Juliusz Tyszka

Juliusz Tyszka ORANGE ALTERNATIVE: STREET HAPPENINGS AS SOCIAL PERFORMANCE IN POLAND UNDER MARTRIAL LAW An essay published in New Theatre Quarterly No. 56 (November 1998) The Orange Alternative, a unique artistic and political phenomenon, was at its prime in the period between Spring 1987 and Autumn 1988. Its manifestations-happenings were the common creation of their initiators-arrangers, and also: the young people of Wrocław, incidental passers-by in the centre of the city and, the functionaries of the state militia who were always very fast and keen to join the action. Before a detailed description of the Orange Alternative’s history, it is necessary to present its specific historical and local background. The “stormy 1980s” in Poland were a period of deep political crisis. They began with the great political breakthrough of the Summer of 1980. It had started with strikes in Lublin, followed by a general strike in Baltic Seaports, and finished with an agreement between the authorities and strikers, led by Lech Wałęsa, in the Gdańsk shipyard on August 31. The workers were supported and helped by the advisors coming from dissident intellectual milieux (The Committee of Defence of Workers, The Flying University and others), and catholic circles. The Gdańsk agreement included permission for the foundation of independent trade unions. In the next few days the Solidarity union was founded. Within the first month of its existence it already had 10 million members and had become a mass dissident movement. The 16 months of the “Solidarity carnival” gave the Polish people an opportunity to act and speak openly, as well as to try hard to build a democratic society. Party officials, continuously pressed by their Soviet comrades, could no longer tolerate the rapid process of destruction of the post-stalinist social and cultural order (the economical order remained untouched). It was clear that the 10 million strong social and political movement had to be stopped before it accelerated revolutionary actions. Therefore, Martial Law was imposed on the Polish people on December 13, 1981. General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the party leader, as well as prime minister of the government and commander-chief of the army, announced it himself on TV. The imposition of Martial Law was in fact a coup d’état performed by the wing of the communist party controlled by Jaruzelski and, above all, by the Polish army who took control of all institutions and gave the order to arrest all important Solidarity activists, including its president, Lech Wałęsa. Martial Law was suspended on December 31, 1982 and called off on July 22, 1983 (The National Holiday of People’s Poland) but many regulations imposed on December 13, 1981 were in force until the fall of the communist regime in the Spring of 1989. All political, artistic, scientific, regional, social, cultural and student associations, and institutions, as well as trade unions were suspended, including Solidarity, of course. The movement was finally officially dissolved in October 1982, after its refusal, declared by a great many of Solidarity's leaders, to collaborate 1 with Martial Law rulers. The censors started to act fervently in an attempt to wipe out all the concessions of the “Solidarity carnival”. After a hard struggle, which cost a few dozen people their lives, the activity of the Polish dissident milieux diminished in 1984-85. The illegal, clandestine Solidarity appeared to lose “Jaruzelski’s war”. People were already tired of constant fighting. The party propaganda announced triumphantly the coming of “normalization”. In 1986-87 the political, economical and moral stagnation reached its peak. The communist powers seemed strong enough to exist for decades, surrounded by the hate of a passive nation (Soviet perestroika changed neither the attitude of the Polish people towards the communist authorities and the USSR nor the tough regulations of Martial Law which were still in effect). However, the attitude of the communists towards the people started to change. The isolation of the Polish authorities, deepened by the tough attitude of the West (the Polish government owed Western banks more than 30 billion dollars), became painfully obvious, even to themselves. The communists gradually began to realize that it was impossible to exercise their absolute power against a passive but openly hostile nation, and Western creditors, without the strong support of their Soviet allies, who were weakened by the defeat in Afghanistan and perestroika. The state militia and ominous riot militia forces (ZOMO) gradually became more mild and indulgent, as did the censors, courts and state administration. The field of the action was ready for the coming of the Orange Alternative. The movement, led by Waldemar Fydrych (nicknamed Major), appeared in the city of Wrocław. It was somehow obvious that only this city could give birth to such an original attitude and activity. Wrocław, formerly the German Breslau, was the