Krystyna Duniec, Joanna Krakowska: Didn’t They Mourn Them?

Krystyna Duniec and Joanna Krakowska provide insight into the Polish consciousness of the Jewish fate, and into the process of constructing a Polish identity after the Holocaust. The article points out that Polish memory and consciousness of the Holocaust have undergone transformations less political than psychological, ideological, and ethical. Using examples from literature, theater, and film from various time periods they demonstrate how memory has served various historical reckonings, while becoming a stable part of constructs of various Polish identities.

Grzegorz Niziołek: The Kitsch Effect. The Heritage of Grotowski and Swinarski in the Polish Theater

Grzegorz Niziołek analyzes the late plays of Jerzy Grotowski and Konrad Swinarski from the perspective of the “kitsch effect,” a notion borrowed from the writings of Hermann Broch – conceived as a forfeiture of critical powers and, simultaneously, an emotional closure to the reception of a theatrical presentation – and Roland Barthes’s concept of the myth. The author puts forward the following thesis: “the sheer power of such plays as Forefather’s Eve and The Liberation or The Constant Prince and Apocalypsis cum figuris disabled the Polish theater, stupified it, created fields of exaltation tied to the experience of mythic totality, fusing historical and religious images into one.” As such, theater served as a medium for incarnating, updating, and ritualizing collective and religious myths.

Monika Kwaśniewska: A Study on Absence: Ophelia, Gertrude, and Janulka vis-a-vis History, Myth and Politics in H. and in ...to Fizdejka’s Daughter, Directed by Jan Klata

Kwaśniewska analyzes two plays by Jan Klata in terms of the images of women they depict. Comparing various scenes with feminist analyses concerning the function of women in Polish national mythology, history, and in public and political life after 1989, she points out that “both plays [...] show that the transformation of 1989 and the accession to the European Union have not changed the fact that the history of Poland – recent history, too [...] has been annexed by men, it is a history from which women are gradually effaced [...] locked in the roles assigned them by tradition and the national mythology.”

Pierre Nora: Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire

Nora writes of the differences between memory and history. Memory “undergoes constant evolution, it is open to a dialect of recalling and forgetting […] prone to manipulation and usurpation […] it is collective and internally diversified, and yet individual.” History, in turn, “is a problematic and always partial reconstruction of what no longer exists […] it belongs to everyone and no one, which is why it claims to possess a timeless authority.” Nora analyzes the dynamics and causes of the changes in relationships between memory, history, and the nation. As a result of these metamorphoses: “What we today call memory is no longer so – it is history.” The titular lieux de memoire, memory sites conceived in various ways, that emerge through the game between memory and history, are a response to a sense of being torn from the past, the impression that memory has been destroyed.

Marianne Hirsch: The Post-memory Generation

Marianne Hirsch defines and describes the notion of post-memory, which is central to humanist and philosophical research into the memory of the Holocaust, and applicable in wider research into the subject of memory. Hirsch differentiates between the concepts of memory and post-memory, writing: “Post-memory should not be identified with memory: it takes place ‘post,’ but retains a similar power of effect.” She also describes the process by which the second generation’s attitude to the Holocaust has taken shape, addressing the issue of traumatic separation and the return of the structures of social memory through their “incorporation into individual and familial forms of mediation and of artistic expression with wide repercussions.” Hirsch also writes of the role that photography has played here.

Agata Siwiak: “Ms Bausch, you are not worth a single mark we paid for you!”

Another text for Didaskalia addressing the situation of cultural institutions – mainly the repertory theaters in Poland. Siwiak’s point of departure is the thesis that the Polish Culture Congress of 2009 “revealed the incapability of Polish cultural policy and the lack of communication between the cultural and the political/bureaucratic environments.” The author proves that Jerzy Hausner’s reform, which was the subject of harsh attacks from cultural circles, featured many innovative and advantageous postulates. She then analyzes the financial and personnel situation in Polish theaters, describes the situation of “freelancers,” and indicates changes essential for the reform – some of which are missing from Hausner’s plan.

Piotr Olkusz: The Expelled

A review of Waiting Room.0 directed by Krystian Lupa (premiere: June 2011, Vidy-Lausanne Theater, Switzerland). Piotr Olkusz notes Lupa’s conscious formal tactics by which he plays various games with the audience’s habits of perception. They allow him to create variations on the theme of a borderline between two worlds: the theater and reality. As such, the director does not rest at showing his protagonists as expelled from social reality, but presents them as people beyond all linguistic or symbolic representation.

