Alternative Theatre in Poland 1954-1989 3718658534, 3718658542, 9781315077932, 9783718658541

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Introduction to the Series
List of Plates
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Background in Polish Theatre History
The Paradox of Censorship
1.
The Beginnings of Polish Alternative Theatre
The Polish October
Postwar Theatre
Student Theatre of the 1950s
Warsaw: STS
Gdańsk:
Bim-Bom
Other Student Theatres
Kantor: A Non-student Alternative
Fifties Alternative Theatre
2.
Expansion, Experimentation, De-politicization
The Small Stabilization
The Polish Theatre of the Absurd
Student Theatre 1958-1968
Satiric Theatres and Cabarets
Dramatic Theatres
Visual and Pantomime Theatre
Poetry Theatres
Grotowski: Between Student and Professional Theatre
Political Retreat But Artistic Advancement
3.
The Full Voice Years
The Events of 1968
Mainstream Auteur Theatre
Student Theatre 1970-75
Wrocław: Teatr Kalambur
Kraków: Teatr STU
Poznań: The Theatre of the 8th Day
Łódź : Teatr 77
Part of the Worldwide Alternative Theatre Movement
4.
Decline But Not Quite Fall
KOR, Solidarity, Martial Law
Mainstream Theatre Becomes Politicized
Alternative Theatre 1976-1989
The Generation of '68: The Theatre of the 8th Day
The KOR Generation: Teatr Provisorium
The Martial Law Generation: The Orange Alternative
Part of the Decline of the Worldwide Alternative Theatre Movement?
5.
The Avant-garde of the Alternative
Word Experiments: Pleonazmus
Visual Theatre/Performance Art Experiments
Scena Plastyczna
Akademia Ruchu
Experiments in the Anthropology of Theatre: Gardzienice
Perhaps All is Not Lost, After All
Conclusion: The Aftermath of 1989
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Alternative Theatre in Poland 1954-1989

Polish Theatre Archive A series of books edited by Daniel Gerould, Graduate School, City University of New York, USA

Volumel To Steal a March on God

Hanna Krall translated and with an introduction by Jadwiga Kosicka

Volume2 Alternative Theatre in Poland 1954-1989

Kathleen Cioffi Volume3 Country House

Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz translated and with an introduction by Daniel Gerould

Volume4 The Trap

Tadeusz R6zewicz translated by Adam Czerniawski

VolumeS Polish Romantic Drama

Harold B. Segel Volume6 The Mannequins' Ball

Bruno Jasienski translated and with an introduction by Daniel Gerould

Additional volumes in preparation: Encounters with Tadeusz Kantor

Krzysztof Miklaszewski

This book is part of a series. The publisher will accept continuation orders which may be cancelled at any time and which provide for automatic billing and shipping of each title in the series upon publication. Please write for details.

Alternative Theatre in Poland 1954-1989 by

Kathleen M. Cioffi

~~ ~~a~1~:n~~:up NEW YORK AND LONDON

First published 1996 by OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) This edition published 2011 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright© 1996 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Cioffi, Kathleen M. Alternative theatre in Poland, 1954-1989.-(Polish theatre archive; v. 2) 1. Experimental theatre-Poland-History-20th century I. Title 792' .022'09438 ISBN 3-7186-5853-4 (hardback) ISBN 3-7186-5854-2 (paperback)

Cover: Scena Plastyczna, Lublin: The Fettering (1986). Photo: Stefan Ciechan.

For Frank

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CONTENTS

Introduction to the Series

ix

List of Plates

xi xiii

Acknowledgements

Introduction Background in Polish Theatre History The Paradox of Censorship 1. The Beginnings of Polish Alternative Theatre The Polish October Postwar Theatre Student Theatre of the 1950s Warsaw: STS Gdansk: Bim-Bom Other Student Theatres Kantor: A Non-student Alternative Fifties Alternative Theatre 2. Expansion, Experimentation, De-politicization The Small Stabilization The Polish Theatre of the Absurd Student Theatre 1958-1968 Satiric Theatres and Cabarets Dramatic Theatres Visual and Pantomime Theatre Poetry Theatres Grotowski: Between Student and Professional Theatre Political Retreat But Artistic Advancement 3. The Full Voice Years The Events of 1968 Mainstream Auteur Theatre

1 3

12 15 15

20 22 25 31 41 42

47 53 53 56 60

63 68 72

77 82 93 95 95 101

vii

viii

Contents

Student Theatre 1970-75 Wrodaw: Teatr Kalambur Krakow: Teatr STU Poznan: The Theatre of the 8th Day L6dz: Teatr 77 Part of the Worldwide Alternative Theatre Movement

104 108

111 120 127 134

4. Decline But Not Quite Fall KOR, Solidarity, Martial Law Mainstream Theatre Becomes Politicized Alternative Theatre 1976-1989 The Generation of '68: The Theatre of the 8th Day The KOR Generation: Teatr Provisorium The Martial Law Generation: The Orange Alternative Part of the Decline of the Worldwide Alternative Theatre Movement?

139 139 145 149 156 167 173

5. The Avant-garde of the Alternative Word Experiments: Pleonazmus Visual Theatre/Performance Art Experiments Scena Plastyczna Akademia Ruchu Experiments in the Anthropology of Theatre: Gardzienice Perhaps All is Not Lost, After All

183 184 188 190 194 206 216

Conclusion: The Aftermath of 1989

223

Bibliography

233

Index

249

179

INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES

The Polish Theatre Archive makes available in English translation major works of Poland's dramatic literature as well as monographs and critical studies on Polish playwrights, theatre artists and stage history. Although emphasis is placed on the contemporary period, the Polish Theatre Archive also encompasses the nineteenth-century roots of modern theatre practice in Romanticism and Symbolism. The individual plays will contain authoritative introductions that place the works in their historical and theatrical contexts. DANIEL GEROULD

ix

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LIST OF PLATES

Following page 138 1. Theatre of the 8th Day, Poznan: Do We Have to Settle for What Has Been Called Paradise on Earth? ... (1975). 2. Theatre of the 8th Day, Poznan: Discounts for Everybody (1977). 3. Theatre of the 8th Day, Poznan: Oh, How Nobly We Lived (1979). 4. Theatre of the 8th Day, Poznan: More Than One Life (1981). 5. Theatre of the 8th Day, Poznan: Report from a Besieged City (1983). 6. Theatre of the 8th Day, Poznan: Miracles and Meat (1984). 7. Theatre of the 8th Day, Poznan: Ascent (1982) 1985 production. 8. Theatre of the 8th Day, Poznan: Wormwood (1985). 9. Teatr 77, L6dz: Circle or Triptych (1971). 10. Teatr 77, L6dz: Passion III (This sequence also appeared in Passion II, 1972). 11. Teatr 77, L6dz: Passion III (This sequence also appeared in Passion II, 1972). 12. Teatr 77, L6dz: Retrospective (1973). 13. Teatr 77, L6dz: Retrospective (1973). Following page 181 14. Provisorium Theatre, Lublin: It is Not for Us to Fly to the Islands of Happiness (1982). 15. Provisorium Theatre, Lublin: Recollections from the House of the Dead (1983). 16. Provisorium Theatre, Lublin: Recollections from the House of the Dead (1983). 17. Provisorium Theatre, Lublin: Heritage (1985). 18. Provisorium Theatre, Lublin: Heritage (1985). 19. Scena Plastyczna, Lublin: Moisture (1978). 20. Scena Plastyczna, Lublin: The Wandering (1980). 21. Scena Plastyczna, Lublin: The Bank (1983). 22. Scena Plastyczna, Lublin: The Fettering (1986).

xi

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my gratitude to numerous people in Poland who taught me Polish, helped me to arrange trips to see theatres and introduced me to people I needed to meet. Among those who helped me most were: Andrzej Ceynowa, Jerzy Limon and Janina Kamiftska of Gdansk University; Leslaw Ludwig, Justyna Limon, Dorota Dol~ga, Boguslaw Posmyk and Wladyslaw Zawistowski of Gdansk; Janusz Marek of Warsaw; Jolanta Adamczyk of the International Festival of Street Theatres, Jelenia G6ra; Krzysztof Zuber and the other organizers of the Festival of Young Theatre, Wrodaw; Wojciech Krukowski of Akademia Ruchu, Warsaw; Lech Raczak and the members of the Theatre of the 8th Day, Poznan; Janusz Oprynski and the members of Teatr Provisorium, Lublin; Leszek MQ.dzik and Piotr Zielinski of Scena Plastyczna KUL-u, Lublin; and Wlodzimierz Staniewski and the members of Gardzienice. Also many thanks to Daniel Gerould of CUNY Graduate School for his help and encouragement. Thanks also to Lowell Swortzell and Robert Taylor of New York University and Steven Hart of the University of South Carolina at Columbia for their help with an earlier version of the manuscript. Finally, Frank L. Cioffi of Central Washington University has served as editor and critic of all versions of this book. Without him it would never have been completed.

xiii

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INTRODUCTION

This book concerns a particular type of alternative theatre that flourished in Poland during the period from the 1950s Thaw to the fall of Communism in 1989. While the movement had some striking similarities to American, British, and other alternative theatres of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, it also developed in a way unique to the Communist bloc. Specifically, many theatres believed it was their right, and even their duty, to deal with, in the words of one director, "the simple facts of political and social reality" (Cioffi and Ceynowa 82). In dealing with these facts, the theatre often reflected a nationwide discontent with the Communist system. At the same time, it existed as a genuine avant-garde artistic movement influenced by trends in the international theatre world. While several of these theatres continued to exist after the fall of Communism, the nature of this phenomenon has now irrevocably changed, as indeed the entire Polish Zeitgeist has been transformed. The study traces this type of theatre from its inception as an amateur student theatre movement in the Stalinist era, through its period of formal experimentation in the 1960s, its greatest maturity and engagement in the 1970s, to finally, its post-Martial Law decline. This involves three intertwined strands of inquiry. First, I attempt to identify the political and social conditions which led to the genesis of the Polish alternative theatre movement and continued to influence it over the years. Secondly, I describe the evolution of working methods, subject matter, and performance styles in Polish alternative theatres. And finally, I try to place the Polish alternative theatre movement in the context of alternative theatre elsewhere and of theatre history in general. I lived in Poland for three years (1984-1987) in the waning days of Communist rule, and then again for a year (1990-91) after Communism had fallen. I was able to observe the phenomenon of Polish alternative theatre first-hand: I attended single performances as well as theatre festivals and became personally acquainted with the creators of most of the theatres described in Chapters 4 and 5. Most foreigners who went to Poland to study theatre went for only a week or two to participate in a theatre festival or, at most, a few months to work with a particular group. The reaction of nonPoles to Polish theatre is usually, at best, similar to British critic John Elsom's:

2

Alternative Theatre in Poland Polish theatre was proud of its allusiveness. With each attempt at repression, the layers of irony went one step deeper, so that the surface meaning was contradicted by a secondary one and then at a tertiary level. It constituted a kind of meta-language, which only Poles could understand. (81)

Since I lived in the country for such a long time and under virtually the same conditions that Poles lived, I had to learn not only the Polish language, but also the meta-language that Elsom refers to as well. I found myself reacting to various performances in much the same way that my Polish friends did, and my reactions changed after the great political transformation of 1989 in the same or similar ways that theirs did. Yet simultaneously, as a foreigner and a theatre historian, I always stood slightly apart and could, I think, more objectively analyze the artistic value of a given production than my friends. The following reflections on Polish alternative theatre are therefore highly colored by my own experience as a kind of half-outsider /half-insider in the Polish alternative theatre scene. In May of 1985, I entered the Economic Transport Building (affectionately called by students "E. T.") at the University of Gdansk in order to see a performance by the Theatre of the 8th Day from Poznan. The performance was by invitation only, and Dorota, one of my students in the English Institute, had gotten me an invitation through some kind of campus "theatrology" circle. Though I knew the 8th Day was well-known and controversial, I expected that the invited audience would be small. When I walked down the corridor to the auditorium where the performance was to take place, however, I found hundreds of other audience members, including several other faculty members and students from the English Institute, milling around. I found Dorota and asked her why we weren't being permitted to go into the auditorium. She replied that the 8th Day actors hadn't arrived yet, and everyone was afraid that either they'd been stopped by the police or the university authorities had gotten cold feet and cancelled the performance at the last minute. Finally the actors arrived and Dorota, after consulting with some friends of hers, whispered that they had been stopped by the police but had then been allowed to come to the performance after all. The actors themselves ushered us into the auditorium and showed us where to sit in a kind of long U-shaped formation around a stage area. I started to worry about whether I was going to be able to see everything. And then the performance, called Piolun (Wormwood), started, and my worries evaporated. I was caught up in a series of striking visual images which possessed no obvious narrative link. Each actor played several roles with an impressively physical energy. The acting was completely nonrealistic, yet utterly

Introduction

3

believable. I was captivated by the performers' skill, commitment, and talent, and by the audience's enthusiastic response to the performance. The tone of Wormwood blended a dreamlike quality and quasireligious imagery with a corrosive, bitterly ironic humor. Its imagery evoked yet exaggerated the Solidarity and martial law experiences. For example, in one scene people fought while waiting on line for meat and finally ate a man. In another, Christmas carollers, one of whom carried a knife ready to stab any attacker, had to find their way in the pitch dark (after curfew? during a power cut? because all the light bulbs in the halls had been stolen?) through an apartment building. A third scene depicted a dreamlike dance on a pier where lantern-carrying dancers joyously stepped out on the water only to discover where they were and fearfully retreat. In images which simultaneously mocked and paid homage to religious traditions a man hung from a ladder as if crucified on the cross and actors slapped (scourged?) themselves frantically with wet towels. After the performance was over, Andrzej, another friend from the English Institute, asked me if I would like to interview Lech Raczak, the director of the 8th Day. He set up an appointment for us to meet Raczak the next day and ask him some questions. Raczak spoke to us for three and a half hours, and told me many things about the 8th Day, their history, and the Polish alternative theatre in general. However, it was not until after I had spent two more years in Poland, reading everything I could get my hands on about Polish literature and history, as well as theatre, and had seen many other alternative and mainstream theatre performances, that I understood what I had seen in the E. T. auditorium. This book is, in a sense, my attempt to explain to myself that first, exciting, puzzling performance which, despite only lasting approximately an hour, embodied within itself numerous elements from Polish theatre history as well as paradoxes about the thencurrent political situation. Background in Polish Theatre History

The theatre has long been an especially cherished art form in Poland, one for which Poles feel a particular affinity. As poet Czeslaw Milosz states: "Polish literature has always been oriented more toward poetry and the theatre than toward fiction" (History xv). In the popular imagination, also, the theatre has a great deal of prestige. Writing in the 1950s about Poland, Clifford Barnett comments: For Poles, who tend to see their own life and history as filled with drama and romance, the spell of the stage possesses a special potency .... Theatergoing is one of the most important

4

Alternative Theatre in Poland social activities of the urban population, particularly the intelligentsia who consider it a serious and edifying experience, not entertainment. (383)

The repertory of a theatre which is regarded as "serious and edifying" has very little in common with that of Broadway or London's West End. Martin Esslin points out that in both Eastern and Western Europe the theatre is usually "regarded as an important cultural institution, on a level with universities, public libraries, symphony orchestras, opera houses or art museums, and thus deserving of, and entitled to, public funding" (26). Such a theatre is generally regarded as playing an important role in preserving the national heritage. In Poland, where that heritage includes more than two hundred years of opposition to the powers that be, the theatre has often found itself at the center of many political controversies. The political nature of Polish theatre is, however, not the only quality that has given it what critic Witold Filler terms "a special place in Polish culture"; he contends that "the theatre has collected a maximum of typically Polish traits and is thus capable of best representing the spiritual features of the country and its people" (7). The specific traits which critic Stanislaw Marczak-Oborski believes make Polish drama unique are an ability to combine crucial issues in Polish history with universal philosophical problems and a further ability to pass freely from the poetic to the humorous: [T]he two main currents of Polish theatre - the poetic theatre and the theatre of grotesque and satire- draw from one another. On the one hand, works of tragic impact, undertaking the most difficult conflicts, do not lack grotesque or humorous elements that help show some other, different picture of the world as if in a looking-glass fixed at a different angle. On the other hand, pieces considered grotesque offer more than just the satirical or playful dimensions of their subject: they draw on the traditions and experiences of the poetic theatre with its vast horizons, intellectual restlessness, and irrationality. (10)

