It is a cold evening in late fall. Bruno Schultz is still a child. His mother comes into his room and friends him feeding grains of sugar to some fies. She asks what he thinks he’s doing. “I’m toughening them up for the winter.” That child certainly could not have imagined that only a few years later humanity would be facing one of its darkest hours. An endless winter in which thousands of people would die like fies. All of them humiliated, tormented, slaughtered. And he would be one of them.

The show, that stays always in balance between dance and thèatre, is inspired by the life of Bruno Schulz, the fgures that populated his childhood and the mythological allusions contained in his drawings and written work.

“IDEALLY, I WOULD AGE TOWARD CHILDHOOD”

Schulz brings together Myth and Childhood. This combination represented a key element for our project. And yet Schulz’ work does not represent a mythological system culturally consolidated in history. The elements of this mythological idiom fow from annobscure region of his primordial childhood fantasies, the fears, premonitions andnconjectures from the morning of his life that constitute the true cradle of mythical thought.
This is the focal point around which our artistic refections revolve.
Myth thus becomes a means of capturing the images that continuously surface and evaporate and reorganizing them into a new tale… As if frozen in time, “imprisoned” in his childhood bedroom, Bruno futters gently in the air, a tiny immortal mouse, carving memories in this space that comes to life again and again in the words, actions and dances that once resided here. To fnd a means of accessing the time of childhood and memories of a past that linger hidden under the wrinkles of adult life. To re-trace those actions that are tiny yet simultaneously mythical, dark and shining, as impossible to bear witness to as any children’s game. Because facing this world once again cannot be a private act; it is something that involves us all. Wide open and stunned, the eye at first believes itself unseeing only to gradually become accustomed to the scarcity of light and remain blinded by glimpsed fragments of the excruciating initiation into life.

So I carried inside of me the myth of an age of genius that at one time presumably was part of my life yet not found in any calendar year, suspended above chronology; an age in which all things breathed within the glow of heavenly colors and you could draw in the whole sky in one single breath like a sip of pure overseas.

Bruno Schultz is the great master of 20th century Polish literature. According to Kantor, “our entire generation effectively grew up in Schulz’s shadow.” His frst and most famous collection of short stories, The Street of Crocodiles, is an autobiography transformed into a fantastical mythology of childhood.

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