Signs of Reading: The Theatre of the Eighth Day's Teczki and Czas Matek

Abstract

This article evokes and analyses the two most recent creations of Teatr Osmego Dnia (Theatre of the Eighth Day), Czas Matek[‘The Time of the Mothers’], first performance June 2006, and Teczki[‘The Files’], first performance January 2007. The two creations contrast strongly – outdoor/indoor, verbal/non-verbal, multi-media and technically complex/small and simple, large cast/small cast, and so on – yet finally both exhibit the ethical concerns which typify Eighth Day's work. Teczki is a dramatized reading of the communist secret police files from the 1970s on members of Eighth Day. Czas Matek is a spectacular evocation of a possible matriarchy (‘the time belonging to women’) which represents an alternative reality, one which would be ‘for life,’ as opposed to our reality, a time of the fathers, a time of ‘the heroism of victims.’ The significance of each of these performances in relation to contemporary Polish society is discussed. The article presents a detailed account of the Czas Matek and ‘reads’ its images as the performance's text. The images of Czas Matek are found to be rich in ambiguity – the play is by no means a drame a these– and constructed on the framework of a double narrative. The creation is interrogated for the ‘reading’ which went into its collective creation – the Finnish painter Hugo Simberg, Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born, and the history of the idea of matriarchy in modern and modernist thinking – are all brought to bear on the ‘text.’ In the end the ‘critic’ finds himself part of the ‘action’ of ‘reading’.