Iga Gańczarczyk: The Space of Ignorance
The author considers the conditions necessary for creating an authentic, free space for artwork and innovative experiments. Commenting on many examples of artists and art theorists (including Kozyra, Rajkowska, Brecht, Artaud and Rancière), she outlines a broad aesthetic-socio-institutional context for artistic work. She demonstrates how difficult it is to build an authentic, living artist/viewer relationship in contemporary art, and how vital an effect of reality is from the position she proclaims.

 

Reality Is Always a Bit Further Away – Iga Gańczarczyk speaks with Joanna Rajkowska
Joanna Rajkowska talks about her projects (including Satisfaction Guaranteed, Oxygenator, Dream Diary, and Aquarius) in the context of how they function in the public space, the language by which they are described, and the reactions they prompt. She also speaks of the place she occupies in the actions she arranges, and explains why she adores cliches and awkward situations. Much space is devoted to the role which after-images and phantasmagoria play in her projects, drawing from both the past and the future.

 

I Believe in Working on the Real – Iga Gańczarczyk speaks with Joanna Warsza
Joanna Warsza labels her concept as “small modifications to reality” extracted from habits of perception (such as the actions Warsaw under Construction, Radio Stadium, Journeys to Asia – An Acoustic Walk around the Stadium); commenting on her work at the Rozmaitości Theater and Nowy Theater in Warsaw, however, she draws from institutional criticism. She also speaks of attempts to emancipate the viewer (as in the Boniek action), and the issue of participatory art and reactionary art.

 

In Search of the Real – Iga Gańczarczyk speaks with Jola Janiczak and Wiktor Rubin
This conversation addresses the issue of the real in theater, and the ethical dimension involved in experimenting with it. Janiczak and Rubin speak of plays in which they attempted to break down theatrical convention and to mobilize a situation in which the “viewer can experience the subject of the theatrical encounter.” They mention Terrordrom. Breslau, in which Krzysztof Zarzecki had an improvised monologue, Spring Awakening, in which the viewers could vote for the way a certain scene was staged, and Orgy, in which the viewers were drawn into the play.

 

Piotr Kosiewski: I, Katarzyna K.
Kosiewski writes of an exhibition of Katarzyna Kozyra’s work at Warsaw’s Zachęta Gallery. The text is composed of three parts. In the first, the author describes the exhibition and its casting session for a role in Kozyra’s autobiographical film. Kosiewski quotes, contrasts and problematizes the statements of some of the participants. Part two takes a look at some of the most important subjects in Kozyra’s work. In the third part, Kosiewski considers why the critical and shocking dimension of Kozyra’s art has grown less powerful over time, and the new opportunities to draw from it.  

 

Joanna Jopek: I Want to Be Over You, Faggots
A review of the latest play by Monika Strzępka (director) and Paweł Demirski (text) – Rainbow Tribunal (Polski Theater, premiere: 5 March 2011). The author views Rainbow Tribunal as a manifestation of political theater and engaged art. She focuses the review on the subject of the demonstration in public space, drawing our attention to the untapped critical potential of this aesthetically interesting performance, and the problematically subversive strategy of its creators.

 

Małgorzata Dziewulska: Languages of the Profane
A review of a selection of dramas by Paweł Demirski, entitled Paraphrases (Krytyka Polityczna, 2011). Dziewulska outlines Demirski’s style by calling attention to his relationship to the texts he works with (Uncle Vanya, Forefather’s Eve), the protagonist who changes from a harmed man to a psychiatric patient, and the language, in which folk sayings mix with quotes from Baczyński. Dziewulska does mention, however, how well Demirski’s dramas fit into a pseudo-rational nomenclature. In the very title of the work and its place of publication, Dziewulska sees the danger of inserting the author into the mechanism of a myth that seeks self-affirmation.