No Mandatory Perspective – Piotr Olkusz speaks with Krystian Lupa

Krystian Lupa reveals the source of his interest in Lars Norén’s text Personkrets 3:1, which inspired the script of his present play. The director also explains how his work in the theater helped him to better understand the essence of the novel. He outlines the specifics of the rehearsals and preparations for the play, and explains why he decided upon such radical tactics when it came to its final shape.

Waldemar Wasztyl: Making Graffiti at Night

A review of Krystian Lupa’s Waiting Room.0, performed at the Polski Theater in Wrocław (premiere: 8 September 2011). Wasztyl compares Waiting Room.0 to other plays by Lupa – he sees it as an extension of the ideas Lupa applied in Factory 2, for instance. Commenting on the fact that the premiere took place during the European Culture Congress, he notes that the diagnosis of the impotence of civilization the play presents splendidly played off the issues discussed at the meetings.

Grzegorz Niziołek: After the Outing to “Oświęcim”

Grzegorz Niziołek asserts that Krystian Lupa’s latest play is the polar opposite of his Factory 2. Inasmuch as the previous play was a radical departure from Jungian myth, allowing him to extract dark forces lurking within, in Waiting Room.0 he returns to it. Niziołek does note, however, that this myth does not return in the form familiar from Lupa’s earlier plays, as invigorating chaos, but in the form of aggressive resentment. This is why Lupa’s play is difficult to digest, and its intentions are to some extent hidden from the audience.

Paweł Schreiber: Landscape after the Party

Anger, aggression, “the frustrations of a man life in times of great change,” rapaciousness, background techno, barely audible yet still drowning out voices, the play of lights accentuating the mystery of the space... All this is to be found in the new play by Dutch director Ivo van Hove – Russians! (premiere: 19 June 2011, Toneelgroep Amsterdam). The play was born through the combination of two Chekov plays: Platonov and Ivanov. The author notes that van Hove interprets the works of the Russian playwright in an innovative fashion, demonstrating how timely the issues are, and finding a portrait of the modern man in the 19th-century figures.

A Modern Chekov – Paweł Schreiber speaks with Ivo van Hove

Paweł Schreiber’s interview with Ivo van Hove on his latest play, Russians! The director explores the subject of the Western-European perception of Chekov and the modernity of his works, which, according to van Hove, also concern the crisis of the modern world. Van Hove feels that, much like Chekov’s protagonists, “we are in a transitional period.” Speaking of his work on his latest production, van Hove outlines all of his work for the theater.

Friederike Felbeck: Your Duty Is to Perceive the Reality

A review of the play Ludwig II, based on the film by Luchino Visconti, directed by Ivo van Hove (premiere: 3 March 2011, Münchner Kammerspiele). The play tells the life story of the famous Bavarian “king of hearts” – Ludwig II – a homosexual enamoured with Wagner, who funded many famous buildings, was declared mentally ill, and was dethroned; he drowned in 1886 in vague circumstances. The play chiefly concentrates on the conflict “between the socio-political function and the personal/artistic idealism of the king,” and dusts off the myth of the “king of hearts.” In Felbeck’s view, the performance is less bold than Visconti’s film, because it avoids many troublesome issues and poses no uncomfortable questions.

Małgorzata Dziewulska: “Yellow Submarine” as a Mass Song

The author describes two performances by Frank Castorf, presented during the Dramatyczny Theater festival in Warsaw – The Negro’s Struggle with Europe (17-19 June 2011) – placing them in the context of the Polish reception of the German director’s work, which has been very popular and inspiring, but which has also provoked numerous controversies and misunderstandings. Dziewulska shows shifts in Castorf’s aesthetics, as demonstrated by the plays invited to the festival: He Who Says “Yes.” He Who Says “No” and Lehrstück. The author opines that the political appeal and outspokenness of Castorf’s work has remained intact.

Katarzyna Fazan: PQ 2011 – A Picture of Transformations/The Transformation of Pictures

A report from this year’s Quadriennale in Prague – a world expo of scenography and theater costumes. Fazan chiefly addresses a change in the point of departure in the very notion of scenography. This change comes from the fact that the visual shape of the stage is increasingly a complex construct of forms achieved in various ways. This is why Boris Kudlička, the curator of this year’s Prague exhibition, has put forward interactive spaces, showing scenography as a field that borders on various arts. The Quadriennale shows that scenography today is a self-sufficient installation, whose material execution has its narrative and dramaturgy.

