Gdzie jest miejsce teatru?

Abstract

While millions of people have lost their lives in the pandemic, hundreds of thousands are losing their lives in war, millions have lost their homes to it, and we ourselves are lost in a world that has lost its rules, I am asking about the place of theatre in all of it. I research my own experiences of the power of theatre with the aid of other people’s experiences. In Wacek Sobaszek's Spiski życiowe [Life Con-spiracies] I have found a quote from Antonin Artaud. Read today, Theatre and the Plague raises introductory questions. Theatre treated as an asylum, further. Reality as a barrier against chaos – Antoni Kępiński helps to distinguish between the powers of derealization and realization in theatre. Another possibility is theatre-laboratory as a place in which we fulfil what we lack in reality. Theatre as school: the Different Theatre School and the Theatre Academy are places where experiences are reconstructed and students teach us more about the state of the world and theatre than the experts. Quarantine and Cantarantanna (a neologism by Honza Mrázek) in Węgajty show what has been divided. The Sobaszeks are not ecstatic visionaries like Artaud; they are patient rebels. In Węgajty, they have created a place for theatre and encourage people to look for similar sites. What is decisive, however, is what place for theatre they have created in their lives – and what places we will create in ours.