Polish Theatre Research Articles

Performing history and cultural memory through ancient drama: the case of contemporary Polish theatre

AbstractBy the mode of representation of human life processes, theatre from its very beginning has contributed to maintaining or confronting a given social order, so as to complete its ethico-political function. One of the genuinely politically involved issues to discuss in theatre has become the past. However, on stage, history is recalled to serve both the present and the future in order to construct and develop cultural memory. Classical reception provides a comprehensive method of coping with the past, empowering the performance of the political. This article ponders the development of the ethico-political function of contemporary theatre in Poland by providing three case studies of productions that perform history and cultural memory in a specifically chosen location: Orestes by Michał Zadara, Ajax. The Machine by Natalia Korczakowska, and Wałęsa at Colonus by Bartosz Szydłowski. The conceptual framework of the analysis is constructed from the idea of the political, adapted to the specificity of the Romantic paradigm that furnishes the ground for the study of performing history and cultural memory in Polish theatre. The issue in focus is to observe how the classical reception of ancient dramas can be a performance of the political through an indirect recalling of the historical past.

‘Close but Far, Human but Square, Normal but Exhausting’: Pandemic Theatre in Poland

The purpose of this article is to explore different ways of countering the COVID-19 pandemic in Polish theatre that were not only attempts to provide protection against the potentially lethal coronavirus, but also attempts to actively combat other ‘viruses’: the capitalist compulsion for productivity and the exclusion of Others (the disabled, the elderly, women or LGBT+ people). Several Polish artists of the lockdown era (participants in the Quarantine Project, Beyond #quarantine and DIY 2020 Masterclasses, members of Theatre 21, Joanna Szczepkowska and Wojtek Ziemilski) have managed to draw the attention of a wider audience to these problems. During the pandemic, they practised the art of resistance in various ways, including the ‘art of failure’ as a resistance against neo-liberal systems. Therefore their projects can be seen as a dress rehearsal before the emergence of a post-pandemic, post-capitalist, post-growth, more ethically conscious theatre of the future.

Jan Sawka: Theatre of Image and Metaphor

Jan Sawka: Theatre of Image and Metaphor

Zmierzyć ślad węglowy kultury. Przykład projektu teatralnego

To Measure the Carbon Footprint of a Culture. A Case Study of a Theatrical Project The article presents the results of carbon footprint measurements of a theatre project. For the purpose of the research, data from a survey and in-depth interviews with representatives of Polish theatres were used. Based on this data, a “model” was created, encompassing different variations of theatrical performances, including production, promotion, as well as online and on-site operations during guest performances. The analysis covers both direct emissions related to electricity consumption, transportation, and set design, as well as indirect emissions resulting from the supply chain and possible audience behaviour. The results clearly indicate that the greatest challenge in terms of the carbon footprint of a theatre project faced by cultural managers is mobility and the use of air travel for transporting theatre ensembles and set designs over long distances. Moreover, the transportation needs of the theatre ensembles and set designs for long distance travels pose a challenge. Additionally, the use of individual car transportation by audiences – even for short distances, is problematic – which could be addressed through the implementation of local partnerships. Getting familiar with this analysis can help producers, cultural managers, artists, and those responsible for shaping cultural policies to identify aspects with the greatest environmental impact and take appropriate adaptive actions. Although most of these actions will involve a profound change in traditional project management practices in the theatre, paying attention to relevant indicators, consciously developing new habits, and sharing resources provides an opportunity to expedite adaptation based on knowledge and organizational learning. These types of activities are necessary due to the unrelenting projectification of the field of culture and beyond, which causes organizations to operate in a kind of “projectocene”.

