We do what we can

«Monika Żmijewska: The Doomsday Company has just returned with an award from the Warsaw festival. Another one this year. The audiences adore you.

Marcin Bartnikowski* [in the photograph]: We can't complain. The award which we received at the Warsaw festival entitled "A puppet is also a human being" for the "Biting" show was in fact the Audience Award. What's interesting, the audience at this festival clearly really liked the Białystok companies - we received the award jointly with the Białystok Puppet Theatre for their production "The pole". Last year the audience also awarded the company a prize and, indirectly also the BPT - for "Baldanders" [the independent actors prepared the show making use of the hospitality of the Puppet Theatre - editor]. Then it was a double award because it was from the public and from the jury. We'll see what happens next year because we will certainly be at the festival. The Audience Award is after all an invitation on spec for the next edition of the festival.

The last few months have been spent on your artistic journeys: shows in Rome, the whole of Poland, in Leipzig in Germany, Edinburgh, then Mexico. The organisers of festivals are snapping you up. A month ago you even organised your own festival in Białystok - "Białysztuk". And a few days ago you returned from Stuttgart. Are you keeping up all right?

Such is the fate of artists. In FITZ! in Stuttgart we showed our latest show, "The seagull". FITZ! is just such a puppet theatre in a modern form which we would like to be in the future.

Which means?

FITZ! is a municipal institution but an untypical one. First of all, with limited bureaucracy, without a permanent company, and inviting a lot of other theatres to cooperate with them.

Something akin to an impresario theatre, like the Mały ["Small"] Theatre in Warsaw?

There are certain similarities but I am talking about something else. FITZ! in addition is also the co-producer of the new shows of the invited theatres, which it brings into its own repertoire and, apart from that, also organises premieres for them in various places in Europe. The Company has also made use of this possibility. Thanks to contacts made back in the theatrical school, for example with Michael Vogel, the founder of Figurentheater Wilde&Vogel, we were able to show several of our shows in Germany, join in a European project and obtain money for further performances. For "The seagull" in particular. It has premiered in various places: in Białystok, Warsaw, Vienna, Leipzig, now in Stuttgart and soon in Berlin. In the West, such a system of theatrical activity - being a co-producer, organising premieres in several places, obtaining money together - has been functioning for a long time and it works. But in Poland it's only just beginning to crawl.

Would you like to introduce this system in Białystok when you get your own permanent place? The talks with the city hall about your new headquarters have been dragging on for months but I understand that you're not giving up on Białystok?

No. We would still like to have a permanent base in this very city on council grounds. Talks are still going on and there is no decisive progress but we hope that this will change soon. From what I know, the city authorities have not withdrawn from the idea of making available for our activities the factory that used to be a squat. Recently we had a very intensive period of creative activity and there was no time to watch over the matter.

You travel from place to place, you don't have your own place on this earth - how do you manage with rehearsals and the storage of scenery?

This is in fact really difficult. New shows are being added, the scenery is growing, we keep it in our private cellars. We do what we can. With rehearsals it varies - most of the company is in Białystok but we have rehearsals in Białystok and in Warsaw. Telephone calls, we arrange a meeting and the rest arrive. We rehearse in private flats but the group of people wanting to help us is growing so sometimes we manage to find a place like, for instance, an aerobics room in one of the schools in Warsaw. But it would be good in the end to have a rest from all this and to gather it all together in one place.

*co-founder of the Doomsday Company, chairman of the SPA, which co-organises the activities of the Company»