The Western is a real-life western set in Poland: a project that explores the idea of the west through music and performance, bringing together two disparate groups: pre-christian pagan performers from rural southern Poland with Teatr Studio, an avant-garde theater in central Warsaw. Poland is a frontier of sorts – “the west” begins somewhere in the Balkans and ends in California, so what better place to ask: What is the west?
The project began with a research trip to rural southern Poland to interview and film regional practitioners of pagan performance, or Dziady. These performances can be traced to the middle ages, and are potentially pre-christian in origin. I returned to Warsaw to work with a Polish costume designer, eight accordionists, and a production team at Teatr Studio to merge the hyper-regional idea of dziady with cowboy iconography. The work culminated in a twenty-minute performance with sound and and a horse on the plaza of Joseph Stalin’s Palace of Culture and Science.
