Contents:
Plays
Barbara Klicka
An Early Reader
Inspired by A Polish Early Reader by Marian Falski, a story about Alice landing in the world of letters. The protagonist, creating her own alphabet, attempts to name reality. The characters she meets have their own worries and their own joys, but just trying to talk about them, Alice approaches their world. Therefore, it is a story about getting to know the world, and about the recovery of the language necessary to describe it. Where do associations come from? How do you connect images and their names? What is the impact of our experience on discovering the new?
Maja Pelević
Belgrad-Berlin (Belgrad-Berlin)
The history of an acquaintance made in the train compartment going from Belgrade to Berlin. She is crazy and longing for freedom, and he is a stiff type. Pelević, however, does not write a love story: it is primarily a dissertation on the myths of the free Western world. What is Berlin? Is it a gateway to the West, for people who are bound every day with a city that constantly licks the wounds of its history?
Bonn Park
Growling of the Milky Way (Das Knurren der Milchstrasse)
A play taking place in the future, but constantly talking about the legacy of our modern times. It is a series of monologues by characters important to our everyday life (including Kim Dzong Un, Donald Trump), voiced from the perspective of a just belief in their own impunity. The play, written in the stand-up poetics, sketches a frightening picture of the times when decisions are made against logic.
Anna Lepper
Girls in Need (Maedchen in Not)
An absurd tale about two friends. Baby would like to be her own woman, that is why even in love she does not want to become addicted to anyone. She thus makes a mechanical doll her partner, this being an admirer whose thoughts she can try to control. Dolly is her opposite, which in time will cause her death. A grim story about a society that values individuals who are able to submit to the majority, and does not tolerate others.
Tomasz Gromadka
Szcz
An ecological play about the wilderness inhabited by hybrid creatures whose ontological status is uncertain. There is a Predator Giving Up Predatory Tendencies, A Person Who Feels A Plant, A Person Who Would Prefer To Be Animals. There is also the One Who Slays, destroying the forest and threatening its inhabitants. The play departs from the non-anthropocentric position, looking for new possibilities of human existence in nature.
Essays, Studies
Jerzy Jarzębski
What is An Early Reader?
The author discusses the play An Early Reader by Barbara Klicka, who constructed her theatrical version of a Readers in defiance of principles according to which it is usually constructed: she added to its language a few quaint kinds of internal dynamics. It is as if this language used various automatisms, as if it was stuck in mechanical calculations or bumped inadvertently into themes and dictionary repertoires that are usually hidden from children.
Łukasz Żurek
Encryption
The author, analyzing the poetry of Barbara Klicka, comes to the conclusion that her entire mature poetic work consists of complicating each of the elements that have created - both on the surface and deep level - the poetics of her early poems. The common denominator of these transformations would be the encryption of the body, femininity, the intimate self, the addressee, recipients of the work, the sense of speech, in an attempt to save each of these issues from communicative accessibility for the reader (and thus: conventionalization, taming), and on the other hand, leave it at the mercy of linguistic and affective flows, which may mess up in them.
Piotr Olkusz
What is the ortolan singing about?
The author confronts interpretations of Piotr Cieplak's performances - from the Snow Queen, through Soplicowo-owocilpoS, Abduction of Europa and ABC, to the Uhlans - with the author's notes from his journal and from his press column. Cieplak is presented here as a commentator on Polish political reality and a Polish link with Europe - his journal from a cycling trip to Portugal also becomes a guide to the theatrical world of Piotr Cieplak.
Marcin Piekoszewski, Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska, Agata Lisiak, Anna R. Burzyńska
Berlin poor but sexy – a questionnaire
Berlin fell victim to gentrification processes. It is no longer a city that is significantly cheaper than other great European capitals. As to its supposedly underground nature, today it is more and more often called the European Silicon Valley. Does this mean that children of the generation that made Berlin an important cultural centre are more likely to open start-ups than galleries, consumerism having replaced club culture? How has Berlin changed? It is no longer poor, but has it stopped being sexy?
Monika Wąsik
Jurrasic World for the rich?
The author describes a new theatrical map of Berlin after the end of Frank Castorf 's directorate. About the city's theatre policy and about the creators who once were rebels, and today are already classics. Is Berlin still a stage for theatrical experiments?, asks the author. For the moment, the most experimental theatre in Berlin has been made by women, but they have not been mentioned during the dispute about Berlin culture.
Iwona Uberman
GOЯKI
One of the most important points on today's cultural map of Berlin is the Gorki Theatre, or rather GOЯKI. Gorki is a team theater, setting on close cooperation with a specific group of directors and authors (which does not mean closing down to other artists). It offers an artistic programme involved in contemporary issues, ranging from the problems of Berlin microenvironments to global affairs and international politics.
Berliners
Justyna Jaworska, Wojciech Klemm, Marta Malikowska, Piotr Olkusz talk about the theatrical Berlin.
Agnieszka Więckiewicz
Afro-Germans in the Third Reich
The history of Afro-Germans has recently entered into the study of the Second World War. It is closely related to the colonial past of Germany. At the end of the nineteenth century, Germany took an active part in the process of "grabbing Africa" by the Western powers. A turning point in German-African relations was the occupation of the Rhineland by French colonial troops as a result of the arrangements of the Treaty of Versailles of 1919.
What cannot be made
A conversation with Dariusz Miłkowski on the situation of Polish theatre and cultural policy of the state within the ‘Weather Forecast’ cycle.
Paweł Majewski
Ten variations on the subject of so-called living nature, with a punch line
Academic considerations on associated species and non-humancentric forms of inter-subject relations, as well as subject-object relations, have been gradually loosing momentum. The order: human-animal-plant-was supposed to become a subject of reconfiguration, but it quickly came to light that it is not known exactly by which - if not human - rules it should be reconfigured.
VARIA
Contexts:
Olga Byrska on the politicalness of Samuel Beckett's work on the margin of Beckett’s Political Imagination (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2017) by Emilie Morin and the feature, („The New York Review of Books”, no 10/2018) by Fintan O’Toole Where Lost Bodies Roam.