Skarbek is a figure in Polish miners' folklore, a mythic gnome who both protects and threatens the men who invade his underground domain of abandoned coal mines. German artist Antje Majewski and author Ingo Niermann have taken the tale as the starting point for a gestural dance-theater project to premiere in Poland and Germany in 2005. The backdrop of the piece is a stylized, hallucinatory underworld where shifting perspectives create an unstable environment, until, finally, the whole stage shrinks into a marionette theater and puppets replace human dancers. The format is unique, so old-fashioned it's cutting edge: a 33-rpm LP of electronic music (composed by Katrin Vellrath), accompanied by text by Niermann, illustrations by Majewski.