A Scenographer Looks into the Window. Anna R. Burzyńska speaks with Jan Pappelbaum and Ute Müller-Tischler

This conversation is an abridged transcript of a meeting that took place at the Manggha Museum of Art and Technology in Krakow to accompany the Jan Pappelbaum – Set Designs exhibition (curator: Ute Müller-Tischler) organized by Theater der Zeit publishers and Krakow’s Goethe-Institut. The interlocutors sketch out a map of contemporary German scenography, speaking of its ties to today’s urban architecture and theater, the realistic and surrealist elements in Pappelbaum’s work, about his cooperation with directors, and the inspiration he takes from dramatic texts.

Tadeusz Kornaś: In Tauris on the Gełczew

A review of the play Iphigenia in T... directed by Włodzimierz Staniewski (Gardzienice Theater Center, premiere: 24 June 2011). The play is a continuation and a counterpoint to the previous Gardzienice play Iphigenia in A.... The new performance uses visual tactics that are new for Staniewski, creating disarming and stimulating contexts: it transforms an ancient tragedy of fate into a modern-day political commentary on Polish social reality, forcing the viewers to see the residents of Tauris in themselves.

Żelisław Żelisławski: Three Looks into the Past

A review of three plays by Michał Zadara: The Great Gatsby (Polski Theater in Bydgoszcz, premiere: 4 June 2011) The Warsaw Conflict. Washington – Moscow – London (Warsaw Uprising Museum in Warsaw, premiere: 1 August 2011) and 1666 (Żydowski Theater in Warsaw, premiere: 27 August 2011). Żelisławski describes and analyzes the three premieres in turn. Though the author makes no attempt to compare the plays, his text indicates the key principles of composition of the worlds presented in each of them, which allows him to find points of similarity between Zadara’s presentations, and to tease out new tactics in the director’s work.

Joanna Walaszek: Play Theater
A review of a play by Paweł Miśkiewicz, performed at the Stary Theater in Krakow –Anton Chekov’s The Seagull (premiere: 4 June 2011). “Theater is the subject of the Krakow Seagull, and the subject of the actors’ games with the viewers,” Walaszek writes in her first sentence. She then analyzes the levels and forms of this meta-theatricality: from the starlet acting crossed with the delicate, yet trashy expression of Nina – Małgorzata Hajewska-Krzysztofik – through fluid acting that straddles characters and actors, and the presentation of new acting conventions, to games with the audience. To sum up, the author compares the play to the most recent season at the Stary Theater – to her mind, a very weak one.

Paweł Schreiber: Charge

A review of Jan Klata’s Chevau-légers based on Artur Pałyga’s text (premiere: 29 November 2011, Polski Theater in Bydgoszcz). Schreiber underscores the spectacular aspect of Klata’s play – he splendidly executes the scenes of the various races, with energetic live music, phenomenal costumes, and breathtaking set design. He also points out the humor skillfully wound into the play. However, in the reviewer’s opinion these strengths do not offset the play’s drawbacks, among which the most important are the simplified analogy between the speedway riders and cheveau-legers, and the over-literalness of the play on the whole.

Monika Kwaśniewska: Hey, Hey! Where Are We in Geography?

A review of the play In the Desert and on the Plains. From Sienkiewicz and Others, directed by Bartek Frąckowiak (premiere: 11 June 2011, Dramatyczny Theater in Wałbrzych). Kwaśniewska notes that scriptwriters Weronika Szczawińska and Frąckowiak “precisely and critically read Sienkiewicz’s novel. They matched every subject with commentaries from the press [...], novels [...], and theoretical texts.” This was how they created a play with a palimpsest structure, in which we can isolate two main strands: “one global, tying Sienkiewicz’s novel into colonial narratives, Europe’s strategies of discriminating against and dominating Africa [...] and the local one [...], which finds Polish colonial phantasms in In the Desert and on the Plains.”

 

Jakub Papuczys: Grappling with Artaud

A review of Artaud. A Doppleganger and His Theater, directed by Paweł Passini (premiere: 11 May 2011, Studio Theater in Warsaw). In his latest play, Passini has decided to stage a kind of mad Artaudian dream. The figure of the French artist is presented from various perspectives, in a way that makes his philosophical visions and real life blend into one. The director is careful not to succumb entirely to Artaud’s vision, ironically distancing himself from his most radical concepts, cautioning that excess phantasm can turn the Theater of Cruelty into a laughable caricature or a naively ritualistic sort of theater.

