Katarzyna Fazan: A Better or Worse Quality Trash? Anti-aesthetics in the Past Twenty Years (1989-2009)
A text delivered by Katarzyna Fazan at the Twenty Years. Polish Theater since 1989 conference. The author picks up the thread of “good quality trash,” defining it and showing its presence in plays by directors who made their debuts in this period. She contests these transformations as follows: “Over the past twenty years we have seen the degradation of theater’s autonomy and its clear artistic profile – that of a distinct art. After many years of fighting for artistic independence, many directors (…) began drawing from models of popular culture. They discarded theater as an elite form of culture (…)”.
Małgorzata Dziewulska: The Wrongful Directing of Our Predecessors
Małgorzata Dziewulska attempts to historically root the term “bad directing.” She notes that breaking norms and accepted rules is an organic property of art. The category of “bad directing” is tied to a language which defies viewers’ expectations and is always shaped at the moment the work is apprehended. It serves to introduce something new, to create an active response, to show “the familiar through the unfamiliar,” to avoid stereotypes. Dziewulska analyzes the practice of “bad directing” using the examples of Jerzy Grotowski, Tadeusz Kantor, and Krzysztof Warlikowski.
Beauty and Mystery, or: Other Operations on Reality. Anna R. Burzyńska and Marcin Kościelniak speak with Michał Borczuch and Michał Zadara
Anna R. Burzyńska and Marcin Kościelniak ask Michał Zadara and Michał Borczuch about aspects of “bad directing” in their work, such as purposefully inconclusive endings, the creation of gaps and ruptures, leaving situations open-ended, and the partial construction of characters, to leave lots of room for actors’ improvisation. The directors say that these strategies are meant to create an open situation, to break with routine and the rational communication of knowledge to the theater public. They prefer to create mysterious and sometimes incomprehensible situations on stage, which are to inspire the viewer to adopt an autonomous position toward what (s)he is shown on stage.
Eva Badura-Triska: Who Becomes a Bad Painter, When, Why – and in What Sense?
Eva Badura-Triska’s text was written on the occasion of the Bad Painting – Good Art exhibition she organized.The author defines “bad painting” as that which rejects the recognized artistic canons, opposing the concepts and rules set by the avant-garde and all the 20th-century “isms.” In the author’s opinion, “bad painting” plays a critical role against the utopia of modernism, unmasking its implacable faith in progress and the power of art to bring salvation. It therefore expresses a lack of trust, an opposition toward the premise of a successful, harmonious, “correct” work of art.
Jakub Momro: From Cynicism to Profanation
Jakub Momro questions the criteria of evaluating art. He puts forward the thesis that the critical model of thinking about art has been exhausted, which is why modernity has had to develop new critical strategies: cynicism and profanation. Apart from the category of cynicism (analyzed through Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason and Jacques Rancière’s Aesthetics as Politics), Momro proposes Giorgio Agamben’s profanation strategy, which involves shattering the fetishes of modernity, shifting things into a new context, allowing for the execution of the critical gesture, and facilitating the questioning of criteria like “good” and “bad” in art.
Josette Féral: Remnants and Riddles: from the Mona Lisa to Rambo
The author considers the process of art reception, which has joined a paradigm shift (of recent years) in “forcing us to redefine our relationship with works of art.” She sees recycling as a contemporary art practice used both by artists and viewers: “recycling, or the work that ‘recycles,’ creates an effect of using materials that have ended their life cycle before becoming part of a work of art, and thus return once more to cultural and artistic circulation, taking on new meaning.” She uses her thesis to describe the work of Brazilian artist Vika Muniza, and the play Rambo Solo by the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma.
Mateusz Borowski, Małgorzata Sugiera: Recycling Gazes
Mateusz Borowski and Małgorzata Sugiera distinguish between two concepts which have heretofore been treated as synonymous: intertextuality and recycling. They show that recycling, unlike intertextuality, undermines the universalist image of culture as text and language. Recycling, as a dynamic process where the borders between kinds and levels of culture are negotiated, shifts the focus from essentialist understandings of techniques and definitions toward the existence and function of art and its various forms in various cultural and historical circumstances. The authors show the effectiveness of recycling as a tool for analyzing cultural phenomena based on the example of fashion shows and Michael Thalheimer’s play Emilia Galotti.
