Łukasz Twarkowski: But when we think about our emotions, they are more like Schrödinger’s cat. We contain contradictions. Life itself is one enormous contradiction that we live through.

MK: The immersive production Quanta, which explores alternate realities and quantum physics, dominated this year of DSB. What was your primary inspiration and how did the idea come to life?

ŁT: It's funny because the inspiration was a book. In the beginning, we were considering something that doesn’t happen to me often — staging a book. Somehow, I believe that quantum physics had already been “in the air” for a long time. Even when we started working on this production, imagining what kind of scenes could visually represent quantum physics, we realized that many of our previous performances already included what we might call “quantum scenes.” So, it was hard to find new ways to build it up because we had already been doing it — without knowing how representative it was of the quantum physics world or its imagery. The book that inspired me so much at the beginning was When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021. It’s a very strange novel composed of several short stories — one about Heisenberg, another about Schrödinger, and others about mathematicians, including a French mathematician from the 1980s. They all try to dig into this strange zone where our understanding ends. Labatut loves paradoxes and explores concepts that are difficult to express, because they push beyond where the brain or conventional understanding can go. And yet — there is still something. There is still something to discover beyond our current grasp of the world. We even tried to get the rights to the book, but luckily we didn’t get them — Benjamin Labatut had already sold the rights to Hollywood, and they couldn’t be given to any theater until the movie is released. Given our hybrid, cinematic style of theater, I knew that even after the movie’s release, we wouldn’t be able to use it meaningfully. So I thought: we didn’t want to stage the whole book anyway, we only wanted to use it freely as inspiration. I said, "Let’s do it on our own — from scratch."

MK: And what have you conjured up from scratch?

ŁT: Then I came up with the idea of a trilogy. Quanta is the first part. We’re already rehearsing Oracle, the second part, which is part of what we’re calling the Science Trilogy. I wanted the structure of the trilogy to reflect the times we’re living in. That’s why Quanta is set in 1938 — just before World War II. It mirrors the feeling many of us share today, this sense that something great and horrible is coming, and the fear we live with every day. Originally, I really wanted to work on this duo — the double portrait of Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger. But during production, our costume designer Svenja Gassen confronted me and said we couldn’t create a performance about Schrödinger while staying silent about his pedophilia cases. I went back to all the books and biographies I’d read, and realized I had been blind. I didn’t want to consider it. I was avoiding the topic. Once you include a case like that, such a heavy taboo, it takes up a lot of space in the narrative. We decided to exclude Schrödinger from the performance. At first, we put him in a room, saying he was there — dead or alive, nobody knew. Eventually, he vanished completely. Meanwhile, we discovered Ettore Majorana, a physicist I didn’t know before. It was one of the biggest revelations — he fit so well. We had been searching for a real person who had disappeared in 1938, and Majorana’s story was perfect. He really did disappear that year. It’s a crazy story. He was one of the leading quantum physicists. He met Heisenberg in 1931, then shut himself in a room, burned all his notes. Most likely, he knew what was coming — the atomic bomb, nuclear weapons — and wanted no part in it. He is considered a symbol of fear or rejection of what science had uncovered. There are several theories and legends about his fate. He sent two suicide notes, then disappeared on a ship from Naples to Palermo. He asked his family not to mourn for more than three days. But then, a few days later, he sent another letter saying he was alive. After that — he vanished.

Giorgio Agamben wrote a whole book about this called What Is Real, focusing on Majorana's case. Agamben tries to prove that it was a kind of enormous performance — a gesture that brought quantum physics principles onto the macro scale. Majorana became a symbol of something that exists and doesn’t exist at the same time. The question he posed was, “What is real?”

MK: I think it's really interesting, and I love that you included it in the production. Since we mentioned Schrödinger — just a silly question — what do you think happened to Schrödinger’s cat? Is it dead or alive?

ŁT: That’s the most beautiful paradox — both in life and in quantum physics. I would say that, in the world we’ve created, where we try to translate quantum laws into human emotions, we are actually living in that paradox. It’s probably difficult for people because we tend to think of ourselves as Newtonian creatures — either dead or alive, existing or not. But when we think about our emotions, they are more like Schrödinger’s cat. We contain contradictions. Life itself is one enormous contradiction that we live through.
The concept of wave function collapse — that's what it's called, right? — captures it perfectly. In a quantum state, all possibilities coexist. That leads to Hugh Everett’s theory of multiverses, where every decision point creates a split — and all the potential outcomes exist in parallel universes. Before we choose, every option is possible. That’s what I truly believe. We should be teaching quantum physics much more, even to children, because it completely changes how we judge ourselves and how we see the world.

