Joanna Bednarczyk. QUANTA, dir. Łukasz TWARKOWSKI

What does the term “quantum” mean? The word quantum in Latin means “how much.” In physics, a quantum describes the smallest portion that any physical quantity can have or change by in a single event. Simply put, a quantum is a portion that cannot be divided. A cake cannot be cut infinitely. There is a smallest possible piece that can be offered to a guest.

Life consists of quanta of events. Events happen one after another, lining up into a certain story. A multitude of phenomena, feelings, and connections average out in a narrative that splits into the past, the present, and an unknown future. We call this life, biography, destiny. Every story is governed by time; it is what makes stories understandable. First, there is a cause, then an effect, and an action triggers a reaction. However, when time begins to accelerate, it ceases to be time and becomes something whose nature we no longer understand; the multitude of quantum events ceases to average out into a reality that can be understood and grasped.

This is exactly what happens on a summer evening in 1938 at the struggling “Les Moires” hotel in the Swiss mountains. The properties of physical space and time are disrupted. The hotel guests themselves also experience this disruption. 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 it be that the reality of large objects, such as a desk, a hotel, and mountains, is beginning to behave like the reality of elementary particles? According to Heisenberg, one can only speak of particles approximately, describing their states rather than the particles themselves. Only by changing their thinking from what a thing is to what the state of a thing is can the hotel guests understand what is happening to them and around them. They arrived at “Les Moires” to look at the world from the perspective of high mountains. To seek deeper meaning in a broad view. What if this meaning can be found not in admiring Swiss landscapes, but in a single quantum: an emotion, an event, an interaction?

The dramaturgical research for the play was supported by Onassis Air.