TO THE BOTTOM

Young actors performing in To the Bottom are trying to return to the origins of singing which remained hidden amidst the chaos of modern times and their shallow, empty and often overly aggressive sounds. They struggle to answer a question – do we really don’t need singing anymore? The spectacle includes lyrics and music from the original folk culture collections by Oskar Kolberg and father Władysław Skierowski. The play as a whole was arranged by its themes– the sowing and the harvest, the wedding and the war, the birth and the death, poverty and a victim. However, the idea is not no tell stories with your singing, but to reach the traces left at the bottom of existence.

The Ludwik Solski State Drama School in Cracow was founded in 1946 by Juliusz Osterwa. The school provides a stationary uniform master of arts course in acting which lasts 9 semesters and another one in directing which is one semester longer. The schools is divided into five departments: Department of Acting and Department of Directing in Cracow, Department of Acting and Department of Puppetry in the Wroclaw affiliate and Department of Dance Theatre in Bytom. The affiliate in Wroclaw offers a course run by Post-Graduate Theatre Directing Study Centre for Children and Adolescents. The school has been managed by the most prominent people related to theatre: Juliusz Osterwa, Tadeusz Burnatowicz, Władysław Woźnik, Eugeniusz Fulde, Bronisław Dąbrowski, Jerzy Krasowski, Danuta Michałowska, Jerzy Trela, Jerzy Stuhr. On one hand, the history of the school was written by fabulous teachers (who worked there for a longer or shorter period) – actors, directors and theoreticians, on the other – the graduates who had considerable influence on the shape of Polish theatre. Many of them cooperate with the school as teachers or diploma spectacle directors. A very close cooperation with theatres in Cracow makes the school even more characteristic.