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Plays
Piotr Rowicki
The Night is Ours
The action of the play takes place throughout different time zones: now, during the Second WorldWar and just after the war. It tells about Świętochłowice in Upper Silesia, where in 1943 a Germanconcentration camp, an Auschwitz branch, was established on the territory of today’s garden plots.From January to November 1945, there was the Zgoda Polish concentration camp there, whereGerman prisoners of war, but also many Silesians, Poles and others accused of collaborating withthe Germans, were cruelly treated. Piotr Rowicki overlays accounts and voices in order to confrontthe repressed memory with the testimony of crime. The drama fits in with the now unpopular „pedagogyof shame”, showing Poles also as torturers or indifferent witnesses, and not just as war victims.
Igor Jarek
Glück auf!
Walter Goj, formerly a mechanic in a mine, now a tramp, lives in a caravan by the woods. Hedefends himself against eviction, his estate having been taken over by an energy company. Analchemist, a punk, and a guru for rebellious teenagers, he disagrees with capitalist changes andlives on Silesian folklore and his own myth. When everyone turns away from him, he resorts tosummoning the ghosts of the mine and casting a curse. The play combines humor and a bravuralanguage with an acute social diagnosis, but it can also be seen as an elegy for mining in Silesia.
Stojan Srdić
My child
A story about a Roma family living in Serbia, in which poverty becomes the justification forsexual harassment and the limitation of the minors’ rights. Stojan Srdić shows the helplessnessof the state’s mechanisms meant to help the weaker, especially when the victim belongs to theunloved ethnic minority.
Essays, Studies
Kornelia Sobczak
The helplessness of liberals. The Second World War Museum
Throughout a dozen of rooms, there is a spirit of universality of tragic experiences of the world’spopulation in the 1930s and 1940s hanging there: the experiences of displacement, exile, economicdeprivation, hunger, poverty, the necessity of poor substitutes for everything: from teaor soap to hands to work; the experience of homelessness and the destruction of material andspiritual substance, the experience of orphanage and prison.
Joanna Crawley
Independent bodies, substitute bodies
Among dozens of projects on the centenary of the Easter Uprising, which shocked Dublin on24-29 April 1916, the audience across Ireland had the opportunity to watch various stagingsof that week. New texts were added to show the „uprising from the perspective of women”,„uprising from the perspective of the province”, „ uprising from the perspective of children”.Among them These Rooms by ANU Productions and CoisCéim dance theatre, and It’s Not Overby THEATREclub were worth mentioning.
Wojciech Klimczyk
Not in this copybook. “Polish”necro-performances by Vaslav Nijinsky
If we assume that Vaslav Nijinsky was a Pole, what does this mean for our thinking aboutPolishness? Trying to answer this question, one needs to look at Polishness not as systematicallyclassifiable labels, but in performative terms – as an active struggle of an individual with theirown, or dynamic creation of one’s identity rather than the possession of it.
Making your own herbarium
A conversation by Katarzyna Dudzińska and Katarzyna Sierakowska on Dorota Sajewska’sbook Nekroperformans. Kulturowa rekonstrukcja Teatru Wielkiej Wojny [Necro-performance. TheCultural Reconstruction of the Great War Theatre] (2016).
Bartosz Żurawiecki
Gardening on bone meal
Since the present government of Poland, regarding history as one of its priorities, has delivereda blow against the independence of the Polish Film Institute, releasing its director before theend of the term of office, there is nothing left to do as to place oneself on either side of the barricade.Hopefully, the cinema of ideas in Poland will finally appear, instead of resorting to thepetty bourgeois „happy medium”. Up to now, however, the losses have been greater than thebenefits. We have become the hostages of the banal.
Ewa Bal
The identity performance must be started anew
It is no longer possible to hide that , throughout the entire post-war period the theatre, especiallythe institutional theatre in Silesia, as well as the school and university curricula of historyparticipated in the process of producing in Silesia inhabitants the conviction that their positionon the cultural map of the country depended on their affiliation the center of national culture.For many years, the theatre remained blind and deaf for the voices of Silesia and its inhabitants.But as it turns out, these times have already passed.
Not only Roma
A coversation of Wojciech Woźniak and Piotr Olkusz.
Two years ago the the Decade of RomaInclusion European programme ended– now it is increasingly becoming a subject of critique,because despite its considerable budget it is hard to notice lasting results of the aid. How stateinstitutions should deal with the problems of the Roma community? Should we treat it as anational or racial minority or apply similar tools as in the case of fighting poverty?
Joanna Krakowska
“Transfer!” Or the Archive
After 1989, a time came when the archive ceased to be a place of exploration becoming anobject of creation. It ceased to be a research and laborious challenge and became a place ofcreativity and thus a battlefield and a source of powerful conflict. The archive established inthe theatre is characterized by the fact that through sharing its own resources, it simultaneouslytests their narrative effectiveness. The best example of this is Transfer! - an emblematic performance for the historical turn in Polish theatre.
Łucja Iwanczewska
Contesting the consensus
In Polish theatrical life of the time of transformation, interesting are the strategies of contestationand emancipation projects at the junction of art and society. And the impact of thesepotential projects on the shape of communities. The emergence of receiving communities doesnot have to rely on understanding and consensus - they can be established by rejection, conflictof interest or denial. Resistance strategies and emancipation projects must be alternative to thefinal and dominant contestation scenarios.
Columns
Marek Beylin, Tadeusz Nyczek, Tadeusz Bradecki
Varia
Notes on plays:
Sarah Ruhl How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, Ignacio García May, Sofía, Igor Jarek Kwiat paproci.