And The Rain Will Pass...

Watch the performance live on vod.teatrwielki.pl on 24 October at 7 pm. 

Ballet in one act
Music: Henryk Mikołaj Górecki (Beatus vir, Quasi una fantasia, Kleines Requiem für eine Polka)
World premiere: 27 March 2011, Teatr Wielki – Polish National Opera

'A nation that cannot live without suffering must cause it to itself,' wrote Professor Maria Janion. Krzysztof Pastor, with the language of dance, strikes up a dialogue with the Polish phantasm of unconscious attachment to victimhood by recalling the fates of people who lived through the Second World War. Górecki’s emotional music and the expression of dancers interplaying with it lead us through the meanders of the collective experience of generations, bringing to the foreground a stormy arsenal of feelings. It confronts us with the trauma passed on in body memory, with time growing into a national complex. 'Rain is like mercy – it will wash over everything/the blood from battlefields and from man/ and the air petrified by fear.' The words of Baczyński’s poem echoing in the imagination during the rainfall scene mix hope with fear. The dancer’s movements, precise and full of vitality, seem to have an advantage over the steady flow of water. The will to survive wrestles with fear, escaping its embrace. Somewhere, with the favourable passage of time, a desire to forget is born and gradually waxes, along with a readiness to live fully, to live anew.

Polish National Ballet
Chorus and Orchestra of the Polish National Opera