Maryla Zielińska: Confusion and the Beacon of History
A review of the play The Affair based on Samuel Zborowski, directed by Jerzy Jarocki at the National Theater (premiere: 17 September 2011). In Jarocki’s latest play Maryla Zielińska sees irritation and dissent toward an understanding of revolt and the right to freedom that disintegrates the community in the act of preserving the “I.” Jarocki suggests reflection and affirmative reconciliation with the world. Thus his play contests the views expressed in Rymkiewicz’s most recent book, discarding his pessimistic view of history in favor of the power and might of human reasoning. 

 

“Forefathers’ Eve” on Krakowskie Przedmieście – Monika Kwaśniewska speaks with Maja Kleczewska
Maja Kleczewska speaks about her performance event at the Jan Kochanowski theater in Opole – Forefathers’ Eve (premiere: 30 September 2011). The director explains why she is staging Adam Mickiewicz’s drama in such a sketchy form, with only a four-day rehearsal period to prepare. She declares that she was inspired for the project by thoughts on the Polish national community, and by extension, also the vitality of Forefathers’ Eve in the context of Smoleńsk and the events on Krakowskie Przedmieście Street in Warsaw. Kleczewska presents her original and very contemporary interpretations of Konrad’s Great Improvisation, the Vision of Father Piotr, and the Vision of Ewa; she also focuses on the figure of Rollison, who, though absent, is to her mind key to the work.   

My Style Need Not Be a Style – an Interview with Alvis Hermanis
Julia Kluzowicz speaks with Alvis Hermanis on his individual style and work methods. The Latvian director has departed from creating plays based on “real history” (as in Long Life, Sound of Silence, Latvian Tales). His latest projects (Platonov in Vienna and Oblomov in Köln and Riga) are based on text, and see him returning to the concept of hyper-realism. Hermanis cannot be unambiguously shelved with any single theater movement. As he himself says: “I prefer to do things knowing that I don’t know how they’re done. If I know how to do something, then there’s no real work or passion.”

 

Katarzyna Targońska: A Sense of Reality
Katarzyna Targońska analyzes the creative path of Alvis Hermanis from the moment he took on the New Theater in Riga in 1992. She describes his artistic development, indicating the typical subject matter and work methods that go to create his original style. She takes a close look at Hermanis’s method with actors, involving both collective and independent work. The author shows this to be a decisive factor in the success of his plays, in which fiction and reality constantly intersect, as do collective history and individual memory, thus exploding firm aesthetic frameworks and theatrical categories. 

 

Latvian Lives – Interviews with Actors from the Jaunais Rigas Teatris
Julia Kluzowicz and Katarzyna Targońska hold a series of interviews about work on Latvian Tales directed by Alvis Hermanis. The actors’ task was to find an ancestor of their future character among anonymous people. Based on stories taken “from the street” of the eighteen pedestrians they created stories which went on to become part of the play. Latvian Tales can be seen as Hermanis’s attempt to create a poetic reality show. Humorous descriptions of conversations with the “ancestors” are interwoven with reflections on methods of working on the roles and the use of a new theatrical language. The “ancestors” themselves take part in some of the interviews.

 

Julia Kluzowicz: Platonov by Hermanis – Notes from Rehearsals
Julia Kluzowicz describes rehearsals from Platonov, based on Anton Chekov’s drama, directed by Alvis Hermanis at the Burgtheater in Vienna (premiere: 7 May 2011). The text includes a description of Hermanis’s premises on how to avoid either modernizing or interpreting Chekov’s drama, in the interest of merely performing it, in line with the director’s aim to create “hyper-realism.” The author leads the reader through the various stages of the performance’s creation, and ways in which Hermanis works with actors, which involves a great deal of improvisation and conversation, and requires courage and creativity from the actors. In addition to the actors’ descriptions and reflections, the text includes numerous never-before-published statements by the director. 

Don’t Search for Metaphors, You’ll Destroy the Text – Małgorzata Bartula speaks with René Pollesch
René Pollesch speaks of both the artistic and institutional aspects of his work in the theater. He problematizes his relationships with actors, whom he tries to ensure “decent work conditions” as well as intellectual material. Along the way, he ironically comments on the director’s position in the modern so-called “actors’ theater” and the personal and sexual arrangements that reign in the theaters. The director and dramaturg also explains the role of text and theory in his productions and why he does not make classical dramas. To conclude, he comments on his media image with a heavy dose of distance.

