WALLY: God! Well, tell me about it.
ANDRE: You see, there was this song. I have a tape of it. I can play it for you one day. And it's just unbelievably beautiful. You see, one of the women in our group knew a few fragments of this song of Saint Francis, and it's a song in which you thank God for your eyes and you thank God for your heart and you thank God for your friends and you thank God for your life. And it repeats itself over and over again, and this became our theme song. I really must play this thing for you one day because you just can't believe that a group of people who don't how to sing could create something so beautiful. So I decided that when the people arrive for the beehive that our group would already be there singing this very beautiful song, and that we would simply sing it over and over again. One of the people decided to bring her very large teddy bear, you know, I think she was a little afraid of this event, and somebody wanted to bring a sheet and somebody else wanted to bring a large bowl of water in case people got hot or thirsty, and somebody suggested that we have candles, that there be no artificial light, but candle light. And I remember watching people preparing for this evening. Of course there was no make-up and no costumes, but it was exactly the way that people prepare for a performance. You know, people were sort of taking off their jewelry and their watches and stowing it away, and making sure it's all secure. And then slowly people arrived, the way they would arrive at the theater, in ones and twos and tens and fifteens, and what-have-you, and we were just sitting there and we were singing this very beautiful song, and people started to sit with us and started to learn the song. Now, there is of course, as in any performance or improvisation, instants for one thing are going to get boring. So, at a certain point, it may have only taken an hour to get there, an hour and a half, I suddenly grabbed this teddy bear and threw it in the air! At which a hundred and forty or thirty people suddenly exploded! You know, it was like a Jackson Pollock painting, you know, human beings exploded out of this tight little circle that was singing this song, and before I knew it there were two circles dancing, you know. One dancing clockwise, the other dancing counterclockwise, with this rhythm mostly from the waist down, in other words like an American Indian dance, with this thumping, persistent rhythm. [Laughter in the background and some faint talking.]
Now, you could easily see, 'cause we're talking about group trance, where the line between something like this and something like Hitler's Nuremberg rallies is in a way a very thin line. [Same background laugh.] Anyway. After about an hour of this wild, hypnotic dancing, Grotowski and I found ourselves sitting opposite each other in the middle of this whole thing, and we threw the teddy bear back and forth. You know, on one level you could say this was childish. And I gave the teddy bear suck suddenly at my breast, and then I threw the teddy bear to him, and he gave it suck at his breast, and then the teddy bear was thrown up into the air again, at which there was another explosion of form into...something [salade de mots] something like a kaleidoscope, like a human kaleidoscope, the evening was made up of shiftings of the kaleidoscope. Now, the only other thing that I remember--other than that I was constantly trying to guide this thing, which was always involved with either movement, rhythm, repetition or song, or chanting, 'cause two people in my group had brought musical instruments, a flute and a drum, which of course are sacred instruments--was that sometimes the room would break up into six or seven different things going on at once, you know, six or seven different improvisations, all of which seemed in some way related to each other. It was like a magnificent cobweb. And at one point, I noticed that Grotowski was at the center of one group huddled around a bunch of candles that they had gathered together, and like a little child fascinated by fire, I saw that he had his hand right in the flame and was holding it there. And as I approached his group, I wondered if I could do it. I put my left hand in the flame, and I found I could hold it there for as long as I liked, and there was no burn, and no pain. But when I tried to put my right hand in the flame, I couldn't hold it there for a second. So Grotowski said: "If it burns, try to change some little thing in yourself." And I tried to do that. Didn't work.
Then, I remember a very, very beautiful procession with the sheet, and there was somebody being carried below the sheet, you know, the sheet was like some great biblical canopy, and the entire group was weaving around the room and chanting. And then, at one point, people were dancing, and I was dancing with a girl and suddenly our hands began vibrating near each other, like this, vibrating! vibrating!, and we went down to our knees and suddenly I was sobbing in her arms and she was sort of cradling me in her arms, and then she started to cry, too, and then we just hugged each other for a moment and then we joined the dance again. And then at a certain point, hours later, we returned to the singing of the song of Saint Francis, and that was the end of the beehive. And then again, when it was over, it was just like the theater, after a performance, you know: people sort of put on their earrings and their wristwatches and we went off to the railroad station to drink a lot of beer and have a good dinner! Oh, and there was one girl who wasn't in our group, but who just wouldn't leave, so we took her along with us!
WALLY: [Amazed:] Hunh! [The waiter brings the first course. We hear a woman talking at another table.] God! Well, tell me some of the other things you did with your group.
ANDRE: Well. Oh, I remember once, when we were in the city, we tried doing an improvisation, you know, the kind that I used to do in New York: everybody's supposed to be on an airplane, and they've all learned from the pilot that there's something wrong with the motor. But what was unusual about this improvisation was that two people who participated in it fell in love! You know, they've in fact married! And when we were--yeah!--out of fear of being on this plane, they fell in love, thinking they were going to die at any moment! And when we went to the forest, these two disappeared, because they understood the experiment so well that they realized that to go off together in the forest was much more important than any kind of experiment the group could do as a whole. [They laugh.] So, about halfway through the week, we stumbled into a clearing in the forest, and the two of them were fast asleep in each other's arms. It was around dawn. And we put flowers on them, to let them know we'd been there, and then we crept away. And then on the last day of our stay in the forest these two showed up and the shook me by my hands and they thanked me very much for the wonderful work they'd been able to do, you see! [They laugh.] So. They understood what it was about. I mean, that of course poses the question of what was it about. But it has something to do with living.
And then on the final day of our stay in the forest, the whole group did something so wonderful for me, Wally. They arranged a christening, a baptism!, for me. And they filled the castle with flowers, and it was just a miracle of light, because they had literally set up hundreds of candles and torches; I mean, no church could have looked more beautiful. There was a simple ceremony, and one of them played to rôle of my godmother and another played the rôle of my godfather, and I was given a new name: they called me Yendrush. And some of the people took it completely seriously, and some of them found it funny, but I really felt that I had a new name. And then we had an enormous feast with blueberries picked from the field and chocolate someone had gone a great distance to buy, and raspberry soup, rabbit stew, and we sang Polish songs and Greek songs, and everybody danced for the rest of the night!