In other words, the qualities which I had noticed in Wormwood - the strange combination of the poetic and the grotesque - are characteristic of all the great works of Polish theatre. Furthermore, the work of the Theatre of the 8th Day was also typical of Polish theatre in that it tried to use national issues to illuminate philosophical problems that go far beyond those issues. These characteristics appeared, at least in embryonic form, almost from the beginnings of Polish theatre history. As in many other European countries, Polish medieval drama had evolved from religious rites in Latin performed in churches to full-fledged mystery plays in Polish performed outdoors. This evolution was complete by about the fifteenth century. The tradition of medieval religious drama was particularly robust in Poland, and has survived up to the present day in the szopka, a Christmas Nativity puppet

Introduction

5

play performed by carollers, and in the mystery plays still performed every year in Kalwaria Zebrzydowska near Krakow. As do other European mystery plays, Polish mystery plays combine comic, often bawdy, interludes with scenes from the Bible. They thus already included the mixture of the poetic with the satiric mentioned by Marczak-Oborski. It was not until the sixteenth century, however, with the advent of humanistic drama in Poland, that Polish theatre acquired its characteristic preoccupation with national issues. The most famous Polish Renaissance drama is Jan Kochanowski's Odprawa posl6w greckich (Dismissal of the Greek Envoys), staged in 1578. The plot of this play, the story of Greek messengers who arrive in Troy just prior to the outbreak of the Trojan War and try to negotiate a peace settlement, contains many allusions to conditions then current in Poland, especially to the disorder which disrupted sessions of the Polish parliament and to abuses that the young gentry was guilty of. There are also calls to war which would have been understood at the time as referring to King Stefan Batory's intention of declaring war on Muscovy. However, the most unusual aspect of the play is the fact that there is no individual hero; according to cultural historian Adam Zamoyski: The characters in the play are not really people, but in effect the voices of collective interests, and the play is not about their feelings, but about the fate of Troy, which is a sort of corporate character. The curious use of dramatis personae to represent the collective is seminal because it foreshadows nineteenth- and twentieth-century Polish drama, the mainstream of which is neither lyrical nor psychological, but ethical and political. (120)

Having a collective hero is by no means unique to Kochanowski's play or to Polish literature of the period; Lope de Vega's Spanish drama Fuente Ovejuna, written in approximately 1614, has a town as its protagonist. What is more significant is that the pattern established by Kochanowski continued to be

followed by Polish playwrights in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Milosz points out: The naturalistic, photographic theatre has never experienced great success in Poland, while the poetic transformation of reality, akin to mystery and morality plays, has attracted many writers.... fl'!lot the drama of the individual as such will attract the poets, but that of the individual as redeemer of the collectivity. (History 73)

Polish playwright/poets, particularly those of the Romantic and later eras, have striven to follow in the tradition both of Kochanowski and of the earlier, anonymous writers of mystery plays. As in the performance I saw of Wormwood, the theme of the individual as redeemer of the nation has been a common one in Polish drama, often expressed in a poetic, non-naturalistic style of performance.

Alternative Theatre in Poland

6

Modern theatre history in Poland starts at the end of the eighteenth century with the establishment of the National Theatre in Warsaw by King Stanislaw August. The first full-fledged director of this theatre was Wojciech Boguslawski, who was also an actor and a playwright. During the period when Boguslawski was active, the Great Powers - Russia, Prussia, and Austria -were in the process of annexing various sections of Polish territory to their own empires. Boguslawski, who is even today honored in Poland as "the father of Polish theatre," made of the National Theatre a political forum during a time of great political ferment. One of the plays he staged in 1791 was Powr6t posta (The Return of the Deputy) a romantic comedy by Julian Urszyn Niemcewicz, one of the deputies to the Polish parliament who was an ardent reformer and champion of a new constitution. The plot of The Return of the Deputy is the unexceptional story of the love between Walery, a progressive deputy in the parliament, and Teresa, the daughter of Mr. Gadulski (Mr. Talkative). However, Niemcewicz used this love story plot to satirize certain types of the Polish gentry, which had an exceptional effect on the political life of the day. Milosz comments: There are not many examples of spectacles having such an immediate political effect .... In Mr. Gadulski ... the audience recognized those deputies to the Four-Year Diet [Parliament] who employed a filibuster tactic to oppose any changes. (One such deputy, after seeing the spectacle, delivered a speech in the Diet against subversive plays and even introduced a motion to withdraw the concession granted to the theatre - fortunately without success.) (History 171)

Boguslawski's own most famous work is the libretto for a comic opera Cud mniemany, czyli Krakowiacy i G6rale (A Supposed Miracle, or Cracovians and Mountaineers), first staged in 1794. This light opera is also a love story- this time between the daughter of Tatra mountain inhabitants and the son of villagers near Krakow. However, Boguslawski's play itself became a political event since the lyrics to the songs were interpreted by the audience as alluding to the political situation. Audience members responded emotionally to these lyrics and the play was a great success. However, Russian diplomats made a formal protest to the government and succeeded in closing the play after only three performances. The beginning of modern Polish theatre history thus coincides with the period of partition and foreign occupation, which was to have a great influence on its subsequent evolution. In the early nineteenth century, Romanticism became a major influence on all Polish literature and on Polish thought in general. Naturally, it had a major influence on the evolution of Polish drama and theatre, and this influence is perhaps unique in theatre history. As slavicist and translator Harold Segel points out:

Introduction

7

The importance of the Romantic drama for later Polish drama as well as theatre far exceeds that of Bachner in the German-speaking countries. Apart from the impact of their formal innovations, which actually anticipated those of Bachner, the Polish Romantic plays gave rise to an entire tradition of modern Polish dramatic writing. (9)

The three great Polish Romantic poet-playwrights, Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Slowacki, and Zygmunt Krasinski, like many Romantic playwrights in other countries, wrote closet dramas with no hope of having them staged. In any case, these masterworks would have been too politically volatile to be performed in occupied Poland. However, the fact that they did not have to worry about actually producing their plays liberated the imaginations of the poets to conceive of works on a monumental scale, far beyond the capabilities of the illusionistic theatre of the time to produce. As MarczakOborski points out, Mickiewicz's Forefathers' Eve, Slowacki's Kordian, and Krasinski's Undivine Comedy have much in common with the plays of contemporaries such as Georg Buchner's Danton's Death, Prosper Merimee's La Jacquerie, and Alexander Pushkin's Boris Godunov: Two features were however distinctive for the Polish poets: firstly, they took up current rather than historical events and secondly, presented them on a monumental scale, not only in the artistic sense, for their performances embraced vast philosophical and moral spheres. It is this multi-plane that has become their contribution to the European Romantic drama. (12)

These vast dramas later became the basis of the modern Polish repertory. They are also the occupiers of a firm place in the modern national consciousness. Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855), long considered the greatest Polish poet, wrote few plays, but his work, together with his theoretical pronouncement on Slavic drama during his lectures at the College de France in Paris, has had tremendous influence on modern Polish theatre practice. Mickiewicz's greatest theatrical achievement, the play Dziady (Forefathers' Eve), was written in four parts. Parts I, II, and IV were written in 1823 when he still resided in Poland; Part III was written in 1832 in Dresden when he was already an exile. The play is based on a folk ritual still in existence during Mickiewicz's lifetime: on All Souls' Day, Lithuanian and Bielorussian peasants would gather to call on the dead and offer them food. Mickiewicz transformed this pagan folk rite into the framework for his multi-part, fragmentary, dreamlike work dealing with the political awakening of a young Pole. Forefathers' Eve also has a strong autobiographical element. When he wrote the earlier parts, Mickiewicz had just experienced an unhappy love, and these sections are concerned with the unhappy love of the hero, Gustaw. However, the later part was written after Mickiewicz's own imprisonment and exile from Poland, and immediately after the failed November Uprising

8

Alternative Theatre in Poland

of 1831-32 against the Russians, an insurrection which Mickiewicz did not take part in. In this section, we see a Gustaw imprisoned in a Tsarist prison but transformed from a person preoccupied with his own personal problems into a man dedicated to the national cause. To symbolize his change in consciousness, Gustaw even changes his name to Konrad (a name earlier used by Mickiewicz in another work about a revolutionary, Konrad Wallenrod). The play reflects Mickiewicz's optimism that Poland could be saved by a Polish "Messiah." It also reflects Mickiewicz's conviction that the Polish nation had been sacrificed, as Christ had been martyred, for some higher, divine purpose; Poland was thus the "Christ of Nations." Forefathers' Eve, like the plays of the other Polish Romantic playwrights, was never performed in the author's lifetime. The first production was not until 1901, when the symbolist playwright/painter Stanislaw Wyspianski directed it in Krakow. Wyspianski merged all four parts and shortened the work into a seven-scene drama that could be performed in one evening. This adaptation became standard. Milosz comments: Afterward it became a kind of national sacred play, occasionally forbidden by censorship because of its emotional impact upon the audience. The most complex and rich among the products of Romanticism, combining dreams with brutal, realistic satire, it has been looked upon as the highest test of skill for theatre directors. (History 223-4)

Since the problems of Mickiewicz's time (especially those connected with Russian occupation) reappeared after World War II, Forefathers' Eve has been seen by modern day audiences as anti-Communist. Polish critic Jan Kott declares in a 1967 essay: "This must be said clearly: we are still attacking the communist heaven and in this great attack Mickiewicz is on our side. Forefathers' Eve is for revolution and for the vehement champions of justice" ("Why Don't" 123). Less than a year after Kott's essay appeared in America, Kazimierz Dejmek mounted a production in Warsaw that so stressed the antiRussian elements of the play that the authorities considered it inflammatory and closed it. The suppression of this production caused student riots which were in turn brutally suppressed; this Polish version of "the events of 1968" is often cited as seminal for the thinking of some of the leaders of Solidarity. The plays of Juliusz Slowacki (1809-49) and Zygmunt Krasinski (1812-59), although more pessimistic than Mickiewicz's, have also had a tremendous impact on modern Polish theatre practice and consciousness and continue to be staged today. Slowacki was far more prolific than Mickiewicz but went nearly unrecognized in his own time. His most famous play, Kordian (1834), was a kind of polemic against Mickiewicz's Forefathers' Eve;

Introduction

9

Kordian, the main character, is a more neurotic version of Mickiewicz's Gustaw /Konrad who searches for love and cannot find it, then resolves to serve the national cause by killing the Tsar but cannot bring himself to do it. Slowacki disagreed with Mickiewicz's messianic notion that Poland could be saved by a single individual. According to literary historian Manfred Kridl: What he did was to take up, to pose and interpret in a basically novel way, the question of the contemporary Polish generation, its psychology, its attitude toward national problems and its ability to act. This question was connected with that of the recent insurrection, which occupied all the minds at the time. (Kridl270)

Slowacki' s criticism of Polish Messianism and the intelligentsia's role in Polish society is a theme that has been taken up over and over again in Polish drama and theatre. The image of a Christlike martyrdom which appeared in the production of Wormwood only to be satirically undermined elsewhere in the performance represents both an homage to Mickiewicz's idea of Poland as "the Christ of Nations" and a Slowacki-style critique of it. Unlike Romanticism elsewhere, Polish Romanticism did not necessarily scorn Classicism. Zygmunt Krasmski's play Irydion is the story of a Greek who desires to avenge his native country for its subjugation by Rome. However, his most famous play, Nie-Boska Komedia (The Undivine Comedy), written in 1833, is a startlingly modern work: "The play deals with revolution, social upheaval, class war, political morality, and the historical process" (Segel 52). Krasinski's hero, Count Henry, goes through a personal crisis (like Gustaw /Konrad and Kordian) then becomes a politically committed man in charge of reactionary Christian forces doomed to lose against revolutionary atheistic ones. Though Krasiil.ski's plays are less specifically "Polish" in their concerns than Forefathers' Eve or Kordian, they are still rooted in Poland's political predicament in the nineteenth century. Milosz contends that Forefathers' Eve, Kordian, and Undivine Comedy exemplify "that type of Romantic drama which is most specifically Polish, dealing as it does with history in the making. Central to all three dramas is the problem of action versus poetry and the spiritual transformation of the hero" (History 234). The person who was to carry on this tradition of political yet poetic theatre was the painter-playwright Stanislaw Wyspianski (1869-1907). Besides staging Mickiewicz's Forefathers' Eve for the first time, Wyspianski wrote his own plays very much in the Romantic tradition. As a painter, Wyspianski was very impressed by a visit he paid to Wagner's theatre at Bayreuth, and on his return to Krakow, he devoted himself to creating a "total" theatre which combined the aural and the visual. He took up many of the same themes as the Romantics, especially in his cycle of plays devoted to national problems which included Wesele (The Wedding), Wyzwolenie

10

Alternative Theatre in Poland

(Liberation), Legion (The Legion), and Akropolis (Acropolis), and the cycle dedicated to the Insurrection of 1830 which includes Noc listopadowa (November Night), Warszawianka (La Varsovienne) and Lelewel. However, like Krasmski, he was fascinated by Classicism, and he wrote several plays set in ancient Greece. Wyspiaftski builds on the Kochanowski-established tradition of a communal hero while creating the kind of monumental theatre envisioned by Mickiewicz and the other Romantics. Wyspiaftski has had an enormous influence on later developments in Polish theatre. His verse dramas are "the cornerstone of the modern Polish theater," according to Milosz (History 358). His most influential play is probably The Wedding, which depicts a wedding between an intellectual and a peasant girl. In the play, which takes place in a peasant's cottage where the wedding reception is going on, characters representing real members of the Krakow intelligentsia of the time mix with peasants. As the evening progresses from relatively sober beginnings to the weirder atmosphere of predawn hours, half-mythological figures from Polish history appear, as well as wholly symbolic characters such as Mulch, a covering for rose bushes who comes to life and casts a spell on the wedding guests. He leads them in a dreamlike dance that suggests the inertia of Polish society. This symbolic dance has had a powerful effect on the imaginations of succeeding Polish generations; as Daniel Gerould states: The Mulch dance, powerful theatrical image of stagnation, hopelessness, and the vicious circle of death-in-life, is taken up again and again by Polish playwrights and novelists from Witkiewicz and Gombrowicz to Mrozek; it appears in Tadeusz Konwicki's film Saito and in Andrzej Wajda's cinema version of the novel Ashes and Diamonds ... (Twentieth-Century 21)

The dreamlike dance on the pier which appeared in Wormwood is yet another reference to the Mulch dance in The Wedding. Yet Wyspianski's influence is not limited to specific images from his plays; his whole philosophy of theatre has been adopted by many later Polish theatre practitioners: Wyspiafzski' s plays live less in their literary texts, which serve rather as scenarios, than in their theatrical potential for realization on the stage. Taking both ancient Greek theatre and Wagner as his models and making use of folk arts, village customs, popular ceremonies, processions, and Christmas puppet shows, Wyspiafzski created a total theatre that is all image - shapes, colors, sounds - and that succeeds in uniting many different arts. (Gerould, Twentieth-Century 19)

This painterly conception of a theatre of imagery where literary text is less important than its ability to be theatricalized can be instantly recognized in alternative theatre works such as Wormwood, as well as in the work of many

Introduction

11

better-known, modern-day Polish directors such as Tadeusz Kantor, J6zef Szajna, and Jerzy Grotowski. The coming of Polish statehood after World War I brought freedom to the theatre as well. Now the "national" dramas, such as Forefathers' Eve, could be staged in theatres throughout Poland, rather than only in the more liberal Austrian-governed Krakow of pre-freedom days. The most famous theatre during the interwar years was the Boguslawski Theatre in Warsaw led by the director Leon Schiller. Schiller, together with his designer Andrzej Pronaszko, carried on the tradition of the Romantics and of Wyspianski by staging huge productions of their works; these came to be known as "Polish monumental theatre" (Marczak-Oborski 12). Schiller's monumental stagings were tremendously influential on several generations of Polish directors. All the directors who began their careers after World War II had been Schiller's pupils before the war. They in turn educated the next generation of directors. However, also during this era, the playwright (like Wyspianski also a painter) Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885-1939), who was extremely controversial in his own time, created what seemed to be a very different type of theatre. Witkiewicz (or "Witkacy" as he liked to call himself) wrote plays which seemed to radically break with past Polish traditions in drama because of their mocking, ironic tone: Previously the Polish poet-playwright had always been committed to noble ideals, and his language had been elevated .... But Witkacy, starting with his childhood plays and parodies, showed a penchant for clowning and burlesque, and his mature art blends metaphysics with buffoonery, self-ridicule, and a flippant, offhand attitude of detachment that subverts the inflated rhetoric and aggrandizement of emotion characteristic of Polish drama until then. (Gerould, Twentieth-Century 33)

