The Polish stilts walker who chose Romania

Despite the terrible Skype connection, it’s incredibly easy to connect to Marlena Grzeda. A Polish-born artist, she speaks from her apartment in Sibiu, in central Romania, where she now lives. The conversation is nicely disturbed by the birds’ chirp.

“I sometimes put bread on the parapet and the little ones come to eat,” she says. “In Amsterdam on the balcony we had a pigeon. We called him Alexander. And very fast he made a family. We had five pigeons in the balcony. He was coming on my hand to get fed.” Marlena is a Polish stilts walker, street theatre artist and costume designer, who says that she feels better on stilts than on her own legs. She has worked for many years with Teatro Pavana, a street theatre group in the Netherlands, but Marlena moved to Sibiu last fall to join her boyfriend, the painter Andy Ciocan (pictured below). In Romania, she started a new group called Pukima, which puts out walking act performances in Sibiu and at various festivals and events in Romania and abroad. “I think it’s a personal healing to be on stilts,” says Marlena. “It takes a lot of work on the ground to break the barriers of fear, so it’s about trust, learning the trust, rebalancing, all these small things are involved in the process of stilts walking.”