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Spadkobiercy Derridy

Author(s): Piotr Dobrowolski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 121-122/2014

A review of Anna Burzyńska's book Deconstruction, Politics, and the Performative (Universitas, 2013). This publication is the fruit of Burzyńska's many years of studying Jacques Derrida's theories and how they work. Dobrowolski is full of admiration for the author and her ability to explain the philosopher's ideas in a simple, logical, and precise fashion, and for her placement of deconstruction in the context of humanists contemporary to Derrida – Jon McKenzie and Erika Fischer-Lichte. The reviewer believes that this book is a splendid compendium of knowledge on the French philosopher.

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Uwaga: to wideo zawiera fragmenty „Kaliguli”

Author(s): Friederike Felbeck / Language(s): Polish Issue: 121-122/2014

A review of the play Caligula directed by Krzysztof Garbaczewski (Schauspiel Stuttgart, premiere: 15.03.2014). His interpretations of the text by Albert Camus and the figure of the protagonist were affected by the decision to cast actress Astrid Meyerfeldt as Caligula. In her rendition, the Emperor is sober and sublime to an extent which, in the critic's opinion, might give viewers a sense of horror. The performance takes the form of a live film. Another important part is played by the rap performed live by Mereia (one of the few characters capable of revolt) based on the anarchist writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. All of these tactics make Garbaczewski's play primarily a formal experiment, a spectacular show of the capabilities of contemporary theater.

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Nowe życie kina

Author(s): Ewa Fita / Language(s): Polish Issue: 121-122/2014

A review of the play The Other Woman, directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna (TR Warsaw, premiere: 24, 25.04.2014) inspired by a film by John Cassavetes. The action takes place on two levels – "real life" interferes with theater life on stage. Jarzyna gives some of his characters the names of the actors playing them, which additionally blurs the boundary between the fiction and the reality. According to Fita, these strategies allow the director to expand the interpretive layer and, by the same token, to create a performance not only about the passing of time, but also about the theater, which, in the capitalist era, has to struggle to hold its position, just as people do.

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Trzecie odrodzenie jako ostateczny dowód na bycie klasykiem

Author(s): Thomas Irmer / Language(s): Polish Issue: 121-122/2014

A review of the minimalist opera Einstein on the Beach by Robert Wilson and Philip Glass of 1976, resurrected during this year's MaerzMusik Festival in Berlin. Irmer points out the inevitable differences between the two stagings (resulting from necessary changes in cast), but also stresses the remarkable vitality of the work in spite of the thirty-eight years that have passed since its premiere. The reviewer compares the stage solutions in Einstein with the later productions by Wilson, proposing the thesis that this avant-garde opera holds the essence of his directorial style.

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Wrogowie luduw Berlinie

Author(s): Thomas Irmer / Language(s): Polish Issue: 121-122/2014

Thomas Irmer reviews the play 12-Spartenhaus (The Twelve Fields of Art Theater) by Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller (premiere: 4.05.2013, Volksbühne in Berlin). The main theme of the project, frequently alluding to Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, is the audience. The performance ran over thirty consecutive evenings, lasting one hundred hours and counting among the most formally radical undertakings, stretching far beyond the norms of repertory theater (even from the perspective of the avant-garde work of the Volksbühne).

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Mozartowski dom lalek

Author(s): Tomasz Kireńczuk / Language(s): Polish Issue: 121-122/2014

A review of the opera Don Giovanni directed by Pippo Delbono (Wielki Theater in Poznań, premiere: 22.04.2014). The author notes that Delbono is among the most important artists in today's experimental theater. The originality of his productions derives, to a large extent, from the director's presence on the stage. This time, however, the director does not appear, though he does inaugurate the play with a monolog from off stage. Comparing Don Giovanni to Delbono's previous work, Kireńczuk concludes that the director is breaking from the theatrical aesthetic he has built up over the years, while the play itself is strongly evocative of Giorgio Strehler's theater.

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Teatr kłamie zawadowo

Author(s): Tomasz Kireńczuk / Language(s): Polish Issue: 121-122/2014

A conversation devoted to Forefathers' Eve at the Nowy Theater in Poznań (premiere: 22.03.2014). The director explains why he renders the experience of commonality in Mickiewicz's drama from the perspective of the Afro-American struggle for freedom. The conversation also addresses how images from the past are evoked through the media. Rychcik is interested in the media transfer of emotions, and he treats media transmissions as places "inhabited by things from the past." The director also speaks of a need for a "return to theatricality," seen as play: "Perhaps, at present, we should allow ourselves the pure pleasure of being in the theater. The theater is, after all, a place where you become a professional liar, and so it has to keep pretending as though it is the most important thing in the world."

