Review: THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON'T THEY?  at Wroclaw Mime Theatre

When I was little, I read in the newspaper that on Thursday evening there would be a film on TV about a dance marathon. I was so excited that I had been waiting for it for days. The title had nothing to do with dancing but who would understand Hollywood, right? I was very disappointed that this movie wasn't filled with glee, and I didn't understand how that was possible, dancing should be fun, and I saw exhausted people, clinging lifelessly to each other. I was confused and it hit me: life can be very hard and disappointing. Well, I was too little to understand why, but I accepted that fact, and those gruesome but real scenes from Sydney Pollack's film have stayed with me ever since (I guess parenting advisory wasn’t a thing in the ‘90s.).

The years passed and when I learned that the Wroclaw Mime Theater was working on this title, I began to prepare myself to reprocess the shock of my childhood. And I was surprised once again.

Firstly, I think it's brilliant that movement-based theater is doing a play about dance in its weirdest shape. I try to avoid comparison with a movie (even though it's super difficult) and I try to relate directly with Horace McCoy's novel.

The show is symbolic and can be read on many different levels, we don't know the exact time or place; the costumes and lifestyles blend to create a mixture of American culture and history. Country, ballroom, high society, Statue of Liberty, white-collar, marines, you name it.

I loved the message in general and all the references to other American masterpieces like Steinbeck's pursuit of peaches and oranges. It was (perhaps too) direct but not brutal. When the monster stops growing it dies and society can't allow that to happen so we feed it. We do it also with our dignity, people chose to do it 100 years ago and they do it now, we may have different ideas on how to do it, on how to survive in a world full of monsters, or on the way of expressing one's existence.

Radoslaw Rychcik, the director, has a weakness for American culture, that’s for sure: his Forefathers' Eve à la américaine changed modern Polish theater ten years ago. Would this be the case here? I don't think so, as there are unfortunately some imperfections. The last scene is so bland that it hurts, especially after seeing such a great universal piece, with breathtaking choreography by (Jakub Lewandowski), costumes (by Lukasz Blazejewski), and all the elements making perfect sense.

Last but not least: the Movement which is, as always in Pantomima, a masterpiece. I could watch for hours how they eat, how they dance, how they run, and how they rest. The person sitting next to me wasn't comfortable watching all of his struggles, the poor guy couldn't sit still squirming in his chair but for me, it worked like a charm. I suppose as someone who spent years in dance studios I'm indifferent to exhausted human bodies, but I have to admit there are a lot of them. I was fascinated by the unstoppable energy of these 16 actors. The movement itself is dignified and says a lot about the fight; the slow motion of the running is like the icing on the (moving) cake. We suffer with them at all stages and if pain ennobles, they want to do it through movement; after all, that's all that matters in life, isn't it?

Photo: Natalia Kabanow