It is hardly a coincidence that a symposium held within the framework of the Old Music New Dance project takes place here and now … Polish EU presidency involves a mission of introducing Europe to itself, but in Polish style.

Poland has a special affection to Baroque. It was a period of economic and social prosperity, a heyday of original political ideas and a wealth of exquisite literature, theatre, and fine arts of both universal and particular appeal. It was Baroque, and later Romanticism, that will forever be synonymous with Polish style. Seventeenth-century music and dance from Poland will permeate works by European artists for centuries to come, the clothes worn by our nobility of that time will for centuries be associated with alla polacca style, while religious rituals and political rhetoric originating at that time will contribute to the gestures and masks which Poles will don until today and which foreigners’ imagination would attribute to us. It was then that the myth of Sarmatia originated, which will for better or worse become synonymous with being Polish. It was then also that symbols and images appeared that make up a glossary of terms related to the “Polish way of thinking” about universal matters.

We want our meeting of artists and scholars to have precisely this Baroque character. Namely, we intend to combine and mix ingredients that are usually separated from one another: an unbridled imagination with mental order, flesh and word, the mundane and the elitist, the political and the intimate. We have therefore asked people whose competence will guarantee our reaching the essence of Baroque to stir this curious mixture. They know well how to transform into actors of a Baroque spectacle, which this event will no doubt prove.

Romana Agnel, a dancer, choreographer and expert on historical dance will introduce Polish Baroque dance, its European roots and European offshoots. She will discover for us the mysterious rhetoric of figures, a wealth of garments and films that demonstrate the theatrical choreography of a Sarmatian spectacle. The director and dramaturge Paweł Kamza will before our very eyes and in our bodies restore the old glory of the forgotten science of mnemotechnics. This skill, which used to be a staple of education of a citizen of Europe, was not confined to memorising but was rather a script of the inner life of the then intellectual. It had an influence on his or her mind and imagination, drew a map of personal memory with the support of which each person discovered their identity. Following a guide, with a Baroque poem in hand and with a score of a Baroque spectacle of memory in mind, the workshop participants will exercise the skill of mnemotechnics to discover themselves in a world that is worth remembering. In turn, the poet and professor Krzysztof Koehler will talk about the concept, a rhetorical topos with a fundamental significance for the European identity of the human person from the early stage of the modern era. The contemporary master of speech will out of dashing analyses, profound interpretations, perfectly chosen examples and bizarre analogies between different arts reveal before us the rhetorical mechanism whose impact on language contributed to transformations in philosophy, politics and even economics.

We trust that the metamorphoses of Polish Baroque will show to the participants of the symposium and workshops a landscape that will be surprisingly close to the inhabitant of each corner of our civilisation, from Portugal to Georgia and from Lofoten to Malta. After all, across Europe Baroque was first and foremost a time of groundbreaking transformation, spiritual fomentation, sophisticated ornamentation and theatralization of life, as well as vehement spiritual changes and tensions between the mind and the heart. Baroque is a period that is hard to define, a watershed that is a far cry from homogenous and, in a word, is similar to our time.

Welcome!
Jadwiga Majewska