Udręki edukacji („Metafizyka dwugłowego cielęcia” Witkacego) - recenzja

Identity crisis, one of the crucial problems tackled by Witkacy in his dramas, is linked first of all with the tradition of modernism by critics. The author of the article suggests a change in the viewpoint, and basing on the analysis of Metaphysics of a Two-Headed Calf presents that problem in the perspective of contemporary discourse concerning identity. The problems that Witkacy’s characters had with their own existence are in consonance not only with today’s quite common conviction that individuals can experiment with their own feeling of identity relatively freely, but also with the concepts of individual ego, that function within social sciences. The tools developed by social sciences allow to have a different perception on the relation between the processoriented/ process-driven nature of identity (self-creation of the ‘I’, game, mystification) and the conviction that its borders are delineated by the cultural pressure and social discipline. In Metaphysics of particular importance are the relations with parents, with the family – representing society – as well as constructions of double-gangers (Doppelgänger) that reveal the subject as the Other, or deprive the subject of its ‘individual-ness’ undermine her/his individual (subjective) status. The diagnoses of Witkacy are quite close to the contemporary ways of conceptualization of the ‘I’, which – as Lacanian psychoanalysis, Foucault’s constructionism – negating the subjective power to cause, do not confine themselves to unmasking the pressure of institutionalized forms of life, and reveal their activity even at micro-level

"Róża" Stefana Żeromskiego : kreowanie mitu

"W kontrowersyjnie zwykle przyjmowanej twórczości dramatycznej Żeromskiego Róża obrosła gąszczem szczególnie zróżnicowanych opinii; przeszła chyba najbardziej znamienne koleje losu. Mocno krytykowana przez sporą część recenzentów po ukazaniu się drukiem w 1909 roku, przede wszystkim jako utwór polityczny, ale też z powodu dominacji tej politycznej perspektywy i uwikłania jej w aktualne spory — utwór niedoczytany1. Po odzyskaniu niepodległości odkryta na nowo, zdobyła uznanie dzięki głośnej inscenizacji Leona Schillera z 1926 roku. Wówczas także ważną rolę w dyskusji zaczyna odgrywać świadomość głębokich powinowactw Róży z dramatem polskich romantyków (...)." (fragm.

Kwartet dramatyczny Wiesława Myśliwskiego

Dzieła dramaturgiczne nie przyniosły Wiesławowi Myśliwskiemu takiego uznania jak powieści. Przez krytyków bywały nieraz traktowane jak słabiej rozwinięte, mniej samodzielne skrzydło jego twórczości, choć trudno przeczyć, że miały też i mają nadal liczne grono sprzymierzeńców. Wydaje się, że w świetle przedstawionych tu analiz można przynajmniej częściowo zweryfikować tę niepochlebną opinię. Myśliwski jest nie tylko kontynuatorem tradycji umuzyczniania dramatu, której klasycznym przykładem są innowacje Stanisława Wyspiańskiego i Karola Huberta Rostworowskiego (np. w Judaszu z Kariothu), ale także jej odnowicielem. Współcześni autorzy preferują raczej muzyczność płynącą z brzmieniowych właściwości języka aniżeli muzykę w jej czystej postaci, muzyczność kreowaną przez układy rytmiczne (np. Porwanie Europy Jarosława Marka Rymkiewicza, Kowal Malambo Tadeusza Słobodzianka), uporządkowanie wersyfikacyjne (Nieskończona historia Artura Pałygi) czy instrumentację dźwiękową (Koczowisko Tomasza Łubieńskiego). Rzadziej natomiast można spotkać partnerskie połączenia (względnie zderzenia) dwu różnych sztuk - słowa i muzyki. [fragm. tekstu

