- Direction/Choreogrpahy: Liwia Bargieł
- Music: Aleksander Kaźmierczak
- Dramaturgy: Paulina Ozga
- Video: Marta Jarnuszkiewicz
- Performers: Patrycja Grzywińska, Sonia Mietielica, Piotr Janusz, Vova Makovsky, Błażej Stencel
- Performance created as part of Project Zero at National Academy of Dramatic Arts in Warsaw
Witzelsucht, or cheerfulness, is a term for cheerfulness and animation, characteristic of people with frontal lobe disorder.
It is one of many ailments that change the mind of a person, thus affecting his personality, and thus also his essence.
The richness of nature should be examined from the point of view of health and disease, infinite forms of individual adaptation,
thanks to which the human body, a human being, can adapt and reconstruct, facing the challenges and changing lifetimes
of life. In this sense defects, ailments and diseases can - by revealing hidden skills - play a paradoxical role. In this sense, the
paradoxicalfeature of the disease is its "creative" potential. It happens that people suffer from exceptional illnesses. Those that
overtake perception – as understood and sensed by a "normal" person - upside down. It is hard to imagine that the ability to
judge is lost while retaining the ability to think purely abstract. When it is easier to describe a glove as a continuous surface
covering hand with five bulges, it is more difficult to guess that it is just a glove.What happens when the ability to recognize
parts of our body is impaired or when we lose the ability to recognize speech? Each of these ailments is a journey into the unknown.
It arouses feelings of anxiety and strangeness, because it distorts and deforms the most basic tools by means of which we get to know
and interpret ourselves and what surrounds us. We are used to how we perceive the world so much that it does not take our attention.
It is obvious that we see colors, smells or identify limbs as our own. On a daily basis, we do not look at it as something extraordinary,
a state of affairs that feels as given to us per se. This type of illness makes us reflect both on how we see the world and how it can be
perceived in a different way from ours. This is the case of people suffering from Tourett's syndrome, all aphasias or other neurological
conditions. Among them, the most interesting are those in which identity is lost - for example Korsakov syndrom, where a man without
memory also loses a coherent narrative about himself and does not know who he is and who are the people who surround him. Patients
must try to arrange a coherent picture of reality from broken particles that would fit into the society in which they live.
Screens from videos
Photo: Bartek Warzecha