 

Joanna Wichowska: Are Gardeners Sexy?
A review ofkomuny//warszawa’s Bookes (premiere: 29-30 January 2011). Discussing the subjects of the plays that preceded Bookes, the author shows that the name change from Komuna Otwock to komuna//warszawa reflects the evolution that has taken place in the group over the last few years: “a belief in the possibility and significance of a radical and sudden transformation has given way to a positivistic strategy of tiny steps.” She then describes the three parts of the Bookes as reflections of this change. The protagonists of the various parts present various standpoints in life; the finale is in praise of the golden mean – hard, systematic work, which might become the road to emancipation.

 

Anna Róża Burzyńska: s/t
A review of the play Railway Opera (premiere: 12 March 2011) – a joint project between komuna//warszawa and Liquid Theatre, part of the Polish Theater in Moscow program during the Gold Mask Festival. The performance is a music and dance dialectical trilogy performed at the Kiev Station in Moscow. This play takes the form of a peculiar concert drawn from the element of music, in which precise structure, accident, artistic work and actual reality combine to make an inseparable whole. Burzyńska reports that the piece as a whole astonishes with its avant-garde concept, but above all, moves the viewer with its poetry and beauty.

 

Hans Burkhard Schlichting: Listening Carefully: The Hermeneutic Process in Media Transformations
The author presents the issues of listening and communication, beginning with the ancient philosophers and ending with mass culture and multimedia. He points out that a hermeneutics adequate to researching the analogue media turns into an anti-hermeneutics in the digital era, because the network of digital media undermines traditional faith in the possibility of agreement and takes away the legitimacy of questions of significance. The author considers the place occupied by radio in this media network. In describing an artistic form of drama typical for the radio, he lists some technical solutions that would produce the dramaturgical and aesthetic forms characteristic of this media. He also presents the battle for the “total radio drama,” which aims to cut all ties with the culture of the written word. 

 

Andreas Hagelüken: An Original Radio Play
Hagelüken describes the acoustic art, setting it apart from the broader horizon of art and radio programs. The author demonstrates how such an “acoustic art” came to be, reminding us how many factors came to affect its ultimate form: from historical/political phenomena, through socio-cultural and technological factors, to the influences of such artistic movements as dadaism, futurism, poetry and musique concrète. He also outlines the possibilities presented by acoustic art, and its further perspectives for development.   

 

I Want to Leave the Main Theme Open – Lukáš Jiřčka speaks with Heiner Goebbels
A conversation with Heiner Goebbels presenting a wide spectrum of the work of an artist who worked as a composer of theater music, in the group Cassiber, as a composer of radio art, and a theater director. Goebbels speaks of his inspirations – from the fields of both music and theater – of his work as an actor, his fascination for the human voice, of music and of deconstruction, to which he subjects his texts – both when working on radio art, and on plays.

 

Hearing Is Exotic: Lukáš Jiřčka Speaks with Helmut Oehring
This composer and director of theatrical concerts speaks of his work with hearing-impaired singers: he comments on the method of musical notation, the relations between the singers and the orchestra, the role of sign language in the visual language of the concert and the openness to imperfection and mistakes which is inscribed in his work. Oehring also makes a list of the musicians who inspire him, and comments on the current state of German Radio art. 

 

Marta Filipiuk-Michniewicz: Eugeniusz Rudnik – Radio’s Master of the Scissors
This text presents the very diverse oeuvre of Eugeniusz Rudnik. The author describes the various stages of the artist’s development. From the varied and rather unsystematic strains in the writer’s work, Filipiuk-Michniewicz describes: collage forms, electronic music, musique concrète, audio linguistic poetry, Ars Acustica and the radio documentary ballad. In writing on Rudnik’s style, she focuses on its open form, its use of metaphor, its strong sense of rhythm and its affinity for phonic trash and waste.

