#12 Łukasz Twarkowski: But when we think about our emotions, they are more like Schrödinger’s cat. We contain contradictions. Life itself is one enormous contradiction that we live through. (EN)

MK: The immersive production Quanta, which explores alternate realities and quantum physics, dominated this year of DSB. What was your primary inspiration and how did the idea come to life?

ŁT: It’s funny because the inspiration was a book. In the beginning, we were considering something that doesn’t happen to me often — staging a book. Somehow, I believe that quantum physics had already been “in the air” for a long time. Even when we started working on this production, imagining what kind of scenes could visually represent quantum physics, we realized that many of our previous performances already included what we might call “quantum scenes.” So, it was hard to find new ways to build it up because we had already been doing it — without knowing how representative it was of the quantum physics world or its imagery. The book that inspired me so much at the beginning was When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021. It’s a very strange novel composed of several short stories — one about Heisenberg, another about Schrödinger, and others about mathematicians, including a French mathematician from the 1980s. They all try to dig into this strange zone where our understanding ends. Labatut loves paradoxes and explores concepts that are difficult to express, because they push beyond where the brain or conventional understanding can go. And yet — there is still something. There is still something to discover beyond our current grasp of the world. We even tried to get the rights to the book, but luckily we didn’t get them — Benjamin Labatut had already sold the rights to Hollywood, and they couldn’t be given to any theater until the movie is released. Given our hybrid, cinematic style of theater, I knew that even after the movie’s release, we wouldn’t be able to use it meaningfully. So I thought: we didn’t want to stage the whole book anyway, we only wanted to use it freely as inspiration. I said, „Let’s do it on our own — from scratch.“

MK: And what have you conjured up from scratch?

ŁT: Then I came up with the idea of a trilogy. Quanta is the first part. We’re already rehearsing Oracle, the second part, which is part of what we’re calling the Science Trilogy. I wanted the structure of the trilogy to reflect the times we’re living in. That’s why Quanta is set in 1938 — just before World War II. It mirrors the feeling many of us share today, this sense that something great and horrible is coming, and the fear we live with every day. Originally, I really wanted to work on this duo — the double portrait of Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger. But during production, our costume designer Fenja Gassen confronted me and said we couldn’t create a performance about Schrödinger while staying silent about his pedophilia cases. I went back to all the books and biographies I’d read, and realized I had been blind. I didn’t want to consider it. I was avoiding the topic. Once you include a case like that, such a heavy taboo, it takes up a lot of space in the narrative. We decided to exclude Schrödinger from the performance. At first, we put him in a room, saying he was there — dead or alive, nobody knew. Eventually, he vanished completely. Meanwhile, we discovered Ettore Majorana, a physicist I didn’t know before. It was one of the biggest revelations — he fit so well. We had been searching for a real person who had disappeared in 1938, and Majorana’s story was perfect. He really did disappear that year. It’s a crazy story. He was one of the leading quantum physicists. He met Heisenberg in 1931, then shut himself in a room, burned all his notes. Most likely, he knew what was coming — the atomic bomb, nuclear weapons — and wanted no part in it. He is considered a symbol of fear or rejection of what science had uncovered. There are several theories and legends about his fate. He sent two suicide notes, then disappeared on a ship from Naples to Palermo. He asked his family not to mourn for more than three days. But then, a few days later, he sent another letter saying he was alive. After that — he vanished.

Giorgio Agamben wrote a whole book about this called What Is Real, focusing on Majorana’s case. Agamben tries to prove that it was a kind of enormous performance — a gesture that brought quantum physics principles onto the macro scale. Majorana became a symbol of something that exists and doesn’t exist at the same time. The question he posed was, “What is real?”

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Ivo Dvořák