Reflecting and resisting. Polish theatre and politics of memory since 2005

This research argues that contemporary Polish theatre has been marked by this struggle between those creating performances and state authorities that see those creations as a threat to their authority. It interrogates the ways in which the artistic and political strategies that have been developed in the past two decades in the Polish theatre field can be theorized as queer artistic and political strategies. It will argue that this struggle has led to the twin processes of theatre makers in Poland resisting political pressure, while simultaneously reflecting on and thinking through their historical role in facilitating the narratives that have enabled the emergence of a more militant form of Polish nationalism that has legitimized itself through a conservative reappropriation of the discourse of Polish Romanticism. It will argue that it is a productive approach to trace these twin processes of resisting and reflecting back to 2005, the year in which the right-wing conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party won that year’s presidential and parliamentary elections and formed its first government. This puts the Polish theatre field in an interesting position: after a period in which it had been moving away from the imagery, narratives, canon and traditions of Polish Romanticism, the latter regained a lot of its political relevance. Even as Polish makers have moved away from notions of martyrdom and the suffering of the nation, the broken pieces of the mirror of Polish Romanticism are still refracting light throughout contemporary Polish theatre. As a result, this research does not focus on canonical Polish theatre, but instead reorients itself towards the dissenting bodies that deviate from the norms of Polish nationalism and heteronormativity, or this research terms it, Polish normativity. This is investigated through the close analysis of nine theatre performances that were produced by Polish makers between 2005 and 2022: Niech żyje wojna (Strzępka and Demirski, 2009), Solidarność. Nowy Projekt (Wodziński, 2017), Have A Good Cry (Szpecht, 2021), Mikrodziady (Smolar, 2016), Bez tytułu (Nowak, 2016), KLUB (students at Akademia Teatralna and Szczawińska, 2021), Masakra (Sakowicz, 2018), Henrietta Lacks (Smolar, 2016-17), and Bez tytułu (Znowu Razem) (Borczuch, 2018).