Frankenstein

In Victor Frankenstein and his Creature it is easy to see two faces of the same person, an identity coming apart. What is secondary for a young, ambitious scientist — love, pleasure, the respect of another person, the ordinariness of life — remains his hidden desire. It is embodied instead by the being he creates. The rift is deepened by the expectations of those around them, which both collide with. In time it is no longer clear what in their actions comes from their own decisions and what from outside pressure. Shelley — daughter of a feminist intellectual, and an extraordinarily creative teenager — seems to have written into her legendary novel a great many dilemmas that are still current today.

The experience of being torn between the fight for expected individual success and private safety and happiness is familiar to today’s teenagers too. Great expectations push us away from the people close to us and make us hurt them, and at the same time they set a trap: we will never be the best, the most important, the most gifted, because there will always be someone who has achieved more. At best this leads to bitterness and a lack of satisfaction. Although the experience seems tied to adulthood, it begins at school, when young people fall into the rat race and the search for a mythical authenticity, uniqueness and talent.

„Frankenstein” is an attempt to set this problem in the popular, imaginatively rich context of the living dead. The Frankenstein of the performance creates, and it consumes him utterly; he is passionate about making something exceptional, which at the same time destroys his humanity and, in consequence, his relationships with those close to him. At first they support him in this passion. In the end he is left alone with his monster of expectations and images, made symbolically present by music that has begun to live without him and turns out to be very human.

Choreography: Tomek Ciesielski in close collaboration with the dancers: Marysia Bijak, Agnieszka Borkowska, Wojciech Łaba, Wojciech Furman, Ania Banasik

Music: Piotr Matula

Costumes: Ilona Binarsch

Production: Joanna Stasina