The box

Wojtek Ziemilski likes to create theatrical scenarios which involve the public, drawing them into participation. In his Prologue (2012), audiences became performers, instructed by a voice they heard through wireless headphones. In the show At High Noon (2014), they were asked upon entering the theatre to write down three things which they associated with the year 1989. The material was then collected and used in the performance. In Pygmalion, we are dealing with a very special performance. This event simply could not take place without active involvement of its audience.

And so we begin with an enticement. The director, along with the actress Rozalia Mierzicka, in a relaxed fashion – as if in an ordinary space, rather than on stage – welcome the audience. They introduce themselves and explain, paraphrasing, “what the situation is”. They go on to ask “Not that we’re forcing you, but would anyone like to come up on stage and do something with it?”. A few hands go up. The director and his actress choose, getting the proceedings going. The audience member goes up on stage and creates the show along with the actress, with subtle guidance. And what do we see? Teamwork? Unashamed engagement? Or maybe some kind of training?

The set, designed by Wojtek Pustoła, consists of just the one item: a rather large construction made out of cardboard. Collapsed down flat, it is at first used as a wall between the actress and the volunteer. Experimenting with its shape, attempts to stand it up without support, leaning against it or trying to find people on the other side by knocking leads to it no longer dividing, but starting to bring people together, allowing contact to be made. In this way, right before our eyes, communication is established, something akin to language.

After a while, the performers go inside the carton box, between its two surfaces and begin to animate it. The public is confronted with a 3D shape, which rolls across the stage, taking on ever more new shapes. It changes into a tube, a box, a wall which presses against the audience or a lengthy object which winds round a pillar. It reminds us of a minimalistic geometric sculpture, set in motion. The sequence doesn’t end with visual effects, however, but goes beyond them. It lasts a long time (over ten minutes), testing the audience’s patience. In time, we begin to understand that the key aspect of the performance has been hidden from us, in an isolated space, which is outside our reach. At this stage, the viewer doesn’t yet know what the subject of the show is, nor how it might relate to the story written by George Bernard Shaw, although we are quite clear that we cannot be expecting a traditional staging of the play.

Stage lights then die. For a moment, we are suspended in total darkness. The cartoon installation freezes, the light from a torch emerging out of it, seeping through slits in the cardboard. The visual effect is surprising and impressive. It surprises mostly because such a minimalistic stage set sets in motion new scenarios and creates various possibilities for games to be played with its form. Rozalia says to her volunteer that she would like to tell him about something important to her – her son, Kazimierz. She suggests a series of exercises. First she asks the audience member to choose three of the twenty questions writ ten on the inner walls of the box and read them out loud. The questions refer to that which the child likes, where it feels safe and whether it would like to be here with us. The next sequence reminds us that the learning of language is most of all a process of observation and repetition. Mierzicka convinces the viewer to try repeating after, as well as along with, her. The volunteer therefore guesses the meanings of words from the movement of her lips, trying to keep up, two voices overlapping, the personal confession from one party becoming the shared matter of both persons on stage. First, we hear stories about initial experiences of learning (“I remember how mother taught me to speak, dress” etc…), then the actress suggests a shared reading from a document which is important to her. This is an official letter from a playschool, detailing little Kazimierz’s behaviour. The boy has problems speaking. He should therefore not attend playschool, but should be observed while in hospital instead.

A history of violence in educational institutions? About the system being unable to accept misfits? Not quite. There is no doubt that the process of learning speech is central to Ziemilski’s play, being its central feature, connecting its four segments, each one quite different in structure. And yet it is here that we see how it ties into Pygmalion as written by Shaw.

For Shaw, the learning of a language becomes a fight for social advancement. The play presents the story of Eliza Doolittle, a flower seller who becomes the focus of a bet between two gentlemen: Colonel Pickering and Professor Higgins. The bet is over a sum of money needed to transform the girl and introduce her successfully into London society, the action taking place at the start of the 20th century. This is a time when one’s lexical abilities along with one’s accent played a vital role in social standing. The key to Eliza’s transformation, besides her manners and clothing, is therefore language. She is to be schooled by Professor Higgins, a phonetics specialist. There is a certain nuance which is overlooked in most presentations of the tale. The flower seller appears at the Professor’s front door of her own free will, after she hears that being able to pronounce and express herself well can turn her into a princess.

