Grodzka Gate in Lublin is an institution devoted to working with memory that defies any simple categorization. The permanent exhibition, the House of Words, NN Theatre, numerous educational initiatives throughout the region, as well as its publishing house and bookstore, are only a small part of the activities undertaken to commemorate Jewish Lublin

A real treat awaits you on Saturday, July 4, at 5:30 PM in the square in front of the Old Synagogue. For the first time in the history of the Jewish Culture Festival, you will have the opportunity to see a street theatre performance – a spectacular production telling the story of The Friends of the Magician of Lublin. Witold Dąbrowski of Grodzka Gate / Teatr NN describes it as follows:

The Friends of the Magician is an outdoor performance inspired by Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel The Magician of Lublin. The production is created in the tradition of street theatre, taking the form of a variety show with live music, incorporating elements of contemporary circus, aerial acrobatics, and dance. Artists from Belgium, Spain, the United States, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and Poland take part in the performance.

The production is part of the programme of the 16th International “Following Singer’s Footsteps” Festival. Since 2011, this summer festival has travelled to towns and cities featured in the stories of the Nobel Prize-winning writer. This year, from July 6 to July 23, the festival programme will be presented, day by day, in seventeen locations: Piaski, Kraśnik, Łęczna, Chełm, Lubartów, Zamość, Krasnystaw, Goraj, Józefów, Janów Lubelski, Tomaszów Lubelski, Łaszczów, Szczebrzeszyn, Biłgoraj, Stary Dzików, Krasnobród, and Lublin.

The performance presented in Kraków therefore serves as a prologue to this nearly three-week journey.

The festival—and this performance in particular—is conceived and organized by the “Grodzka Gate – Teatr NN” Centre in Lublin, a unique institution operating within the historic Grodzka Gate, which for centuries connected the Old Town with the Jewish quarter. From this very geography emerges the Centre’s most important mission: preserving the memory of the city, its inhabitants, stories, voices, and places that together created multicultural Lublin, with all its lights and shadows.

The work of Isaac Bashevis Singer naturally aligns with the Centre’s mission. Singer wrote about the world of the small towns and villages of the historic Lublin region, the world of the Yiddish language, everyday rituals, human passions, dreams, disputes, and longings. The festival follows in those footsteps, bringing literature back to the places from which it emerged. In doing so, it evokes a “forgotten continent.”

This is why the travelling troupe visits town after town, inviting local residents to listen, watch, talk, and remember together.

For the “Grodzka Gate – Teatr NN” Centre, the festival is also a way of working with memory beyond the walls of the institution itself. The Gate sets out on the road, accompanied by artists, stories, music, theatre, and contemporary circus. Each stop becomes, for a few hours, a place of encounter with Singer’s literature and with local history—history that often remains close at hand, yet requires us to notice it anew.

In this way, memory returns to the places from which it was drawn and meets their inhabitants once again.