This flippant detachment was particularly disconcerting to critics at the time, and Witkiewicz's plays (those that were staged at all) were scathingly reviewed. It is Witkiewicz, however, who established what Marczak-Oborski refers to above as the second "main current" of Polish theatre: the theatre of grotesque and satire which nevertheless draws on the poetic theatre's vast horizons, intellectual restlessness, and irrationality. Jan Kott says of Witkiewicz: The unquestionable greatness of this theater consists in its historical perspective, in the perception of the end of contemporary civilization which was fatally threatened both by the egalitarian revolution coming from the East and by Western mechanization. (Kott, Foreword xv)

Despite Witkiewicz' s buffoonery, his irreverent puncturing of the balloons of national mythology, and his grotesquerie, he too has proven to be as Polish as

12

Alternative Theatre in Poland

Mickiewicz, if in a slightly different line. Like Witkiewicz, the Theatre of the 8th Day employed a mordant satire which still maintained its historical perspective in their production of Wormwood. Another extremely important figure in Polish theatre history of the interwar years is actor-director Juliusz Osterwa. Osterwa founded an experimental theatre in 1919 called the Reduta. Polish director Kazimierz Braun writes of Red uta: It was the first theatre-community in history. It was a theatre, but at the same time it was an acting workshop and a school. All events of life and artistic activity were communal, with a common kitchen and money. Specialists of varying skills were called to rehearsals as advisers and teachers. Actors and spectators met after performances to discuss the work. All this was based on Osterwa's belief that the theatre is a process, an inter-human process artistically conditioned. ("Reports" 25)

Just as Witkiewicz anticipated the theatre of the absurd in his plays, Osterwa anticipated many of the concerns of both the Polish alternative theatre and the alternative theatre in the rest of the world. He experimented with actor training, audience participation, and what would later be termed "environmental theatre." In the last part of his life, he promoted the idea of an order of theatre artists like an order of monks or nuns who would serve society by their artistic activity. He had a marked influence on the work of Jerzy Grotowski, who in turn influenced many younger Polish alternative groups. Like Reduta, the 8th Day and other Grotowski-influenced groups have aspired to serve society with their artistic activity. The Paradox of Censorship

When it became clear to me that the Polish audience appreciated Wormwood precisely because it depicted ideas and scenes which could not be depicted on, say, television, I wondered why the censors allowed such depictions at all. If the censors were able to stop programs critical of Communism and of the Soviet Union from appearing on TV, why did they seem incapable of stopping the 8th Day and other groups from performing? Those of us who did not live in Communist countries tended to think of the Communist system as a monolith which had complete control over all aspects of culture. Therefore, it seems like a paradox that something like alternative theatre, with its more or less explicit critique of politics, could exist. However, though the system was supposed to control all aspects of culture, and in various other countries in the Eastern Bloc (for example, Czechoslovakia), it was .more successful, in Poland, for various reasons, it frequently broke down. In some periods, the censors were required to be stricter, in others less strict. The level of strictness of censorship varied widely

Introduction

13

from region to region. Moreover, the censors themselves often colluded with artists to allow various allusions or implications to be published, presented on stage, or shown on film. In an interview with Eva Hoffman, an emigre from Poland who returned after 1989, a former censor somewhat cynically declares: [T]he point is ... that you could always say to your boss, "There's nothing underneath this, there's no subtext. It simply says what it says." And then maybe both you and your boss could pretend there was nothing there. After all, life under socialism was supposed to be one big stretch of sunny happiness; there was not supposed to be a dark layer to anything. So it was perfectly possible, even advisable, not to notice anything under the overt surface. (Hoffman 85-86)

Therefore, though it is in fact paradoxical that the system was not able to control artists it was usually actually subsidizing in various ways, when one considers that censors were people rather than mere cogs in an impersonal system, that as time went on, the system became more and more unpopular, and that there were fewer and fewer dedicated Communists who believed in the system, the fact that cultural criticism of the alternative theatre type was allowed to exist becomes less astonishing. Moreover, the structure of the funding mechanisms for cultural institutions in Poland actually aided alternative groups in subverting the system's control. In other words, because alternative theatre started under the aegis of university sponsorship it was subject to less strict censorship. As sociologist Jeffrey Goldfarb points out in his book The Persistence of Freedom, there were different types of cultural institutions in the Communist system: primary ones manned by professionals under the direct control of cultural and educational ministries and ancillary ones not under the control of the cultural or educational ministries. Examples of primary cultural institutions are universities, literary publishing houses, scientific academies, and professional theatres. Examples of ancillary cultural institutions are newspapers and publishing houses of various professional organizations, research institutes of various industries, culture houses of specific localities, and student theatre (14-20). Most alternative theatres started life as student theatres financially supported and supervised by the officially apolitical Polish Student Organization (Zrzeszenie Student6w Polskich or ZSP), an organization created by the party in 1950 as an alternative to the very political Union of Polish Youth (ZMP), which was not strongly supported by students. Because Polish student theatre was an ancillary cultural institution, controlled only by an officially apolitical organization, it was able to develop in a more autonomous manner than primary institutions such as professional theatres would have been allowed to.

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1 THE BEGINNINGS OF POLISH ALTERNATIVE THEATRE

Polish alternative theatre came into being during the period directly preceding the historical event known as "the Polish October" in 1956. The "October" was a result of a complex sequence of circumstances starting with the Communist takeover at the end of World War II and ending with the installation of an anti-Stalinist, Wladyslaw Gomulka, as head of state. It marked not only a change in government, but also a transition point in the relationship of creative intellectuals to the party-state apparatus. This changing relationship in its turn affected the intelligentsia's attitudes toward the regime. A new skepticism brought about the beginning of Polish alternative theatre. The Polish October The Polish October and the beginning of Polish alternative theatre were both a reaction against Stalinism, but in the first period after the war, roughly from 1945 to 1949, Stalinism did not operate at full force in Polish society. Literature, for example, was not subjected to the intense scrutiny by the censor that it was to fall under only a few years later. According to poet Czeslaw Milosz, the period "was marked by debates on what literature should be in a country aiming at socialism," but writers were not dictated to (History 453). In addition, there were certain egalitarian features of the new government's cultural policy which attracted the intelligentsia. For example, members of the pre-War peasant and proletarian classes were now encouraged to go on for higher education and so become members themselves of the intelligentsia. Tickets for concerts, plays, and other cultural events were government subsidized and priced low enough so that workers could attend; though these low prices were designed for the benefit of the working class they also enabled intellectuals to afford attendance at many cultural events. However, this period, when the intelligentsia was wooed and allowed considerable intellectual freedom, came to an end as the cold war intensified in the late 1940s.

16

Alternative Theatre in Poland

Late in 1948, Moscow started pressuring the Polish Communist party to adhere more strictly to the Stalinist line. "Socialist realism" was called for in literature and in art. This formula, according to Mitosz, "enforced a reversion to techniques of the second half of the nineteenth century and prohibited any avant-garde experiment" (History 456). The Communist party tightened its control of all the means of mass communication. Censorship regulated all intellectual, cultural, and political activity. The mass media became organs used to present the party's position and to defame the critics and opponents of the party. Although freedom of speech, of the press, and of association remained guaranteed by the Polish constitution, they were systematically curbed. The intellectual atmosphere of the years 1949-53 can be described as a sort of "mandatory optimism." An artist's proper attitude was not amusement at the absurdity of life, but cheerleading. Poet Mieczystaw Jastrun describes the type of absurdity which was common: Censorship not only appropriated the actual past but also affected our emotional life. Pessimism and sadness were banished as bourgeois and liberal emotions. Even death could be confiscated. The editor of a literary magazine rejected a short story whose protagonist had died. "A positive hero cannot die," he said. (Olszer 325)

Nor only was optimism forced, but also a greater emphasis was placed on the use of the arts as tools for building socialism. This resulted in a certain boredom with the arts, especially on the part of young people. Journalist Andrzej Drawicz, one of the founders of the Warsaw student theatre group STS, describes the atmosphere of the early fifties: The ironclad scheme of "the artistic sector" which in the beginning of the fifties still had the charm of a certain freshness, became in that time a boring cliche. Sometimes circumstances revived it somewhat: the appearances of so-called agitational groups in villages where poetry and song encouraged the production cooperatives to perform .... Or, before the 1952 elections, the reciting outloud of Mayakovsky in a Warsaw neighborhood, in chorus, to the astonishment and amusement of the passers-by. But the way it usually was except for holidays was that everyday life yawned with boredom. (62-63/

Thus, instead of enlivening life, in Stalinist times, the arts were just one more boring lesson on Marxism. Despite the cultural and intellectual suffocation of the Stalinist period, compared to the experiences of other East Bloc countries, Poland's were mild. According to Norman Davies:

1

Translations from sources that are listed in the bibliography with Polish titles are my own.

The Beginnings of Polish Alternative Theatre

17

Stalinism never attained the same pitch of ferocity in Poland that reigned in neighbouring countries .... The remnants of the bourgeoisie and the intellectuals, though denied all free expression, were not liquidated. (Playground 2: 581)

Moreover, creative intellectuals had many privileges during the Stalinist era. Krzysztof Zanussi, the prominent Polish filmmaker, recently commented in an interview that now that Poland has a democratic government, and is moving toward capitalism, creative artists may have a natural tendency toward reactionary behavior because they will long for what they had during the Stalinist era: Such privileges as the artist had then will be granted by no one again .... Because such were the laws, and to a great extent the engineers of the human soul had free rein. Yes, they suffered censorship, but on the other hand the authorities spoiled and elevated them. They were really interested in them. [Then General Secretary] Bierut could listen to their poetry for hours, and party activists watched all the new films. (Pietrasik 24)

Those intellectuals, in other words, who were willing to be dictated to by the regime, were pampered by it. In the words of Miklos Haraszti, now the leader of a political party in Hungary, artists under the Stalinist system who were tractable and accommodated the Party's demands were held in a "velvet prison." On the other hand, those who refused to submit could not publish their books, exhibit their paintings, screen their films, or participate in any public intellectual life. The height of Stalinism only lasted about four of five years. Almost as soon as Stalin died, on March 3, 1953, intellectuals began gently pushing at the boundaries of what was acceptable. Even the Communist Party stepped back from its earlier insistence on socialist-realism. At a session of the Council of Art and Culture in April, 1954, the Minister of Culture himself said that socialist-realism was neither "a definite artistic school, nor a definite style, nor a recipe" (qtd. in Raina 26). A few months later at the Sixth Congress of the Union of Polish Writers, several writers attacked socialist realism and censorship. In 1955, the chairman of the Writer's Union and one of the members of the party's Central Committee declared that there had been errors in the administration of cultural policy. This emboldened some poets to write startlingly critical poems like Antoni Slonimski's "Chorus of the Gallant," which reads in part: Hey! you morally filthy, go to the bathroom! You must take a wash while the washing tub is full. We will be valorous, valorous today Let the cautious villain tremble! We will be fearless!

18

Alternative Theatre in Poland For it is possible. And if it appears that such is not yet the case We will be the first to beat our breasts Till our nipples swell, Till the Minister of Culture and Art Shall fondle our breasts again. (qtd. in Raina 35)

Surprisingly, censorship allowed these poems to be published in official publications like Nowa Kultura (New Culture). The intellectual ferment of 1954-55 was to come to a head in the events of the Polish October in 1956. The October was initiated by Khrushchev's "secret speech" to the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in Moscow in February of 1956 which recounted some of Stalin's crimes. The Stalinist Polish Communist leader, Boleslaw Bierut, who had traveled to Moscow to attend the Congress, died there allegedly of heart failure, though many ordinary Poles believed he committed suicide. But the real precipitating factor (as in so many later Polish events) was a workers' strike, this time in Poznan. In June, the Communist workers of the Zipso Locomotive Factory rioted under banners demanding "Bread and Freedom" and "Russians Go Home." There were two days of fighting between workers and militia and fifty-three deaths, and the Party, in shock that workers could rebel against a workers' state, decided to appoint a new Party leader who had a greater measure of public confidence. In October, at the Eighth Plenum of the Polish Communist Party, they elected Wladyslaw Gomulka, who had been First Secretary of the Party during and just after the war, but had subsequently been imprisoned by the Stalinists for "nationalist-rightist deviationism." The Soviets were not happy with the choice of Gomulka and in fact, Khrushchev himself flew to the Warsaw airport, unannounced and in a fit of rage at the waywardness of the Polish Communists. However, after two days of discussions between the Polish and the Soviet Communists, the Soviets relented and Gomulka' s election was confirmed. Stalinism was now officially over. Though Gomulka was ultimately to prove to be a disappointment to the Polish people, his election and facedown with Khrushchev raised their hopes. He believed in something he called "the Polish road to socialism," a socialism which took into account the national characteristics of the Polish people, and did not try to force them into the Soviet mold. For approximately a year, Gomulka allowed and sometimes even initiated reforms which gave rise to the hope that things would indeed be better with him as Party leader than they had been under the former Stalinist leadership. The collective farms which the Stalinists had established dissolved themselves and the

The Beginnings of Polish Alternative Theatre

19

peasants took back their land. Workers took control of their own factories. Censorship vanished for awhile and the secret police were much more circumspect. Above all, people felt they now could speak freely. Christine Hotchkiss, a Polish woman married to an American businessman, wrote on her return to Poland during the "October" period: The very first thing that strikes a new arrival to Poland is the complete, almost belligerent freedom with which people talk and behave. It is so extraordinary for a Communist country that it took me some time to grasp the full meaning of it. The people feel free. They say what they like, criticize the government loudly, crack jokes about Soviet Russia, Communism and at Lenin. They speak their minds on the telephone, and nobody whispers in the crowded cafes and restaurants. (31)

The atomosphere of the· entire country seemed to have gone from one of fear and hopelessness to one of optimism and boldness. It was the intelligentsia who were the most emotionally involved in the Polish October. Many of them had joined the party or supported it after the war. They, however, had become disillusioned with it in the intervening years, and they seized upon the opportunity that the Polish October provided for reforming, or in the jargon of the day, "revising" Communism to better fit people's needs. These "revisionists" still thought of themselves as Communists but they had a vision of "a better form of socialism." Journalist Neal Ascherson writes: [W]ith the passion of converts, they urged an open, pluralistic form of Marxist socialism, a workers' democracy which would break completely away from the Soviet model and construct a society somewhere between that of Jugoslavia and Western social democracy. The new Poland would not be a revival of traditional "bourgeois" Poland, although they respected those traditions, but an entirely new experiment in left-wing politics. (Struggles 166)

This revisionist Communism of the Polish October era resembled the "socialism with a human face" ideas of the Prague Spring over ten years later. Young intellectuals, particularly university students, were especially supportive of of the ideas of the revisionists. Christine Hotchkiss interviewed students at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow about the nature of what they called "Polish socialism": "Nobody will be poor," explained Julian, a slender, dark-eyed science student. "Nobody will lack a job; nobody is going to be very rich, but then there will be no poverty. It will be a planned economy, but the people will have a say in what the Party decides. And, above all, there will be freedom- freedom to say and to write what one pleases." (151)

The hotbed of revisionism was the weekly journal of the young intelligentsia, Po prostu (Straight Talk), which sent its correspondents all over Poland to

Alternative Theatre in Poland

20

report on matters of public interest and was quite successful in getting the regime to put several reforms into place. Po prostu also organized clubs for the young intelligentsia all over the country. The writers for Po prostu and other young Polish intellectuals were eager to struggle for their ideals: The ZMP [Zwiqzek Mlodziezy Polskiej- Union of Polish Youth] had taught them enthusiasm, self-confidence and a certain critical arrogance which they now turned against the Party leadership and its tired dogmatism. They had been trained to challenge "incorrect" views, to believe that they could build the future with shovels, red flags and a guitar. This enthusiasm survived their disillusion with Stalinism. (Ascherson, August 68)

The young people of Poland, particularly the young intelligentsia, were seriously committed during this era to reforming Communism and making it work in their country. Postwar Theatre

Polish theatre during the postwar period mirrored the changes in political climate detailed above. The theatre became even more important in Poland after the war than it had been before it. Theatre critic Jan Kott notes the special place that theatre had in lives of the postwar generation: For the first ten or fifteen years after the war in Poland, the situation was special. There were very few movies, because of the scarcity of hard currency to import them. The theatre was relatively cheap; a ticket cost less than a pack of cigarettes. Theatre was an important part of our lives, more so than any time before or since, and it always presents special opportunities in times of political repression. Something in theatre's nature makes it relevant to the political arena, even in plays that aren't political like Waiting for Godot. (Bharucha 30)