Ewa Guderian-Czaplińska: [kw?r]

A text describing and analyzing two projects for the Theater Institute conceived and directed by Marta Górnicka – [kw?r ?v w?m’?n]. The author analyzes the choral form of the play created with amateurs on the basis of a script compiled from very disparate texts – from the Bible to advertising slogans. The plays focus on women’s predicament in culture, though in Guderian-Czaplińska’s view they do not depart from the social norm, and are in no way transgressive or provocative. They do show, however, how to mess around with the social division of voices without straying past the borders of the theater.

Agnieszka Rataj: In the Shadow of Maturing Daughters

A review of the play Daughters, directed by Małgorzata Głuchowska, based on Zofia Nałkowska’s Diaries and fragments of texts by other authors (premiere: 18 February 2011, Dramatyczny Theater in Warsaw). As Rataj notes, Daughters is made in the spirit of the original Young-Poland-era cabarets, though the director has departed from the “gender roles” that reigned at the time, and has pushed women into the foreground. Consequently, Głuchowska “has managed to create a play as complex as a box filled with surprises. […] Gently witty and subversive toward the fin de siècle climate, and yet all the while deeply charmed by it.”

Łukasz Grabuś: Catching the Wind in the Pines

This text, paired with Joanna Braun’s, makes for an interesting dialogue on the Warsaw opera Matsukaze with music by Tosho Hosokawa and choreography by Sasha Waltz, based on a play by Zeami (premiere: 31 May 2011, Wielki Theater – National Opera in Warsaw). Grabuś particularly turns her attention to the diverse cultural backgrounds of the performance’s creators, which creatively complement one another, having a positive effect on the final form of the opera, and also on the fascinating relationships between the sound, music, and movements of the dancers.

Joanna Braun: The Hereafter of Sasha Waltz

Joanna Braun reviews Matsukaze directed by Sasha Waltz (premiere: 31 May 2011, Wielki Theater – National Opera in Warsaw). Sea, salt, night, dance, and dawn are the five concepts the author names as providing the harmony and order for the play. In Braun’s opinion, the ideal of the arts operates on the senses, allowing us not only to see and hear the story presented, but also to sense it.

Jolanta Łada: Tannhäuser: Between Dionysus and Apollo

A review of the opera Tannhäuser and the Warburg Singing Tournament, directed by Sebastian Baumgarten (premiere: 25 July 2011, Richard Wagner Festspiele, Bayreuth). The reviewer believes that the director was inspired by Nietzsche’s philosophy in this staging of Richard Wagner’s opera – primarily his concept of the two dimensions of art: Dionysian and Apollonian. Baumgarten strips Wagner’s work of its medieval setting. The Apollonian side is shown through a three-level installation recalling a factory hall, while Venus’s Kingdom, representing the Dionysian sphere, is set in the subterranean part of the space.

Żelisław Żelisławski: Those Excluded from the Culture of Victims

Żelisławski analyzes plays presented during the Poznań Maltafestival (4-9 July 2011) in the context of the various aspects of the main theme: “Excluded.” He particularly focuses on three productions: After the Battle by Pippo Delbono, It is Hard to Be a God by Kornél Mandruczó, and Prometheus Landscape II by Jan Fabre, whose performances and aesthetics show different dimensions of exclusion in a variety of ways.

Jadwiga Majewska: The Sum of Certainties Is the Unknown. Or: A Daring Attempt to Philosophize in Dance

Gilles Jobin’s A­+B=X, shown to Polish audiences during the Maltafestival in Poznań (4-9 July 2011), is the author’s point of departure for reflections on how far it is possible to express a philosophy on the state of the body’s consciousness in the post-modern world through dance.

Tobiasz Papuczys: A Festival of Process

A report from the first edition of the International Theater Schools Meet (6-11 May 2011, Wrocław), an initiative of the Grotowski Institute, taking place in the recently opened Studio na Grobli. The invited participants, representing schools from Paris, London, New York, Moscow, Murcia, and Wrocław, took part in workshops and presented their own performances, which, along with the practical exercises, showed diverse methods of adapting texts, and various acting techniques.

Monika Muskała: Greenland Is Everywhere

A report on the Wiener Festwochen (13 May–19 June 2011), whose main theme was “ends of the world.” The author devotes special attention to a few plays: + ? 0. Ein subpolares Basislager by Christoph Marthaler, Mission by David Van Reybrouck, Bodenprobe Kasachstan by Stefan Kaegi and Rimini Protokoll, The Far Side of the Moon by Robert Lepage, and Wastwater by Simon Stephens. Each takes up the notion of “the end of the world” in a different manner, rendering different meanings of the phrase, whether geographic, cultural, or mental.