Grotowski, Kantor y Mrożek: Tres itinerarios del teatro polaco en América Latina

The central core of this article aims to theorise about the process of theatrical transitions, specifically based on the part dedicated to the “transitions” of Polish theatre in Latin America. The development of the theory begins with a fundamental question: how did and does Polish theatre influence and influence Latin American theatre, and at the same time, what were its points of departure, its routes, its journeys? In this work, the category of “transition” raises several problems. It is defined in two ways, it is both an episteme and a category. Consequently, this research framework will offer to analyse, present and show which are the axes of transition that have marked the perspective of sense and meaning in Latin American theatricality from the 1960s onwards, taking as the object of study for this purpose the influences of Grotowski, Kantor and Mrożek. If so, these broad time frames would predict an “ultimate destiny” that remains to be discovered and that will “allow” us to cover long periods of time in the context of the proposed study. It is necessary to mention that the article will work on two categories of research, namely 1.- The axis present in Genealogy (Foucault): The pass, the transfers, the mechanisms of translation; 2.- On the axis of the theatrical epistemes that organise, reinterpret, distribute the discourses in their respective fields of action. Finally applying the Theory of Transitions, it will be possible to observe and study in detail the starting points, the “scenic routes” that these three creators had on the continent.

Books Briefly

Books Briefly

Contributors

Contributors

A HUNDRED YEARS OF RESEARCH ON THE 18TH‑CENTURY THEATRE IN POLAND AND FRANCE

Among the modern researchers conducting studies on the 18th century, there is a widespread belief that research on Polish theatre of that era did not develop until the turn of the 1950s and 1960s. It is only part of the truth. The apogee of theatrical research coincided with those years, resulting from the 200th anniversary of the National Theatre, which was widely promoted by the authorities. However, the first diagnoses of Polish theatre scientists dealing with the 18th century are much earlier. Suffice it to recall Ludwik Bernacki’s monumental work, “Theatre, Drama and Music under Stanislaw August”, which the researcher published in Lviv in 1925. Bernacki’s research was closely related to the work of French theatre scientists, who conducted research on the scene and drama of the 18th century before the First World War. This article analyses and chronologically presents the last century of theatrical research and its methodological changes on the example of Polish and French history of 18th-century theatre.

Reimagining Theatre History

This article presents the edited volume A History of Polish Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2022) as a welcome addition to the growing English-language scholarship on Polish theatre. The reviewer appreciates the editors and contributors’ strategy to make the past intelligible through the present. He emphasizes that this strategy contributed to developing a coherent set of articles dedicated to a wide range of topics. As a new source in English, the book will be immensely valuable, both for students and for those interested in finding out more about specific themes in Polish theatre. The scholarship is fresh, and the articles demonstrate connections of the past to the present, emphasizing the importance of each era, not in service to the narrative of progress but rather in Benjamin’s constellation metaphor. The reviewer further notes that the book assumes some knowledge of Polish theatre, Polish culture, and Polish history from the beginning. He argues that the book will therefore not serve as a complete replacement for more traditional histories but rather contributing to the reimagining of how to tell them.

The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust By Grzegorz Niziołek. Translated by Ursula Phillips. Cultural Histories of Theatre and Performance. London: Methuen Drama, 2019; pp. xii + 308, 63 illustrations. $115 cloth, $34.95 paper, $31.45 e-book.

The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust By Grzegorz Niziołek. Translated by Ursula Phillips. Cultural Histories of Theatre and Performance. London: Methuen Drama, 2019; pp. xii + 308, 63 illustrations. $31.45 e-book. - Volume 63 Issue 2

Being a Modrzejewska's Fangirl: Female Fandom and Celebrity in Nineteenth-Century Polish Theatre

