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The article compares two autobiographical texts from the 1930’s, written by two – male and female – Danish migrants to Argentina. It examines differences and resemblance in topics connected with leaving one’s home country and settling in a new one from the male and the female perspective. A brief history of Danish migration to Argentina and some of its special features are provided at the beginning of the article.
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Hrolf Kraki’s Saga (1974), an American fantasy fiction novel, represents the reception of medieval Scandinavian literature in popular culture, which has played a rather significant role since the 1970s. Poul Anderson treats the medieval sources pertaining to the Danish legendary king with exceptional fidelity and reconstructs the historical settings with almost scholarly care, creating a world more pagan than in his main source, the Icelandic Hrólfs saga kraka. Written at the height of the Cold War, Anderson’s Iron Age dystopia is a praise of stability and order in the midst of a civilisation under perpetual threat.
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Agata Łuksza's article analyzes the conditions of women working in the 1920s and 1930s in stage revues. The author is particularly interested in the case of the Polish revue, which she compares to its equivalents abroad. She also situates her text in a broad context of sociological phenomena. Łuksza traces various ways of disciplining the female body and conceptualizing the image of the revue actress, who had to strike a balance between remaining decent and arousing desire. At the same time, she reveals and names a range of mechanisms whose use led to wielding discursive power over the artists.
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This article is devoted to an outstanding theater director who died last year, Dimiter Gotscheff, whose plays – still present in various theaters' repertoires – were staged during the Berliner Theatertreffen Festival in May 2014. Irmer begins the review of his final production, based on Heiner Müller's Cement, by reflecting upon the role and the place of historicism in twentieth-century German-language culture. The play, dealing with the issue of socialism prior to 1989 in Central-Eastern Europe and its present-day repercussions, is contrasted with Gotscheff's previous works.
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Anna R. Burzyńska reviews the monographic work The Hellish Ideas and Angelic Souls of the Witkacy Theater in Zakopane by Ewa Łubieniewska (Universitas, Krakow 2013), putting special emphasis on the unique nature of the institution, which continues to give theater critics a major problem to this day. The Witkacy Theater, which is primarily known for its ambitious repertoire and its adamant fidelity to metaphysics, has been given a book documenting its history and explaining the ideals that have accompanied it over the decades, unchanged. Burzyńska points out the essayistic nature of Łubieniewska's monograph, in which the author points out the main attributes of the theater's aesthetics, the specifics of its creative process, and the vision of the world the artists put forward, from the perspective of people deeply involved in their research subject.
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This conversation between Marta Kacwin and Sashka Brama focuses on three topics: first, the play Diploma (the director's recent premiere) and its connections with documentary theater; second, his planned rendition of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet; third, the political situation in Ukraine and the role that theater has to play in the social transformations. Brama also indicates why he was interested in documentary forms and posits the necessity of bringing current political problems into the theater.
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Metamorphoses (14-17.05, Poznań), another series created at the Castle Culture Center, addressed the issue of relationships between space and memory. Seredyńska describes three plays from the competition: Tyran(s), choreographed by Karine Ponties, Space and Power byDaria La Stella, and I Wanna be Someone Great by Dominika Knapik and the Harakiri Farmers collective. These works tie in to the stories of three remarkable cultural centers: La Briqueterie, Les Brigittines, and the Castle Culture Center, whose previous designations – a brickyard, chapel, and royal castle – mark out the thematic scopes of the plays (power, religion, labor).
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Joanna Braun sums up Warsaw's A Puppet Is a Person Too festival (Theater Institute in Warsaw, 10-17.10.2014). The author provides an overview of the event's program, briefly describing a few selected plays (Nicola Unger – Audience of One, Unia Niemożliwy Theater – Options for Living according to Professor Leszek Kołakowski, Room Two, Scarlattine Teatro/David Zuazola Puppets Company – Cupido es una broma, Lalka i Ludzie Theater – A Journey, Meitel Raz – The Zebra and Journey to the Moon, Tadeusz Wierzbicki – Tra). She concentrates on the visual forms of the presentations and their correspondence with the themes involved. The key to understanding the festival's strategy is the category of “overcalibrated” forms and concepts involved with puppet theater.
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Łucja Iwanczewska's article is devoted to the political dimension of maturity as a category. She diagnoses the growing problem of the infantilization of the citizen following the political system transformation; they have been transformed from conscious political subjects, capable of making independent decisions, into children who require caretaking. In describing what has brought about the figure of the child acquiring major significance in structuring the social imagination, Iwanczewska indicates the need to create a new formula for maturity in the post-1989 era. At the same time, she joins Joanna Krakowska in lauding ahistoricity as potentially the most important critical strategy, with the capacity to differentiate and antagonize.