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sztuka wyboru

Author(s): Jakub Kłeczek / Language(s): Polish Issue: 121-122/2014

A review of the play/game Hedge Knights by Machina Ex, whose mechanics are based on the physical activity of the viewers/players (a play presented 11-13.04.2014 in the framework of the Play Instinct! festival). The task before the audience recalls an LARP (Live Action Role-Playing), where set roles are incarnated according to the requirements of the convention and the game system in order to develop a non-linear story. The viewers of Hedge Knights have to perform set tasks and solve problems inspired by point’n’click video games to push the action forward. The relationships between the protagonists, the particular attributes of the characters, and the course of the scenes are shaped in the decision-making process by audience and actors both.

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Zderzenie, klincz, impas Narracje o stanie wojennym w polskiej pamięci kulturowej

Author(s): Maria Kobielska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 121-122/2014

Maria Kobielska analyzes popular feature films about Martial Law (Popiełuszko. Freedom Is in Us directed by Rafał Wieczyński, Everything I Love by Jacek Borcuch, and Andrzej Wajda's Wałęsa: A Man of Hope), perceiving recognizable memory cliches about this event, and mutually exclusive memory images that serve defined political functions. Kobielska proves the massive influence of politics on how the Martial Law narrative is shaped. Recreating the event in the sphere of cultural memory becomes, she feels, both a medium of memory and authority.

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Nu, pogodi!

Author(s): Rafał Kołsut / Language(s): Polish Issue: 121-122/2014

A review of Jan Klata's play Polish Thermopylae, based on a drama by Tadeusz Miciński (Polski Theater in Wrocław, premiere: 3.05.2014). Kołsut points out the masterful pacing of the narrative and the director's extensive tampering with the original text, allowing Miciński's words to take on a remarkable modernity. Situating the action (through numerous historical allusions and pop-culture quotations) in 2014, Klata presents the tangled and bloody story of the relations between Poland and Russia over the last two centuries. At the same time, the reviewer sees the play's major strength in the ironic distance it keeps while allowing the topic to remain serious.

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Wypełnianie konturów

Author(s): Tomasz Kowalski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 121-122/2014

Tomasz Kowalski reviews the play Western Society by the Gob Squad, performed in the framework of the Poznań You Are #Not Indifferent to Me series. The project's point of departure is an attempt to recreate (with a few audience members) a short film shot during an undefined family reunion karaoke party. Although the film the artists found on YouTube had a record number of views, very little happens; the artists see it as emblematic of contemporary culture and take it as a point of departure for reflecting upon themes of alienation, solitude, and blocking out major problems. Kowalski opines that the risk of blatant moralizing and banality raised in tackling this subject is avoided through the event's consistent structure, based on play.

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Dziady Unchained

Author(s): Tomasz Kowalski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 121-122/2014

Radosław Rychcik has transposed Forefathers' Eve (Nowy Theater in Poznań, premiere: 22.03.2014) into American history and (pop) culture: the characters and plot lines from the drama have been inscribed into cliches from the American imaginarium, both from films (e.g. the Joker as Guślarz, the figure of Marilyn Monroe, Kubrick's The Shining, Lynch's Twin Peaks, Tarantino's Django), and American politics and history (Kennedy’s assassination, slavery, the Ku-Klux-Klan). In Kowalski's view, however, the play is incoherent (it has a few specifically Polish elements, such as the Great Improvisation performed by Gustaw Holoubek) and uses an excess of associations. This results from the director's ambivalent approach to the text: on the one hand, he stresses his mistrust of Mickiewicz, while on the other he wants to convince the viewer that this is a universal drama.

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Walka się nie skończyła

Author(s): Monika Kwaśniewska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 121-122/2014

A conversation with Marta Dzido and Piotr Śliwowski – creators of the documentary film Solidarity according to Women, addressing the roles and significance of women in Solidarity. The film is made up of conversations with former opposition activists, archival materials, and contemporary narratives collected by Marta Dzido (the screenwriter and director of the film), describing the film's creation process and commenting on the phenomena depicted. The creators speak of meetings with the film's protagonists, expanding how we look at the biographies of the women with information about their fates in free Poland. The archival research they do is of particular interest, in particular because the rights to use the unique, never-before-seen tapes and photographs delayed the premiere of the performance.