Marta Bryś: The General’s Tears
A review of the play Long Live War!!!, directed by Monika Strzępka and based on a text by Paweł Demirski at the Dramatyczny Theater in Wałbrzych (premiere: 12 December 2009). The author states that the subject of the play, whose point of departure was the Four Tankmen and a Dog television series, is a discourse on war, politics, and historical politics, whose victim is always the truth. Describing and analyzing the play, Bryś notes that in Strzępka and Demirski’s work, “Wartime blends with the post-war period, figures change identities, and the duty to establish facts and render justice becomes less a Utopia than a mechanism of oppression.”
Revolutionary Potential. Monika Kwaśniewska speaks with Monika Strzępka and Paweł Demirski
The creators of Long Live War!!! (based on the Four Tankmen and a Dog television seriesand novel) speak of the specifics of working at the Dramatyczny Theater in Wałbrzych, about their approach to the source material in the context of the stage’s new season, entitled “We Know, We Know!”, and the process of building the script, working with actors on obscene and vulgar scenes, and the role of theater in changing social relationships and politics. A great deal of space is devoted to what they see as the most important theme of the play: the image of class conflict between the peasants and the intelligentsia both in film and in the Polish historical narrative.
Monika Kwaśniewska: Revenge. Reactivation?
A review of a play at the Dramatyczny Theater in Wałbrzych: Madonna, directed by Ivo Vedrala, and Revenge by Weronika Szczawińska (premiere: 19 November 2009). Małgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk’s Madonna is a modern reinterpretation of Aleksander Fredro’s famous drama. The plays thus form a diptych, presenting two visions of the place of Revenge in contemporary Polish culture and art. In Kwaśniewska’s opinion, “Weronika Szczawińska’s play is a formally diverse, theatrically clever, and intelligent discourse on theater aesthetics. The basic conclusion is that Revenge no longer has anything to tell us.” Madonna, on the other hand, “takes up a subversive dialogue, with both Revenge and the national myths and collective consciousness of Poles as such.”
The Radical Alienation Effect. Marta Bryś speaks with Weronika Szczawińska
Weronika Szczewińska speaks of her work on Aleksander Fredro’s Revenge at the Dramatyczny Theater in Wałbrzych for the “We Know, We Know!” season. Claiming that the text she directed cannot not be brought to the stage, Szczawińska declares that the key to making the play – and above all, working with the actors – was the “datedness of the drama, the educational-staging legend that surrounds it, and all the slogans deriving from educational obligation: type, model, theater as a museum of forms, of fossilized behavior, of types and stereotypes of stage solutions and conventional situations.”
Maria Shevtsova: Elements and Principles
A translation of a fragment of Maria Shevtsova’s book Robert Wilson, in which the author defines and describes Wilson’s theater categories in detail. The author concludes that “the more complex Wilson’s work becomes in visual terms, through the use of colored lights and gestures, and the more whimsical and unusual his costumes become, the more distanced (by the principles of the grotesque) those are who wear them.” Shevtsova tries to prove that everything in Wilson’s theater is a question of visual, audio, and moving images, through which the direction turns the images into “text.”
Jakub Falkowski: Wilson at the Dramatyczny Theater – The Process of Making a Play
A report by a participant in workshops run by Bob Wilson in 2007 at the Dramatyczny Theater in Warsaw, describing the process by which his play came about, on the basis of work on two texts: Gabriella Maione’s Symptoms and Acropolis by Stanisław Wyspiański. The author takes us through the initial casting, the daily workshop plan, and exercises for the imagination and senses. We meet Wilson’s international team and have a peek at the master at work.
Żelisław Żelisławski: I Want You to Notice I’m Not There
Żelisławki notes that The Odyssey – a play by Krzysztof Garbaczewski at the Kochanowski Theater in Opole (premiere: 15 November 2009) – has a collage structure. The director multiplies the ideas and means of expression instead of selecting from them. He is interested in the mechanics and poetics of looking, of absorbing the world.