 

René Pollesch: In Praise of the Old Lithuanian Director’s Assistant in the Gray Smock
Pollesch’s essay uses the figure of the Old Lithuanian Director’s Assistant in the Gray Smock to critique the currently obliging type of acting and use of theatrical narrative. This figure of Pollesch’s, who tells no story and does not meddle in artificially imposed and constructed narrative schemes (which Pollesch calls “meta-narratives”) becomes perfectly unexpressed. Paradoxically, through such “non-expression,” through discarding all the heroic “meta-narratives,” the actor or director comes closer to presenting the truth about the reality outside the theater.

Stephen Greenblatt: Cultural Mobility – An Introduction
In the introduction to his book of essays Cultural Mobility, Stephen Greenblatt diagnoses past and present work on the cultural transfer of the title. He analyzes two models for understanding this term: the first developed by historians and ideologists (Persia-Greece-Rome-young European countries) and the second, created by theologians (the Catholic Church, heir to Rome in the intermediated transfer). The author also introduces what he sees as the missing element of this research, i.e. contingentia, the presumption that the world could be different – and thus he brings fate and accident into the field of research.

 

Stephen Greenblatt: A Manifesto on Cultural Mobility Research
A manifesto in which Stephen Greenblatt lists the five basic rules of research on cultural mobility. Mobility, in his opinion, should be understood utterly literally (and thus take into account directly determining movement in a literal sense), and research into it should throw light on both outward and the hidden translocation of people, objects, pictures, texts, and ideas; it should identify and analyze “zones of contact” in which exchanges of cultural goods are made; it should present the tension between an individual subject and structural restrictions; it must analyze feelings of rootedness.
  
Małgorzata Sugiera: Dramatic Genres and Cultural Mobility
Małgorzata Sugiera’s text takes its point of departure from the notion of theater, drama, and literary genres that have been around since the latter half of the 20th century. Describing various theories behind these new structures and definitions of various genres of poetics, Sugiera indicates that all attempts to depart from the impasse have been insufficient. She shows this problem in the wider context of cultural research and the process of cultural translocation, which never occurs in a simple, bilateral way, but is composed of a network of discreet, interacting elements and their transferal in the sphere various cultures. This is why, for instance, the television program Why Me shows the applicability and inspiring power of Stephen Greenblatt’s concept of cultural mobility, which takes into account interacting and synchronous cultural and social forces. 

Katarzyna Fazan: The Incarnation of the Rejected Fetish. Roee Rosen / Justine Frank: To Live and to Die in Someone Else’s Name
An article inspired by an exhibition of Roee Rosen’s work at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Warsaw (The Dynamic Dead Roee Rosen, 21 April-03 July 2011). Fazan analyzes one part of the installation presented in Warsaw, concerning Justine Frank – an artist from the early 20th century created by Rosen. The author describes and analyzes the various elements of the deception: the artist’s biography, her work, and her novel. Rosen signed the texts on her work with his own name, or with the name of an art critic he created. Ultimately, he states: “In the Justine Frank 1900-1943 project, which was spread out over time and composed of innovative works, Rosen decided to understand himself as someone else – a creator and self-annihilator, to experience the death of the author, to consign his work to the past.”

 

Joanna Jopek: Alias aka Alias
The author describes this year’s Photomonth in Krakow (13 May-12 June 2011). She points out the distinctiveness of this edition from those previous, which were, above all, “traditional” photography exhibitions. This time round, the curators decided upon a conceptual approach to the event, asking twenty-two writers to invent biographies of fictional artists, and twenty-three photography artists to execute the fictional works from the texts. This idea not only gave a breath of fresh air to the festival, but also served as a basis for considering issues of post-modern identity, the free movement between creation and authenticity, and the fluid boundaries between staging and reality.

Piotr Kosiewski: Nothing Innocent about the Gaze.
Piotr Kosiewski describes the latest exhibition of Karol Radziszewski’s work. He pays special attention to the double-edged title – Backstage – which should lead the viewers to the wings of the creative process, into the artist’s workshop. Karol Radziszewski, however, draws from the tradition of the 1960s neo-avant-garde, playing a subversive game with the viewer, blurring the position of the subject in art. The viewer him/herself becomes the subject and object of the art. This is why the viewing process itself is an important element in Radziszewski’s art.

