- Performances – Outdoor – The Fragrance of Time
The performance lasts one hour and is like one’s paging through an old family album. A shade of sepia, some crumbs of melancholy, a gram of nostalgia. And also a teardrop of sentimentalism, quite inevitable in such circumstances.
Paweł Głowacki, Dziennik Polski
The Fragrance of Time
Jerzy Zoń
The poetry and melancholy of street theatre kidnapped the audience and took it into the world of Zoń. The actors perform in fascinating fashion to the music of Tchaikovsky. This vivid story is full of hidden dreams and fears. (…) Instead of heavy intellectual scenes there is a gentle spontaneity and a stirring pleasantness in watching.
The performance of the Polish theatre group was found very convincing during the summer festival in Siegen (…) after the show everyone understood why it functions as a flagship of the street theatre of Poland.
It is a nostalgic show with marvellous music by Tchaikovsky, well constructed, full of dynamism and movement.
It is the familiarity of a small town that the director of the show captured in a way that brings to mind the ambience mastered by Fellini in his movies.
The public expressed the enchantment with the poetics, the design, the space and a tremendous momentum of the show.
There is a huge cage, and inside it there is Jerzy Zon as a small boy. The word still smells of safety but it is already quite tempting. While flocks of feathered fears already scare him, another company of birds entices him with their twitter. Little Zon will go for it. He will leave the cage and slowly begin the tasting of life. (…) Because there are more and more fragrances around him. The fragrance of the parish house, the priest’s cassock, the smell of chalk, a blackboard, a cathedral and the first mischief at school. The smell of cavalry, horses and a true manhood. Then the fragrance of the basic passions of heart. Finally the fragrance of today (…).
Who knows? Maybe the big Zon decided to take a look at the small Zon who had not yet dreamed about the theatre? After all, the time of childhood is a fundamental period for an artist.
And everything played its role in this show: all the elements of the Main Square of Krakow detached all of a sudden from their pragmatic and obvious everyday functions: the Cloth Hall and the Town Hall, the trees, the street lamps, the paved space and the streets going away in different directions, the sky and the moon over the square. There was a moment when even the pigeons played their role (…). In a way we, the audience of the KTO, were also involved in the show. Initially the accidental passers-by, then the others, grasped by it and transformed into its participants within the magic circle of the Theatre that had come to us and for us to take us – for a moment into different worlds – strangely familiar, remembered from our childhood years and from our dreams.
Does time have a fragrance? And if so, what does it smell like? The KTO Theatre from Krakow deeply analysed this question creating an original show – diverse, rich in detail and, above all, thought-provoking.
The actors presented a sensuous and amusing show accompanied by Tchaikovsky’s fascinating music.
One of the most spectacular open-air productions by Jerzy Zoń, bearing reference to the enchanted world of a childhood filled with hopes and fears and inspired by the director’s life and the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Hugo Claus and Emil Zegadłowicz.
The show has been presented at over 60 festivals in 15 countries, including Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, Iran, Austria, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, France, Romania, Spain and Spain.
Script and direction
Jerzy Zoń
Consultation
Zbigniew Sułkowski
Music
Piotr Czajkowski
Selection of music
Jan Poprawa, Jerzy Zoń
Music arrangements for harmonica pieces
Paweł Ostafil
Movement:
Krzysztof Jędrysek, Aleksander Kopański
Stage set and costume design:
Krzysztof Tyszkiewicz, Joanna Jaśko-Sroka
Stage set concepts:
Jerzy Zoń
Stage set production
Robert Calikowski
Performers
Aleksandra Deka, Magdalena Dymsza, Paulina Lasyk, Justyna Orzechowska, Magdalena Pietnoczka, Grażyna Srebrny-Rosa, Marta Zoń, Sławomir Bendykowski/Szymon Pater, Bartek Cieniawa/Jacek Joniec, Tytus Grochal, Aleksander Kopański, Tomasz Łukawski, Adam Plewiński, Mieszko Syc, Karol Śmiałek, Krzysztof Tyszko
Premiere
June 6, 1997, Warsaw
Revival of the production
May 7, 2018, Krakow
Duration
60 minutes