Friederike Felbeck: Those Hotentot Eyes!

Friederike Felbeck notes that this year’s Theatertreffen in Berlin (6-23 May 2011) reflected the German theater’s sharp divide into two clear camps: the subsidized state and city theaters and the aesthetically different independent scene. This year’s extraordinarily diverse program included costly co-productions like Christoph Schlingensief Via Intolleranza II, the performance art projects of the She She Pop group, and performances like Mad Blood, produced in the Ballhaus Naunynstrasse center in Kreuzberg. Felbeck observes that an important theme in this year’s festival was the changing political, economical, and demographic situation of the increasingly ethnically diversified modern-day Germany.

Thomas Irmer: The Depression Drive

A review of the play Diamonds Are Coal Put to Work directed by Wojtek Klemm at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin (premiere: 19 May 2011). Because Paweł Demirski’s text is a modern take on Uncle Vanya, Irmer first considers the phenomenon of the popularity of paraphrases on Chekov’s dramas. He then describes Klemm’s work, pointing out the changes the director had to make to the text to make it legible to the German viewer. In sum, he states: “From a German point of view, this is a very vivid tale of how the victims of the transformation lose the capacity to stand once more on their own two legs.”

Magdalena Talar: Vigil

Magdalena Talar describes a project to read James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake out loud in Chartreuse – the national center of dramaturgical and theatrical research in Villeneuve lez Avignon (12-14 May 2011). The author begins her text with some characteristics of the novel: drawing on texts by Umberto Eco and Marek Kędzierski, she describes its poetics and calls it a proto-hypertext. She then describes the project – “A marathon of reading out loud, transmitted live on the Internet” – in which she herself took part, paying special attention to the physical dimension of the 36-hour, 25-minute, and 41-second-long experience.

Natalia Orkisz: Around Our Global Table

A review of the play Diciembre by Guillermo Caldéron (both the director and the author of the play), which the author of the article had the chance to see at the Under the Radar Festival in New York in January 2011. The performance is an interesting combination of classical dramatic form (unity of time, place, and action) and lively everyday language and problems encountered by modern-day Chileans. Caldéron retains the local context while treating the war – the main theme of Diciembre – in a universal fashion, as a clash between two extreme ideological world views, and as the clash between male and female realities.

Łucja Iwanczewska: Metaphor with a Key, Key with a Metaphor

A review of Jarosław Fazan’s book From Metaphor to Delusion. An Attempted Patography of Tadeusz Peiper. Łucja Iwanczewska stresses the value of Jarosław Fazan’s book for research on Tadeusz Peiper’s work to date. According to the critic, Fazan uses various interdisciplinary analytic tools to observe the subject created by the artist as a psychotic one whose fundamental existential and artistic strategy is metaphor, conceived in a particular way – as a manner of experiencing the world that involves constantly linking extraordinary and seemingly unconnected things.

Anna R. Burzyńska: A Moment of Anarchy

A review of Georges Didi-Hüberman’s L'oeil de l'histoire: Tome 1, Quand les images prennent position, a dazzling analysis of selected reproductions of pages from albums by Bertolt Brecht that are little known to Polish readers. This is not only a valuable source book that enriches the modest Polish-language literature on Brecht, it is above all extraordinarily interesting material that serves Hüberman’s insightful descriptions of the montage technique as a tool for the deconstruction of historical narrative, which is subject to political pressures and succumbs to the tendency of mythification.

Justyna Gajek: Phantasms

A review of Łucja Iwanczewska’s Self-presentation. Sade and Witkacy. Gajek observes that the “point of departure for considering the works of the artists named in the title” is the figure of the psychotic. Iwanczewska draws from Schreber to create a precise description of the psychotic formation of the world, which she uses in analyzing the works of Sade and Witkacy. Meanwhile, the most crucial concept Iwanczewska applies is that of the phantasm. This book is neither a coherent vision of the works, nor a monograph precisely, but was composed “with the psychotic creation of reality in mind, and is the fruit of the insightful collection of phantasms.”

Diana Poskuta-Włodek: A (Probably) Possible Zelwer

The author of the text describes Barbara Osterloff’s two-volume work devoted to Andrzej Zelwerowicz, the fruit of many years of scrupulous investigation and thorough research of extensive source materials. This book also reflects modern tendencies in biography writing – the critic notes that this book attempts to use both classical and presently fashionable research tools. The detailed personal biography of Zelwerowicz has been supplemented by an insightful presentation of the professional career of this outstanding realistic actor and skilled organizer of theatrical life in Poland.