Art is the Language My Heart Speaks When I am Silent

Art is made to dissolve boundaries and mental hardening

Privately, I am not very talkative. But I loved the stage. I loved everything that led to it.

I started to perform poetry when I was about 11, maybe 12. A teacher from a local cultural centre visited our school, looking for children who might be receptive to performance art—those with sensitivity, capable of standing still, of expressing something deeper, a certain readiness: an openness to being shaped by something larger than oneself. I… was an obedient, respectful, quiet pupil. We were asked to choose a poem and simply say it. After I finished mine, I was invited to attend tutoring sessions at the local “Culture House,” as we called it.

My first tutor was a woman who came to the school; sometimes we rehearsed in her private home when her child was ill. Later, I was “taken over” by a male tutor—a graduate of sociology, a theatre instructor, and a jury member in the early stages of the town’s competitions. I started to take part.

Funny enough, it all started with what the orthodontists of that time believed to be too many teeth in my mouth. Some of my teeth—faithful to their owner’s nature—didn’t want to grow in the usual direction, so it was decided they needed to be readjusted. I remember a lot of bright light, a lot of periodic pain, and endless exercises to open my mouth wide enough to give the air a chance to pass through all that metal. It was inevitable: even before then, air had trouble finding its way out of my mouth, getting lost in the maze of independent incisors, canines, premolars, and molars. And let us not even mention the wisdom teeth, which would come later, eager to play their vital, destructive role in an otherwise orderly, rearranged kingdom of structure.

Unconcerned with aesthetics, I wanted help with something else: the ability to speak clearly. My theatre instructors showed me that I had a voice, that I could let it out for a variety of purposes. We worked on my voice, breathing, and understanding of the texts—long mirror sessions (I hated mirrors!). We worked with poems and prose, dismantling one at a time. I discovered some kind of interaction between myself and the texts. With the nature of someone who draws words, who prefers to keep them to myself unless safely covered by a protective shawl of someone else’s words, I recognised that when pronouncing texts, I was becoming an unknown to myself persona, a medium of deeper meanings. And not long before I knew I was deep down in…This is when I got exposed to some brilliant writing: Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Gabriel García Márquez, Italo Calvino, Bohumil Hrabal, Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, Marguerite Yourcenar, Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Derek Walcott, just to mention some.

I practised various forms—études, recitation. I did not possess a natural, effortless memory, so I repeated the texts thousands of times. On the morning of a competition, I would open my eyes and recite the piece without emphasis. When everything held, I knew I would be able to “deliver it”.

Once or twice, I faltered early in the day. And once, I forgot the text entirely, on the “stage” (although the setting wasn’t really stage-like, the whole place felt uncomfortable, maybe too near a library;-). The disaster wasn’t forgetting, but that I was in the wrong place and despite the signs, the place that didn’t feel right, the poet whom I didn’t appreciate (only her texts were allowed). And I didn’t withdraw. It was a love poem. At that time, I disliked love poetry; I did not believe in that particular poet. I believed in others—Szymborska, for instance.

I remember returning to the classroom afterwards and continuing with my lessons. Not long after, my language and literature teacher began changing the displays on the classroom walls. The poet now prominently featured had just received the Nobel Prize for Literature. She lived in the nearest large city to our town. It was Szymborska. Until then, my teacher had never strayed beyond the prescribed programme. Suddenly, Szymborska’s face and poetry mattered. Suddenly, the poems and her image appeared everywhere.

Internally, I was disgusted with all this sudden obedience to recognition, the conversion of indifference into prescribed reverence. Perhaps I simply did not like the teacher. I was impeccable in grammar, fulfilled every requirement, but there was no invitation to risk, to be passionate about literature.

Fortunately, my high final exam results opened the door to an elite high school where I entered an entirely different game. And that was even long before I went to study literature, which is another topic.

Before that, through their texts, and many others, I progressed through the second and third stages of national competitions, held near the external borders of our country. Those journeys that continued throughout the next stages of my literary education—away from home, with workshops and performances of exceptional actors and singers got catalogued in my memory among the best.

No, I don’t have any pictures from that period.

Text in other languages? No, not yet, that came later, in school, when we performed French plays. No! Didn’t play main roles. I only remember playing a police officer. I guess I didn’t have much to say, but I wore a tie.

I like ties.

One of my colleagues’ mothers organised trips to the theatre (he later became a playwright—I never thought I would write a play, until it changed recently…), and almost at once I found myself belonging to the bohemian world.

I love theatre, and I enjoy cinematography too, especially when it achieves engagement through a strong story.

Personally, I like telling unobvious stories.

That is why art is made: to dissolve boundaries, to soften hardened ways of thinking. Art certainly can make us think—and that is where change begins. With those individual impulses we receive, impulses that alter how we see the world. A different way of seeing, in turn, becomes a different attitude, and a different attitude leads us to draw boundaries in new places—or to dissolve them altogether. And slowly, step by step, change comes into being.

In art, I need freedom and adventure. In life, it’s enough for me if no one blocks the sunshine. I’m comfortable with myself.