“all my dead sweethearts” is a series of lamentative performance pieces on complaints, wails, gripes, affective demands and longing. It is a passionate practice of the politics of the voice in the full spectrum of its acoustic and corporeal possibilities. The scores of the individual performances were created based on interviews conducted with people living in Poznań and Emilia-Romagna (Italy) in 2024. Balancing between the real and the imagined, the documentary and the melodramatic, “all my dead sweethearts” is a record of the obsessive need to mourn and be mourned, as well as the passionate repetition of a heard complaint and shared longing.
Lament is the voice of the weak, an utterance of complaint, regret, expectation and longing, it balances between the individual and the social. Its strength is in initiating unusual forms of solidarity and peculiar communities. The language of mourning may seem pointless, or fetishizing, what is lost. It can also be destructive, and the emotional involvement of the initiator of the lament (people initiating the lament) is questionable in terms of its content. However, in history we can find female laments that pose a threat to the social order, are effective and subversive, including the Greek goos, the 16th-century female art of lamentation in Ireland, the lament of Orpheus, the death of Dorothy from Nowy Targ, the death of Mahsa Amini and the resulting mass protests in Iran.
What can contemporary lament be today? Why do we need to resuscitate the art of lamentation especially today? Why should we lament always and everywhere?
Concept, direction, performance: Klaudia Hartung-Wójciak
Research cooperation, performance: Małgorzata Biela
Costume, performance: Hanka Podraza
Lighting direction, performance: Jędrzej Jęcikowski
Music: Piotr Peszat, Hildegarda z Bingen
White goat, black goat, performance: Olga Lauba
Chorus: Brygida Sawicka-Stępińska, Kamila Tracewska-Mikołajczak, Karolina Piesik
Shake and trembling: Weronika Podkowska
Performance: Puma
Research-artistic and field cooperation: Jakub Hartung-Wójciak
Production-artistic cooperation, performance: Michał Surówka
Language consultation: Alicja Kozłowska
Production-artistic and curatorial cooperation: Jagna Domżalska
Production: ZAMEK Culture Center in Poznań
The performance uses fragments of the Wedding March from the Kozioł Region and a Hutsul song (Умерська), recomposed for the white goat.
The project was created as part of the Artistic Residency of the ZAMEK Culture Center in Poznań. Research work in Emilia-Romania was conducted as part of the artistic residency of the Santarcangelo Festival and the Creative Europe mobility program, financed by the Goethe-Institut. The work was created thanks to the financial support of the European Union. The project is co-financed by the Scholarship of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage “Young Poland” of Klaudia Hartung-Wójciak.
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