Because of censorship, politics could only be alluded to, but the intelligentsia became adept at finding connections to their own lives in almost any play. Director Zygmunt Hubner comments, "Post-war theatre perfected the art of political allusion, as did the audience in reading political messages in almost every production whether it was Antigone or Richard III, or for that matter, The Miser" ("Guilty" 224). In the first years after the war, the repertory of the Polish theatre was extremely varied, though there was a tendency toward comedies and Russian plays, and German plays were avoided. Perhaps the most significant development during this period, from the point of view of Polish alternative theatre, however, was not actually performed at the time at all - Konstanty Ildefons Galczyti.ski's Little Theatre of the Green Goose. Galczyti.ski was a satirist who published a weekly installment of playlets in a Krakow magazine from 1946-50. The Green Goose was an imaginary theatre, only performed in its

The Beginnings of Polish Alternative Theatre

21

readers' minds, which satirized intellectual pretensions, Romanticism, and various other Polish sacred cows. Galczynski's miniature plays ranged in length from three lines to three pages. The Green Goose was both extremely popular and extremely controversial, attacked by both the right and the left for its irreverence. Though the plays were not actually staged during Galczyitski's lifetime (he died in 1953), The Green Goose served as a major inspiration for the student theatres which were started in 1953 and 1954. While The Green Goose was still being published, socialist realism started to limit postwar theatrical life in Poland. Starting in 1949, only plays which depicted "Socialist reality" positively were allowed. No ambiguities were permitted: capitalists had to be portrayed as all evil, factory workers as all good. The classics of Polish Romanticism were forbidden on several grounds: among others, their style was wildly unrealistic, they did not depict ordinary working-class people, and they did not provide positive models. Even socialist playwrights, such as Brecht and Mayakovsky, were prohibited as neither sufficiently realistic nor positive, and naturally "decadent Western" playwrights such as Ionesco were not even considered. Galczyitski, despite the fact that his plays were in no danger of being performed, was forced to "close" the Little Theatre of The Green Goose in 1950. The Stalinists even tried to force children's theatre into the Russian mold by establishing Young Spectator's Theatres which used live actors in didactic plays; these performances proved to be much less popular with Polish children than performances of fairy tales at the puppet theatres. Polish theatre, with its nonrealistic, nonillusionistic traditions, found itself straitjacketed during the Stalinist period. At the same time, during this period, the theatre became more firmly institutionalized on the Soviet model. State theatres were subsidized through direct grants from the Ministry of Culture and Art and through city budgets. The newly funded theatres became huge institutions, somewhat like factories, with large technical and artistic staffs responsible for turning out an "artistic product." While the fina~ial stability provided by the state meant that theatres did not have to stage only box office hits in order to survive, a certain rigidity and laziness set in. One of the founders of the Polish alternative theatre movement dismissed the state theatres as "academic whales. The actors come, rehearse, get paid -like clerks!" (Afanasjew, interview). During the Polish October period, socialist realism was jettisoned and the censors permitted many previously forbidden kinds of performances to be shown. Political messages were allowed to creep into productions of otherwise nonpolitical plays. Christine Hotchkiss describes the "Warsaw 1957" version of Offenbach's opera The Beautiful Helene, adapted by Janusz Minkiewicz:

22

Alternative Theatre in Poland A "Greek choir," composed of unruly intellectuals dressed in dark business suits and wearing glasses refuses to make the usual offerings to Jupiter. "Times have changed," they sing. "We are tired of you, we care nothing about you these days." The disconcerted Greek god, who looks strikingly like Khrushchev, goes away sadly disappointed. The beautiful Helene, preparing to meet Paris, orders that clothes be sent to her from the "Ciuchy," the rag market in Warsaw .... "I would rather die than be seen by Paris dressed in an outfit from the People's Cooperative in Sparta." (162-63)

No matter how obvious the allusions were permitted to get, however, they could remain only allusions. Political realities were normally only referred to by means of such coy strategems as Hotchkiss describes, never directly portrayed onstage in a mainstream theatre. Student Theatre of the 1950s Alternative theatre began in 1954, after Stalin's death, but before the "Polish October" period. In fact, the development of this type of theatre was one of the ways that intellectuals initiated the thaw that resulted in the "October." It was founded by students, and, at its inception, tended to concentrate on satire. It therefore was often referred to in this period as "students' satirical theatre." Jaroslaw Abramow, one of the founders of this type of theatre, writes in 1961: "Up to 1954 there were no students' satirical theatres in postwar Poland. The year 1954 marked a turning point. The political atmosphere then became more suitable for the development of satire" (7). Stalin was dead, and the young intellectuals who created these theatres felt the time was right for a new kind of theatre, one that actually addressed the reality of their own lives, instead of only hinting at it through veiled allusions. Unlike alternative theatre of the same period in America, which was generally created by professional theatre artists involved in the "offBroadway" and the later "off-off-Broadway movements," the alternative theatre movement in Poland started in the universities, as universitysponsored organizations. Moreover, these organizations were not part of American style theatre departments, which have never existed at Polish universities. However, their sponsorship as official, extracurricular university activities resulted from the Communist system of control over culture, which was viewed as a product to be consumed by the public. All cultureproducing organizations had to be subject to the control of some supervisory state body. There had been student theatres in the immediate postwar years, but these were of a different character than the ones which formed in 1954 and 1955. They had been created by students in various university departments and had put on plays meant only to entertain, not to make any social or

The Beginnings of Polish Alternative Theatre

23

political commentary. Their sponsoring organizations had been local ones, and these organizations did not attempt to assert undue political control over the theatres, since the theatres were engaging in harmless (from the point of view of the Communist party) entertainment activities. For example, in L6dz, in 1946, a student theatre called simply the Student Dramatic Group (Studencki Zesp6l Dramatyczny) presented Zrz~dnost i przekora, Pan Benet (Nagging and Contrariness, Mr. Benett) by the nineteenth-century author of comedies of Polish manners, Aleksander Fredro. In the early postwar years, then, the activity of student theatrical groups resembled that of student theatres everywhere: they produced "classic" or contemporary plays for the entertainment of their audiences. In the Stalinist period, the activities of student theatre groups were placed under the control of the Union of Polish Youth (ZMP). This was an organization which had been created specifically to propagandize young people and to imbue them with Communist ideology. It viewed all cultural activities as means for building socialism and nothing else. Hence, the dramatic activities of student theatre gruops under ZMP sponsorship tended to be of the agit-prop variety. For example, in L6dz in 1952, the Platform Group of the Law School of the University of L6dz (Zesp6l Estradowy Wydzialu Prawa Uniwersytetu L6dzkiego) presented the program Naprz6d mtodzieiy swiata do walki o pok6j i wolnosc wszystkich narod6w (The Advance of World Youth Toward the Fight for Peace and Freedom for All Nations), a "montage of poetry and revolutionary song." Writing about this period in an article about the later L6dz satiric student theatres, Pstre.g (Trout) and Cytryna (Lemon), Leszek Skrzydlo, one of the founders of Pstre.g, comments: The image of the 1950s was perhaps the same in all the university student milieux. The ZMP monopolized cultural work. The matter was clear, the outline simple: revolutionary poetry, mass song .... Everyone without exception took part in the cultural movement. Each student grouping had to have some kind of cultural club and repertory. Thus we loudly and melodiously praised the large harvest; we called resoundingly for the fulfillment of the plan. (104)

In other words, student theatre groups in the Stalinist era provided a politicized version of the sort of entertainment that we might, in America, find at high school assemblies. All this changed in 1954, however, when students, perceiving that Stalin's death already had caused a change in the political climate, created an entirely different type of theatre than their previous efforts. Now they put together satiric programs dealing with the absurdities of life in the Stalinist system. They applied to a new sponsoring body, the Polish Student

24

Alternative Theatre in Poland

Organization (ZSP), which did not try to control the political content of their works as ZMP had. The censors' office also allowed political content which would have been unthinkable only a year before. When the theatres presented these satiric revues to the public, they achieved instant popularity: The following years, 1955-57, marked the first development period of students' theatres. One could call it the period of bursting the flood-gates. The success of these theatres was mainly due to an increased interest in politics, both on the part of various students' ensembles and on the part of their audiences. (Abramow 7)

Abramow indicates that it was an increased interest in politics on the part of the audiences and the student theatres which made the theatres popular. However, it is important to note the fact that the theatres were now allowed to be interested in politics, and this previously forbidden topic held a great deal of fascination for the audience. The type of theatre these students created was still rather rough and amateurish. It consisted of a series of short, satiric revue sketches with a unifying theme or concept. Critic and actor Maria Berwid-Buchner writes: "At its inception, i.e., in 1954-56, the Polish students' theatre was more a social and political affair than an artistic factor, strictly speaking" ("Adventure" 3). In general, content was more important than form. At first, the theatres concentrated on satirizing the absurdities of university life under the Stalinist system. Later, as the political de-Stalinization process advanced toward the "Polish Qctober," they broadened their targets and reacted to current events as they happened. The openness and frankness of these theatres quickly came to be extremely important to their audiences of young intellectuals. This period, roughly from about 1954 to 1958, later became known as the "heroic period" of student theatre because the theatres saw themselves as fighting against Stalinism. Critic Krzysztof Miklaszewski writes: The "heroic period" set very important tasks to the student theatre. The student community and circles of young intelligentsia demanded that their theatre should make up by its programmes for all the shortcomings of the so-called bygone period. (9)

Where Stalinism had distorted language, they would now speak the truth; where Stalinism had enforced cheer they would now feel free to be ironic. The student theatres looked upon themselves, along with other phenomena of the time (such as Po prostu), as being instrumental in actually causing the "Polish October." One of the creators of the Gdansk student theatre, BimBom, said in an interview: "In 1956, the student theatres caused the revolution" (Afanasjew interview). This theatre, radically breaking both from

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its Stalinist past and its past as a copier of professional theatre, was the beginning of what would turn into the Polish alternative theatre movement.

Warsaw: STS 2 The most influential theatre of this period was the Student Satirists' Theatre (Studencki Teatr Satyryk6w) of Warsaw, which quickly became known mainly by its initials, STS. STS was started by students as Warsaw University who conceived the idea while on a work brigade during the summer of 1953. Most of them were in the last years of their studies in the Polish department, but other fields such as art history, journalism, and Russian were represented. In the fall they gathered together a group of people interested in starting a satiric theatre group and began to write skits dealing with university life. This group applied to ZSP (the Polish Student Organization) for funding, promising to provide entertainment at the upcoming May Day celebrations, and STS was born. Undoubtedly, the funding organization was surprised at the type of theatre they had sponsored, but STS quickly proved so popular that they decided it was in their best interests to continue to fund it. From the beginning STS was a political theatre. One of the writers for STS, Andrzej Jarecki, comments: "We saw our theatre as a soap box. We openly called it a theatrical political newspaper" (422). The members of STS were all former members of ZMP, the Polish Youth Union, and they shared that organization's ardor for Communism. They were fully part of the revisionist movement described earlier; they wanted to reform Communism, but they were still Communists. Theatre critic Jacek Sieradzki, in an article about STS published during the Solidarity period entitled "The Bitterness of Disappointed Youth Unionists," writes: These young people were enthusiastic and impatient; their feeling of discontent was connected with reality, but this discontent in a quite unusual way was interwoven with a full affirmation of the line of development of the state. To condense and simplify their position: they accepted the directions of activity as the most correct; they only criticized the realization. It's worth emphasizing this matter: at the height of their artistic powers the members of STS were maybe the last group of youth agreeing in principle with official ideology and culture ... (107-8)

STS thus typified the attitude of young intellectuals of the Polish October period. Though many of these same young people would become disillusioned later, at the time of the Polish October, they still believed that Communism could be re-shaped and made less restrictive. The following section was previously published, in somewhat different form, in Cioffi, "Communism."

2

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Where STS broke from the past was in openly criticizing the regime. Theatre historian Roman Szydlowski writes: "The young people were rationalists and wanted to speak without recourse to metaphor about the things that rankled them and that they did not find to their liking in the preceding period in Poland" (139). In other words, instead of resorting to the veiled allusions and allegories which were the only means the professional stage had to comment on the political situation, they simply portrayed reality in a straightforward way. One of their programs was even entitled Idi na spacer alegorio (Take a Hike, Allegory). This was invigorating for the audience; Jarecki writes that STS "was the life breath of the epoch" (422). STS' s programs were, in this beginning period, satiric variety-type productions, "consisting of short sketches, monologues, black-out scenes and songs, all linked together into a whole by the main over-all idea of the show" (Abramow 7). Jerzy Markuszewski, the director of the group, had gathered together a group of talented writers and performers, many of whom later became playwrights and actors in the professional theatre in Poland. However, they were not strong in the area of visual effects; Szydlowski writes, "They were less interested in staging effects and the visual side of the performance, focusing attention wholly on the text and its interpretation" (139). Nevertheless, STS developed a characteristic flavor to its productions. Sieradzki writes: It formed then its own patented style: a short satirical form based on snappy ripostes, on clever

points .... The authors of STS learned to perceive social concreteness; they acquired a feeling for the linguistic characteristics of a character. Overall, they discovered new territories for exploration forbidden in times of prudery and politeness: city and lumpenproletarian folklore, criminal ballads, the theatrical tradition of commedia dell'arte, and also the sphere of loveeroticism-marriage. (11 0)

STS, then, found its own voice, both in terms of form and content; moreover, this voice spoke a language that was considerably more daring than any allowed during the puritanical Stalinist era which preceded STS's formation. The kind of theatre that STS aspired to create was an attempt to revive an older tradition of satiric theatre. Professional satiric cabarets were a tradition in Poland that went back to the fin de siecle Little Green Balloon (Zielony Balonik) cabaret in Krakow. However, during Stalinist times these professional cabarets had been forced to tone down their satire to such an extent that (in STS's view) they were completely emasculated. Though in its early stages STS was aided by some professionals associated with the Syrena cabaret in Warsaw, Jaroslaw Abramow, one of the founders of STS, comments: "In comparison with the politically indifferent and stifled programmes of the professional satirical theatres, the students' satire startled

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with its sharpness and the uncompromising way in which it unmasked the shortcomings of the period." (7). In addition, what STS attempted goes all the way back to the origins of comedy. As Jerzy Koenig points out in his essay "From Aristophanes to STS": In the beginning was the comos. A merry procession for the worship of Dionysus, phallic song, bawdy and mischievous jokes thrown to the crowd, scoffing at well-known personalities in the city, invective against the worthies, parodying of myths, theatrical entertainment which was not yet, at that time, theatre. This, which marked in Athens the beginning of comedy, found several ages later its voluntary equivalent on the student stages of the satiric littie theatres ... ("Od Arystofanesa" 99)

Like the creators of the c(jmos and Aristophanes himself, STS wanted to act as a kind of goad to the authorities. They too employed song and dance, parody, jokes at the expense of well-known personalities, and bawdiness. This was the way they chose to shock the ears of listeners attuned to the the rigid formulas of official mass media language. STS's first production, To idzie mlodo5c (There Goes Youth), opened May 2, 1954. It satirized the university scene, particularly the politicized nature of university life at that time. The STS members used texts from their "patron saints," authors like Mayakovsky who had inspired them, and tried to update them and make them apply to the student milieu. Drawicz writies: We tried to revise, to make current the texts of the patron saints, to give them a student specification; [for example] everything about the bureaucracy was operating in the act of cooling one's heels in the dean's office, ... [where] a chorus sang the pleasant couplet: "To Warsaw U, to Warsaw U, to Warsaw U! If you want to get something, you'll have to wait here longer!" ("STS" 65-66)

The facts of student life in Communist bureaucracy were satirized in this skit: students quite often had to spend as much time waiting in the dean's office for a signature as they did in class. Another scene in There Goes Youth, performed entirely in pantomime, described "A Day at the University." Groups of students walked back and forth across the stage as signs announcing the activities of various ZMPsponsored activities were posted: 8:00 a.m.-ZMP Meeting, 10:00 a.m.-Mass Meeting, and so on until 10:00 p.m. when a ballet rehearsal for an agititational brigade was scheduled. Each time students passed across the stage they displayed signs of greater and greater fatigue until the climax, after the ballet rehearsal sign was posted, when they made pitiful attempts to leap across the stage in a balletic fashion. This pantomime satirized another aspect of the university bureaucracy in Poland: since the Ministry of Higher Education dictated exactly what each student had to do in order to graduate,