Doświadczenie pamięci

The theme of memory in the newest drama is related to the reorientation of modern literature which accentuates the meaning of an individual, subjective experience renouncing the communal and traditionally approached image of experience. Thus, what is actually renounced is its fundamental way of experiencing the real world as well as its function of its main object in a stage performance. In my article, traumatic events filtered through memory are considered on the one hand from the perspective of representation, presencing and repetition, and on the other psychoanalytic approach. The dramas taken into consideration in the article, Savannah Bay by M. Duras, Suita I by P. Minyany, and A Summer’s Day by J. Fosse, project the future either in a narrative way as a fragmentary, gapped and blurred story, or with the use of techniques and means of expression typical to drama. Even though narration and dramatization do not introduce major discrepancies in characteristic mechanism of memory functioning, still they vary considerably as to the way in which memories are reconstructed. As long as those mechanisms can be articulated, the medium of memory allows for creation of an image of a fleeting experience, which in fact renders attempts at capturing it in its prime shape impossible, especially in plays by Duras and Minyany. Thus, uncertainty concerns memories that are impossible to verify; however, it still reveals a dimension of experience whose imprints have greatly influenced the subject. Therefore, an attempt to comprehend and objectify, added to the inability to make primal experience part of the present, comes to be the individual experience of memory

Śmierć i przemiana w dramatach Williama Butlera Yeatsa

The article analyses the motifs of faith, sacrifice and transcendence as well as a variety of methods in which they are represented in the dramatic works of W.B. Yeats. The article also tackles the difficult theme of creating national myths through dramatic and political activity that Yeats was so keen to engage with. Additionally, Wąchocka discusses the mythological imagination in Yeats’s drama in the context of the Celtic mythological tradition, pointing to how certain motifs and subjects (especially lives of gods and heroes) find their way into his plays. Wąchocka pays particular attention to the irrational, subconscious elements in Yeats’s work, identifying a variety of traditions he was drawing his inspiration from. The article also discusses the topic of reincarnation, and the theme of return to life of Yeats’s heroes, and interprets images and symbols used to represent them

Śmierć w "nowych dekoracjach"

The change in the place of death in contemporary culture was caused by two interdependent phenomena — the desire to completely rule over life, and a utopian faith in unlimited possibilities of its prolonging. At the deepest level, a widespread disappearance of faith in immortality is the cause of this change. The result of this mass removal is the “privatization” of individual death, its removal from the field of social and cultural visibility, as opposed to the reach and omnipresence of the occurrence in media public space, where the event of death is treated in the category of a show. A meta-commentary to cultural processes is the manner, in which the subject of death is revealed in both art and thanatological thought. The dramas analyzed within this text — Kaprysy Łazarza by S. Grochowiak, Lalek by Z. Herbert, Requiem dla gospodyni by W. Myśliwski, Dobrze by T. Man, and Cicho by M. Bieliński — often turn out to be an artistic exemplification of judgments of philosophers, anthropologists, or culture historians (M. Heidegger, M. Scheler, L. Kołakowski, Z. Bauman, E. Lévinas, J. Baudrillard, Ph. Ariès), and confirm the direction of theoretical thought. The authors of dramas show, on the one hand, the impossibility of communication related to the intimate experience of death (silence as a form of exclusion), on the other — the dawn of old rituals accompanying dying. The older texts — those by Grochowiak and Herbert — can be read as a gesture of revision towards the suppression of fear and death in post-war culture of Poland, a result of the war trauma. The newest works — those by Myśliwski, Man, and Bieliński — as a counter-proposal to a media show, to its passive observation of anonymous death. Regardless of historical references, contemporary drama is a reflective field of art, which attempts to settle anew the subject of death in the public sphere, a significant voice in discussion on its tabooing, and its marginalization in cultural practices

Jak opowiedzieć, jak grać tę historię?

In contemporary work for theatre, different forms of mise en abyme became an important tool for redefining the identity of drama in the altered social and political situation. The turn towards new themes which occurred towards the end of the first decade of the present century – political, historical, revisory, biographical – is connected with a manifestation of a different approach to writing, and – as a result – a development of new forms of expression (dramatic adaptations, collages, remixes and paraphrases, recycling and travesty). Different means and tropes of metatheatre serve the validation of authorial narrative strategies, world-view and aesthetic preferences. With reference to Daniel Heller-Roazen’s concept of “forgotten language,” the article analyses typical authorial interpretations of the situation in which drama’s “language” finds itself – rejected and still essential, severely weakened and found in modernized or mocking uses, amazingly lively in parodies and pastiches. I present several fundamental strategies for revealing the author’s self-consciousness, whose subject is, on the one hand, the way of telling “history” (L. Amejko, B.M. Bukowski, A. Pałyga, Z. Rudzka, M. Sikorska-Miszczuk), and on the other, the project of stage realization of the text, and thus also theatrical communication, building a close relation with the audience (P. Demirski, M. Pakuła). Self-reflexivity is an opportunity for strengthening the stage message, and these strategies also indicate the search for such forms which could endow today’s omnipresent and commonplace metatheatre with a significantly self-reflexive character

