Genesis

“And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” (Gen. 2.2-23) 

“We come from two different cities: Kyiv (Rimma) and Odessa (Anastasiia). We first met in Poland, in Poznań. Here, we met Ewa, with whom we decided to write a new Genesis. Our own symbolic parable of the emergence of women’s power. Beautiful and emotional, though without any ribs, paradise or Adam. We are creating it on stage at a particular historical and  biographical moment. Because of the war triggered by Russian aggression in our country, Ukraine appears to us, on the one hand, as an unreal, paradisical even, space of something that might never come back. On the other, it is a collection of concrete visual symbols and images that we want to protect. The new Genesis might include the seascape of Odessa, or a fragment of a cobbled street in Kyiv, or maybe a folk tune remembered from somewhere. We want to create a story about women that gives them hope. A story about the new beginning we are experiencing and about the power of creation.”

Rimma Tyshkevych, Anastasiia Ivasova, Ewa Kaczmarek

The Genesis project was produced by the Jerzy Grotowski Institute as part pf the programme Szczeliny. Kobiety w sztukach performatywnych 2023, curated by Monika Wachowicz. The performance premiered on 2 April 2023 in Wrocław.