This essay brings together the perspective of theatre history studies and fan studies in order to ask what it meant to be a celebrity fangirl in the late nineteenth century and thus to historicize fandom and recover forsaken aspects of nineteenth-century theatre culture. By invoking the unique traces of fan experience and fan practices such as recollections left by a self-declared "theatre maniac" or fan letters written to Helena Modrzejewska, this essay investigates Polish female, middle-class fandom of this theatre superstar. Despite emigrating to the United States in the mid-1870s, during the following decades Modrzejewska, known to American audience as Modjeska, guest-performed in Polish lands on a regular basis to great enthusiasm of local audiences. Even though no organizations like the US Modjeska Club ever emerged among Polish spectators, there were equally devoted circles of Modrzejewska's fangirls. They can be compared to other female theatre fans at the turn of the twentieth century, such as the matinée girl in the United States and the psikhopatka in Tsarist Russia. Fangirls shared hierarchies of values, which often collided with social expectations, and together they tended to explore and test alternatives to roles prescribed to them by society. The essay proposes to imagine these women as social and theatre "pirates" who both challenged accepted gender norms of behavior and questioned their own alleged female limitations, as well as advanced forms of reception that were abolished in the process of the "embourgeoisement of theatre."

Wdrażanie założeń zrównoważonego rozwoju w praktyce działań polskich teatrów

Implementation of the Principles of Sustainable Development in the Practice of Polish Theaters The aim of the paper is to present how Polish theatres implement the principles of sustainable development in practice in their day-to-day operations. The background for the considerations involves the evolution of the approach to sustainable development observed from the perspective of international documents discussing this concept. The author’s own empirical research consisted of the preliminary survey of the information available on the websites and social media of selected Polish theatres and the questionnaire sent to the theatres in the first half of 2021. The research has made it possible to distinguish four main types of activities undertaken in this respect by the theatres: 1) the content of performances and other artistic endeavours; 2) the day-to-day functioning of the institution; 3) the theatre building and its surroundings, and 4) co-creation and participation in broader initiatives for sustainable development. The questionnaire results indicate that the dynamics of activities in this domain has nothing to do with the size of the urban area in which a given theatre operates, but it is more associated with the fact that the theatres align themselves with the environmental policy of their local governments, and with the possibility of obtaining funds for such initiatives. Furthermore, and perhaps above all, it depends on the theatre’s strategy determining how it operates in the local milieu. Building upgrades involve savings and help theatres build an image of an environmentally-friendly organisation.

The Węgajty Theatre: From Collectivity to Participation

This article charts the evolution of one of the most significant Polish non-institutional theatres, the W#ęgajty Theatre. We focus not only on the artists’ interests, forms, and methods of work on performances, but also on the organizational structure of the theatre and its ensemble. This analysis of the team ethic underpinning W#ęgajty’s working practices and its evolution reveals how some of its transformations are specifically connected to social changes in Poland during the reconstruction of the political system in recent decades, as well as broader global contexts. The document analyzes two main aspects of the W#ęgajty Theatre: its tity as a constellation of creators and collaborators and the evolution, over more than twenty years, of the group’s working process in realizing theatre performances.

Inscenizacje oraz adaptacje twórczości Janusza Korczaka w polskim teatrze w latach 1931–2021

The subject of the article is the history of the theatrical reception of Janusz Korczak's (Henryk Goldszmit) (1878 or 1879–1942) literary works in Polish theatre in 1931–2021, from the premiere of the drama „Senat szaleńców” in 1931 at the Ateneum Theatre in Warsaw to the most recent productions. The author also includes adaptations of three of Korczak's novels for children: „Król Maciuś Pierwszy”, „Król Maciuś na wyspie bezludnej” (first printing – 1923) and „Kajtuś czarodziej” (oldest edition – 1935). The author writes about productions from dramatic and puppet theatres from various Polish cities, as well as about one ballet theatre, evoking staging, radio and television adaptations of Korczak's novels. It highlights the advantages and disadvantages of the parts of the staging, as well as the methods of promoting them. The reasons behind the low interest of theatre artists in the play „The Senat szaleńców” and the fact that they willingly adapt the writer's books for children are discussed. The research material used in the article is mainly sources – press publications, posters and theatrical photos, to a lesser extent memoirs, and in one case a radio recording. Scientific and popularizing studies, useful in the query and cited in the bibliography and footnotes, are publications on the biography of Janusz Korczak and the history of Polish theatre.