 

Barbara Hanicka: The Rhythm of the Image – On Space in the Theater of Jerzy Grzegorzewski
A many-year collaborator with Grzegorzewski points out that “in Grzegorzewski’s plays, space becomes music through the rhythmic existence of the actors and objects.” Hanicka describes how the artist selected the spaces for his plays, and how he destroyed or modified the traditional theatrical architecture. In describing the way objects function in Grzegorzewski’s plays, she calls him a “great collector.” She does not agree with labeling the spaces a heap of debris. In her opinion, they were characterized by their discipline of form and their beauty.

 

Anna R. Burzyńska: Play Something that Has Perished 
A review of Stanisław Radwan’s record Something that Is Perished Seeks Out Its Name. Music for the Theater of Jerzy Grzegorzewski. Burzyńska notes that in spite of the difficulties in recording and releasing theater music, Radwan’s album gives the impression of capturing a private jam session, and the “music (...) seems like something organic and natural.” Burzyńska also notes that Radwan and Grzegorzewski shared the ability to strike up a living dialogue with the past, and supports these interpretations, as she regards Grzegorzewski’s theater as having been principally derived from music.  

 

Katarzyna Fazan: Chameleon – a Figure of Transformation. Jerzy Grzegorzewski and the Polish Theater’s Turn in Aesthetics.
Katarzyna Fazan shows how an analysis of three artistic strategies used by Grzegorzewski – relationship to the text, treatment of the aesthetic category of mimesis,and use of the category of the sublime – can be used to undermine outworn perceptions of the artist. Fazan shows that there is no gap between Grzegorzewski’s theater and strategies applied in the new theater, though this is not a situation of simple references and clear influences. The author does demonstrate, however, that Grzegorzewski is constantly found between “tradition and the avant-garde,” which is why she calls him an elusive chameleon – an ancestor of techniques observed in today’s theater.

 

Grzegorz Niziołek: Cat-astrophe, or: A Point that Leads Nowhere
A text devoted to Jerzy Grzegorzewski’s The Slow Darkening of Paintings (Studio Theater, 1985), based on Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. Niziołek considers the language of the performance, claiming that the deformation of words, mimicking their onetime significance, creates an unsolvable rebus. Niziołek ponders the presence of “deformed, disappearing, yet ever perceptible traces of historical catastrophe” inscribed in Lowry’s novel. He discards the possibility of considering Grzogorzewski’s theater in categories of the sublime or calling his plays a mere game with the viewer’s memory. To his mind, in The Slow Darkening of Paintings Grzegorzewski “sought less to activate, than to eliminate the ability to draw associations, to cull from the stores of the memory […],” and “instead of mourning, he celebrated […] a melancholy sense of a catastrophe that has already happened.” 

 

Dorota Semenowicz: A Missed Encounter. Krzysztof Warlikowski’s (A)pollonia
Dorota Semenowicz draws from the theories of Lacan in considering the ethical dimension of Warlikowski’s play. Citing the three orders of Lacanian psychoanalysis – the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real – and dividing the characters in (A)pollonia into executioners and victims, Semenowicz finds that the executioners operate in an Imaginary order, and the victims in a Real order. The author notes that the ethics of this play are, in a Lacanian sense, revealed as insoluble, and emerge on the side of the victims.

       

Bartosz Frąckowiak: Hamlet’s Hysterical Strategy
Frąckowiak analyses a play by Krzysztof Warlikowski, using the concepts of Lacanian psychoanalysis on the issue of hysteria. In the actions of the play’s protagonist he sees an enactment of the strategy of a hysteric, which involves revealing the falsehoods of one’s interlocutors (in their possession, for instance, of a coherent identity). The author proves his thesis with an analysis of the scene in which Hamlet enters his mother’s bedroom naked.

