.

How can a performer bear witness and become a testimony? How can he declare himself a witness of events that are outside his experience?

The action draws on the scenic concept from a new Teatr ZAR performance, Armine, Sister. At its core is an installation of 16 columns representing an Armenian temple. Witness, however, is an independent work, although created on the same artistic premises as Teatr ZAR’s performance. The piece explores Armenian history but at the same time goes beyond it, addressing the issues of how memory is retained and carried.

Teatr ZAR first started collaborating with Daisuke Yoshimoto in 2003 on a piece called Lazarus, as part of Gospels of Childhood. The creative encounter with the Japanese dancer was an important ensemble-forming experience for the group, of which the Butoh master became a honorary member.

Performer: Daisuke Yoshimoto

Concept: Jarosław Fret

Daisuke Yoshimoto graduated in art from the Theatre Department at the Nippon University in 1967. Since the early years of his stage career, he collaborated and co-created performances with the greatest Butoh masters such as Hisayo Iwaki, Yukihiko Sakai and Kazuo Ohno (as a stage manager for La Argentina in 1977 and My Mother in 1981). In 1983 he created his first Butoh piece, The Head of the Bird Woman. He has performed in many countries, including Austria, Denmark, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway, Ukraine, Hungary, Italy and the USA. He first time came to Poland as a stage manager with the group Ner-Kyōgen (Tokyo) to take part in an international festival of student theatres organized by Bogusław Litwiniec and Teatr Kalambur in Wrocław. In the 1990s he visited Poland several times with his pieces Eros and Thanatos (2004) and Ruined Body (2008), which he presented in Kraków, Lublin, Olsztyn, Poznań, Szczecin, Warsaw and Wrocław (at the invitation of the Grotowski Centre and the Grotowski Institute). In 1997 he was the artistic consultant of a Butoh festival conceived and held by the Grotowski Centre. In 2003 he collaborated with Teatr ZAR on Gospels of Childhood as a dancer in a piece called Lazarus. In 2010, together with Jacek Ostaszewski and the music group Osjan, he performed Ruined Body in the Grand Theatre and National Opera in Warsaw and at the Cross-Culture Festival to mark the 40th anniversary of Osjan. In 2013 he shown in Wroclaw as part of the 2nd International Theatre Festival “The World as a Place of Truth” the performance Kyokatabira of the Body.