ПСИХОЛОГІЯ ТВОРЧОСТІ АЛЄКСАНДРА ФРЕДРА: ТРАНСФОРМАЦІЯ ТВОРЧОГО ДИСКУРСУ, УКРАЇНСЬКА РЕЦЕПЦІЯ

The article studies reception of the work of Alexander Fredro, the comedy playwright in the Ukrainian Galician theater culture. the sources of his artistic development and, at the same time, the reasons that led to the completion of the publication of new works almost at the peak stage of his creative burning. Already in the first quarter of the 19th century, the dramaturgy of Alexander Fredro gradually turned Galicia into a center of Polish culture. The article ex- amines the peculiarities of the psychology of creativity, the transformation and creative development of the playwright: from children’s plays to juvenile obscene poetry during the Napoleonic Wars, and then to comedies. Fredro’s comedies are not a theater of characters, schematized and precisely outlined by the classicist cutter of stylistic devices. These figures go beyond the boundaries of schematism. Fredro moves away from presenting his characters as special human types, unambiguous in their weaknesses and passions. His char- acters are alive and complete – even in their pettiness, worthless passions and the neediness of their ideals and aspirations. All this makes them real. Together they create a great theater of the life of Galicia. S. Goszczyński really insisted: the cosmopolitanism of A. Fredro’s comedies can be seen from the fact that his heroes are not national characters: they are borrowed from French classical comedy and linguistically stylized according to French ease. He was the last prophet of Clas- sicism, who heralds the dawn of Romanticism, destroying the poetics of classicist comedy, laying bridges and paving new ways of development for comedy. The Ukrainian Galician theatre, which began to form somewhat later than the Polish theater in Galicia, was not interested in A. Fredro’s comedies. The most important reason for this is the huge gap between the mental and cultural spaces of the Poles and Ukrainians of Galicia. The world of Fredro’s comedies is often a timeless world of aristocratic courtyards and city residences, aristocratic families with their values, traditions and ideas of the noble people of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Blasted 1999 : Sarah Kane's body against the archive

The body-archive category in Polish Theatre and Performance Studies is articulated as an emancipatory tool with the potential to reclaim the history of marginalised, oppressed, and silenced groups not represented in the archive, but as I claim, it still subsumes the body under the power of identity and meaning it gains through history. Looking at one of the most important 'dead bodies' in the archive of Polish contemporary theatre – Sarah Kane's body – and the way it was present and presented to the Polish viewers, I ask if the other model of the relation between body and history is possible. I find it through the notion of trauma and plasticity inscribed in Kane's text and realised on the Polish stage in the 1999 production of Blasted. Reading the remains of the performance I ask how it can be read in the context of Polish political transition and how it reflects the meaning of Kane's 'new brutalism' in Polish 1990s.

Stage and Scenography in Polish Theatre of the Early 20th Century

Stage and Scenography in Polish Theatre of the Early 20th Century

Культурно-мистецький діалог українських театрів на сторінках польської періодики початку ХХІ століття

