The article presents various aspects of the work of the Franco‑Austrian director Gisèle Vienne, one of the most important artists of contemporary European theater in their forties. With originality, Vienne builds complex stage worlds that treat the text only as one of its elements and a separate authorial understanding defining realism. She creates performances combining elements of dramatic theatre, contemporary dance, work with objects – dolls and robots – and electronic music. The article reconstructs...

The article discusses the background of Eleonora Kalkowska’s best-known play, Sprawa Jakubowskiego [The Case of Jakubowski], 1929. It is also a reconstruction of the work’s reception in Poland and Germany. The diplomatic materials uncovered in the archives, which shed a new light on the trial of a Polish farm labourer sentenced to death in the Weimar Republic, draw out a broader context and the political tensions surrounding the writer’s stage debut. The author of the...

The author outlines the development horizon for virtual reality and offers a multilevel analysis of Nietota, the first Polish production using virtual reality, staged in a repertory theatre by Krzysztof Garbaczewski in collaboration with the artistic collective Dream Adoption Society. Historical and theoretical reflections are complemented by a report of the empirical studies conducted in February 2019 at the Zygmunt Hübner Powszechny Theatre in Warsaw and an analysis of the reviews of that performance. The...

The article addresses the problem of the so-called documentary turn in contemporary art, especially in those practices that are related to the project of decoloniality. It examines how traditional documentary conventions, which constitute part of the Western epistemic code, are appropriated and dismantled for the purposes of the decolonialization of the image of cultural Others. From this perspective, I analyse the main strategies used by activist artists who seek to expose the typical mechanisms of...

This article is an analysis of Wielopole, Wielopole by Tadeusz Kantor. It opposes the most well-known interpretations of the play, stating that it is chiefly an artistic diagnosis of the Polish society’s state of mind, unable to liberate itself from the constantly multiplied and reproduced national-Messianic myth that governs it. To this end, the author uses some ideas from Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, and the concept of the holy and the sphere of the sacred by...

Zbigniew Majchrowski looks at the female characters in stagings of Adam Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve. The author spotlights the socio-economic condition of women in the nineteenth century, which is often overlooked in the interpretive and theatrical tradition of this work. Majchrowski analyses differences in staged presentations not only of iconic female characters such as Zosia or Mrs. Rollison, but also of marginalised, secondary characters such as Ewa, whose monologue was frequently removed from staged performances. The...

A critique of the fashionable theory combining the stage (the performing arts) with obscenities, understood as “something that cannot be presented on stage.” The folk etymology of the Latin word obscena, -orum, propagated by Lynda Nead or Carmela Bene, leads to D.H. Lawrence and – even more remotely – to Havelock Ellis and the Latin expression po(st)scenia, meaning “behind the scenes” or (according to Lucretius) “the secret part of life”. Etymological relationship between the obscene...

This article is an attempt to present the phenomenon of gender-based violence (violencia de género) in Spanish society. The author describes its presence in three areas – everyday life, legislation, and contemporary drama. An important turning point is the year 2004, when the Act on Integral Measures for the Protection against Gender Violence was adopted (Ley Organica 1/2004, de 28 de diciembre, de Medidas de Protección Integral contra la Violencia de Género), thanks to which...

Nowadays the growing interest in the work of Nikolai Evreinov, especially in the idea of ​​the theatralization of life, provokes the question: Was Evreinov really ahead of his time, as Erika Fischer-Lichte suggests? What do his ideas mean today, in the era of performance studies? The article discusses Evreinov's most important concepts – such as the theatralization of life (on the example of human sex life, among others), monodrama, theater for oneself – as well...

In this article, the author describes the work of the Argentinian artist, Lola Arias, from the perspective of her interest in individual and collective memory. The frame for this research is the notion of „time machine” compared with Maria Janion’s notion of „archive of existence”. The author situates the work and biography of Lola Arias the director, filmmaker and visual artist within the „archeontology in action”. Also, he describes Arias’ strategy of overlapping reality and...

Agata Adamiecka’s article is devoted to Oliver Frljić’s affective The Curse, a play of unprecedented social impact in the post-transformation history of theater in Poland. Adamiecka chiefly focuses on the closing scene, where a wooden cross is cut down and a noose is hung around a plaster figure of John Paul II, as the clearest acts of symbolic violence, through which the artists affectively work on the audience, simultaneously showing themes that are most powerful...

The author begins with an observation by André Lepecki concerning the fear of working with a dramaturg. Recalling several concepts that define the role of the dramaturg in dance (Lepecki, Liesbeth Wildschut, Bojana Cvejić, Bojana Bauer, Maaike Bleeker), the author juxtaposes various interpretations of the scope and forms of collaboration with the dramaturg. She reaches the conclusion that although in a professional context, dramaturgy is most of the time associated with project-based work and the...