 

I Have Set Many Traps for the Viewer – Piotr Kosiewski speaks with Karol Radziszewski
Karol Radziszewski speaks of the function the arts workshop plays in his work and ideas. He also reveals the premises of Backstage, involving a discussion of the stereotypical images of the artist and the creative act. He explains what “dressing the body in art” means to him, and the significance the viewing process – staring at the work of art.

Stories of Zina and Her Children – Joanna Turowicz speaks with the creators of Stories of Zina.
A conversation about the play Stories of Zina, based on stories of Chechen women living as refugees in Poland. The conversation concerns issues of the female experience of war and exile, documentary theater as a forum for the excluded, and the identity of the second generation of refugees from the Caucasus. The actresses speak of the creation of the play, the building of the theatrical narrative on the basis of true stories, and the aim of the play, which is to break down social stereotypes concerning refugees.

Anna R. Burzyńska: The Foyer of Reality
An analysis of Prologue, a project by Wojtek Ziemilski, whose premiere took place during the Krakow Theatrical Reminiscences Festival (6 October 2011). Describing the three parts of Prologue in detail, in the center of which viewers are guided by the Voice of the Prologue through headphones, Burzyńska claims: “Ziemilski’s extraordinarily precise, conceptual play/installation is a kind of socio-philosophical experiment.” As the author notes, Ziemilski’s anti-theater is based on a “faith in the power of the theater to be able to alter the audience’s consciousness.” The result of this experiment depends on the participants’ involvement – we should see it as the source of transformation, because “art can only be a prologue to change.”  

 

Magdalena Hasiuk: A Constellation of Sleepwalkers
A review of Eugenio Barba’s play The Chronic Life (premiere: 13 October 2011, Jerzy Grotowski Institute in Wrocław) dedicated to Anna Politkovska and Natalia Estemirova – Russian journalists murdered by unknown assailants.
Precisely describing the various parts of the play, which she follows Nando Taviani in describing as “imagination in action,” Hasiuk states that “The Chronic Life is a performance about human fate, about individual decisions and the tides of history […]. But also about a Europe of somnambulists and blind men sowing destruction […]; about dirty money used to buy people’s death; […] about the lack of forgiveness, understanding, and compassion. […] This diagnosis of Europe is unsettling to say the least.”

 

Katarzyna Lemańska: Of the Femme Fatale, or: How to Be Unloved
“Him, her and volksdeutsch, a well-aimed slap, a killing. Or maybe in a different order? Szczawińska builds a story from elliptical sentences, scraps of statements, fragmentary thoughts,” writes Katarzyna Lemańska in reviewing the Koszaliń play How to Be Loved (premiere: 8 October 2011). Weronika Szczawińska uses fragments of stories by Kazimierz Brandys and a film by Wojciech Jerzy Has to create a theatrical palimpsest about memory and the search for one’s own place in history. The characters struggle with the material of language, going “beyond the well-worn patterns of remembering, speaking, and naming.” The two protagonists, Ms Felicja and her alter ego – Ms Fatale – recreate a tale of their unfortunate love from the years of the occupation. Past and future blend into one.

 

Paweł Schreiber: Waiting for a Galilean
In Paweł Schreiber’s analysis the latest play from the Gnieźno Aleksander Fredro Theater entitled The Undivine Comedy. A Piece on the Cross (premiere: 17 September 2011) is a straightforward reading of Krasiński’s drama. The sometimes obvious modernization of the text is saved by the interesting set design ideas. The director, Piotr Kruszczyński, has abridged the text of the drama to make room for hallucinatory music and movement, which serve as the axis of the festival. The critic focuses on the emergence of new places on the theater map of Poland, and on the political parallels between Krasiński’s times and today’s, when people keep repeating the same mistakes.

 

Monika Kwaśniewska: Midwife Economics
A review of The Midwife Hospital of St. Zofia by Paweł Demirski (text) and Monika Strzępka (director) created at the Rozrywka Theater in Chorzów (premiere: 17 September 2011). Kwaśniewska notes that one of the basic conflicts of the play is the clash of the institutional dimension of birth and parenthood (the privatization of hospitals, the “Give Birth Humanely” project, nurse strikes) and their personal dimension. The motif that links these spheres is economics, whose principles cross into the most intimate spheres of life. The author claims that the accumulation of too many plots reduces the play to “banal stereotypes, in which it is hard to find the ironic or grotesque cracks.”

