| Gospels of Childhood |
 Performed by: Marta/Maria – Ditte Berkeley/Kamila Klamut and Nini Julia Bang, Przemysław Blaszczak, Tomasz Bojarski, Jaroslaw Fret, Aleksandra Kotecka, Ewa Pasikowska, and Tomasz Wierzbowski.Project leader: Jaroslaw Fret  The initial impulse for the project Gospels of Childhood was an interest in the Gnostic elements in the beginning of Christianity. The performance oscillates between two threads: the story of the resuscitation of Lazarus evoked through the mouths of Marta and Maria, his sisters and ‘the testimony of Mary Magdalene,’ who according to some Gnostic traditions took a particular position among the apostles and was identified as one of the sisters of Lazarus. Among the texts which appear in the performance are scarcely known apocryphal gospels such as that of Mary Magdalene, Phillip, Thomas and fragments by Fiodor Dostoevski and Simone Weil. The songs which appear in the performance were collected by the company during its expeditions to Georgia, Bulgaria and Greece in the years 1999–2003. Of crucial importance was the work with the people from Svaneti who live in the highest part of the Caucasus mountains. In their tradition they kept the funeral songs, which root back to the beginning of our era and are the oldest form of polyphony in Georgia, probably also the oldest in the world. The second musical plot consists of liturgical songs from the Orthodox Republic of Monks – Athos. These songs, connected with the Pascha period, build the end part of the performance – consolamentum.The performance is an attempt to tell the ‘late story of the flesh’ – after love, after humiliation, after death; an impossible story of resurrection. |