The PAST-a building in Zielna Street is best known for its role in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. Few people remember that prior to those wartime events the PAST-a was a telecommunications node where Warsaw inhabitants’ phone conversations all met.

Stories (out) of Connections is a musical-theatrical performance that comments in a poetic and humorous manner on the building’s past function as the telephone exchange established by the Swedish engineer Henrik Cedergren.

The telephone operators working inside the “Swedish Tower” silently witnessed hundreds of human interactions every day, thus writing a chapter in the city’s cultural history. Our performance, co-created by an international team of artists and performers, is a kind of tribute to those women telephonists and their work. The project combines traditional songs, electronic compositions, as well as experiments with captured sounds of telephone calls and the acoustics of the space. We also try to find out whether those conversations, connections, and human interactions could possibly become… music. Drawing inspiration from operatic narrations and storytelling traditions, we take a look at human communication – its complexity, fragility, and frequently impossibility. The question seems important especially today, when – despite manual switchboards having been replaced by automated systems decades ago, and despite the continual emergence of ever new tools of communication – getting through to a fellow human being is becoming progressively more difficult.

The performance’s first version was part of the #ArtConnections participatory project, included in the programme of the Polish presidency of the Council of the European Union. The project aimed to inspire meetings between professional artists and non-professional groups of performers, and to build artistic bridges between members countries of the European Union.

Amadeusz Nosal