The Wedding that was not Makers

Among them there is The Wedding by Stanislaw Wyspiański, a piece from 1901, describing the marriage between a Galician peasant and a representative of the Krakow bohemia. The peasantry and the intelligentsia – two social groups unable to unite – meet at the wedding and confront their prejudices and superstitions. This is one of the most important and most frequently played pieces of the Polish repertoire, drastically describing Polish inabilities and complexes. The paradox is that the author, while describing the wedding reception, did not even once mention how the wedding table looked like and what was served during the reception. Yet, rustic weddings are, in the culinary terms, up to this day a great theatrum culinae, the show of social aspirations, the hope for a better life. Professor Anna Królikiewicz from the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk and Maciej Nowak – theatrologist, food critic – takes up the challenge of reconstructing this gastronomic universe.

Based on the local Galician products, after studying the sources of the era, Królikiewicz and Nowak will present the sensual, flavoured vision of a Polish wedding a hundred years ago, which the viewer will join when it is already in full swing.

The band is still playing the tunes, but the party is slowly over. Remainders of the feast are still on the tables, and the wedding guests are still tipsy, even intoxicated. The smell of alcohol fills the whole room. – Were Chopin still alive, I think, he would drink – says the hero of Wyspiański’s play called Nose, whose character was inspired by Stanisław Przybyszewski, a modernist Polish writer known throughout Europe. National discussion is unfolding in the atmosphere of decadence, drunken hallucinations, escape from political realism.