HALKA/HAITI 18°48’5”N 72°23’01”W

For this project, artists Joanna Malinowska and C.T. Jasper were inspired and provoked by Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, deciding to revisit his mad scheme of bringing opera to the tropics. Fascinated by Fitzcarraldo’s faith in the universal power of opera, but not uncritical of the colonizing underpinnings of his actions, they set out to reveal and undercut its romanticism by confronting a set of particular geographical, historical, and sociopolitical realities. To this end, they elected to stage a very specific opera in a very specific place.

The destination for their quest was Cazale, a village in the mountains of Haiti inhabited by the descendants of Polish soldiers who fought for the Haitian Revolution. Originally sent to Haiti by Napoleon in 1802 and 1803 to end the slaves’ rebellion, the Poles, who had joined Napoleon to fight for the independence of their own country, instead decided to unite with the local insurgents. As a result, these soldiers were granted honorary legal status in the newly established republic, and still today, people from Cazale identify with their historical motherland and bear creolized last names of their Polish ancestors. 

Cazale was chosen as a strangely appropriate setting for Stanisław Moniuszko’s Halka, a piece considered a “national opera” ever since its Warsaw premiere in 1858. Halka has been praised for its depiction of Polish folk culture at a time when the country was still struggling to regain independence. Far from a simple rural romance, the tragic love story of the eponymous highlander peasant girl seduced and rejected by her mighty landlord is haunted by echoes of the bloody peasant revolt of 1846, underscoring the tense class relations between Polish landlords and their feudal subjects. These echoes become even more prominent in the context of the Haitian Revolution. 

Through the gesture of exporting a Polish national opera to the Haitian tropics, which resembles the routine efforts of governments promoting their countries abroad, the project’s authors meant to ask whether such an export could signify something other than cultural colonization or state promotion. Setting the opera’s coordinates to 18°48’05”N 72°23’01”W reorients the meaning of its national significance. Could the opera’s themes resonate with Poland and Haiti’s shared histories to connect, for a moment, two geographically and culturally distant communities?

Though not a typical social-practice project, Halka/Haiti 18°48’05”N 72°23’01”W does aim to highlight this little-known aspect of Polish-Haitian history in order to attract international visibility to the community of Cazale. After two research trips, the final ten-day visit to Cazale in January and February of 2015 included the choreographer, theater director, and director of photography, who together with the artists and curator engaged with the local community in preparation for the performance. Two young men from the village worked as translators and coordinators of the daily dance workshops, and the Holy Trinity Philharmonic Orchestra from Port-au-Prince, a crucial partner in the Polish-Haitian collaboration, was invited to perform the score. The final shape of the opera performance was the result of a multi-layered collaborative process, an intentional product of the original form of Halka and the possibility of its staging under the local circumstances. Ultimately, the opera was performed by five soloists and the conductor of the Poznan Opera House, twenty-one musicians from Port-au-Prince, and eighteen dancers from Cazale.

On February 7, 2015, a one-time-only performance of Halka was staged for a rapt local audience of Haitian “Le Poloné,” their neighbors and friends, on a winding dirt road nestled between several houses, complete with passing motorbikes and animals. The event was filmed in one take and first shown at the International Art Exhibition in Venice, the world’s preeminent site for exhibiting art in a nation-centered framework.

Presented as a multi-channel, cinematic installation recalling the format of painted panoramas, Halka/Haiti probes the present-day power of traditional artistic genres to embody, represent, and construct national identities in the 21st century. 

Halka/Haiti 18°48′05′′N 72°23′01′′W was produced by Zachęta – The National Gallery of Art in Warsaw for the Polish Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale in Italy.