 

Jakub Papuczys: History Written on the Body
Papuczys builds an interpretation of Wiktor Rubin’s latest play – Joanna the Mad; The Queen (premiere: 16 September 2011, Żeromski Theater in Kielce) – based on its mechanisms revealing the functions of a “traditionally” conceived historical narrative. The reviewer believes that Rubin and the drama’s author, Jolanta Janiczak, attempt to retell Joanna of Castile’s story by looking at her body. Their performance shows Joanna through her body, which was a tool of various political games and intrigues. The creators show that avoiding the portrayal of corporeality and emotions in the past distorts our picture of history, and serves various manipulations.

 

Marta Bryś: I’m Not Really Feeling This, I’m Just Earning My Salary
Marta Bryś notes that in Jackson Pollesch staged at the Rozmaitości Theater in Warsaw (premiere: 17 September 2011) René Pollesch looks at theater from an actors’ perspective, and sees an element of the economic system that functions like every corporation in a liberal, capitalist social order. In the reviewer’s opinion, however, this play is unlike Pollesch’s previous works, in that it stops short at farcical mockery, and offers no insightful analyses or provocative theses.

 

Waldemar Wasztyl: Guests at the Lord’s Supper
A review of Brand. City. The Chosen Ones based on a drama by Henryk Ibsen, directed by Michał Borczuch at the Stary Theater in Krakow (premiere: 24 September 2011). In his very precise description and analysis of the various scenes and plots in the play, Wasztyl states: “The effects Borczuch uses to build his City do not move our emotions. They work on a different basis […]. The images are produced very precisely and linger in the memory. The staging respects the viewer’s intelligence. A reluctance to emote does not mean, however, that the ensemble shrinks from a brave sort of discussion.” For, in the author’s opinion: “The sight of the faithful fleeing from the phantom of a beautiful church frightens Polish Catholics.”

Grzegorz Niziołek: The Two Festivals of Krystyna Meissner
In this report from the 6th International Dialog Theater Festival (Wrocław 7-15 October 2011) Grzegorz Niziołek puts forward the thesis that Krystyna Meissner presented two festivals of differing artistic quality under a single heading. The author wittily differentiates the run-of-the-mill plays from the more refined weekend performances. In the first section he describes and analyzes plays by Romeo Castellucci, Alain Platel, Ivo van Hove, and Krystian Lupa, which were the source of great interest and lively audience response. In the second part he critically comments upon the performances presented during the week, which “to a greater or lesser degree” used “received conventions.”

 

Agnieszka Marszałek: Quod libet
A review of the Krakow Theatrical Reminisces Festival (6-12 October 2011). The author notes: “The program put forward by the organizers testifies to our epoch of diversity. […] Dance and drama, improvisation and carefully developed scripts. Empty stages and rich set design. Altogether it made for an interesting collage.” She then provides in-depth descriptions and analyses of a few selected plays: Quizoola! byForced Entertainment, Jan Klata’s America, and Alvis Hermanis’s Oblomov.

 

Magdalena Talar: Closed Circulation
Magdalena Talar’s review of Trickster – a performance program to accompany the European Culture Congress, which took place from 8-11 September 2011 in Wrocław. The catchphrase for the range of plays selected by Agata Siwiak was the trickster of the title. The author analyzes in detail works by Mirosław Bałka, Oskar Dawicki, and Massimo Furlan, showing the multiplicity of forms that the archetypal figure of the trickster can adopt, and the methods he uses to turn attention to the issues he raises.  

Thomas Irmer: More Art, More Fun, More Truth, But No Declarations, Please
A portrait of Herbert Fritsch – a famous and admired sixty-something actor who, during the period of crisis in the theater where he worked – the Volksbühne – decided to become a director. Irmer outlines his path – from provincial theaters to Berlin’s largest stages, crowned by his play for this year’s Theatertreffen. Using the example of Spanish Fly (premiere: 20 June 2011, Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz) the author outlines his style, which uses ostentatious theatricality, artificiality, and farce. Fritsch, according to Irmer, “has found a niche of pure comedy, proto-comedy,” which was marginalized in German culture during the political shift. As such, “what Fritsch does is [...] a reflection on the present status quo.”     

