LAST FUGUE

“The Last Fugue” is a performance that implements my innovative concept of “Mechanical Theater,” which dates back to 1994. Growing over time on stage, the main component of its expression is an installation consisting of nine specially constructed objects and machines subject to transformation, revealing peculiar “acting of the object ”*. All of them were created by inspiration and with reference to Francisco Goya’s painting “May 3, 1808. Execution of the Madrid insurgents,” carrying a profound humanitarian message that shows the ritual of execution as ‘murder by order of the law, and all this in the name of justice conceived in a particularistic way, being a blatant violation of its idea ’*. A very important consequence of this idea is the reduction of actor’s role on stage, making the performance – thus conceived – capable of coping with the stage’s main charisma: transience. It becomes a weapon that frees Theater from death, placing it in the dimension: now – whenever – always!”*. The uniqueness of the project is completed by the fact that this is the world’s first performance generated entirely in 3D technology.

* From the texts of Dariusz Gorczyca*„Teatr mechaniczny” [“Mechanical Theater”], 2024.

The premiere took place on November 19, 2024 in the Małopolska Garden of Arts (Małopolski Ogród Sztuki) in Cracow.

The performance is accompanied by a catalog: Dariusz Gorczyca “The Last Fugue” – a mechanical performance, in tribute to Goya and Bach, Austeria Publishing House, 2024, (96 pages with theoretical texts, description of events, drawings and photos of machines and from the performance).

Duration 45 min.

Dariusz Gorczyca – author, director, lighting, cinematography, video editing, music arrangement.
Michał Sikora – 3D modeling, texturing, simulations, animation, rendering, post-production.
Piotr Michał Madej – sound engineering.
Daniel and Krzysztof Płonka – preliminary 3D modeling.

Music: Johann Sebastian Bach – “Fugue a 3 Soggetti” (BWV 1080/19), Krzysztof Penderecki – “Passacaglia” from Symphony No. 3.

Series 1.

From the darkness come the sounds of Johann Sebastian Bach’s unfinished “Fugue a 3 Soggetti” (BWV 1080/19). Its justification appears with the light of a spotlight emerging in front of the audience – an array of pipes assembled into an organ. After a further minute, the fugue gives way to Passacaglia III from Krzysztof Penderecki’s Symphony No. 3. Its rhythm initiates the slow movement of the organ to its right along an arc, revealing the first object of the performance. Positioned sideways, it reveals a second frame (opposite the one with the organ), with a lowered black blind. The two elements are connected by a long metal structure, its form resembling that of a truss bridge, supported in the middle on a wooden base with a shaft driven by a slatted belt coming out of a control room located deep inside. It is a small metal-clad building, closed at the front by a door with slotted openings. The composition, building up its drama, emphasizes the moment when the organ pipes slowly descend to a horizontal position and become a row of rifles with their wooden butts now visible. In the opposite frame, a rising roller blind reveals a white shirt hanging by its sleeves. And here we have a scene similar to the one in Francisco Goya’s painting “May 3, 1808. The execution of the Madrid insurgents”.. On the right, the pointed, shiny barrels of the firing squad. On the left side, a white shirt of the executed man is spread in a gesture of screaming – the main focus of Goya’s painting. A salvo resounds, after which the shirt falls, and the frame moves with it along an arc, coming to a halt directly in front of the audience. During this phase, we can observe a slow, automatic lifting of the shirt, now gushing with blood, due to the gutter of red liquid into which it falls after the gunshot. This is how the “VEHICLE OF PERPETUAL EXECUTION” is fully disclosed, now returning to its initial position of the organ and its corresponding sound of the fugue. With this, a further fragment of it is played in each new cycle. Meanwhile, further back on the stage, at the opposite end of the facility behind a tilted door of the control room, the “bloodstained shirt” is being exchanged for a clean one. This concludes the operating cycle of the “Vehicle…”, but it also reveals the main module of our performance. It is during its subsequent repetitions that a new machine appears on stage in the final phase of the previous cycle to present its operation. The duration of the full performance of “Vehicle…” is also determined by the length of the recurring musical motif. A specially created “Mechanical Music Score” precisely determines exact moments of introducing and presenting each object, with reference to consecutive stages of its operation.