The aim of this article is to look at the categories of homo and heteronormativity with their resonance in Polish society. To visualise the specific strategies of identity performance beyond these concepts the author uses two main artistic examples created around the subject of HIV/AIDS - Angels in America directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski (2007) and An Ongoing Song by Szymon Adamczak (2019). Starting from the reconstruction of the debate about homoidentity on Polish ground, the...

The article discusses the discourse and feminist practices of the transformation period in Poland. The author traces the intermingling of feminism and postmodernism at the time, the Polish specificity of modernity and democratization, pointing to the role of critical art in the performative archive of Polish feminism of the 1990s. She reconstructs the feminist archive of that time to inquire about its contemporary potential and agency. Keywords: feminism; postmodernism; feminist art; archives; public discourse

The text is a proposal to analyse the film Symphony of the Ursus Factory from three different perspectives: performance studies, qualitative research, and participatory art. Departing from a quote by the director, Jaśmina Wójcik, where she reminisces about her first encounters with the former employees of the factory, the author focuses on the issue of embodied knowledge. Through discussing different moments of the film and its visual and audial strategy, the author also shows how...

The article addresses the issue of artistic research in the field of performing arts with a particular emphasis on movement, dance, and choreographic practices, set in the Polish context. The authors aim to identify and describe examples of artistic-research processes in the field defined above; to explore the specificity of AR practices and the contexts in which they are realised; to share tools, methods, and knowledge about them at the level of AR practices themselves...

The aim of this article is to draw attention to the theatrical and performative aspect of visual works by Władysław Hasior. The Zakopane artist is presented not only as an acknowledged sculptor, creator of assemblages and banners, but above all, as a performer, stage designer, director of a peculiar “theatre of the elements”, and the author of open-air shows with complex dramaturgy and precisely defined course. The author of the article attempts to indicate the...

The article highlights the activities of the Centre for Political Beauty), a Berlin-based collective operating on the border of art and activism. The author maps the artistic strategies of the creators, discusses their inspirations and general assumptions of the collective. A significant part of the text is devoted to an extensive analysis of Federal Emergency Programme (2014), a public intervention whose starting point was an attempt to rewrite the historical Kindertransport rescue operation to the...

The aim of the paper is to provide a reflection on the choreographic practice in the field of dance performance for families in the context of related fields of politicalness, from the perspective of performance as research. The author describes some important moments in the global and Polish cultural policy concerning dance for children and presents an understanding of politicalness after Ana Vujanović and Mark Franko. The text undertakes reflection on the usefulness of the...

What is the future of German theatre? This article discusses the transformations taking place in German theatre, triggered by the #MeToo movement. In Germany, these began in 2018 with the sexual harassment accusation of a prominent film and television director and producer, Dieter Wedel, although the activism of organisations drawing attention to violence against women began much earlier. Subsequent cases of harassment and violence in the workplace revealed in the media have prompted the theatre...

From a practice-as-research perspective, the author analyses his dramaturgical work on the performance How to Save the World on the Small Stage? directed by Paweł Łysak (Teatr Powszechny in Warsaw, 2018). This particular case is the starting point for complex research of methods and tools for ecological theatre. Una Chaudhuri’s idea of “Fifth Wall Dramaturgy” becomes the inspiration to exceed only human perspective and involve inhuman actors to the theatrical structure. Keywords: ecology; globalisation; climate...

The article highlights an attempt at modifying the performance Unfished Story by Ula Kijak at the Teatr Nowy (New Theatre) in Zabrze in 2012 – after a protest by some local Catholic and right-wing activists, and also by the sponsors of the theatre. Jerzy Makselon, the managing director of the theatre, tried to organize a special non-public performance of the play with the Mayor of the City as an expert in order to decide on...

This article attempts to interpret the theatre work and pedagogical practices of Boris Yukhananov (b. 1957), the Artistic Director of the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre in Moscow. A closer look at Yukhananov’s ideas, the concepts he uses, the historical context in which he began his work and the sources of his inspiration leads to the conclusion that the artist’s aim is to depart from textual interpretation in theatre. Downplaying the importance of authorship does not mean lack...

Sonic singularities The article introduces the most important philosophical and musicological contexts of Jakub Momro’s book The ear has no eyelid. Sonic primordial scenes. The author of the book places the music and sonic practices of late modernity into an extensive network of philosophical concepts, especially those related to the philosophy of deconstruction and psychoanalysis. In this way he shows the relationship between music and the issues of time, voice, materiality and corporeality, sound and...

The aim of the article is to examine possibilities of using the experience of the qualitative social research in developing more complex interpretation methods of participatory projects in theatre and performance art. Departing from the classical essay On Ethnographic Authority by James Clifford which traces different strategies that researchers use to represent the field reality in their writing, the author introduces the qualitative research trend and its reflexion. The author refers to different ways of...