In my lecture I will depart from reflecting on the body-archive category in Polish theater and performance studies. It is most commonly articulated as emancipatory tool with potential to reclaim the history of marginalized, 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 theater – Sarah Kane’s body – and the way it was present and presented to the Polish viewers, I will 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 realized on Polish stage in 1999 the 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 nineties.
Dorota Sosnowska
Assistant Professor at the Institute of Polish Culture (Department of Theater and Performance) at University of Warsaw. The author of the book about three actresses of the communist period in Poland entitled “Królowe PRL. Sceniczne wizerunki Ireny Eichlerówny, Niny Andrycz i Elżbiety Barszczewskiej jako modele kobiecości” (2014). She took part in the scientific projects devoted to the problem of performance documentation (ECLAP), theoretical status of sources, archives and documents in performance studies (Sources and Mediations) and performance and memory (Performing Memory). She published articles on the subject in Polish and international journals such as “Performance Research” or “Theatralia” and coedited a book devoted to the memory of worker’s theater (“Robotnik. Performanse pamięci”, 2017). Now she is a leading researcher in the project “Odmieńcy. Performances of otherness in Polish Transition Culture”.
You can attend the lecture online by ZOOM or in person.
