The Sejny Chronicles

DESCRIPTION OF THE PERFORMANCE:

"The Sejny Chronicles", a story of the multicultural town of Sejny, is a stunning montage of oral histories and legends that are spoken, sung and danced around a baked clay model of the town. Actors approach the town, listen to the houses, and hear a Jewish prayer from one, the Lord’s Prayer in Polish from another, and then in Lithuanian, and Russian… then lullabies in the many languages spoken along the shifting borders of Eastern Europe.

The play is unusual because the actors - teen-age children of Poles, Lithuanians, and Russian Old-believers living until today in Sejny - tell the real stories and legends handed down by their own grandparents and great-grandparents. The performers represent the fifth “generation” of the youth to pursue this re-discovery of their roots. Uncovering these stories in the houses, one by one, in the dreamlike atmosphere of a scene by Chagall, they all become their own forefathers, voicing their memories of Roma caravans, Slavic solstice customs, and pagan legends, or in magically fluid transitions become the guests at a Lithuanian wedding or beggars gathering before the church. Then again they remember the tailor’s daughter Rachel, or the Jewish child rescued from imminent death. It is the richness of a multicultural past re-discovered and brought to life by its youngest heirs. It speaks with disarming power to any of us who may feel we have lost our roots.

Performance ‘‘The Sejny Chronicles” was initiated in 1999 as an artistic and educational undertaking. It is the next stage of the long-term work of the "Borderland of Arts, Cultures and Nations Centre" with children and teenagers, where young people creatively try to answer the question of how to make cultural heritage a living value for the young generation. How do you implement memory, common history and awareness of cultural heritage into the bloodstream of young inhabitants of this land, how do you take them together to a creative adventure of discovering their own history 0 of the town, region, family. What language do you choose to tell this story? How do you orientate building cultural identity in this dimension on family and home culture, heritage of ancestors, rooting, and above all, how do you build a sense of familiarity in your "small homeland"? These questions are a kind of key to wandering, which allows the young generation to understand the whole complexity of the cultural heritage of the place, so that it becomes not only a collection of names and concepts separated from one another, but also settles in their hearts as broadly understood multiculturalism.

INFORMATION ABOUT THE ARTISTS: 

"The Sejny Chronicles" have been built on the stories of the oldest inhabitants of Sejny who wanted to tell their lives to young people. Every 5 years, the next generation takes over this extraordinary neighbourly story gathered back in 1999 and caring for it warmly, communicates and shares it with the whole world. The director of the performance - Bożena Szroeder supervising this work, makes sure each generation brings their new and old stories. The fifth generation will recall the former Sejny for the Retrospektywy Festival.

In this stunning theater piece, the performance techniques of Polish experimental theater are merged with the Borderland Foundation's dedication to building bridges across ethnic, religious, and national borders, and between older generations and the new. "The Sejny Chronicles" had its premiere in 1999, and was performed throughout Poland, including the Malta International Theatre Festival in Poznan in 2002, as well as in Bosnia, Lithuania, Germany and Denmark and USA. The performance evolved from a 1998 exhibition, "Our Good Old Sejny" - postcards and photographs from the years 1910-60 from the Borderland Center collection, augmented by snapshots brought by the townspeople’s children. This prompted a competition on Sejny’s history which yielded 100 art and literary works by children, of whom some were selected to continue what became an ever-evolving project over the years. 

With guidance from Ms. Szroeder the children gathered oral stories from their parents and grandparents, compiled them in their own individual mini-chronicles, drew family trees, and together drew a half-true, half-mythical plan of the town, matching the stories and legends they had heard to specific sites. Meanwhile they learned each other’s songs - Lithuanian wedding songs, Old Slavonic chants, Polish folk songs, as well as Jewish nigunim and Roma songs. A new stage in the project was to re-create in baked clay the pre-war multi-cultural Sejny, with town hall, synagogue, and Catholic and Evangelical churches – an ideal “set” for a theatrical performance.  As a further step in this on-going educational project, the production has been documented by the children in their book "Sejny Chronicles", edited by Bozena Szroeder.

Bożena Szroeder - following pedagogical studies, has collaborated on cultural projects with Krzysztof Czyzewski and Malgorzata Czyzewski since 1987. With them, she co-founded the Borderland Foundation in Sejny in 1990, where she runs the Documentation Center of Borderland Cultures and is director of the children’s theater studio. She created an innovative program of intercultural education in the Borderland Center, now a model introduced in many schools in Poland. She is also co-author of a program on memory and local identity for youth - The Glass Bead Game - being realized with many centers in Poland and Europe. Bozena Szroeder is a specialist in the history and culture of the Roma. 
 

FRAGMENTS OF REVIEWS:

"Celebrating multiculturalism with affectionate curiosity, The Sejny Chroniclesis a delightful and persuasive piece of theatre."
(Ron Cohen, Backstage)

"The hourlong show is a modest, gentle expression of cross-cultural appreciation, conveyed by a cast impossible to resist."
(Andy Webster, New York Times)

LINKS:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8AA3PNerUA