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Słabość, empatia, troska. Nowe światy i nowe wspólnoty według Grzegorzewskiego

Author(s): Monika Kwaśniewska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 121-122/2014

Analyzing Forefathers' Eve - Improvisations of 1987 (Studio Theater in Warsaw), Kwaśniewska hazards the thesis that this is a play "about the role of women in the Polish, male-created, national mythology and in political and social life, in which male culture and male models are in a state of profound crisis." She points out that Grzegorzewski cast his actresses in many male roles, thus creating various images of mothers, caretakers, and seductresses. Interpreting the significance of the Miss Rollison figure, to whom Grzegorzewski entrusted the "Seeing…" text, she draws on a concept of "politicized motherhood." Then referring, in turn, to the potential to transform the national community with the active participation of women in collective life, she evokes Carol Gilligan's ethics of care.

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Po premierze

Author(s): Monika Kwaśniewska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 121-122/2014

In a brief commentary on Radosław Rychcik's Forefathers' Eve (Nowy Theater in Poznań, premiere: 23.03.2014), Kwaśniewska states that the director has managed to read Mickiewicz's work in the context of colonialism. The author appreciates the fact that, in forging compelling analogies between the Polish partition period (as well as the People's Republic) and American slavery, the director avoids universalizing, indicating a potential conflict between the victims of colonialism. Kwaśniewska also appreciates the ambivalence that Rychcik injects into the scenes of revenge.

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Sprawdzanie tradycji. Konrad Swinarski i teatralny anachronizm

Author(s): Paweł Mościcki / Language(s): Polish Issue: 121-122/2014

Mościcki defines the ontological status of the figure of Konrad Swinarski in contemporary Polish theater discourse. He traces the correlations that come to mind when we consider theater between Swinarski and Brecht, indicating the similarities and the differences in how they conceived the processes that govern the stage. One of the most important concepts in the article is of the theatrical anachronism (occurring during a performance, where very literal, material contemporaneity clashes with the historicity of classic texts), which Swinarski saw as the source of the secrets of historical truth.

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Ideologia w ofensywie

Author(s): Karolina Obszyńska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 121-122/2014

A review of the play The Gates of Paradise directed by Paweł Passini (Wrocław Współczesny Theater, premiere: 22.02.2014). Passini pairs Andrzejewski's prose with Marcel Schwob's The Children's Crusade, presenting the bystander's point of view. The director subtly, but pointedly shows the erotic dimension of history. According to Obszyńska, the play draws an analogy between the situation presented in Andrzejewski's prose and Poland's socio-political situation. Passini does not, however, introduce any clear references to the present in the text – these can be found strictly in the costumes and the set design, which the reviewer interprets as a symbolic foyer of heaven.

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Po śladach

Author(s): Dobrochna Ratajczakowa / Language(s): Polish Issue: 121-122/2014

A review of the book Ritual Sources of the Theater by Włodzimierz Szturc (PWST Publishers, 2013). Ratajczakowa notes that the researcher approaches the titular issue from less an anthropological perspective than a phenomenological one, which is a novelty in theater studies. The reviewer stresses the profundity of Szturc's observations, calling to life a new branch of study – an archeology of the humanities, researching the imagination of its depiction, rooted in ancient meanings, images, and processes, and pertaining to archetypes which decide upon the continuity of the human species.

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Przebieralnia

Author(s): Paweł Schreiber / Language(s): Polish Issue: 121-122/2014

A review of a play by Maja Kleczewska, based on a text by Elfriede Jelinek, Shadows: Eurydice Speaks (IMKA Theater in Warsaw, Polski Theater in Bydgoszcz, Muzyczny Capitol Theater, premiere: 26.03.2014). The minimalist set design by Katarzyna Borkowska depicting Hades is particularly noteworthy; it is based on a cuboid of one-way mirrors, which means that the actors cannot see the audience, only their own reflections. Another phenomenon is the character created by the vocalist of the band Hey, Katarzyna Nosowska, who breaks up the performance with various songs. The greatest drawback of Kleczewska's production is the selection of the consecutive incarnations of Eurydice, which remains no more than a shallow, though skilfully executed satire on contemporary trends. Nonetheless, the general evaluation is a positive one.

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Solidarność niemożliwa „Squaring the Circle” Toma Stopparda

Author(s): Paweł Schreiber / Language(s): Polish Issue: 121-122/2014

Schreiber's text concerns a film based on Tom Stoppard's Squaring the Circle screenplay, whose action takes place during the "Solidarity carnival.” The author examines this manner of seeing issues in Poland and the Poles, by people outside of the country and culture where the events in the film occur. The text analyzes the stereotypical, even phantasmatic image of Eastern Europe seen through the eyes of Western neighbors. This process exemplifies an age-old phenomenon known as "literary colonization."

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