YES, YES, YES! Joanna Jopek speaks with Anna Maria Kaczmarska
Joanna Jopek speaks with Anna Maria Kaczmarska about a performance she directed that appeared in The Odyssey (directed byKrzysztof Garbaczewski). In Kaczmarska’s scene Penelope (Aleksandra Cwen) delivers Molly Bloom’s monologue from Ulysses. This project is an attempt to contend with the patriarchal system and is an expression of the body’s absolute disavowal of this system. Through physical acts and the desire to discard compulsory cultural formulae the actress speaks the text contrary to its intentions.
Olga Katafiasz: Would You Believe It?
Olga Katafiasz reviews Szymon Kaczmarek’s play Gospels based on the Gospel according to Saint John, performed at the Dramatyczny Theater in Warsaw (premiere: 17 December 2009), noting that the director’s aim was not to create a religious tale with a biblical message. Kaczmarek is dealing with the moment when a familiar piece of history is just being born, an event that must turn into a story that changes the course of history. In the reviewer’s opinion, the play asks us to question the nature of the individual’s religious experience in the contemporary world.
Tadeusz Kornaś: Multiflaccopulo
Reviewing Szymon Kaczmarek’s play Gospels, Tadeusz Kornaś raises a number of doubts. He states that if the basis of the play is the Gospel according to St. John, then it ought to concern the most crucial and fundamental of matters. Of course, the director can put forward a new religious interpretation of the text, or present an informed blasphemy. This sort of strategy demands an in-depth, consistent, and thoughtful analysis of the text itself. According to Kornaś, none of these elements are to be found in the play.
Dorota Jarząbek: The People’s Republic. Memories for Sale
Dorota Jarząbek reviews Michał Zadara’s play Utopia Coming Right up at the Stary Theater in Krakow (premiere: 16 January 2010): a collage of texts by Paweł Demirski, songs from the 1980s, and the Book of the Polish Nation by Adam Mickiewicz. The author sees the performance as a symptom of theater’s tendency to return to the People’s Republic era. The story of rebellious youth is told through private biographies and childhood recollections. Jarząbek does wonder, however, if amid the abundant theatrical scaffolding the play says something real and sincere about this epoch now past.
Maryla Zielińska: The Bride
Maryla Zielińskareviews Federico Garcia Lorca’s Yerma, directed by Wojtek Klemm (Studio Theater in Warsaw, premiere 19 December 2009). Apart from a much-abridged version of Lorca’s text, Klemm uses fragments of works by Heiner Müller, texts from Internet forums about artificial insemination, and brochures for fertility restorers. The author notes further intertextual contexts, situating it against the backdrop of discussions on in vitro fertility and praise of anti-abortion regulations.
Dorota Semenowicz: A Niche Author
Dorota Semenowicz reports on a series of dramatic readings entitled Słowa’cki Collected Dramas (a project by Paweł Sztarbowski,organized by the Theater Institute). The aim of the project was to find a contemporary language for Słowacki’s dramas. Directors were asked not only to read the dramas, but to present concrete interpretive options in the form of a lecture. As the author stresses, most of the concepts pushed only the plot into the foreground, which is why she is critical in rating the project as a whole.
Anna R. Burzyńska: The Score of Fear
Fear of war, terrorism, banditry, ecological annihilation, illness... Anna R. Burzyńska’s review of Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat,directed by Jan Klata, based on a series of plays by Mark Ravenhill (premiere: 9 January 2010 at Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus). Taking into account the form of the dramatic cycle, its subject matter (current social themes), and the director’s strong political standpoint, the critic decides that Ravenhill was right in choosing Klata to direct the world premiere of his short dramas. “The desire to show the contemporary world in all its absurdity and chaos constantly clashes with the need to draw from tradition – as indicated, at any rate, by the titles of these plays, which allude to great works of literature, music, and film.”