 

Playing with the Sublime, or: Why Should the Theater need Lacan, or Lacan the Theater? A conversation between Paweł Dybel, Andrzej Leder, and Krzysztof Pawlak
A record of a panel discussion that took place 8 December 2010 at the Aleksander Zelwerowicz Theater Academy in Warsaw. The panelists present their concepts on the ties between Lacanian psychoanalysis and theater. Drawing upon the Lacanian interpretation of Sophocles’s Antigone, Krzysztof Pawlak turns his eye to the issue of the revelation of speech, and the related fashion in which theater affects the viewer. Andrzej Leder makes reference to Dorota Semenowicz’s paper on (A)pollonia in trying to unravel the function which Ancient Greece plays from the perspective of centuries. Paweł Dybel, finally, points out the theatricality of the psychoanalytical therapy situation, and then reverses the title of the panel discussion to wonder “Why should Lacan need the theater?”

 

Żelisław Żelisławski: Death in a New Suit
A review of a diploma performance by students of the PWST Acting School in Krakow – Babel 2, directed by Maja Kleczewska. Żelisławski describes the structure of the play, composed of series of disconnected etudes, and compares the performance with the previous rendering of the same Jelinek piece by Kleczewska in Bydgoszcz less than a year ago. He sees the key feature of Babel 2 to be the introduction of multimedia techniques, which make the “themes of identity, emulation, and the gaze resound much more powerfully and compellingly than they did in the Bydgoszcz Babel.”

 

Jakub Papuczys: Boyhood, Girlhood
A review of two premieres as part of the Dramatyczny Theater in Wałbrzych’s “We Know, We Know, in the Box” series: Sorry, Winnetou directed by Piotr Ratajczak and A, Not of Green Gables directed by Katarzyna Raduszyńska. Papuczys demonstrates how these treatments of the novels of Karol May and Lucy Maud Montgomery show the problem of relating to childhood myths in a complex and unconventional manner. In either case, however, these ideas have not been backed up by equally interesting direction work.

 

Olga Katafiasz: Chill
A review of the play Lenz based on Georg Büchner’s story, directed by Barbara Wysocka (National Theater in Warsaw, premiere: 18 February 2011). Katafiasz states that the use of “distance, irony, and the constant manifestation of acts on stage as mere signifiers […] serve nothing.” Regarding the play as an attempt to capture the moment when a modern type of neurotic sensitivity was born, Katafiasz compares the play to Michał Borczuch’s Werter, which, in his opinion, was far more interesting in its treatment of the Romantic myth, in terms of its theatrical language and its manner of apprehending the world. 

 

Żelisław Żelisławski: We Don’t Need Another Hero
A review of the play Judith, based on a text by Friedrich Hebbel and directed by Wojciech Klemm at the Współczesny Theater in Szczecin (premiere: 8 January 2011). Żelisławski highly rates the acting talents of the group as a whole – in particular Marta Malikowska-Szymkiewicz, who plays the title role. He does accuse the director, however, of not exploiting this potential, and of reducing the majority of the characters to farcical cliches. The subjects contained in the text, meanwhile, are given general treatment. “He has concentrated on the question: Who is Judith as a Character? But he has ignored a second, equally vital question: What is the subject of Judith as a drama?”

 

Piotr Olkusz: There Will Be More and More of Them
A review of the play Black Battles with Dogs by Bernard-Marie Koltès, directed by Michael Thalheimer at Théâtre de la Colline in Paris (premiere: 22 May 2010). Olkusz precisely describes the play, and then draws attention to the intercultural context of the staging of the drama, which is often seen – in spite of the author’s declarations to the contrary – as a text about neo-colonialism, prepared now in France by a German director. In Olkusz’s view, “The director does not tell a story that allows one to draw the conclusion that ‘culture should be respected’; he inserts the viewers in the oppressive world of Black Battles with Dogs, and simultaneously shares his helplessness in the face of this social problem.”

 

Paweł Zapendowski: The Castaways of Mad Hope
A review of the Théâtre du Soleil’s Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir (Aurores), based on the novels of Verne from the Incredible Journeys series (the text was co-written by Hélène Cixous). Zapendowski describes the compositional structure of the performance, made up of a series of episodes focused around the events of 1900, drawing from the aesthetic of silent cinema, and a few scenes which are, to his mind, central. He ends by stating that the play can be viewed in two ways: “in a concrete manner, taking into account its socio-political premises, and more as entertainment, blithely observing man’s mad struggle for a better existence.”   

