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KOCUDZA -THEATRUM VITAE ET MORTIS - THEATRE OF LIFE AND DEATH
Popular song accompanies and comments life focusing on its crucial points: birth, death, mourning; expresses most profound feelings: love, pain, orphanhood; admonish and shows the way. All this in a straightforward and direct manner; yet symbolic sometimes: using figures, parables, examples. These are mostly epic songs, telling stories which are drawn in a space of myth - it is not that they once happened, they keep happening.
Here ultimate existential questions, good and evil introduce their actors, scenery, narration and dramatic plots. This is a theatre of life and death.
Kocudza is a village near Biłgoraj, in the region of Lublin. Not only a particular dialect has been preserved there - but also a rich song-culture, unfortunately not so much cultivated among the young generation. Beata Oleszek has been singing these songs "since ever"; she learned them from her mother and the "Panie" - Ladies, being old inhabitants of the village, remembering the beginning of the 20th century.
The program me was devised by Maciej Kaziński, who usually accompanies Beata on the suka (reconstructed instrument, indigenous to that region), hurdy-gurdy and harmonium. Today she performs with Jacek Hałas -a wandering bard.