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it could dictate mandatory activities other than classes. In Stalinist times, students were forced to participate in Communist party agitationpropaganda. "A Day at the University" and the other skits in There Goes Youth were very successful. As Sieradzki points out, even though the STS-members were not terribly daring in their choice of targets, they were the first to speak out openly in any way against the absurdities of life under the rigid, Stalinist system: "There was something in their performance ... so fresh and new that they met with great acclaim" (108). STS's second program, premiering in November, 1954, was entitled Prostaczkowie (The Simpletons). The "simpletons" of the title were the Athenian craftsmen from Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, fragments of which, in Galczynski's translation, opened and closed the show. By identifying themselves with Shakespeare's simple craftsmen, the members of STS were trying to identify themselves with common sense, as opposed to the elaborate rationalizations, rhetoric, and absurdities of the Stalinist system; "In this way the jesters of STS set themselves up against their bombastic epoch" (Sieradzki 108). Again, in this production, STS satirized the absurdities of student life. For example, the sketch "Master of Ceremonies,' written by Jaroslaw Abramow, portrayed a professor's lecture on marxism, which consisted entirely of senselessly mismatched quotations. A miniature operetta entitled "Last Judgement" took as its subject a student's falling asleep during a lecture and the subsequent disciplinary procedure he had to go through. In the third program, Konfrontacja (Confrontation), STS's attack became both more specific and more wide-ranging. Specifically, the members of STS satirized the organization that most of them had been members of, ZMP, the Polish Youth Union. At the same time, they attempted to broaden their target to include the opportunism rampant in the Communist system: Here the object of the attack became the broad range of attitudes reducing things to the lowest common denominator of inanity and opportunism; under the slogan of opposing truth and appearance, cant and reality, masks and faces, a blow was struck at mechanical changes of political orientation, at the automatic action of "historical turning points," which was bringing the first, still only very outward wave of loosening and easing of tension. (Drawicz, "STS" 67)

STS, presciently fearing that the "thaw" following Stalin's death would only be a superficial one, tried to goad their audiences into examining the nature of the changes that were still only just beginning to be initiated in the political system of the time. Confrontation opened with a song written by Andrzej Jarecki and based on an epigram by Juvenal: "It's hard not to write satire when we look

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at you " (Drawics, "STS" 67). While this verse was sung, spotlights were turned around and shone on the audience; thus STS "confronted" its spectators. Later, in the sketch "Catacombs," written by Witold D1;1browski, ZMP is de-legalized and forced to go underground as the Home Army had done during World War II (Sieradzki 108). But the idea of ZMP, an organization which existed to support and even toady to the regime, going underground is completely absurd. In another portion of the show, "Hooligan's Confession" (a monologue written by Andrzej Jarecki), a loyal Stalinist hooligan loses control of himself and shouts: The times are leaving me behind! ... The professional unions are teaching young people to dance New Orleans style. And I don't know how .... So now I don't know, and like at holy confession I humbly ask "Do I have to join ZMP?" (Drawicz, "STS" 67-8)

The hooligan is a symbol of opportunism, probably someone the party has made use of to intimidate recalcitrant intellectuals. He does not want to join ZMP, but if the party says to join, he knows he must. In this way STS questioned if the reforms initiated by the party were genuine or if they were only skin-deep. In the next program, Myslenie ma kolosalnq przyszfost (Thinking Has a Colossal Future), premiering in September, 1955, STS tried to expand beyond the subject matter it had used previously: The next program, Thinking Has a Colossal Future, went beyond student subject matter. It still remained somewhat about youth, but now the subject matter concerned all adults. We were setting forth on wide waters. Instead of speaking "about youth," we were speaking "about everything from the position of youth." (Jarecki 427)

The title, Thinking Has a Colossal Future, was so well-liked by the audience that it became a popular saying. The program contained a sketch called "Song to the Audience," written by Witold D1;1browski, which was both a parody of the mass recitations of the Stalinist era and a pointed questioning of the audience's motives in supporting the post-Stalinist thaw. The actors stood under a red banner reciting a poem which starts as a typical Stalinist ode to progress under Communism but which ends with the chorus: "Comrades, maybe this too bold question mocks you; comrades, aren't there too few red cells in your blood?" (Sieradzki 109). After this show, STS moved into its own theatre building in an eighteenth-century former Masonic lodge. This gave the members of STS an opportunity to work on the artistic style of their presentations: Strictly speaking only here did we set about the task of seriously giving a form to our performances corresponding with the contents. What kind of a stage is it? ... It is, strictly

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Alternative Theatre in Poland speaking, only a platform, nearly nothing separating the actors from the audience, only a little elevated from floor level. An actor at the proscenium has constant contact with the public. This sort of architecture was ideal for us. We could ... address each of the audience members as if whispering into his ears or looking into his eyes, and yet everybody could hear. (Jarecki 428-9)

This very shallow stage area and small auditorium confirmed STS in its tendency to put most of its emphasis on words rather than on visuals and encouraged an intimate, cabaret-type mood for its performances. The first performance in this new theatre was Czarna przegrywa czerwona wygrywa (Black Loses -Red Wins), premiering in February, 1956. The premiere was one day before the opening of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, the Congress at which Khrushchev made his historic speech denouncing Stalin. The poster for this show pictured a colorful deck of cards, and the theme was that of a fairground magic show. A sketch by Andrej Jarecki, entitled "Charlatan," made the analogy between the so-called "red bourgeois," a party member who joined the party out of opportunistic motives rather than out of conviction, and a con man. STS contended that opportunists in the party, while hypocritically claiming in their rhetoric to represent the people, were simply using their positions to feather their own nests. "Charlatan" became a favorite sketch of STS's, and was subsequently repeated as part of other programs. In addition, in Black Loses- Red Wins, the STS members evolved a kind of formula for their productions which remained more or less permanent in their subsequent revues: A Russian song, sung as a protest against an unthinking embrace of everything Western which was current at the time; blackouts, or visual tableaux satirizing current themes; a minioperetta usually just before the end of the program; and the "STS-ik," a sketch based on some kind of parody. After the Twentieth Congress and Khrushchev's revelations, Jaroslaw Abramow needed to add only a short skit, "Everything's Becoming Clear," for the program to remain completely current. The next performance, Agitka (Propaganda Leaflet) had its premiere June 2, 1956, at the height of the pre-October ferment, and ran through the time of the "Polish October." This show was later considered by STS to be the "apogee of the first period" of their existence (Drawicz, "STS" 77). It had a more interesting stage set than any of their previous programs: scaffolding was arranged so as to form five playing areas, so action could take place simultaneously on various planes. One of the sketches, "One Road" by Jarecki, made the analogy between "the blind leading the blind" and the problem of false leadership of the party. Another, "The Exclusive Dragon" by Agnieszka Osiecka, poked fun at the snobbish atmosphere of the so-called

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"clubs of the young intelligentsia," established by party-sponsored organizations at the time. STS was considered to be so important at this time that they were asked to perform fragments of Propaganda Leaflet at the Eighth Plenum of the Communist Party in October, the Plenum at which Wladyslaw Gomulka was elected Chairman of the party. The members of STS truly could claim to have helped to make the revolution. This brought to a close the first period of STS' s development. Propaganda Leaflet was the culmination of the period of STS's being the "life breath of the epoch," (in Jarecki's words) or "the voice of a generation," (in Sieradzki's). For both political reasons and artistic ones STS would no longer be so influential as it was in the period of 1954-56. Politically, the choice of Gomulka as party chairman was interpreted by many people as meaning that it was no longer necessary to fight for reform; it was believed that the revisionists (and STS with them) had won the battle. Artistically, STS felt that it was time to experiment. Jarecki writes: In 1957 we entered a difficult period - maybe especially for us -for a little theatre not yet very fixed, not set. Renewed by the October publicity, we wanted to continue our successes, to be accompanied by further transformations. However, it was not possible to go further in the same skin as hitherto. One stage was over. As a satiric theatre, nourished by actual events, by contemporaneity, in some measure by negative destiny, but at the same time as a group affirming the state of things- we did not have an easy task. (432)

STS wanted to change as the times had changed, but they did not exactly know how. Furthermore, very soon, the political climate was to change in yet another way, a way which did not nourish the kind of satire that STS was famous for.

Gdansk: Bim-Bom At about the same time that STS in Warsaw was forming, another student theatre, Bim-Bom, was starting independently in Gdansk. Together, these two theatres would set the tone of the alternative theatre movement for many years to come. Unlike STS, which was founded strictly by students, Bim-Bom was a collaboration between students and professional theatre people. The students came primarily from two local institutions of higher education, the Sopot Art Academy, one of the most important art schools in Poland at the time, and the Gdansk Polytechnical College. The professionals were actors Zbigniew Cybulski and BogumH Kobiela who came from the Wybrzeze (Coast) Theatre (the state-supported theatre of the city of Gdansk) and would later star in Andrzej Wajda's Ashes and Diamonds as well as in other Polish films. This collaboration was to prove extraordinarily fruitful in creating a rich, original style of performance and staging.

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Since there was no university in the Gdansk area at the time, there were no representatives of humanistic disciplines among the founders of Bim-Bom; thus it lacked the "literary" tone of STS. Unlike STS, which created a "satiric theatrical magazine," essentially a variety show loosely held together by a theme, Bim-Bom paid more attention to the artistic form of their shows. Jerzy Afanasjew, then a student of architecture who was one of the founding members and actors in Bim-Bom, says they aspired to create a poetic whole in their programs: At that time our theatre was not simply a newspaper or scenic almanac with texts by various authors like professional cabaret was. It was a poetry of various disciplines- of painters, set designers, directors, actors, architects, musicians - poetry bearing fruit on various esthetic planes at the command of a common idea of the performance, poetry interpenetrating and very much creating a common unity. (Kazdy 79-80)

The creation of each segment of a Bim-Bom production, then, was aimed at producing a single idea, rather than a conglomeration of skits. Bim-Bom also differed from STS in its views on the uses of allegory and metaphor. Rather than disdaining metaphor, Bim-Bom embraced it. Sydlowski writes: "The single distinctive feature of the Bim-Bom was its poetic style. It did not speak straight out about the important questions of our day, but in the form of poetic metaphor, lyrical figures of speech, allegory and allusion" (140). The creators of Bim-Bom, many of them painters and architects, did not believe in explaining everything to their audiences. Andrzej Cybulski, another member of Bim-Bom, writes: "We fought for the right to poetize, for the metaphor onstage, for not saying everything and in this way drawing the viewer to decipher 'for him/herself' the intention of the theatre" (11). In reaction to the socialist realism imposed on the arts in Stalinist times, they declared themselves to be "socialist romantics" (Afanasjew, Kazdy 78). Nevertheless, Bim-Bom was not a pretentious theatre; they aspired not to create "high art," but rather popular entertainment. Andrzej Cybulski comments: I remember that never in Bim-Bom did we count on great artistic accomplishments; we did not treat our work like a "mission." Young people, 17 or 20 year old students, met about a common hobby often close to fanaticism, and had fun in the theatre. They prepared for their friends in the audience- "jokes." (11)

The members of Bim-Bom perceived Western European avant-garde theatre of the time to be confusing and difficult; they, on the other hand, wanted to reach out to their audiences and entertain them. Afanasjew writes: "Our theatre never was an experimental theatre in the sense of elevated

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difficulties .... We always thought of the audience and carried it away, because our ideas were listened to and understood" (Kaidy 104). Bim-Bom was, in the words of Daniel Gerould, "popular avant-garde" (Twentieth-Century 68). The way that Bim-Bom reached its audiences was by awakening them to a sense of joy. Where STS made fun of the absurdities of life under Stalinism, Bim-Bom wanted to transport the audience away from the greyness of Stalinist existence, to make audience members realize their own capacity for having fun. Zbigniew Cybulski, who functioned as an artistic director for the theatre, declared: Let there be characteristic carnivals of joy because we have obvious reasons for it. To awaken youth by our humble art, to put in its hands the right to mirth- that is our current task .... We hotly fight for the normal matters of men in the street who want to be happy, to have fun, and to relax. This is a theatre of metaphor but standing close to man, based on a deep observation of people. (qtd. in Afanasjew, Kazdy 74)

Bim-Bom identified with common man, with the person called in Polish "szary czlowiek," or "the grey man," the man on the street, a nobody, an everyman. This was the man whose life had been ground down by Stalinism, and Bim-Bom wanted to bring some genuine cheer (rather than artificial ZMP-type optimism) to his existence. Because there were no literary people in Bim-Bom, the emphasis was on the visual. In his essay "The World Is Not Such a Bad Place ... ," Afanasjew writes: Owing to the fact that visual artists created our theatre, a brightly colored breeze from painting permeated the matter of the theatrical art which we produced. The images in RimBam were canvases which we wished to paint; they were a three-dimensional country from a painter's utopia where visual artists often wander with their thoughts. On the pathway of each of our conceptions there always existed at the beginning a forest of shapes and colors. ("World" 263)

The working process of these visual artists varied cosiderably from that used by the more literary STS. They collectively came up with ideas for staging: We did not think about the text but about the scenic picture. Instead of using ink to write the sketches, we used artists' pastels and architects' pencils to very efficiently draw the staging plans and light plots. In this theatre how to stage a given text was not thought about but rather how to stage - a given idea. What to do so that this idea would reach the spectator. How to show it. And then how to arrange these ideas to tie them together dramatically. In this theatre the text was a fragment of the production. It came into being if and when the production demanded it. (Afanasjew, Kazdy 47)

Words were reduced to a minimum in Bim-Bom, and often scenes were played in pantomime. As Daniel Gerould points out, "It was a theatre of

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colors and shapes" (Twentieth-Century 69), with written texts considered to be just another scenic element, no more or less important than the scenery, lighting, costumes, movements, facial expressions, or music. The atmosphere of the Art Academy with its romantic Bohemianism permeated Bim-Bom. The members of the theatre were under the influence of Impressionist painting: "We were in love with Cezanne, Matisse, Utrillo; their visionary paintings, their sadness and love were transferred to the theatre" (Afanasjew, Kaidy 89). They were also influenced by several films, especially Vittorio de Sica's Miracle in Milan, Lamorisse's The Red Balloon, and Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator (Afanasjew, Kaidy 77). However, they appreciated some literary people: Afanasjew mentions Galczynski and Pablo Neruda (Kaidy 96). In general, the poets, painters, filmmakers, and authors whom Bim-Bom most loved were those who expressed an element of rebellion against authority in their work, but in a whimsical or metaphoric, rather than a confrontational or direct, way. It was as if Bim-Bom imagined that whimsy itself could be a kind of weapon against authority, or at least against the greyness that the Communist authorities created. The members felt most akin to artists - both fine and popular - who aspired to create an atmosphere of lyricism in their work. Because of the collective nature of their work, Bim-Bom also had a strong kinship with commedia dell' arte and other medieval street entertainments. Zbigniew Cybulski declared: "As in the old theatre of the Middle Ages, a great independence dominated us. The limitations of skill became obliterated here. Literature, direction, performance, improvisation came together in one organism" (qtd. in Afanasjew, Kaidy 108). There were more

than sixty people involved in Bim-Bom in one way or another, but the core group generally responsible for the conception of the programs as well as the execution included Zbigniew Cybulski, who generally had the deciding voice about what was included in a given program, Kobiela and Afanasjew, who contributed ideas and acted, Wowo Bielicki, a painter who acted and contributed much to the visual "look" of Bim-Bom, and Jacek Federowicz, who played many leading roles in Bim-Bom. Eventually, each of these people developed their own kind of humor, for which they became responsible within Bim-Bom: Each of us most fully felt himself in "his own garden." An unwritten understanding of excessive noninterference in someone else's creative territory existed. Each of us was, to some extent, a specialist, a gagman, in his own discipline. (Afanasjew, Kaidy 66)

Just as commedia artists developed their own "lines of business," the Bim-Bom artists grew to have their own comic specialties.

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Eventually, too, the sketches in Bim-Bom's performances developed a characteristic format. Afanasjew writes: "Each sketch had an introduction (let's call it the moment of take-off), then the action proper, and the finale, which was a short, well-aimed punch-line" (Kaidy 93). The content of these sketches varied, "often taking the form of loving parodies of film scenarios, cabaret skits, and circus acts" (Gerould, Twentieth-Century 69). For transitions between skits or scenes within a skit, the Bim-Bom artists imitated films: "Film fade-outs, indicating the end of scenes, were effected by a gradual dimming of the lights; film dissolves, marking the passage of time, were achieved by the intersection of planes of light" (Afanasjew, "World" 264). Thus a sophisticated structure grew almost organically from the initial sketchings and improvisations of the core group. Like STS, Bim-Bom regarded itself and was regarded by others as having participated in and even as having precipitated the "Polish October." STS-member Abramow writes of Bim-Bom, "They knew how to present the problems of the day by means of spectacular theatrical effects" (7). However, since Bim-Bom strove to create a lyrical mood, rather than a strictly satiric one, its emphasis was slightly different from STS's: Bim-Bom was a patriotic little theatre .... It never criticized without understanding, without presenting instead its own proposals. It negated Bad so as to affirm Good. It condemned Falsehood so as to affirm Truth. If it declared itself against Soullessness, it wanted Toleration. (Afanasjew, Kai:dy, 95-96)

Bim-Bom showed the victory of the "little man" with his romantic soul over the soulless Stalinist bureaucrats, and that, in itself, was revolutionary in a gentle way. Bim-Bom took much longer than STS to get started, and to assume its characteristic form. Its first effort, in 1953, was a short program entitled simply "0"; depending on how an audience member read the poster, this may have been understood either as "Zero" or as the Polish word "o" which may be rendered in English either as "Oh!" or as "About ... " At this time, Bim-Bom had not yet evolved its collective way of working, and the skits were written by Afanasjew and another student. The program was presented on a makeshift stage in a cafeteria smelling of sauerkraut at the Polytechnical College. Afanasjew writes of it: Pooh! A so-so chaos of the vaudeville type .... Some parodies, scenes from student life, cafeterias, dormitories, the cemetery where dates took place that was adjacent to the Polytechnic. The value was that it was OUR THEATRE. Our first theatre. (Kai:dy 52)

This first effort, under the direction of Zbigniew Cybulski, but without many of the other personnel, gave the group the courage to go on experimenting.