 

Søren Gauger: A Report from the London Mime Festival
This review begins with a description of the play entitled Sans Object by Compagnie 111/Aurelian Bory, which the author sees as emblematic of the festival’s dominant tendency to create elaborate and showy forms shorn of content. Gauger does describe two plays, however, which break free from this paradigm: Gobo. A Digital Glossary by Akhe Theater from St. Petersburg, who use ordinary objects to create shrewd and multi-layered stage metaphors, Flesh and Blood & Fish and Fowl by Sobelle and Ford – a skillful and intelligent comedy which creatively uses the tradition of American slapstick comedy.

 

Piotr Kosiewski: Mobilizing the Viewer
A description of the Move: Choreographing You exhibition, first displayed at the London Hayward Gallery, and later in Munich and in Dusseldorf, showing the ties between visual art and dance over the last half-century, with a particular focus on the significance the experience of everyday life had for the artists. The exhibit tries to “activate the viewers,” incarnating the participatory potential of works on display. As Kosiewski notes, “Move tries to address the limits the museum process places on artwork,” and to establish the present-day relevance of the search for modern classics.

 

Zbigniew Osiński: Japanese Inspirations and Enchantments: Jerzy Grotowski and Mieczysław Limonowski
Osiński describes the impact that Japanese N? theater had on Grotowski, citing statements and texts by the director, as well as texts by Jadwiga Rodowicz, and his own recollections. In searching out the sources and the consequences of this fascination, he recalls Grotowski’s lectures on Oriental philosophy and his visit to Tokyo. His point of departure for his thoughts on Limanowski is a letter to Stanisław Witkiewicz, quoted here in full, in which the author states: “Japaneseness not solely limited to art, but conceived in a much broader fashion, concerning the whole approach of the young disciple toward life.” Osiński also stresses Limanowski’s enthusiasm for the Japanese actress Sada Yako.

 

Tadeusz Kornaś: Chopin in the N? Theater
A review of the play The Piano Tuner by Tessenkai Theater (Tokyo), directed by Kasai Kenichi and based on a text by Jadwiga M. Rodowicz-Czechowska (Polish premiere: 17, 18, 19 February at Studio Theater in Warsaw). Kornaś outlines the basic information about Japanese N? theater and drama, and presents Rodowicz’s concept – to inscribe a European context, conceived around the figure and music of Chopin, around this conventionalized structure. He then describes the staging, indicating moments in which the two entirely disparate aesthetics combine or clash. 

Wojciech Dudzik, Małgorzata Leyko: Performance Studies: A Cultural Spectacle – Handbooks
This article is a polemic with a text by Mateusz Borowski and Małgorzata Sugiera (Structure or Problematize?)and their translation of the article Cultural Representations by Erika Fischer-Lichte (“Didaskalia” no. 101). The authors disagree with the opinions of Sugiera and Borowski on Blame’s handbook, explaining that it is an “introduction to theater studies.” Moreover, the authors regard some of Sugiera and Borowski’s translation solutions as excessive (such as the main terms: “cultural representation,” “cultural staging,” and “cultural spectacle”). They also formulate the opinion that a textbook Borowski and Sugiera overlook – The Anthropology of Spectacles – would fulfil most of their demands.

 

Mateusz Borowski, Małgorzata Sugiera: Discovering America – and Performance Studies
A response to Małgorzata Leyko and Wojciech Dudzik’s polemic printed in the current issue of “Didaskalia.” Borowski and Sugiera address all the accusations made against them, explaining: “We had no intention of presenting the whole panorama of works on performance studies, nor to bypass certain accomplishments in the field (...) To illustrate our thesis we selected certain texts (...) with the deep conviction that they best illustrated the subject we were dealing with (…).” They also explain their translation decisions with reference to how the words already function in Polish terminology.