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.
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