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By November of 1954, they began to prepare their first full program, entitled Ahaaa. This name came from Galczynski's Green Goose playlet "Nightingales" which ends with the line "Geniuses, are you? - Ahaaa ...." At this time, the theatre itself did not have a name, but the members held a plebiscite in one of the dormitories, and later during the first performances of Ahaaa, the audience was also invited to participate in the choice of a name for the theatre. The name Bim-Bom comes from the name of Winnie-the Pooh's house in the Polish translation of A. A. Milne's classic children's story, and from the name of a pair of Russian clowns. The problem of a place to perform was solved by the director of the Miniatura Puppet Theatre, Ali Bunsch, who allowed Bim-Bom to perform in the evenings, after his regular performances for children were over. Perhaps Bim-Bom's location in a puppet theatre may have had some influence on its playful attitude; moreover, Bunsch' s Miniatura was itself known for its visual experimentation, and the use of its technical facilities probably aided Bim-Bom's own visual inventiveness. Ahaaa, which had its premiere in 1955, began with four parapsychologists holding a seance in a dormitory and conjuring up an Imp, who descended from heaven by means of a large pulley. The Imp, played by Jacek Federowicz, a thin man with thick glasses, announced that he was a new spirit who would possess the Minister of Culture and Art. This beginning was an obvious allusion to the changing situation of cultural politics in the country. The program continued to allude to the political situation in an imagistic, symbolic vein. Afanasjew describes another sketch in which people are depicted as having become so ossified by Stalinism that they have become "soulless, dead bricks": A lion devoured the stereotyped speaker at a youth meeting at the very moment that the bricks cracked and from them brightly colored young characters leapt with flowers and danced a waltz. A great effect. The rumble of the cracking bricks, the swarm of youth throwing flowers to the audience was an omen of spring after the frosts. (Katdy 54-55)

The optimism at the core of Bim-Bom's philosophy is clearly shown both by the Imp's announcement and the cracking bricks; rather than just declaring "Look how bad things are under Stalin's system," they also said, "Things are going to get much better." Ahaaa was almost childlike in its determination to induce gaiety in its audience. It contained a parody of a circus which Afanasjew, as "Mr. Thomas," was the director of. There was a clown, named "Mr. Lorenz," an act with trapeze artists, a horse with two performers inside, a barker, and a ballet dancer played by an unshaven, hairy-legged actor in a wig. The performers, in the best tradition of amateur theatre, played tricks on one

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another: "For example, one night the pianist in the pit took off the actors' shoes and tickled their feet: the following night, when they retaliated by throwing objects, the musician pulled out a water pistol and shot them" (Gerould, Twentieth-Century 69-70). The audience was also given presents by the performers. Youthful high spirits, spontaneity, and sheer joy were the keynotes of this program. In 1955, Bim-Bom took part in the first Student Theatre Festival and in the above mentioned International Festival of Youth and Students in Warsaw. The Student Theatre Festival brought about an exchange of ideas with other groups, especially STS, and from that time the two groups became close friends. In preparation for the International Festival, the members of Bim-Bom took a vacation in the Mazurian Lake District, where they lived in a school and rehearsed day and night. This improved the quality of their performances. At both festivals, they were extremely successful: Wherever they went, they traveled in special trucks, establishing a carnival atmosphere and playing in the streets to crowds. The girls wore black tunics and yellow skirts with painted black flowers. The Bim-Bom song became a popular hit, as did the theatre's yellow scarf with a picture of a dog lifting his leg on a cactus. (Gerould, Twentieth-Century 70)

In addition, Bim-Bom stood ready to improvise impromptu entertainments for crowds of people at any moment. Bim-Bom was to have many tours to various parts of Poland and abroad, and to bring this atmosphere of gaiety and spontaneity to all kinds of venues. Bim-Bom's second full-length show was an even greater illustration of their principles of gaiety and poetics of imagery. It premiered 16 March 1956, and was entitled Radosc powaina (Joy in Earnest). The central theme of this program, which was carried through in all the sketches, was the contrast between those people that Bim-Bom called "roosters" and those they called "organ grinders." Andrzej Cybulski, in his book Pokolenie kataryniarzy (A Generation of Organ Grinders), writes: The members of Bim-Bom announced that in each person is something of the "rooster"- the personification of pride, bureaucracy, evil -and of the "organ grinder" who in his heartorgan, plays the most beautiful melody. They declared themselves on the side of the latter. (11-12)

Bim-Bom declared that roosters existed all around them in life and could be found in all professions from poets to beggars, from artists to office workers. Organ grinders were idealists who believed in the triumph of good over evil even though they knew that nature ordains the survival of the fittest. Once again, Bim-Bom identified itself with "grey people" and tried to liberate the essence of their "heart-organs."

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Joy in Earnest was considered by Afanasjew to be Bim-Bom's most mature, innovative program. This was the most film-like of the Bim-Bom shows. In "The World Is Not Such a Bad Place ... ," Afanasjew writes: Joy in Earnest had something like a film script, a conscious organization of movement, sound, and image. Both film close-ups and long shots were played in the window of the stage. Film, and therefore Movement, were the working spotlight of our conceptions. ("World" 263)

Bim-Bom tried to achieve a montage of images which would involve the audience in the same way that a film would involve them. The spectator was surrounded by a stereophonic sound track, and the effect of close-ups, medium shots, and distance shots was achieved by artfully directing the spectators' eyes to various parts of the stage. These filmic techniques succeeded in giving the show a filmic atmosphere: The atmosphere of the perfomance. It rarely happens that theatre fascinates to the end like film does. "And what next?!" the public asked during intermission. Bim-Bom was a very strange film. During intermission, when the movie projector was seemingly stopped, the people stood befuddled; their dream had been interrupted. (Afanasjew, Kazdy 79)

This dreamlike atmosphere, it was felt, aided the audience's involvement in the process of unmasking the "roosters." Bim-Bom's skits in Joy in Earnest generally kept words to a minimum with much of the action played in pantomime. The lone exception was a skit called "The Professor" written by Slawomir Mrozek, who was to become Poland's most famous playwright in the 1960s. Mrozek was only associated with Bim-Bom for one show, Joy in Earnest, but it was as a result of this association that he discovered his talent for playwrighting, to which he has devoted the rest of his career. "The Professor," tells the story of an old mathematics teacher, obviously one of the organ grinders, who loves to reminisce about his native city, Vienna. Whenever the students do not want to do their math, they coax the Professor into telling them stories about the old days. One day he tells a particularly animated story about an evening at the opera, and begins to conduct the class as if it were an orchestra, with the boys joining in and mimicking the sounds of various instruments. The Director of the school shows up, and asks the Professor to come to the office. As he and the Professor leave together, a rooster's cockscomb pops up from the top of the Director's head. The last line belongs to one of the students, who has apparently himself been turned into an organ grinder because he exclaims ("loudly, almost dispassionately, with a delicate mixture of objectivity, respect, and admiration"), "What a performance!" (Mrozek, "Professor" 249-253). This is one of the few skits in a Bim-Bom program which actually had a script with lines written down for the actors.

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More typical of the collectively written skits in Joy in Earnest were "Snouts," "Pilots," and "Faust," which had scenarios written for them rather than scripts like "The Professor." In "Snouts," subtitled "An Antimilitarist Picture," the motif of conducting is repeated, only this time the conductor is a "Politician for a Certain Power" who is dressed in a black tuxedo with the legend "Uberrooster" written on his back, and he is conducting a chorus of huge Prussian spike-helmeted heads who are singing Nazi marching songs. Eventually, the Politician turns to bow and backs right into one of the yawning, singing mouths which devours him with relish (Afanasjew and Troupe 245-46). Thus the roosters of the world get devoured by their own cynical collaboration with the devil. "Pilots," Zbigniew Cybulski's favorite sketch in Joy in Earnest, also had an antiwar theme. Through the use of lights and screens, the audience's point of view was shifted back and forth so that they first saw the crew inside an atomic bomber and next were put in the position of people about to be bombed by them. Through sound as well as visuals, the audience witnessed the dropping of the bombs and the crash of the plane from the pilots' point of view, and than viewed the scene from the earth and saw parachutists and bombs falling. An atomic explosion was even simulated, with a mushroom cloud, then total darkness, a ticking sound, and finally sharp light. Bim-Bom then broke the illusion with an actress at the front of the stage blowing soap bubbles at the audience. Finally, the rest of the actors reappeared, so close that they were almost among the audience, letting the audience know that the real outcome was in the their own hands. In "Faust" the stage is represented as though seen from the back. An Actor with a Great Theatre stands with his back to the actual audience, and performs the role of Faust to an audience further upstage of him. He takes his bows to the sound of bravos, but every time the upstage curtains close, he "becomes a private person," and the real audience can see his fatigue and ordinariness. After his final bow, he turns to go offstage, and is surprised to see another audience, the real audience, which has been spying on him from behind. He says, in an embarrassed voice "Intermission," and quickly shuffles out (Afanasjew and Troupe 247-48). Though the "message" of Joy in Earnest was serious, Bim-Bom still maintained the lighthearted, deliberately amateur tone they had cultivated in Ahaaa. They played pranks on one another in this show as well. In a skit parodying the workings of the fire department, for example, Afanasjew usually played the role of minister of the department. However, often an actor named Karwowski replaced him in the role, and Afanasjew liked to play practical jokes on him. Once Afanasjew placed Epsom salts on a sandwich Karwowski was supposed to eat onstage during the skit. Another time he tied flowers to nylon line coming down from the flies overhead, and

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then jerked them away from Karwowski every time he reached for them. The spontaneous, improvisational atmosphere of Bim-Bom allowed and even encouraged these kinds of highjinks onstage. Like STS, Bim-Bom was a part of the Polish October, and because of the October it became more and more popular. It toured thourghout Poland. In November of 1956, Bim-Bom performed in Katowice (renamed Stalinogr6d after Stalin's death). During this time the Hungarian Uprising took place, and when the people heard about its suppression by Russian tanks, they held a demonstration at the railway station where they burned Marxist-Leninist books and the station's new sign with "Stalinogr6d" on it. Another part of the crowd went to Bim-Bom's performance where the company added a new pantomime ridiculing various dictators, including Hitler and Stalin. Bim-Bom was also invited to Student Theatre Festivals in Eastern and Western Europe. The newly liberalized Minstry of Culture financed trips to Moscow, Paris, Amsterdam, and Brussels to attend such festivals. In Moscow they were so popular that crowds of people were turned away, and some tried to climb through the windows of the theatre to attend. They were also successful in the West, but they felt alienated both from the art they saw there and from the pace of life: The journey confirmed us in the conviction that what we did, we did in an original way. The art of Bim-Bom originated in a reserve of poetic naivete; it was fresh, not weighed down by traditions, not derived from any influences. The world, which flew around us in the course of a hundred days, impressed us with its colors, but it was noisy like a Persian marketplace; there was time in it neither for thought nor for poetry. (Afanasjew, Kazdy 105)

Bim-Bom thought that Western Europeans, racing around in their cars, made thoughtless by their prosperity, were more like roosters than like organ grinders. Their art needed to be filtered through the medium of Polish problems in order to be fully comprehensible to its audience. Bim-Bom started work on its third full program, entitled Toast, in August, 1956, but work progressed slowly and the premiere did not take place until June, 1957. For this program, the company abandoned its improvisational approach, and wrote texts right from the beginning. In Afanasjew's opinion, they had gone too far in the direction of visual theatre, and Toast was inferior to Joy in Earnest: "In effect, in Toast an excess of decoration and staging took place. The program stood before us as heavy, monumental, like a Greek temple. The scenery became foregrounded, the person- backgrounded" (Kaidy 103). Some of the other actors also believed that Toast was too impersonal, and that Bim-Bom had retreated from its commitment to the ordinary man.

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Toast was conceived according to a symbolic system of colors. In the first part people dressed in black, symbolizing the "subjective evil inherent in us," and played against a white backdrop. In the second part, people wore white, symbolizing the "objective evil which surrounds us and poisons us every day," and played against a black backdrop. The third part began with building a wall made of black and white bricks around people appearing in colored clothing. From these bricks, the. young people then build a house. They build their lives. The "toasts" of the title were proposed to "the fish who, on account of their experiences with the atom bomb, live in the woods," to "the voice of the speaker calling for medicine for a sick child," and others. (Afanasjew, Kazdy 108). In its conception, Toast continued to be about the little man, the "grey man," but in its execution, the scenery overwhelmed its humanity. Starting in 1958, many of the principal members of Bim-Bom began to form other groups or to be involved in other activities. Zbigniew Cybulski and Bogumil Kobiela worked more and more in film, and eventually became stars of the Polish cinema. Jacek Federowicz was accepted to study acting in drama school, and eventually became the most popular comedian on Polish television. Wowo Bielicki directed another student theatre in the Gdansk area, the cabaret To Tu (It's Here), and eventually became a professional stage designer. Afanasjew started his own theatre using members of his own family, which expanded the circus act that had been part of Ahaaa. This theatre, the Afanasjeff Family Circus, continued some of Bim-Bom's work into the 1960s, when Afanasjew became a televison film director. In 1959, Bim-Bom did put together one more program, Cos by trzeba (Something Would Be Necessary), which it toured to Belgium in 1960, but after that, it came to an end. Other Student Theatres The example of STS and Bim-Bom inspired many other student groups in other cities to organize themselves into theatre companies. Many of these theatres started only months or even weeks after STS had its first premiere, and some even preceded STS. For example, in Warsaw itself, the D.S.S. (Dziennikarska Sp6ldzielnia Satyryczna- Journalists' Satiric Cooperative) had its first premiere in the fall of 1954, in Wrodaw, the Ponuracy (Gloommongers) premiered in May of 1955, and in Poznan, the Z6ltodzi6b (Greenhorn) Theatre had its first premiere in March, 1954 (two months before STS). All these groups produced variety-type, satiric revues much like STS's. There were enough of these new student "little theatres" already in 1955 to hold the First Festival of Student Theatres in Warsaw. The best known of the student satiric theatres, other than STS and Bim-Bom, was the Pstr1;1g (Trout) Theatre of L6dz which had its debut March

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6, 1955. Many of the personnel who later founded Pstrflg, however, had already in 1952 (before Stalin's death) tried to produce a satiric revue entitled Dyliians satyry (Satire's Stagecoach) which, despite the fact that it confined its satire to the student milieu, was cancelled after only a few performances on the grounds that it was "ideologically dubious" (Skrzydlo 104-105). Pstrc;J.g's history is very similar to STS's; the "Trouts," as they called themselves, were in contact with literary circles in Lodz and so paid close attention to words in their revues. Like the STS-ers, many of them went on to careers in the professional theatre. Meanwhile, the older type of amateur student theatre which produced plays written by playwrights, usually originally for the professional theatre, continued to exist. However, it too underwent a subtle change around the time of the Polish October. These "student dramatic theatres" (as opposed to "student satiric theatres") began to produce plays that had hitherto been unproduced on the Polish professional stage. Western plays which had been forbidden by the censors in Stalinist days were given their Polish premieres by student theatres. In addition, student theatres began to produce Polish plays which had been forbidden since the war, for example, the works of the Romantics and of Witkiewicz. The best-known student theatre of this type was Teatr 38 (named after Jean Giraudoux's play Amphitryon 38) in Krakow, which premiered with a "poetic show" based on Gakzynski's poetry, entitled Galczyfzski 38 in May, 1956. Teatr 38 went on, however, to concentrate mainly on the works of the French absurdists. Seminal works of absurdism were presented for the first time in Poland by Teatr 38, including All Against All and Professor Taranne by Arthur Adamov, Endgame and Krapp's Last Tape by Samuel Beckett, and The Maids by Jean Genet. Krapp's Last Tape was actually performed in Poland before it was performed in France. Teatr 38 also premiered works by other French-speaking writers, such as Michel de Ghelderode, Jacques Audiberti, and Jan Potocki (a Pole who lived from 1761 to 1815 and wrote in French). In addition, they produced Krasinski's Undivine Comedy (along with a performance based on Dante's Divine Comedy) and Slowacki's play Samuel Zborowski. Kantor: A Non-student Alternative