Shaw’s Pygmalion touches upon the complex issue of individual development and the ability to influence ones own life. Eliza turns out to be a child of her times, of early modernism, symbolising a period when the myth of the emancipated individual makes an appearance, someone who has influence over their social standing, partly through being able to educate oneself. The background to this includes traces of the Bildung notion, not well known in Poland, missing from our traditions, but absolutely central to European city dwelling cultures (e.g. in German culture, widely popularised since the publication Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years by Goethe). What is Bildung? The idea of growth, of the emancipation of the individual through engagement with culture, but also through the practice of solitary reinterpretation of assimilated canons. “Intellectual enlightenment, a certain quantum of general knowledge and information needed to work in a profession or some kind of employment for the benefit of society, are simply a necessary introduction to attaining intellectual maturity. This depends on the ability to convert gained knowledge into a personal set of convictions and values”, according to Maria Janion and Maria Żmigrodzka, writing in one of the few Polish works on the topic of Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years. Of added importance is the etymology of the word Bildung, where we can find a certain analogy with Pygmalion in its original, mythological version, which tells of the King of Cyprus who so very much desired that a sculpture he had carved of a woman come to life, that Aphrodite made his wish come true. Bildung, coming from the word bild, meaning a picture or image, refers both to one’s education as well as giving form or sculpting, emphasising the aspect of self-development.

Child

The performance on stage is interrupted when a video is projected onto the back wall. Here is little Kazio (Kazimierz), playing in the centre of the cardboard set, smiling, drawing with felt tip pens. He communicates with his mother without any problems, though without words – using gestures, frowns, shouts. What is more, at some point he frees himself from the box, runs outside and tosses into the air confetti he has found on the floor. A moment of triumph? A manifestation of his own self, manifested in spite of limitations?

Ziemilski in some way toys with the idea of childhood as utopian state of freedom, which is taken from us when we enter into social contracts as adults. Gleefully, he shows the boy running, as if he was saying that we should give the child the chance to develop at his own pace, and not attach to him the label of “misfit” or “failure”.

A similar strategy was promoted in the 1960s by the American psychologist Robert Rosenthal. The author of The Pygmalion Effect tested the effects of social expectations on behaviours. He conducted a famous experiment in a school in San Francisco, measuring the intelligence of a single class of children starting their education in Year One. Next, he isolated a separate group within the class, telling teachers these children had tested as having the highest IQ. After a few months, it transpired that both test results as well as class grades rose remarkably within this group, compared to the rest of their classmates. Results of this experiment were rather surprising, because it turned out Rosenthal had lied to the teachers and separated the class into two groups at random. In other words, the children who performed better were those who had, from the very start, been assumed to be more intelligent. For Rosenthal, this was proof that in the educational process positive perceptions can sometimes have a self-fulfilling function.

Positive motivation as a superior method of educating? Better than hard tests of actual ability? In Pygmalion we see both ends of this didactic spectrum. What should we choose? Or rather, what will the director choose? Should we defend Kazio against the damaging effects of being civilised? This idea for a moment makes an appearance in the play, but it seems only to allow the players to abandon it and move on to another, this time final, point. The fourth section of the show is Rozalia’s monologue – about her life journey as an actress. The monologue takes the form of a series of thank-yous.

Actress

Mierzicka tells us about studying in acting school, which involved the exhausting exercises of breath control or modulating one’s voice. She is especially grateful to her elocution tutors. They are the ones who once told her she was “dumb” and should read and watch more in order to grow up. There is no irony in her oration, more a need to express gratitude for the harsh words heard years ago, which fuelled her need to develop. There is a sort of nostalgia here for schooling of an old style – severe, though full of faith in the arts. In the end, we have more confetti – shot up in the air by Rozalia. Is this now the real triumph?

The performance programme contains a puzzling phrase, claiming that we are dealing with exercises in extreme empathy. It is not, however, obvious, what empathy taken to extremes might be. Trying to put yourself into the shoes of another, or something more – identifying with them? And where to find this empathy? In relations between two performers hiding in a cardboard tube? Between them and us, the audience? Or more in the emotional ties developing between the audience and Kazio, who we see up on screen? Because we are all rooting for him, wanting the boy to speak later in life, to be able to communicate and develop. Exercises, which have to be performed with him every day, time after time, are nothing negative, nothing repressive. Surprisingly, in Pygmalion, terms such as education or pedagogy are somehow vindicated, even though they have, it would seem, been dismissed by being considered in contexts of discourses of discipline and rigour

It is hard to see Ziemilski’s decision to give his play the title Pygmalion, and his telling it through two parallel histories of education, as accidental. The first history shows a child, for whom learning a language is key, in order for it to be able to develop and function. The second, however, focuses on his mother, Rozalia, for whom mastering language has become an important personal experience, and also the tool for some kind of advancement. The learning of speech is – a little as in Shaw’s piece – presented as a process of initiation into culture, for which individuals must pay a set price, though they may reap substantial benefits from it afterwards.

And what about the concept of Bildung, so important to the We, the townspeople cycle? It might seem that its romantic roots nurture a vision of development based on personal freedom. This leads to the proposing of a model in which learning does not mean training or instruction, but Bildung – choosing ourselves which aspects of culture we make use of, thereby shaping the path towards self-development.