Kwit/Квіт (Marina Mashtaler, Johannes Niehaus): The Florist

Marina Mashtaler, Johannes Niehaus, Łukasz Pośpieszalski, Darek Bafeltowski, Piotr Budniak

PPA production: Renata Majewska

A year ago, in the final of the Song Interpretation Contest, the petite brown-haired girl in red tights sang the song about Mack The Knife from “The Threepenny Opera” in German and – in Polish – her own “Fog”.
Her ten-minute performance went down in history. With no fewer than five awards – including the Grand Prix, the Audience Toucan, and the Radio RAM Award – Marina Mashtaler set a festival record for the number of awards won in one go and at the first attempt.
The artist came to Wroclaw from Ukraine and, as we already know, is a talented singer. She is also a songwriter and translator, a Polish philologist, and an actress (mainly in the experimental theatre Ej Aj).

“Kwit/Kвіт” is her premiere project in collaboration with the composer Johannes Niehaus. Ukrainian, Polish and German literary and musical contexts are combined here with the unlimited possibilities of synthesisers and… field recordings, from Wrocław, among other places.

The leitmotif is flowers. Flowers in the mouth, flowers in the eyes, flowers in the lungs, flowers in the brain. The florist’s is a magical place where you can do anything, get flowers for any occasion: for winter sleep, for spring awakening, for summer meadow walks and bonfires, for the long autumn. The florist’s is a never-ending bloom, an eternal garden, home to joy, sadness, indifference, love and death.

fot. Justyna Żądło