The One Who Knows: On the Archetype of an Old Woman on the Basis of the Paratheatrical Activities of Ewa Benesz

Abstract

This paper portrays Ewa Benesz, a great individuality moving within a borderland between theatre and para-theatre, literature and the art of telling stories. In her activities, she refers not only to the melody and rhythms originating from various cultures but also to traditional, everyday practices guaranteeing the generations durability, such as baking bread, producing wine or pressing olive.

In this ethnography I do not only describe my experience of being a participant of her original para-theatre workshops – In the act of creating – at her artistic residence turned into a hermitage in Sardinia, but I also interpret her artistic biography as a figuration of the One Who Knows, La Que Sabe according to the South American mythology, the archetypical woman “as old as time” who preserves the female tradition like a chronicler of the female practices using a special kind of language – the language of theatre, and possessing a special kind of imagination – the “anthropologic imagination”; and finally, having an experience which is the experience of a laborious and endurable creation of the theatrical trend of counterculture in Poland.