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Anka Herbut speaks with Piotr Skiba on building a certain kind of theatrical presence in Krystian Lupa's play The Woodcutters: Holzfällen (Polski Theater in Wrocław, premiere: 23.10.2014). The artist speaks of how he came to explore Thomas Bernhard and the path he took with the director in the process of creating such an introverted and contradictory character. For Skiba, the key mechanism in building the role was an almost performative transcendence of his own self in his actor's imagination, which he calls “betraying the actor in himself.” Skiba sees theatricality and acting as among the main themes of both the text and the staging.
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A presentation of the later dramatic works of British author Caryl Churchill. Aleksandra Kamińska begins by outlining the views and consistent standpoint of this author who is counted among the most important creators of political theater. Analyzing Churchill's various plays in terms of their current relevance (often they were written as spontaneous responses to contemporaneous political events), the critic points out the aesthetic vein of her theater. She notes that Churchill's formal experiments have inspired a younger generation of playwrights, including artists who are not involved in political theater.
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A review of the play King Ubu directed by Jan Klata at the Stary Theater in Krakow (premiere: 16.10.2014). The author notes that the director follows Alfred Jarry’s text, aesthetics, and thinking quite closely. Above all, however, the play serves Klata as a way of staging a polemic with his earlier work. King Ubu reproduces their strategies, using a series of self-quotations, but without the mysterious ambivalence, pathos, and horror. The most compelling and disquieting part of the play is its nihilism.
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Karolina Obszyńska describes Ewelina Marciniak's play Rag (Wrocław Współczesny Theater, premiere: 27.06.2014) based on a text by Jarosław Murawski. This story of a pathological relationship between siblings – the blind Rag and his able-bodied sister – is only presented from the girl's perspective. In the form of a macabre show, the protagonist tells the audience the story of her traumatic childhood, marred by a destructive fight with her brother. Obszyńska wonders to what extent the performance would have been changed if the handicapped brother had been allowed to speak.
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Małgorzata Jabłońska's article is an introduction to this issue's guide to the work of Vsevolod Meyerhold, concentrating on the concept of theatrical Biomechanics. The author speaks of the Russian master's various fields of work. Jabłońska also briefly describes Meyerhold's surviving writings and explains the circumstances behind the creation and publication of The Principles of Theatrical Biomechanics by Mikhail Korneev, one of Meyerhold's students.
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Marta Kacwin's review of the Lesh Kurbas 3rd Festival of Young Ukrainian Directors (Kiev, 26.09 – 2.10.2014) focuses on what the author feels were the two most interesting plays: Lena by Tamara Trunowa and Diploma by Sashka Brama. Kacwin states that the reduction of stage props and the questioning of realism in the productions described are an attempt to revolutionize the model of theater that reigns in Ukraine. She does confess, however, that in spite of some interesting ideas, the directors did not manage to create good plays.
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A panel discussion organized on 11 March 2014 by the Kazimierz Dejmek Nowy Theater in Łódź and Didaskalia to address the essential, and often overlooked subject of the translator in creating the theatrical work. The discussion was held with people professionally involved in translating dramatic works from various European languages. The interlocutors focused on the issue of the specifics of drama translation, the translation process, and on translation techniques themselves. Questions were also raised concerning the collaboration between a translator and the theater. A particular case of direct cooperation between a translator and director while creating a particular play was also discussed.
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A review of the a new play, Africa, directed by Bartek Frąckowiak at the Polski Theater in Bydgoszcz (premiere: 17.10.2014). This is a statement on the recolonization of the African countries through economical and ideological dependence on Europe, which takes the form of a theater essay, in which the artists focus on the oppressive nature of contemporary narratives about Africa. The critic points out the documentary style of the artists' work, which aims to evoke a sense of doubt in the viewers and incline them to reflect and to do further independent research.
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The author describes the very popular phenomenon of creating non-theatrical performances. He provides examples of specific sites of theater activities and ways that audiences function within them, often according to principles borrowed from or based on computer games. Tunnel 228 is particularly important – it was made in 2009 by British theater ensemble Punchdrunk in an inoperative section of London's metro system – as is the computer game The Path (a take on Little Red Riding Hood), both of which the author describes and analyzes in detail.
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In conversation with Katarzyna Nowaczyk, Jacopo Fo describes the functioning of his partly self-created, economically self-sufficient “micro-republic” of Alcatraz (Libera Università di Alcatraz), which he himself describes as a “utopia in the making.” This is a place for meetings between cultures, views, and needs, open to diverse social and artistic activities. Jacopo Fo speaks of the special role of art in making his social projects (such as those dealing with education and adult literacy).
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