Między domem a forum : (zamiast wstępu)

In the post-modern “flow” culture, in a world with a prevailing global stream of mass distribution of images, designating and retaining borders between the private and the public becomes increasingly difficult. Privacy, sometimes defined in opposition to that, which is public, seems to be an abstract construct, since the poles of this dichotomy are not either parallel, or entirely antithetical. The changes that occurred in the public life sphere during the past two centuries have significantly influenced the functioning of culture, irreversibly — it seems — changing the relations between the public and the intimate. The lability and instability of such notions, as “intimate”, “private”, and “public”, is not only a signum temporis of the ever-changing world, but also a kind of a handy key to unlock complicated awareness changes, which are increasingly noticeable and demand a comprehensible commentary. It doesn’t mean that these concepts ever had any universal explications and clearly established bounds. On the contrary — there is not one delineation of this triad, and its meaning can only be revealed by means of an analysis of systemic variables: geography, history, and culture. The understanding of these concepts also differs in terms of the type of scientific narration or the field, in which they are used (sociology and anthropology, social psychology, cultural sciences, media sciences, the language of politics and political science, law) and in which they have specific connotations as a result of subject references and scopes determined by their virtue. It is obviously impossible to negate collective components of historically variable categories, but the article emphasizes semantic shifts, which — like is the case with intimacy, for example — are difficult to understand without referring the modernization of marriage, initiated wit the appearance of the idea of romantic love, the “discovery” of a child, the pattern-making role of motherhood, the birth of the modern notions of “family” and “home”. The shape of the triad in question — especially during the last couple of decades — has been influenced by the transformation of contemporary communities into “media societies”, which often force a specific character of intimate, private, and public life. Electronic technologies alarmingly oust emotions, closeness, and engagement. As a result of detachment from family-, love- and friend-related communities, intimacy becomes a value less clearly connected to privacy, but possible to be experienced — or found — in any circumstances. It becomes diffused in the multitude of social interactions, which include them, the flood of images and social practices of (auto)presentation, but at the same time wherever it unceremoniously circulates as an element of the style of exchange, a product, or a sign — its actual value decreases

Musical Dramaturgy

In her paper, Ewa Wąchocka examines the phenomenon of recent dramatic works becoming increasingly more ‘musical’ and the terminological shift it brought about, i.e. the inclusion of the term ‘musical dramaturgy’ in writing for the stage. The author argues that far from being limited to the sounds of speech and language in general, musicality also encompasses a variety of non-musical sounds, the unravelling of the play’s narrative and the psychological makeup of its characters; it also penetrates deeply into the structure of the text. In the analysis of plays by W. Murek, A. Grzegorzewska, and S. Bogacz, the author demonstrates how essential the inspirations sourced from musical culture are for recent dramatic works: the 20th-century experiments with music, the discovery of how potent sound expression can be, or the most technologically advanced methods of sound reproduction. By presenting the many and varied dramatic strategies, the author shows that contemporary playwrights not only use musicality to represent the sound landscape of the world but, first and foremost, to create the ontology of an internally conflicted world.In her paper, Ewa Wąchocka examines the phenomenon of recent dramatic works becoming increasingly more ‘musical’ and the terminological shift it brought about, i.e. the inclusion of the term ‘musical dramaturgy’ in writing for the stage. The author argues that far from being limited to the sounds of speech and language in general, musicality also encompasses a variety of non-musical sounds, the unravelling of the play’s narrative and the psychological makeup of its characters; it also penetrates deeply into the structure of the text. In the analysis of plays by W. Murek, A. Grzegorzewska, and S. Bogacz, the author demonstrates how essential the inspirations sourced from musical culture are for recent dramatic works: the 20th-century experiments with music, the discovery of how potent sound expression can be, or the most technologically advanced methods of sound reproduction. By presenting the many and varied dramatic strategies, the author shows that contemporary playwrights not only use musicality to represent the sound landscape of the world but, first and foremost, to create the ontology of an internally conflicted world

Słowo wstępne

Wstęp do książki "Gatunki dramatyczne: rekonfiguracje" pod redakcją Ewy Wąchockiej