We are not Newtonian objects, where inputs lead to predictable outputs. This connects to the mystery of consciousness — which, by the way, is the theme of our next piece, based on the life of Alan Turing and the question of artificial intelligence. Nobel Prize winner Roger Penrose says he doesn’t believe that computers will ever be capable of real intelligence or consciousness — and certainly not through computation alone. Computers operate in a binary system — they calculate, they simulate — but real intelligence, real consciousness, requires something else. It requires randomness. That randomness is the most beautiful aspect of quantum physics. I remember working several years ago in Hanover on a piece called Once Upon a Time Life, about biology and genetics. At one point, we hit a wall and became a bit depressed, realizing how deterministic everything seemed. We saw ourselves as biochemical machines, made up of serotonin and dopamine, predictable chemical systems. That kind of determinism is bleak. But quantum physics gives life meaning again — because it introduces uncertainty, unpredictability.

This isn’t a matter of lacking the tools to predict — it's simply impossible to predict. Life, at the subatomic level, is ruled by randomness. That randomness makes life feel infinite and unknowable. And these quantum states — where something can be both dead and alive, or up and down at the same time — are incredibly relevant to how we experience human nature, emotions, and our relationship with the world. Another important shift that quantum physics introduces is a focus on relationships, not particles. We can’t really say much about particles themselves, but we can measure the relationships between them. A particle doesn’t “exist” until it’s observed. As Niels Bohr said, we shouldn’t be interested in what the electron does when we’re not observing it. It's only in the act of observation that it becomes something. This idea of the observer-participant relationship is also very relevant to human interactions.

We often see ourselves as solid, independent beings, but we’re constantly changing in response to others. Just now, as I speak with you, I am not the same person I was ten minutes ago. This ongoing transformation — this process of exchange — is at the core of human experience.

MK: Do you see quantum physics as a useful metaphor for exploring human emotions? For example, isn’t love itself a kind of quantum phenomenon, metaphorically speaking?

ŁT: I think I already answered this question earlier, yes. Because that’s really the core of it — the biggest insight quantum physics gives us is an extreme paradigm shift. And that’s likely why it’s still not very popular. We kept asking ourselves during the process: Why didn’t the discoveries of quantum physics change our understanding of the world the way Newton’s Principia did? Once Newton published that work, everything shifted. The world became explainable. We could rationalize it. We began to feel like we had some control, some agency over what happens around us. But that shift didn’t happen with quantum physics. Even today, it hasn’t entered mainstream understanding. Schools still teach it as something overly complicated — something that doesn’t “really apply” to us because we live on the macro scale, while quantum events happen deep in the micro world of particles. I think that’s completely false. And in that way, love, emotions — all of it — make much more sense through a quantum lens than a classical one.

MK: How do you direct the actors? Is your approach more theatrical or cinematic or somewhere in between?

ŁT: It’s definitely somewhere in between. But it’s true that most of the communication happens through the screen. From the very beginning — even during the first improvisations — we don’t watch the actors live. Instead, we work with camera operators, or often the actors themselves become the operators. They all go through an accelerated course in cinematography. They learn to work with cameras, to understand what it means to frame a shot, not just be in front of the camera but behind it as well.
Then we do long, long improvisations — sometimes two or three hours at a time. These are always filmed with two cameras mounted simultaneously. We watch the results as if we’re watching a film, from the very beginning. This is incredibly important to me — to immerse them inside this mediated world from the outset. They have to build their performances with the knowledge that they are being filmed constantly, that the medium is the screen. We don’t add the screen later, as an afterthought to some “live” theater — it’s integrated from the start.

MK: What were the most important technical prerequisites for staging a production like this? Did you need to buy or adapt anything for Janáček Theatre?

ŁT: No, not here. We brought everything with us — almost everything. Projectors, LED screens, all of our cameras, thermal cameras, infrared cameras. In this process, it was actually our first time working with thermal and infrared vision in a deeper way. We hadn’t used them much before, but we’ve developed them further for the upcoming show.

And it’s important for me — the medium is the message. I really believe that. We need to constantly ask ourselves why we are using a particular medium. Why use a camera? If there’s ever a way to do it without the camera — then it’s probably better to do it without. I think many productions would be much better off without video, simply because in many cases, it’s not necessary at all.

MK: Your productions require full multi-sensory engagement from the audience. For you personally, which sense do you consider the most crucial in experiencing your work?

ŁT: There isn’t a single most crucial sense. I find theater to be the most sensual of all the arts — and that’s why I love it so much, despite how difficult it is as a medium. Especially in these complex realities we construct, it takes an incredible amount of effort from every person involved. We’re talking about more than 40 people who have to work with absolute precision. It’s like a symphonic orchestra — if anything is off, the whole experience is compromised. What fascinates me most about theater is its very strange relationship with time. Time is one of the most interesting subjects for me — what it is, how we perceive it — and I believe theater is one of the best mediums to explore it. It deals with the human body, presence, sweat, and lifetime. And when combined with live video, it allows us to create certain time loops that simply wouldn’t work in pre-recorded film or video. There’s a kind of mystery, even a miracle, that’s only possible in the live moment. That same mystery extends to sound and light as well. They are not just illustrative tools in our productions — they are independent protagonists. They build a non-mimetic experience that engages every sense.

Sound, for example, is not just about what you hear. It’s what you feel — the bass in your chest, the vibrations in the room. Light too — it’s not just about visibility. It transforms space and atmosphere.

This is why I choose theater — because it touches every sense without exception.