“Always in the Likeness”: The Virtual Presences of Helmut Kajzar’s Gwiazda in the Lothe Lachmann Theatre

Abstract

In the 1970s, Helmut Kajzar formulated his manifesto, in which he defined theatre as “a place in between – such as stairs, a hallway, such as the Earth” (Manifest); yet, he never stopped asking where theatre begins and where it ends (Teatr Meta-codzienny).1 Nearly thirty years later, the participants of the International Theatre Festival, Dialog, were trying to answer, “What can the theatre offer […] in the time of the expeditious development of audiovisual arts? Does the theatre try to compete with the tools of contemporary pop-culture […] how does it use them?” (“Dialog”). After he had written his manifesto for Teatr Metacodzienno_ci [the Theatre of Meta-everydayness], Kajzar bought one of the first tape recorders available in Poland and, delighted with the new opportunities, treated it as an element of his theatre. Over the years, technological inventions have become not only tools or instruments in theatre but the meaningful elements of the theatrical space; similarly, digital transmission not only has enabled theatre to stage events, now, using solutions familiar from television or film but also poses basic questions as to the status of materiality and presence in theatre. Trying not to compete with the tools of contemporary electronic culture but rather to use them, theatre has developed various hybrids, extending the range of its already multiform configurations with multimedia performance. Equipped with technology much more advanced than Kajzar’s tape recorder and questing after the body as “the primary means of theatrical display” (Kunst, “Impossible”), the Videoteatr “Poza” [Lothe Lachmann Theatre] actively pursues one of the lines of inquiry into this marriage of diverse forms.