Joanna Jopek: Notes from the Crisis
Ivo van Hove, showing a clear proclivity for the medium of film, has taken on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (Toneelgroep Amsterdam / Ruhrtriennale Bochum, premiere: 18 September 2009), creating a kind of remake in a different medium. Joanna Jopek interprets the play as a subversive parallel to xenophobia, and as a parallel to the myth of transformation in the context of ecstasy as a state of crisis.
The crisis touches every contemporary person. The Toneelgroep performance also unveils the disavowal of the ideas of the 1960s before they entered the mainstream.
Magdalena Stojowska: Leave the Childish 3D Leporelo on Stage
Magda Stojowska analyzes a play by Rimini Protokoll entitled Vùng biên gió'i, made for the Prague German-Language Theater Festival (premiere: 9 October 2009, Dresden; 2 November 2009, Prague). The project focuses on one of the few populous minorities in both Germany and in the Czech Republic: the Vietnamese. As usual for this German collective, this performances straddles the boundary between documentary and play: Vietnamese “experts” appear on stage to tell their private stories.
Anna R. Burzyńska: Totally Unmasked
In this report on the 15th edition of the Impulse Festival, held from 25 November-6 December 2009 in Rhineland, Anna R. Burzyńska describes selected projects: Boris Nikitin and Malte Scholz, the Gintersdorfer/Klaßen duo, and the Far A Day Cage group from Switzerland. The author points out that the festival presents experimental prototypes, and is thus a barometer of sorts for changes in German theater. She thus shows that we can no longer speak of plays, but more of commentaries to non-existent performances, drawing from biographical experiences, or works in progress on pieces that will never be made.
Alicja Binder: The Non-erotic Constant
The author analyzes a play by The Wooster Group directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, entitled Vieux Carré, based on a late play by Tennessee Williams (premiere: 16-24 November 2009). The Wooster Group finds contradictions in the play – one of Williams’s bolder texts, created in an autobiographical context – and pair it with the improvised films of Paul Morrisey. They also call attention to the Beckettian dimension of Williams’s work.
God’s Theater. Katarzyna Osińska speaks with Anatoli Vasilyev
During the “Grotowski. The Solitude of Theater” conference that took place in Krakow in March 2009, Katarzyna Osińska held a conversation with Anatoli Vasilyev. Grotowski was a mentor for the Russian researcher, influencing the way he read the Stanislavsky Method. Vasilyev also gives his own interpretation of the poor theater.
Dostoyevski – The Great Inquisitor – Theater. Ludwik Flaszen and Leszek Kolankiewicz in Conversation
Ludwik Flaszen and Leszek Kolankiewicz met on 8 December 2007 at the Jerzy Grotowski Institute in Wrocław for the “Great Inquisitor” project. This unique conversation tackles the key chapter of Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov in the context of the Laboratorium Theater.
Marek Waszkiel: Straw Puppet-Doll-Animated Form
In the latest part of a series devoted to the history of Polish puppetry after World War II, Straw Puppet-Doll-Animated Form, Marek Waszkiel focuses on the years from 1955-1962, which tend toward European puppetry. The author presents outlines of outstanding Polish puppeteers: Władysław Jarema from Krakow’s Groteska Theater, the creative tandem of Warsaw’s Lalka Theater: Jan Wilkowski and Adam Kilian, and the enfant terrible of Polish puppetry – Jan Dorman, creator of an anti-illusionist theater for children.
Katarzyna Fazan: Further on, Nothing…, or: The Art of Tadeusz Kantor and the Crisis of Representation
A review of Further on, Nothing. Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre by Michał Kobiałka. According to Katarzyna Fazan, the publication is “an attempt at complementarily grasping the artistic ideas and theatrical pieces of Tadeusz Kantor.” The author forges a vision of Kantor the postmodernist, who “destroyed representation to achieve reality,” creating “a work which, like a narrative of postmodern theory, proposes an examination of the past in an unfamiliar, unimaginable, incomplete, and fragmentary image.” As the reviewer writes, this perspective allows us to situate Kantor in the light of postmodern cultural phenomena and philosophical/artistic discussions, though it does simplify and iron out his portrait.