 

Friederike Felbeck: The Catastrophe Bookmaker
Friederike Felbeck has a look at Elfriede Jelinek’s most recent dramas from the point of view of their performances during the last theatrical season in Germany. She analyzes various approaches to and methods of bringing the author to the stage which, in the critic’s view, have been alternately unsuccessful, and bold, innovative, and fascinating. The second category, Felbeck believes, includes the Work/ On the Bus/ Collapse triptych performed at the Kolner Schauspielhaus by Karin Beier.

 

Magda Stojowska: Come on – Grow up!
A review of the latest Gob Squad play – Before Your Very Eyes (premiere in Berlin in April 2011). Stojowska describes the play, in which the children brought together “experience” the various stages of their life to come – from the teenage years, through the forties, until they are elderly people dying before the audience’s eyes. Though the author has certain reservations concerning the conclusion, she is very appreciative of the idea and the actors’ performances.

 

Grzegorz Stępniak: In Doing Science, You Become God
A text devoted to Jesus Rodríguez – the most well-known performer and artist in Mexico. Her work is quite multi-faceted: “Apart from directing, writing for theater, playing on stage, and set design, Rodríguez also organizes demonstrations against the Catholic Church […] and anti-government protests.” Stępniak then outlines the attributes of the work of the Mexican artist, describing and analyzing her solo performance entitled Diálogos entre Darwin y Dios, combining aspects of Berlin cabaret, vaudeville, academic lectures and a subversively modified drag queen show.

Julia Hoczyk: (Meta)Narration
A report from the 4th edition of the Body/Mind Festival (17 September-2 October, Warsaw). The author observes that this year’s edition tackled the subject of history – and the history of dance, above all. She then outlines the approaches to this issue taken by the plays presented during the festival: Portrait of a Dancer by Lütz Förster, Fake it byJanez Janša, Re//mix by Weronika Pelczyńska, A Mary Wigman Dance Evening by Fabian Barba, and The Show Must Go on by Jérôme Bel. In the final performance of the festival, all the subjects raised in the other performances appeared at once: plays on conventions and structures of dance, as well as their travesties, redefinitions, and remixes.   

 

Anna Królica: A Place for Warsaw Dance
Anna Królica describes the Warsaw Dance Stage project, which began this October and is slated to continue for the next three years. The author situates it on the map of the capital city’s dance scene. She points out the lack of space for creating and performing works of this sort. She also tries to define the Warsaw dance artists, listing the inconsistencies in the local criteria for the project alongside the urgent need to organize events of this kind on a wider scale.

Przemysław Strożek: Kurt Merz Schwitters. An Individual Gesamtkunstwerk
Przemysław Strożek presents the work of avant-garde artist Kurt Schwitters, who is known as MERZ. Strożek presents MERZ’s theory, in aiming to “collect and use materials of all kinds to create something utterly new out of unusual combinations, something re-imagined as a work of art.” In outlining Schwitters’s vast output, he describes the execution of MERZ’s ideas in the sphere of the visual arts –  MERZbild, the MERZbühne theater concept, Normalbühne MERZ, and architectural pieces – MERZbau. As Strożek notes, Schwitters’s project was meant to efface the boundaries between art and reality. The result: “He himself […] became the aesthetic creation.”

Diana Poskuta-Włodek: Mikołajska +
A review of Joanna Krakowska’s book Mikołajska: Theater and the People’s Republic (WAB Publishers, Warsaw 2011). Poskuta-Włodek outlines the extraordinarily rich, complex, and passionate life of Halina Mikołajska, the protagonist of Krakowska’s book, and is very appreciative of the author’s research method for its sober look at the events it describes, the distance it keeps from its sources, and its questioning of home truths. She also praises the book’s “‘epic’ method, involving the description of the private sphere, acting, and public activities,” and then providing the reader with the contents of all the parts of the work.” To conclude she states that Mikołajska: Theater and the People’s Republic is one of the “best books on theater published in recent years.” 

 

Rafał Maciąg: Toward the Whole. A Review of Jacek Wachowski’s Book Performance
Maciąg notes that Wachowski’s book is conceived in opposition to a work by Marvin Carlson, which collected, categorized, and ordered categories of performance in order to state that it is a phenomenon that by nature evades any sort of definition. Wachowski’s project aims to create an innovative definition of performance by attempting to capture the phenomenon in the framework of the systematized rational order, and simultaneously, to furnish this tactic with proper methodological basis.