In 1956, Tadeusz Kantor, who had previously been known as a visual artist and set designer, opened his own theatre in the Dom Plastykow (House of Visual Artists) in Krakow. It was named the Cricot 2 after the interwar artists' theatre Cricot. Cricot 2's first production was Witkiewicz's Mqtwa (The

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Cuttlefish), which had been performed for the first time in 1933 at the original Cricot Theatre. The Cuttlefish, a play about art and totalitarianism, was a particularly appropriate work for a theatre founded by a visual artist in the October era. Cricot 2 was not Kantor's first foray into starting an independent theatre, however, nor did The Cuttlefish mark his start as a director. During the war, together with some artist friends, he had organized an underground theatre, which performed plays clandestinely in private apartments. In 1943 he had directed and designed Juliusz Slowacki's romantic tragedy Balladyna and in 1944 Wyspianski's symbolist drama The Return of Odysseus for this underground experimental theatre. The Cricot 2 was the first theatre in Communist Poland to be independent of the state-supported system of subsidized theatres. Unlike the student theatres, which were subsidized indirectly through student organizations, Cricot 2 did not receive any state subsidy. However, Kantor's theatre resembled the student theatre Bim-Bom in several ways: it employed both professional theatre people and amateurs, it appealed mainly to young people (at least in its early days), it was devoted to experimentation, and it wanted to remove artificial barriers between the arts. Moreover, according to theatre historian August Grodzicki, like Bim-Bom it strove for a "circus form of expression" (116). Kantor saw no division between his work as a visual artist and as a director, and he brought the sensibility of a painter to his productions. Thus, his productions, from the time of his wartime underground theatre experiments up through 1990 when he died, were filled with striking visual imagery and through the years relied less and less on literary texts. Kantor's theatrical vision evolved through several stages and during the 1956-75 period, each stage was illustrated by a Cricot 2 production based on a play by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz. Each stage was also accompanied by a manifesto which expressed Kantor's thinking. The first stage, which Kantor called "the autonomous theatre," applied to his underground productions of Balladyna and The Return of Odysseus as well as to The Cuttlefish. Balladyna was conceived as a total performance of costumes, properties, and movement. The character of Balladyna was "played" by an abstract masked figure in the center of the room in the apartment in which the performance took place. Critic Jan Klossowicz describes The Return of Odysseus: Kantor dreamt of an Odysseus who returned to Krakow by train: the mythological hero appears at a dirty, overcrowded station; he steps into the waiting room which is under constant Nazi surveillance. The play was staged in a room partly blown apart by the war. ("Journey" 100)

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In this early production, Kantor was already interested in how outside reality (in this case, the war) "intrudes" on the world created by the artist. This was to become one of his principle preoccupations in subsequent productions and visual artwork. He refined his ideas about the function of theatre in 1956 when he produced The Cuttlefish, conceived as "an abstract commedia dell' arte" (Grodzicki 116), and declared in his "Autonomous Theatre" (Teatr autonomiczny") manifesto: "The theatre which I call autonomous is the theatre which is not a reproductive mechanism, i.e., a mechanism whose aim is to present an interpretation of a piece of literature on stage, but a mechanism which has its own independent existence" ("Writings" 115). He was careful to differentiate his concept of autonomous theatre from that of directors who find a "stage equivalent" for the action specified by the author for a play. Instead, he wanted to "create such reality, such plots of events, which have neither logical, analogical, parallel, nor juxtaposed relationship with the drama" ("Writings" 116). Kantor was to continue this search for an "autonomous theatre" with a life of its own unrelated to the life of a dramatic text in all his subsequent experiments. Kantor's succeeding theatrical stages in the 1960s (the informel theatre, the zero theatre, the theatre happening), the 1970s (the impossible theatre, the theatre of death, cricotage), and the 1980s (theatre of memory) all attempted in various ways to break down artificial borders between the worlds of fine art and theatre, but at the same time to define and explore the borders between art and reality. 3 For example, Kantor believed that the process of creation was more important than a finished theatrical product. Consequently, in his 1960 production of Witkiewicz's W malym dworku (In a Little Country House- 1921), he squeezed his actors into a small wardrobe, and directed them to wander about chaotically and repeat broken fragments of sentences. He also believed in "dismembering logical plot structures, building up scenes not by textual reference but by reference to associations triggered by them," ("Writings" 126), and so in his 1963 produciton of Wariat i zakonnica (The Madman and the Nun - 1923), the actors recited lines, interrupted them, discussed them, commented upon them, returned to them, and repeated them. He was interested in creating something partway between a Kaprow-style happening and a theatre piece; consequently in his 1967 production of Kurka wodna (The Water Hen- 1921), real waiters served coffee and eggs to the audience, the character, "the Water Hen," sat throughout the entire performance in a tub full of water, into which a

3

For a more detailed description of these stages, see Kantor, Journey.

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cleaning woman poured water and wrung out towels, and the performance took place among the audience, with house lights on and the actors making contact with spectators. From this production on, Kantor himself began to appear onstage in all his productions, not as an actor but as himself. Kantor became known for startlingly evocative visual imagery in his productions. For example, his 1973 production of Nadobnisie i koczkodany (Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes - 1922) included in the cast the following characters not originally specified in Witkiewicz's text: "Man with Two Heads," "Man With Two Additional Legs," "Man With a Board in His Back," and "Man with Bicycle Wheels Grown into His Legs." In his 1975 production of Umarla klasa (The Dead Class), based on Witkiewicz's 1920 play Tumor Brainiowicz, Witold Gombrowicz's novel Ferdydurke (1938), and Bruno Schultz's short stories "A Treatise on Mannequins" and "The Pensioner" (1934), a classroom of old people, carrying dummies of themselves as children, returned to school from the realm of death. Kantor's late productions used his own life as source material rather than Witkiewicz' s plays. In these works Kantor's preoccupations- family, memories, deathresembled those of any old man, but he avoided both sentimentality and cheap psychoanalysis by, instead of trying to create a kind of memory madeinto-coherent-narrative as many realistic playwrights do, trying to recreate onstage the essence of memory itself, in all its illogical, repetitive obsessiveness. His 1980 production of Wielopole, Wielopole, for example, used the duplication and repetition characteristic of real memories: the title is a repetition of Kantor's village's name, one of the characters (Kantor's uncle) is "doubled" by an inanimate mannequin, there is another set of twin uncles, Olek and Karol, who argue about how the "room of memory" should look, and all the characters play many of the scenes over and over again. Kantor's theatre was an expression of Kantor's own artistic vision, obsessions, and personality. Though he theorized prolifically in his various manifestoes, his theories were expressed in a poetic language (and sometimes even written in the form of poetry) and were consequently difficult for other theatre practitioners to take up. It has been remarked that therefore, unlike Jerzy Grotowski, who started working a few years after Kantor, he had very little influence on other theatre groups. Polish critic Andrzej Zurowski comments that whereas Grotowski started a theatre movement: It is quite different with Kantor's theatre, which is a "separate theatre," a "lonely theatre," around which one can see no meaningful movement, school, or following. This in itself is neither good nor bad: it is simply the case. But because of this, it is difficult to speak about the

precursory or avant-garde character of Kantor's beliefs. It would be better to speak about a uniqueness that broadens the artistic panorama of the period. (367)

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While it is true that Kantor cannot be said to be part of an alternative theatre "movement" in the same way that the student theatres were, to regard his beliefs as not precursory or avant-garde is to ignore much of the subsequent history of alternative theatre in Poland and in the rest of world. On the contrary, Kantor's theatre and his ideas about theatre had an influence on individual Polish alternative theatres and on the way the Polish alternative theatre developed. Kantor's theatre was popular with young people in its early years, and may even have influenced Grotowski, who was a theatre student in Krakow in the years when Cricot 2 was starting. Denis Calandra writes that Kantor "actually claims to have been one of Grotowski's teachers" (59). Probably Kantor did not mean by this statement that Grotowski literally took classes from him since Grotowski was a student in the Drama Academy and Kantor taught periodically at the Fine Arts Academy in Krakow. However, Grotowski almost certainly saw Cricot 2's productions in the 1950s and 60s, and though his artistic preoccupations were somewhat different during his "theatrical" period than Kantor's, his thinking and experimentation on his productions show a certain kinship with Kantor's. Some of Grotowski's ideas which later became influential with other alternative groups were, in fact, first practiced by Kantor. The two best examples of this were the idea that there is nothing sacred about a dramatic text and the idea that what is important about theatre is the process rather than the product. Kantor espoused and practiced these ideas from the very beginning of his work with Cricot 2; that they became associated with Grotowski is due to the fact that his theatre started touring abroad during the sixties while Cricot 2 did not tour abroad until the seventies. Kantor, however, did not share some of the other preoccupations of alternative theatre practitioners of the sixties and seventies, and this may also have been why he had less direct influence on the alternative theatre movement at that time. While Zurowski is quite right to point out Kantor's "uniqueness," Kantor nonetheless evidently influenced those theatres in the sixties and seventies who sprang from a fine arts tradition rather than from a university or drama school milieu. These theatres will be discussed in subsequent chapters, but they include groups which started in the 1960s and 1970s. The entire tradition of performance art, as it now exists in Poland, can claim Kantor as its forebear. Aside from examples of specific, visually-oriented Polish theatres and performance art groups in whose work one can detect traces of Kantor, the phenomenon of Cricot 2's very existence had an effect on the evolution of the alternative theatre movement in Poland. First of all, the fact that Kantor's theatre was able to exist independent of any state subsidy proved that it was possible to truly be alternative in a Communist state. Also, Kantor's

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opposition to the Communist party's attempt to institutionalize artists served as an inspiration to others attempting to operate outside the system of statesubsidized theatres. This attitude was summarized by Kantor in an interview in 1985: It is clear to me that if artists do not belong to or are not sponsored by museums, cultural institutions, or private funds - which, theoretically, are supposed to support them but, in reality, only use than - they cease to be artists in the eyes of society. These autonomous artists are relegated to outlaw status; they are separated from society and left to "die" among their own artistic creations. (Kobiatka 178)

Perhaps because of the all-pervasiveness of the state in the cultural life of a Communist country, Kantor felt that the only real artist was one who could free him or herself from the establishment and ''belong to the circle of artistes maudits rather than those who enjoy official recognition" (Kobialka 178). Kantor shared the contempt that student theatre practitioners had for "official" theatre, and refused himself to be held in the "velvet prison" of state-supported art in the socialist state. This attitude, elevated by Kantor into an artistic principle, became one of his commonalities with the rest of Polish alternative theatre of the seventies and eighties. Fifties Alternative Theatre STS, Bim-Bom, Pstr~g, Cricot 2, and the other theatres mentioned above started roughly about the same time as the Living Theatre, probably the most well-known alternative theatre in America and Western Europe. However, the Polish theatres differed in several ways from the Living. First of all, the fact that most of them were student theatres, sponsored by university organizations, was an important difference from the Living, which was basically a private theatre organized by Julian Beck and Judith Malina (at first performances were held in their apartment). This university sponsorship had both positive and negative consequeneces. On the one hand, from the first Polish student theatres enjoyed a fair amount of financial stability, something that every alternative theatre in Western Europe or America would envy. On the other hand, they were subject to censorship which could become more or less strict as the prevailing climate changed. Even Cricot 2, which operated independently of state subsidy, still was subjected to censorship. While many Western alternative theatre practitioners would undoubtedly argue that there is a kind of marketplace censorship which operates in capitalist society, few have had to undergo the kind of prior restraint that was common in Eastern Europe until the end of the 1980s.4 4

The exception to this rule might be in Great Britain, where theatre was censored until1968.

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A more significant difference between the 1950s period for the Living Theatre and the Polish alternative theatre is the Poles' earlier ability to set themselves up "in opposition to institutions and social patterns" (1), the major criterion by which Renate Usmiani, in her book on Canadian alternative theatre, judges whether a theatre is alternative or not. From the beginning, the Polish student theatre was a political theatre whereas for the first twelve years of their existence (1951-63), according to Theodore Shank, the Living Theatre's "theatre work and their political convictions were ... separate" (9). In this period Beck and Malina focused on producing plays, particularly nonrealistic plays which experimented with poetic language. In this enterprise they resembled the Polish group Teatr 38. But Teatr 38, while making an important contribution to the Polish theatre scene, cannot really be considered an alternative theatre; they only differed from traditional amateur student theatre groups in their choice of repertory. The more seminal STS, Bim-Bom, and Cricot 2, however, were definite alternatives, both in style and in content, to the mainstream theatre of the era. STS, Bim-Bom, and Cricot 2, rather than resembling their contemporaries, the 1950s version of the Living Theatre, provide a link between certain theatrical developments of the interwar years and techniques which some later alternative theatre groups in the sixties, seventies, and eighties would use. Pre-Stalinist Soviet theatre practitioners, such as the Terevsat and Blue Blouse groups, Mayakovsky, Eisenstein, Meyerhold, Okhlopkov, and Tairov all contributed in various ways to techniques or ideas that the 1950s Polish practitioners used. The work of the Poles also relates to the work of Brecht and Piscator in Germany, Living Newspaper performances in America and Britain, and other interwar experimental theatres. In addition, STS and Bim-Bom presaged the work of 1960s groups like the American San Francisco Mime Troupe, El Teatro Campesino, and Bread and Puppet Theatre, the English Theatre Workshop, and the French Grand Magic Circus. Similarly, Cricot 2 connects with the 1970s and 1980s theatres that Shank, in his book on American alternative theatre, calls "New Formalist" (123-154). It is as if there was a kind of thread of experimental alternatives to mainstream theatre which ran throughout Europe and North America in the early part of the twentieth-century. This thread was dropped for a while during World War II, but was taken up again after the war perhaps by the Poles a bit sooner than it was elsewhere. STS, for example, consciously counted a number of prewar theatrical forerunners among its influences. Among the Polish influences, both Drawicz and Jarecki mention Witkiewicz and Galczynski, whose miniature plays inspired the format of STS's work. But STS also claimed inspiration by several socialist playwrights and directors who were active in Germany and in the Soviet Union. Drawicz writes:

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Mayakovsk:y, principled, bitter, and tragic at the same time, became for STS the number one patron saint. Several other names, known mainly by repute, by legend, by haphazard and inadequate readings, were summoned up- Piscator (a copy of Das Politische Theatre was circulated), Brecht (whose usefulness for the socialist-realist theatrical canon had been not long ago still the subject of lively discussion), and Meyerhold (exciting above all as a legend). ("STS" 68)

All these theatre activists, the Poles, the Russians, and the Germans, have in common that they were unaccceptable to the Stalinist censors because of their nonconformity to the socialist-realist model. All had been, like the members of STS, scoffers at the stagnant "establishment" of the day. STS also built on the work of other, early left-wing theatres. Soviet satiric theatres such as Terevsat (1919-1922) and the Blue Blouse groups of the 1920s, much like STS, had used popular forms in order to make political points. 5 These included Living Newspapers which had transmitted information to a mostly illiterate population. In the 1930s, this form was taken up by the American WPA Federal Theatre Project and developed to dramatise various social problems. In Great Britain also, Unity Theatre in London and Joan Littlewood's Theatre of Action in Manchester produced Living Newspapers shortly before World War II. The American New Playwrights Theatre in 1926 also used satire to transmit a political message. The main difference between all these groups and STS was that in general the Soviet groups and their American and British offshoots aimed their social criticism at capitalism (or the vestiges of capitalism then existing in the Soviet Union) where STS's satire was aimed at then existing Communist structures in Poland. STS criticized the Communist party for not living up to its own ideals. In the style of their criticism of "the system" (though it is a Communist, rather than a capitalist system), STS is also a forerunner of several 1960s alternative theatres in America and England. For example, STS's style has clear parallels with the theatrical techniques used by the San Francisco Mime Troupe and El Teatro Campesino. The short skit form used by STS resembles the aetas that El Teatro Campesino first started performing in 1965 to entertain workers on the picket line during the Farmworkers's Strike in California; it also resembles San Francisco Mime Troupe's 1965 production A Minstrel Show or Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel. San Francisco Mime Troupe's claim that "satire was our forte" (Davis 86) could have been first used as a motto by STS. In addition, STS used the commedia dell' arte style which would become the staple of the S. F. Mime Troupe from 1962 to 1970. Furthermore, music and musical parodies were as integral to the productions For more detailed discussion of Terevsat and the Blue Blouse groups see Curtis. Also see Deak for discussion of the Blue Blouse groups.

