Joanna Bednarczyk: QUANTA

◊ 2024 Golden Stage Cross Award for Best Director – Łukasz Twarkowski ◊ 2024 Golden Stage Cross Award for Best Scenographer – Fabien Lédé ◊ 2024 Golden Stage Cross Award for Best Lighting Designer – Eugenijus Sabaliauskas

Translated from Polish by Vyturys JARUTIS

“Some places are like people: some shine and some don’t” – to quote a classic. The Les Moires hotel is the only shining point for many kilometres around. Far from popular tourist routes, it exists as if time had no hold on it: it does not grow old or young; it simply is. They say that time flows faster high in the mountains, although people cannot notice such differences. While Les Moires itself does not experience time, the fates of its inhabitants accelerate compared with what happens closer to the ground. The fact that this acceleration can be observed contradicts every law of classical physics. Minutes and seconds seem more densely packed in time, so that there are more of them in a day and a night than an ordinary clock would measure.

In this suspiciously accelerating time, a certain property of the physical world also accelerates—a property that might be called the quanta of events. What does “quantum” mean? In Latin, quantum means “how much.” In physics, a quantum describes the smallest amount that a physical quantity can possess or change by in a single event. Put simply, a quantum is an indivisible portion. You cannot cut a cake endlessly. There is a smallest possible piece you can offer a guest.

Life is made up of quanta of events. Events happen one after another, lining up to form a story. A multitude of phenomena, feelings and connections averages out into a narrative divided into past, present and an unknown future. We call this life, biography, fate. Every story is governed by time; time is what makes stories comprehensible. First comes a cause, then an effect, and an action brings about a reaction. But when time begins to accelerate, it ceases to be time and becomes something whose nature we can no longer understand. A multitude of quantum events stops averaging out into a reality that can be understood and grasped.

This is exactly what happens one summer evening in 1938 at the barely making ends meet Les Moires hotel in the Swiss mountains. The properties of physical space and time become disrupted. The hotel guests are affected too. Something begins to change in their memories, attitudes, emotions and desires. No one understands what is happening. Among the guests is the famous German physicist Werner Heisenberg, author of the uncertainty principle. Could the reality of large objects, such as a desk, a hotel and mountains, really be beginning to behave like the reality of elementary particles? According to Heisenberg, particles can only be spoken of approximately, by describing their states rather than the particles themselves. Only by changing their way of thinking—from what an object is to what state it is in—can the hotel guests understand what is happening to them and around them. They came to Les Moires to look at the world from the perspective of the high mountains. To seek deeper meaning in the broad view…