greatest “melting pot” of nations and cultures in Poland. Its population in the 1950s consisted mostly of people who just after the II World War had been deplaced from former Polish territories of Western Ukraine, Belorussia and Lithuania to former German territories of Lower Silesia. In the 1970s Wrocław became a vibrant cultural centre, deeply touched and changed by the creation of the Polish Laboratory Theatre of Jerzy Grotowski, the State Pantomime Theatre of Henryk Tomaszewski, the State Polish Theatre of Jerzy Grzegorzewski, the State Contemporary Theatre of Kazimierz Braun, the creations of another famous theatre director Helmut Kajzar, the great International Festival of Open Theatre, which had started in 1967), the presence of the great poet and plawright, Tadeusz Różewicz, the activity of monthly “Odra” and the milieu of fine artists. In the 1980s Wrocław, together with Gdańsk, was the most powerful centre of resistance against communist power. In 1982 and 1983 tens of thousands of Wrocław inhabitants regularly, at least once a month, participated in mass demonstrations and heavy street fights with riot militia. The clandestine Solidarity with its legendary regional leaders, Władysław Frasyniuk and Józef Pinior, had great support there. The leader of Orange Alternative, Waldemar Fydrych - Major (1953) was a graduate of Wrocław University, departments of History and History of Art. He took his nickname in the 1970s when he was pretending to be mentally handicaped in order to avoid compulsory military service after his studies. During one of his sessions with a psychiatrist Fydrych promoted the doctor to the rank of colonel 2 and made himself a major. “Then, when I had gone to the psychotherapeutic camp - recalls Fydrych - and lead the military manoeuvres there, I became Major for good”1. The original creation by Major started in the period of the “Solidarity carnival”. In April 1981 he was one of the organizers of the Wrocław Peace March, the only one in the part of Europe dominated by the USSR. He was also an activist of The Movement for New Culture, the only student organization in Poland with no strictly political program. Its founders were intending to promote a new paradigm of culture rather than the idea of Solidarity’s revolution. The M.N.C. became the forum of artistic opposition for Wrocław students and young intelligentsia, referring to the anarchistic aspects of Western counterculture from the 1960s. The intention of its creators was to expand its influence to workers and clerks. In October 1981 M.N.C. organized demonstration in the very centre of Wrocław. The most important slogans from the banners were: “Down with symetry!” and “Long life to free imagination”. A street demonstration itself was something extremely unusual at that time, and the content of the slogans deepened the surrealistic effect. Therefore, as Fydrych later stated, “people were associating this peculiar demonstration rather with happenings and street art than with real social problems” (21). Major was the editor of the movement’s ephemeral periodical “Orange Alternative”. Why orange? Its editors gave several explanations: orange is a mixture of red and yellow, the colour of an orange (oranges, as well as all exotic fruits, were almost impossible to buy in Poland at the time) and the colour of the rising sun which in India and China is a symbol of wisdom. In “Orange Alternative” Fydrych and his colleagues from M.N.C. were publishing surrealistic long-short stories, as well as slogans, manifestoes, and texts by Krishnamutri, and André Breton’s famous letter to rectors of European universities. The most original and popular slogan of that time was: “Proletarians - be beautiful!”. In autumn 1981, during a long strike of Polish academies, one of thousands of strikes organized in the period of the “Solidarity carnival”, Major arranged his first street happening. Every night the militia would take away posters left on the university walls by striking students. One night the student unit led by Major left the building and sang the Polish Birthday and Nameday song “Live for a Hundred Years” for the men of the militia. The following night they sang “The Internationale” and a few hundred photographs were taken as documentation of the action. The militia withdrew leaving the walls untouched. “We named the building of the Faculty of Philosophy Fort No. 1 - recalls Fydrych - organizing the work of our Revolutionary Staff and editing our periodical there. In Orange Alternative we were writing mostly about art but in that time it was first and foremost a political art” (8). Step by step Major’s ideas started to focus on the concept of “socialist surrealism”. “Everything is moving within deep feelings of surrealist imagination - he wrote in the first issue of “O.A.” - Socialism is good for fragmentary people who acquire a certain perfection in the lack of totality. Nothing can define it except for the magic of routine in the office.

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