Contents:
Plays
Malina Prześluga
There is no
A "pseudo-realistic" play about country life, or rather about one’s misconceptions. A young corporation employee from the capital goes by chance to the village of Żabki Małe, and then returns there regularly because he falls in love with a local "ordinary" girl. It turns out, however, that country life only looks ordinary. In fact, it is full of secrets, and finally the rural idyll reveals its dark side .. . The play begins in a comedy tone, and then it gradually changes into a metaphysical thriller.
Marta Górnicka
Love Anthem
The third part of the trilogy built around the figure of Mother Courage. A multi-layered choral piece on the danger of community ideologies that easily lead from love to hatred. National and battle songs, prayers, confessions of goodwill, lullabies of mothers mix with statements by Anders Breivik and great historical criminals, references to the Holocaust being also clear. The words change their meaning here fluently, while fanaticism increases. Everything is written for solo and choral parts, with a seductive but disturbing rigor.
Falk Richter
Je suis Fassbinder
The play refers to a collection of short films Deutschland im Herbst of 1978. The author of one of them is Rainer Fassbinder - it is the filmmaker's conversation with his mother describing the dream Germany of the seventies, ruled by "some kind and honest Führer". In Falk Richter's case, we have a repetition of that situation (the film is being re-created), but time perspectives are mixed: instead of Germany in the seventies shaken by political scandals and terrorism of left-wing extremists, there is today's Europe and its struggles with the challenges of multiculturalism.
Essays, Studies
Joanna Krakowska
Unnecessary community
Tomasz Plata, author of the book Postmortem Life of Romanticism, defined Polish national community through the prism of aborted fetuses of Romanticism, i.e. the three dominant political narratives that now shape public sphere and organize Polish collective consciousness. The question is do we need such a national community and do we need ideological and identity-based communities at all?
Anna R. Burzyńska
In the search of a new subject
When I think about the theatre of Marta Górnicka, the first picture that comes to my mind is an insect swarm. Górnicka’s choir is a self-organizing, metastable being characterized by smooth dynamics. Something like a swarm of bees - intelligent and at the same time endowed with strong instinct, laborious and useful, but when necessary, able to manifest strength and defend what is important to them.
Marcin Bogucki
The purest form of non-Aristotelian poetics
Libretto had not enjoyed the interest of researchers for a long time. The statement that this is an incomplete, unpredictable creation, neither literary nor musical, can be found in serious studies in the 1960s, and even today there are still complaints about librettos mediocre literary value. The perception of libretto as a work equivalent to drama is the merit of scientific reflection practiced since the 1970s.
Thomas Irmer
Fassbinder is alive, although he died a long time ago
One of the most interesting phenomena of Fassbinder's latest reception is undoubtedly the fact that some of his films are staged as adaptations in the theatre. After his death in 1982 this seemed unthinkable, all the more so because in those days the adaptations of films appeared very rarely in the repertoires of German theatres, and the development of all kinds of film scripts for the purpose of the stage was not yet a common method of work.
Mateusz Atman, Agnieszka Jakimiak
Notes on Reiner Werner Fassbinder
Fassbinder talked openly about budget entanglements, difficulties in getting money for new productions and about his own debts. Even if he cultivated the artistic myth, carefully developing his image as a brazen and romantic anarchist, falling into addiction after addiction, he successfully destroyed the legend of the need to limit the production budget in the name of the higher purpose of art.
Marta Keil
Substitute fears
Social fears, phobias and prejudices are undoubtedly one of the most effective political tools at the moment. They became the basis of the language of populists, in the narrative based primarily on the division into "us": a more or less imagined community created against "them": those who would threaten it and against whom “we” have to be protected. "They" are, depending on the context, the elite, nationalists, refugees, experts, feminists, immigrants, artists, leftists, conservatives, financiers, philistines, etc. But this dichotomy is by no means exclusively a populist specialty: it has permeated the language of everyday debate, creating divisions that are less and less obvious and more and more difficult to overcome.
Who are they afraid of?
Opinions of Agnieszka Jakimiak, Katarzyna Tubylewicz, Alina Czyżewska, Matthias Frense and Sascha Kӧzlow being extensive fragments of the debate which took place in connection with the premiere of Fear Eeats the Soul directed by Agnieszka Jakimiak at the Powszechny Theatre in Warsaw in December 2017.
Jolanta Kowalska
Wałbrzych: a double portrait
Through the history of the Wałbrzych stage of the past two decades the author is led by the images. Not the titles of high-profile performances, not directorial names and not the calendar, measured out by the intervals of subsequent directors, but images, always somehow inscribed in the city. You cannot take it in parentheses while sitting in the chair in the audience.
Columns
Marek Beylin, Tadeusz Nyczek, Tadeusz Bradecki