Why do we sacrifice so much energy to our art?
Not in order to teach others but to learn with them what our existence, our organism, our personal and repeatable experience have to give us; to learn to break down the barriers which surround us and to free ourselves from the breaks which hold us back, from the lies about ourselves which we manufacture daily for ourselves and for others; to destroy the limitations caused by our ignorance or lack of courage; in short, to fill the emptiness in us: to fulfill ourselves…art is a ripening, an evolution, an uplifting which enables us to emerge from darkness into a blaze of light.
Jerzy Grotowski
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I don’t pretend to understand everything about Polish experimental theater. But when the Grotowski Work Center makes its way from Pontedera, Italy to San Francisco, and it just so happens to coincide with Julia and Aram tying the knot, well, that’s the kind of beautiful collision that restores your faith in the universe’s sense of timing.
Franconia. That house where Michael, Niki, and Ciara lived. Where Julia crashed for a while too. The kind of place that becomes more than an address, it becomes mythology. These spaces always do when the right people pass through them at the right time.
They celebrated with song and dance, which is exactly what Grotowski would have wanted. Not some bloodless, intellectualized performance-about-performance bullshit. Real bodies, real voices, real joy erupting in real space. The Polish master understood that theater, real theater, is about breaking down the barriers, filling the emptiness, emerging “from darkness into a blaze of light.”
A wedding is theater. Life is theater. And somewhere in the middle of all this, the avant-garde meeting the ancient ritual of marriage, the Work Center’s rigorous practice colliding with champagne and dancing… there was Sharka. The greatest dog in the world, according to sources. Every great party, every genuine moment of human transcendence, needs a great dog bearing witness. Sharka knew what was up.
This is what happens when you let art breathe, when you stop treating culture like a museum piece and let it be what it was always meant to be: alive, messy, joyful, transformative. Julia and Aram got married. People sang. People danced. The Work Center came to town. Sharka was there.
Everything else is just commentary.