Series 2.

During the repeat of the fugue fragment in series I, “SALVO WARNING DEVICE – CROSS” slowly approaches from the back of the stage.. It is a simple object, consisting of a cross mounted on a wooden tripod and a megaphone at the top. Its movable horizontal arm conceals an automatically appearing hand at its right end. When lowering the pipes to the rifle position, the arm with the raised hand moves upward, and upon the command “salvo,” it falls idly, returning to the form of a cross. The aforementioned order, along with the commander’s other commands, comes from a loudspeaker each time in a different language, starting with French – this is as a reference to the events of May 3, 1808 in Madrid.

Series 3.

After lifting the “bleeding shirt”, and while the “Vehicle…” rotates to the position of the organ position in Series 2, “TRANSPORTER OF VICTIMS” slowly rolls out in the right part of the stage. As the organ sounds, a four-wheeled carriage appears on rails, coming from behind a partially tilted screen. On its wide top, clad with a metal sheet, lies a naked, inert body with its head covered with a sack. Carried “spontaneously” to the front of the stage, it is automatically unloaded onto the proscenium. From now on, in this phase of the action, the pile of victims will continue to grow by one more body. Importantly, each time a now empty cart returns, a completely different film projection appears on the surface of the screen located at the back. All of them (except the one in series 9) pertain to Goya’s painting “May 3, 1808…”. The first is its full presentation, while the next ones show the passage of the camera from the ready-to-shoot platoon to the face of the next of the group of convicts.

Series 4.

It is accompanied by presenting the object “TARGET – DIAGRAM OF KILLING” – appearing at the end of series 3 (during the passage of the “bloody shirt” along an arc to the right). Its main element is a large shooting target set on one of two double wooden shafts, connected by transmission belts. The top of the target, with inscribed numbering, was split along the borders of the circles of each field. The rotation of the driving shaft, transferred by the belts to its double counterpart underneath the target, will make – thanks to a special support – its every other slit field rotate in the opposite direction. The resulting momentary “astrolabe” will reconnect into a plane, revealing its reverse. It is entirely filled with the image of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, but inscribed only in the circle of the target’s edge. Further emphasized by the value, a silhouette appears on it with arms raised and legs joined, clearly in reference to the pose of the executed insurgent from Goya’s painting. The object appears on the stage with a target placed at an angle to the audience. Its disclosure comes at the moment when the roller is lifted up that has concealed the whiteness of the shirt. Transformation into the drawing of Leonardo’s figure occurs during the lifting of the “bleeding shirt”. Meanwhile, the return to the position at an angle to the viewer happens at the moment of moving the “Vehicle of Perpetual Execution” to the organ stage.

Series 5.

As the “Vehicle of Perpetual Execution” rotates, just after the exposure of the “blood-dripping” shirt in Series 4, another, most complex object majestically arrives on the right. It is a set of the same life-size silhouette – multiplied to five – of a mechanical man, seen in profile. Made of metal and joined in a side-by-side arrangement, these marionettes appear in a distinctly sorrowful pose. Each of them holds an impressive lighted blessed candle in front of him, becoming, in the context of the scene, a peculiar funeral procession of a kind. However, at the moment when the descending organ in “Vehicle…” becomes an array of rifles, the procession automatically performs a deep stride, combined with rotation of the blessed candles to the position of the aimed rifles that they now become). At the command “fire”, pumped gas causes streams of fire to come out of the “”gun barrels of the blessed candles”, illuminating the scene. This is how “FUNERAL PROCESSION – FIRING SQUAD” is fully revealed. The movement of the frame moving to the right with a dripping shirt, ending the cycle, initiates the platoon’s return to the contemplative pose of the procession.

Series 6.