The paper gives an analysis of articles, reports, and reviews of specialized Polish periodicals from 2000 to 2010, which include interviews, reviews, impressions, and comments of theater experts about contemporary cultural and artistic events in Poland in which Ukrainian artists participated. To fulfill the tasks set in the research, the author considers the main theatrical magazines of Poland “Dialog. Miesięcznik poświęcony dramaturgii współczesnej”, “Didaskalia”, “Pamiętnik Teatralny”, “Scena”, “Teatr”, which have had a long history of activity since the last century. The analytical work of the study is part of the preparatory stage before digitizing the materials on the Ukrainian-Polish cultural dialogue and placing them in the Polish Academy of Sciences database. The current issue requires improving the content in the virtual information environment regarding the creative activity of Ukrainian theaters. Accumulation, storage, and research of available information in electronic format will enable immediate processing and speed up the solution of many current problems: visualize the quantitative indicators of the institution's activity; make it possible to forecast its development; contribute to the search for effective ways of functioning. The author considers that a significant unsolved aspect of the problem is the lack of research into the Ukrainian-Polish cultural-artistic dialogue, which concerns theatrical practices at the beginning of the 21st century. The fact justifies the originality of the research, as there has been no study of Polish periodicals on theater studies, whose publications reflect the activities of Ukrainian artists. The chronological framework in the study is essential, as it was marked by important political events in both countries: 2004, when Poland joined the European Union, and in Ukraine, the Orange Revolution. The preliminary result of the analysis of Polish theater publications illustrates a specific direction of each of them and is the basis for determining their thematic direction: retrospectives, festival events, and creative meetings; biographies of personalities and discovery of new names; literary reviews. The activity of Ukrainian actors and theater groups in the artistic life of Poland is one of the indicators of the work of governmental cultural diplomacy and personal contact between the two countries, which determines the strengths and weaknesses of international relations. Further investigation of the phenomenon will make it possible to trace the dynamics of international communication ties of the period recorded in theater journals. In the future, the author aims to explore similar information in mass media (press, television, websites) and conduct interviews in focus groups (theatre administration, theater critics, ambassadors). Such a comprehensive systemic approach will contribute to the demonstration of a complete and accurate picture of the Ukrainian-Polish cultural and artistic dialogue on the example of theatrical practices.

“FROM UKRAINE I COME HERE...”: UKRAINIAN CHARACTERS ON THE POLISH STAGE IN LVIV (1842–1900)

The article comprehensively presents information about theatrical representations of Ukrainians on the Polish stage in Lviv from 1842 to 1900. It is noted that throughout the 19th century, Ukrainian characters predominated in various genres of performances on the Polish stage in Lviv, with Romanticism serving as the backdrop for the portrayal of Cossacks, hetmans, insurgents, peasants, and villagers. The study meticulously analyzes the corpus of Polish plays in Lviv featuring Ukrainian characters and categorizes them into four groups based on representational strategies: Arcadian, infernal (Haidamak), historical-heroic (Cossack), and domestic-folkloric (peasant). The contribution of the Polish stage in Lviv to the development of Ukrainian discourse in national culture is outlined. A list of the acting ensemble of the Polish theater in Lviv at that time is provided. Emphasis is placed on the significance of the Count Skarbek Theater in shaping the stage representations of Ukrainian characters from 1842 to 1900. The reaction of the Polish audience, which sought to see them as “brothers on the border”, romantic free-spirited heroes, warriors, exotic ethnic neighbors, faithful, clever servants, and the Ukrainian audience when there was no Ukrainian professional theater in Galicia yet, is traced. Attention is focused on the dramaturgy based on events from the shared Polish-Ukrainian past. It is demonstrated that the represented images of Ukrainians were characterized by enthusiasm, love, a sense of danger, and hope for a shared future. The influence of the Polish theater on the formation of Ukrainian professional theater in 19th-century Galicia is highlighted.

Music in the Polish-Jewish Theatre in the First Decades of the 20th Century in the Light of Surviving Sources

Abstract The article presents the few surviving documents concerning the incidental music to Polish-Jewish plays performed on the Polish stages in the first decades of the 20th century (until 1939). This kind of theatre was to constitute a space for the dialogue between the Jewish and Polish communities. The idea of its creators was to reject the existing, usually negative, way of presenting Jews in Polish theatre as well as to show authentic Jewish life — customs, rituals, music and dances — on stage. A breakthrough in both of these areas came with the so-called Jewish plays of Gabriela Zapolska — Małka Szwarcenkopf and Jojne Firułkes. The idea of the Polish-Jewish theatre was then developed by Marek Arnsztajn (Andrzej Marek). Referring to the surviving sources (scores as well as press reviews and notes in directors’ copies of the scripts), the author analyses music to two performances of Małka Szwarcenkopf, and presents the musical appendix to the Polish version of An-ski’s Dybbuk published in 1922. The analysis seeks to capture the composers’ specific ideas of Jewish music and to discover the sources of their inspiration. The second objective of the article was to present the cultural background against which the Polish-Jewish theatre evolved.