This article offers a preliminary diagnosis of Polish social theaters with regard to the crises of the individual and the community during the Covid-19 pandemic. The interpretive framework is Lidia Zamkow’s concept of the theater of ambulatory care, which allows us to locate the activity of social theaters in the context of Michel de Certeau’s tactics and Jack Halberstam’s low theories. The theater of ambulatory care recognizes the needs of individuals and communities in a pandemic crisis and reacts to them in different ways. We distinguish and describe three ideal types of diagnoses and the resulting treatments that theaters of ambulatory care use in a pandemic: therapy, conjuring, and revolution. The article is based on materials collected during two studies: a funded research project on the anthropological and social activity of the Węgajty Theater, carried out at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and a survey among theater staff during the pandemic, initiated by the Zbigniew Raszewski Theater Institute in Warsaw. (Trans. K. Kułakowska)
This paper portrays Ewa Benesz, a great individuality moving within a borderland between theatre and para-theatre, literature and the art of telling stories. In her activities, she refers not only to the melody and rhythms originating from various cultures but also to traditional, everyday practices guaranteeing the generations durability, such as baking bread, producing wine or pressing olive. In this ethnography I do not only describe my experience of being a participant of her original para-theatre workshops-In the act of creatingat her artistic residence turned into a hermitage in Sardinia, but I also interpret her artistic biography as a figuration of the One Who Knows, La Que Sabe according to the South American mythology, the archetypical woman "as old as time" who preserves the female tradition like a chronicler of the female practices using a special kind of languagethe language of theatre, and possessing a special kind of imagination-the "anthropologic imagination"; and finally, having an experience which is the experience of a laborious and endurable creation of the theatrical trend of counterculture in Poland.
The article describes the functioning of alternative theater community during the COVID-19 pandemic. The theoretical framework of analysis is determined by the social worlds theory, allowing us to capture the processual nature of reconstructing the social world of alternative theater in the era of COVID-19. We explore the ways in which independent theater is coping with the threat to its practice, understood as a tool for building a community “here and now,” i.e. its main technology, values, and the primary activity that organizes communication within the social worlds of alternative theater. We take into account changes brought on by the pandemic (the inability to build relationships via direct interaction with audience members/participants) and the constant, everyday experiences of people working in alternative theater (their ability to function in a crisis). Our analysis is based on empirical data collected in the course of socio-anthropological studies into: (1) the working conditions of Polish theater workers during the pandemic, carried out by the Zbigniew Raszewski Theater Institute in Warsaw; and (2) the modus operandi of the Węgajty Theater from the perspective of its participants’ experiences.
The ethical challenges which creative work entails and which at times are explicitly stated or remain only signalled between the lines: this was what we were acutely aware of when listening to our interlocutors discussing “caring navigation" received from Wacław and Erdmute Sobaszek. These two had created within the Węgajty Theatre a space of freedom not only for themselves but also for the participants of the Different Theatre School: a place where you can “experiment, explore, make mistakes, doubt, be afraid, ask”, while “feeling safe when wandering.” This text concerns such ethical challenges. In this chapter, we ask questions about the ethical quandaries in the implementation of the horizontal model of interpersonal relations in the Węgajty Theatre’s work. We ask about the risks associated with working in a theatre created via polyphonic methods of managing the artistic process and based on a community model of relations. The vision of theatre proposed by the Sobaszek family seems to create an ideal, non-violent, non-hierarchical, dialogue-oriented place of creative endeavour, and yet some participants of the Węgajty workshops and tours expressed doubts concerning the implementation of this vision – which sometimes deviated from the proclaimed values. The context for our analyses is provided by the utopian character of the Węgajty project on the one hand, and on the other, by the atmosphere currently prevailing in Polish theatre, conducive to an open discussion of negligence and wrongs as well as fact-checking inconvenient for the legends of the theatrical community; all these are broadly related to violations of dignity or freedom of theatrical employees. In our analysis, we use the categories employed in the anthropological reflection on the ethics of field research and adapt them to the analysis of the creative process.
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