It reveals “ANATOMIC DEVICE,” which is made of a metal flat bar – a schematic outline of a human silhouette with outstretched arms. The whole figure is divided into geometrized segments of individual body members, with steel axes of rotation passing through their center. They are vertical for legs, torso and head, and horizontal for arms and hands. These axes are connected to the main axis of rotation by gears and chains. Turning it by a certain angle will cause all other axes to rotate by the same value, and the boards mounted on them will rotate, revealing their other side. But before this happens, the first side of all the boards is arranged in the already mentioned figure of the Vitruvian man by Leonardo. Except that here we face its version with the feet joined together and the arms spread out to the sides. The rotation of the boards transforms this figure into an anatomical diagram of the “machinery” of the subcutaneous muscles of the body – a spectral preparation of the mortality of the human stature. This takes place exactly when the salvo flares out, while the return to the front side takes place in the phase of raising the roller blind in the “Vehicle of Perpetual Execution”, revealing the whiteness of the shirt. It should be noted that the entry of the “Device…” onto the stage is not accompanied by any image, as the boards are in an intermediate phase, at an angle to the audience. It also takes this position each time in the middle of the final rotation of the “Vehicle…” to the organ phase.

Series 7.

In the same phase of the earlier series, the object “PHOTOPHASES OF DEATH – ADAM” enters the stage, taking its place left of the control room. It takes the form of a large metal frame on wheels. Inside it is a life-size photograph – which looks old and tattered – of a standing naked male figure. The picture board is divided into four equal segments, and these in turn into upper and lower sections, connected by a common metal axis (the object has four of them in total). In the “Death Photophase” machine, the elements from the upper part fall simultaneously to the lower position, revealing the remaining photos, hidden underneath, which form a new complete picture each time. A quick swap of them animates a move, showing the next six phases of a naked figure’s fall, from standing to lying down, plus an additional black board. In the hands of the figure in the first photograph is a plate with the inscription “Adam”. The signal for the unveiling of the image of the standing person is the moment when the mob stops even before the pipes turn into rifles. The sound of the salvo initiates a “shuffle” of images of successive phases of the fall, ending with an image of a lying body. This image remains until the end of the series (the organ ready for the fugue), when it disappears under a curtain of falling black boards.

Series 8.

Similar to Series 7 except that now a second object appears on the right: “PHOTOPHASES OF DEATH – EVE”. It also includes a life-size photograph of a standing nude figure, in this case a woman, holding a plate that reads “Eva.” This shows a clear allusion to the Old Testament motif of Adam and Eve, the first to be sentenced – punished here with mortal punishment – for their shared original transgression. The principle of operation and the moment when the object is presented remain exactly as in the first, “male” version.

Series 9. CODA

It is not accompanied by appearance of any new object. This is the final presentation of the entire machinery of execution, which is amassed on stage. Along with it: presentation of the composition, rhythm and sound of the objects displayed in succession, creating interactions. This is the full unveiling of my “MECHANICAL THEATER,” aided by the climactic piled-up drama of the resounding Passagali. The series ends with a fragment of the fugue breaking off abruptly as the last body slides off the tilted top of the cart. The ensuing silence is accompanied by a projection showing the last notes of the master’s unfinished score and a note handwritten by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel: “As the B-A-C-H motif appears in the countermelody, the composer is dead”. The last elements emerging from the gloom remain the organ pipes and the pile of bodies lying on the stage. After a long while, they too disappear into the darkness.

Part 10. EPILOGUE

The lingering silence is broken by the steadily increasing sound of a heartbeat, and a spotlight illuminating the darkness brings out the only living figure of the show – a naked figure of a woman standing on the proscenium, with her eyes blindfolded. Around her neck hangs a mysterious metal horizontal object, heavily foreshortened, which is supported by her arms. The figure, gradually lowering her head and raising her arms (in the gesture of the insurgent in Goya’s painting), slowly reveals – fastened with a belt around her neck – a large, shiny metal weighing cell. Her stillness is interrupted by sudden dropping of scales plates hidden in her hands, attached by chains to the rings on her fingers. Thus, the “LIVING TARGET” of the show’s epilogue turns out to be not a helpless anonymous naked woman, but the “Exposed Figure of Captive Justice.” A violent sound of cannonade interrupts the sound, cuts off the light. It’s over – the stage is flooded with darkness and silence.