5

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of STS as they were later to the San Francisco Mime Troupe and El Teatro Campesino. STS's work also prefigures some aspects of Joan Littlewood's production of Oh, What a Lovely War at the Theatre Royal in Stratford East, London. Theatre Workshop (Littlewood's group), The Mime Troupe, and El Teatro were unlikely to have been aware of STS's earlier explorations of some of the same forms; however, their similar aims and some of the same influences (particularly Brecht and the various Living Newspapers) led them in similar directions. Bim-Bom also had antecedents in various pre-World War II theatrical phenomena. Rather than the theatrical antecedents that STS claimed, BimBom pointed to artists as its forebears: "Chagall interested us more than Brecht, Utrillo rather than Piscator" (Afanasjew, "World" 263). Nevertheless, much of Bim-Bom's work echoes motifs in the plays of STS's "number one patron saint" Vladimir Mayakovsky. Much like Bim-Bom, Mayakovsky and Vsevelod Meyerhold, another of STS's patron saints, were particularly interested in popular fairground forms of theatre and in the circus, incorporating these into many of their productions. However, the Russian whose aesthetics most resembled Bim-Bom's was Sergei Eisenstein. Before Eisenstein became a film director, he aspired to create a nonliterary theatre inspired by music hall and circus; he termed this a "montage of attractions." Like Bim-Bom's productions, Eisenstein's version of Ostrovsky's Enough Stupidity in Every Wiseman incorporated numerous gags and stunts, a total disrespect for literature (Ostrovsky's text was dismantled completely and then reassembled as a series of images), cinematic effects, scenes played in the style of Chaplin, and the breaking down of distinctions between drama and other, more popular forms of entertainment. Bim-Bom also resembles the American Workers' Laboratory Theatre, a Marxist group formed in 1928, which tried to be a theatre of image that connected scenes thematically rather than through a chronological plot. In addition, the cinematic imagery of some of Bim-Bom's productions recalls some of the imagery that the Federal Theatre project used in its Living Newspaper productions. Bim-Bom also had some of the same goals as 1960s alternative theatres in America and elsewhere. Bim-Bom's desire to be a truly popular theatre was similar to the San Francisco Mime Troupe's; in critic Eugene van Erven's words about the Mime Troupe, "Apart from being overtly political, their productions always provide good, old-fashioned fun" (26-27). Also, like the Mime Troupe, Bim-Bom was willing to raid all kinds of popular entertainments for techniques; both groups used circuses, parades, and carnival techniques. However, though Bim-Bom did not use puppets, its visual style was closer in spirit to Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theatre than to the satiric Mime Troupe. Like Bim-Bom's founders, Peter

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Schumann comes from an artistic rather than literary background; thus Bread and Puppet "has little patience with the spoken word, preferring instead to express its perspective on modern civilization with stark visual images irt motion" (Van Erven 53). Schumann is a pacifist, and many of his productions protested against the Vietnam War in much the same stark, visual way that Bim-Bom protested against militarism in its skits "Snouts" and "Pilots." Zbigniew Cybulski, the artistic director of Bim-Bom, had the same attitude toward theatre that Peter Schumann has: Schumann considers theatre to be something essential to life, like bread, and Cybulski also called Bim-Bom "our black bread with its own aroma and manner of treatment, well-baked, fragrant" (qtd. in Afanasjew, Kaidy 108). Bim-Bom was also a forerunner of groups like Jerome Savary's Grand Magic Circus in France. Tadeusz Kantor also traces his theatrical roots back to the preStalinist Soviet theatre, as well as to constructivism elsewhere: [M]y passion for theatre originated- and remains- with the works of the constructivists, Meyerhold, Tairov, the Habima, the Bauhaus, Schlemmer, Pitoew, to mention a few. There one can find the roots of my fascination with theatre. After World War II, happenings, which were as powerful as constructivism, were the link between visual arts and theatre. They were powerful because they made use of physical reality. (Kobialka 182)

Kantor's concern with exploring the borders between life and art in his work with Cricot 2 also built on the previous work of Nikolai Okhlopkov in his Realistic Theatre of the early 1930s. For his production of The Iron Flood, Okhlopkov used the audience as one of the actors, much as Kantor and Grotowski were to do. Kantor consciously links theatre with the great trends in modern art of the twentieth-century. As Jan Klossowicz writes, Kantor's attitude toward his work was far more similar to that of a visual artist's than to that of a theatre artist: Kantor wants to create theatre that is his alone - the same way a painter is the sole author of her/his paintings .... He is not part of any group (though he uses the same actors in production after production); he is not interested in training the actors; nor is he interested in the anthropology of theatre, its ritual character, or its social function. He is only interested in theatre as a spectacle or a mirror of an artist's- his, Kantor's- inner process. ("Journey" 112)

Nevertheless, Kantor chose to fuse theatre and his sensibility as a fine artist in his unique productions. In this he resembled many later alternative theatre practitioners, both in Poland and elsewhere. Though Kantor was clearly not part of any alternative movement in Poland, nor was he interested in certain types of alternative theatre (such as the Grotowski or student theatre types), as a visual artist involved in theatre,

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he was part of a worldwide trend toward painters and sculptors creating visual theatres. In his book on American alternative theatre, Theodore Shank writes: An influx of visual artists into the theatre was a major impetus toward theatre of real time and place. Painters and sculptors, who in the late 1950s were discontented with their traditional static media, began creating happenings in which they hoped to eliminate the separation of art and life. (5)

Shank's American "happening" artists were interested in combining the environmental aspect and controlled time dimension of theatre with the art spectator's perception of events in real, rather than fictional time. Like the American artists that Shank describes, Kantor began experimenting with a "theatre of real time and place" with his wartime production of The Return of Odysseus in 1944. He continued those experiments throughout his career. After the Cricot 2 began touring abroad in the early seventies, other alternative theatre practitioners, particularly in Germany, France, Italy, the United States, and Great Britain, had a chance to see and be influenced by his work. In turn, some of these theatres influenced practitioners back in Poland. Shank proposes three criteria which set alternative theatre apart from traditional theatre: "[T]he most important changes are the development of an autonomous creative method, a shift from the dominance of words to a visual emphasis, and an aesthetic that keeps spectators conscious of the real world rather than focusing them exclusively on a fictional illusion" (3). STS, Bim-Bom, and Cricot 2 all invented their own material instead of performing plays written by playwrights for the professional theatre. Their "autonomous methods" differed: Bim-Bom developed their skits collectively through discussion and improvisation, STS had a group of playwrights who each wrote various skits, and Kantor developed his own material with the actors of Cricot 2. All three groups also had Shank's "aesthetic that keeps spectators conscious of the real world rather than focusing them exclusively on a fictional illusion;" they constantly made reference to the surrounding reality. Only Bim-Bom and Cricot 2, however, fulfilled Shank's requirement of "a shift from the dominance of words to a visual emphasis;" STS's cabaret format dictated a reliance on words which was reinforced by the literary bent of the writers. Nevertheless, right from its inception, two out three major alternative theatres in 1950s Poland met all of Shank's criteria, and even STS met two out of the three.

2 EXPANSION, EXPERIMENTATION, DE-POLITICIZATION

The era of the Polish October, with its hopes for reform, greater freedom of speech, and more democracy within the Communist system, lasted a very short time. Political scientists George Kolankiewicz and Paul Lewis state that "within a matter of weeks, a marked shift of emphasis occurred in Polish political life and debates within the party" (138). Instead of fulfilling the implied promises of the October, Gomulka launched a policy which he called "our small stabilization" but which might better have been called "small steps backwards." Nevertheless, the post-October period saw an institutionalization and a proliferation of new types of experimentation in the alternative theatre in Poland. The Small Stabilization

Though the party began retreating from promises of reform almost immediately after October, 1956, the Polish people, especially the intellectuals, continued to expect to reap rewards from their revolution. Stefan Staszewski, a Communist Party Central Committee member who was demoted in 1959, contends that Gomutka never intended to be a real reformer: Gomulka was given credit, enormous credit without any security- if you read his speeches the ones he made at the eighth plenum [when he was elected Communist Party leader] or at Procession Square [just after his election], he really promised very little. But still, people invested the enormous burden of their hopes and aspirations in him. (Toranska 184) n~,

These hopes and aspirations for a less repressive form of socialism at first seemed to be fulfilled, at least to some extent. The intellectuals and revisionists pressed for more and more freedoms, but they were destined to be cruelly disappointed by Gomulka. Historian Peter Raina writes: "For the intellectuals the 'revolution' had only begun. For Gomulka, it had ended with his election to the office of First Secretary of the Party. This was the paradox that was difficult to understand at the time" (58).

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The heady period of a relatively free press, lack of secret police terror, and bold satire on the stage lasted approximately one year. Even during that time, however, Gomulka was already working to dislodge reform-minded Communists from positions of influence. At the ninth plenum of the Communist Party Central Committee in May 1957, he made a speech attacking the revisionists as bourgeois democrats. Later that year, the editor of the student magazine Po prostu was removed and in October, the magazine itself was ordered to cease publication. Students at the Warsaw Polytechnic demonstrated against the closing of Po prostu, and their brutal beating by the police started a riot which lasted for four nights. In addition, at the end of 1957, the Party began to purge its membership of revisionists. Eventually about twenty percent of the Party was purged. By the end of 1957, the October was clearly over. The atmosphere at the end of the fifties and beginning of the sixties was exactly the opposite of what it had been during the time when the first Polish alternative theatres were founded. The exhilaration of the 1954-57 period was completely gone. In an interview, the novelist and film director Tadeusz Konwicki comments: [T]he second period of Gomulka's rule started with a putting-to-sleep; a putting-to-sleep of society and of our culture. It has to be remembered that this was a period of dreadful boredom, horrific boredom, in Poland, a period of interminable conferences, plenary sessions, speeches of - I don't know- four or six hours by Gomulka himself who monotonously read reports. (qtd. in Ascherson, Struggles 168)

This change in intellectual climate was noted by foreigners as well. After a stay in Poland in 1960 political scientist William E. Griffith wrote: "Poland today is a country of spent passion. Apathy, hopelessness, indifference to politics, rejection of any ideology and retreat into private life dominate the scene" (26). The Poles, along with those Westerners who had identified with their struggle, had allowed their hopes to be raised so high that they were plunged into cynicism when those hopes remained unmet. Where politics had been of vital concern only a few years before, now it became simply boring. Even though many, if not most, of the gains of October 1956 were soon lost, the country did not retreat all the way back into Stalinism. Leopold Labedz, the associate editor of Soviet Survey, wrote in 1961: The situation is different from that under Stalinism, when a discrepancy between private feeling and official ideology could find no expression, and intellectuals had either to withdraw internally or repress their thoughts and rationalise their compromises. The end of terror made such reactions both less necessary and more difficult. Under Stalinism, Polish intellectuals saw in the world around them a gigantic drama or a grotesque tragedy. Now the proportions

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have been somewhat reduced: the level is often trivial rather than dramatic and the grotesque is simply farcial. (30

In a way then, the intellectuals' dilemma under Gomulka was even worse than it had been under the Stalinist Bierut. Bierut forced them into making heroic choices, but Gomulka tended to ignore them. Though they were no longer terrorized, they were now marginalized. In the mid-sixties, despite Khrushchev's fall and the subsequent neoStalinist noises emanating from the Kremlin, the intellectuals began to fight back. The poet Antoni Slonimski gathered signatures on a petition against censorship, the "Letter of the Thirty-Four," and delivered it to the offices of the Chairman of the Council of Ministers in March, 1964. Neil Ascherson writes: "This was only the beginning of a long guerilla struggle between Gomulka and the intellectuals, conducted by more petitions and open letters which were answered by expulsions from the party and dismissals from public posts" (Struggles 172). In 1965, Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski, two junior academics at Warsaw University who had been expelled from the Party in 1964 for writing a doctoral dissertation claiming that "state socialism" was as alienating and exploitative as capitalism, distributed an "Open Letter to the Polish United Workers [Communist] Party" defending themselves and advocating a workers' democracy which closely followed the ideas of Trotsky. They were arrested, and soon after, student unrest erupted at Warsaw University. Both were sentenced to prison, one for three and the other for three and a half years. In 1966, after philosophy professor Leszek Kolakowski delivered a biting attack on the decade of Gomulka's rule at a meeting called to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Polish October, he was also expelled from the party, and more arrests at the university followed. This "guerilla warfare" between Gomutka and the intellectuals resulted in art which carried on the battle, but because of censorship, only in a disguised fashion. In this time period, the character of Polish culture changed: Nothing could be said straight out. Everything was implied by a historical allusion, by a meaningful omission, by an apparently innocent choice of word. Polish literature and film, which had been ... fearlessly direct and open, now became hermetic. No foreigner could hope to decipher the private references - cultural, historical or merely personal - through which, for example, an early [Jerzy] Skolimowski film delivered its message to the gloating sophisticates of Warsaw. Through this semiotic jungle, the cultural gendarmerie and the intellectuals stalked each other and laid their ambushes. (Ascherson, August 88)

The directness of say, STS in its heyday, could no longer be tolerated by the censors, but they would now (unlike in Stalinist times) allow more coy

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references to the current political situation to pass. Often, the censors, many of whom were members of the intelligentsia themselves, willingly participated in this game, and were even sympathetic to the artists' goals. However, after the book was published, the film was released, or the play had opened, if the public reacted too openly to the artwork, the censors would realize that they had allowed the artists to go too far, and then quickly move to suppress the artwork. Both the Stalinist and the Polish October periods left their legacies to the Gomulka era. Stalinist attitudes towards the social function of art persisted among the Communist elite who periodically tried to impose these attitudes on the recalcitrant intelligentsia. By contrast, the intelligentsia, remembering the hopes engendered by the October, constantly tried to force the regime to restore its previously-enjoyed freedoms. Because of the October, the Communists never dared to reinstate the levels of censorship and terror which had been common in the Stalinist era. The intellectuals, for their part, were afraid to protest too much, for fear that full Stalinist terror would return. A kind of stalemate was reached; the level of personal freedom, freedom to say and write what one pleased, was higher than during Stalinist times but not as high as during the October. However, a profound cynicism and loss of faith in the ability of Communism to solve the country's increasingly severe problems manifested itself in cultural and social life during this period. The Polish Theatre of the Absurd

Despite the rather depressing political atmosphere, Polish theatre during the years of the "small stabilization" became revitalized. Even though censorship was quickly reimposed on literature and theatre after only a short period of almost complete freedom, it was never again as strict as it had been during the Stalinist period. Moreover, the authorities abandoned the doctrine of "socialist realism," so limiting to the Polish theatrical imagination, and avantgarde theatre blossomed. According to Daniel Gerould: The accumulated and long repressed avant-garde writing that poured forth made the years from 1956 to 1968 a great period in Polish theatre. All Polish theatres were avant-garde; in effect, there was no commercial stage and no complacent, entertainment-seeking audience. With approximately four hundred new productions a year, mainly of contemporary plays, the Polish theatre in this era had perhaps the most interesting and varied repertory in all Europe. (Twentieth-Century 84)

This blossoming of the avant-garde in Polish theatre manifested itself even in theatres which were funded through the Ministry of Culture and Art and

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thus went through more rigorous censorship than, for example, student theatres. Polish audiences were especially receptive to the absurdist plays written in France in the late 1940s and 1950s, seeing in them parallels to their own everyday lives, which they thought of as absurd. Successful productions of these plays in the late 1950s and early 1960s in turn inspired the development of Poland's own theatre of the absurd. In no small part this phenomenon was due to the efforts of Adam Tarn, who in 1956 started a monthly journal devoted to theatre, Dialog. Tarn gathered a circle of poetplaywrights, translators, and critics around him, and in the years 1956-68, they published approximately two hundred foreign plays in Polish translation and nearly twice that number of contemporary Polish dramas. Dialog also publised numerous articles, reports, reviews, forums, and interviews on the state of theatre in Poland and in the rest of the world. Tarn considered the French theatre of the absurd, especially the works of Samuel Beckett, to be the most significant development in twentieth-century drama. He therefore made great efforts to obtain translation rights to all the works of the French absurdists, and published many of them almost as soon as they were published in France. Dialog soon attained a unique position among Poland's dramatists and theatre critics, and Tarn's theories and predilections gave shape to Poland's absurdist theatre. Two neglected Polish dramatists from a previous era, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz and Witold Gombrowicz, were re-discovered during this period and promoted in Dialog. Though Witkiewicz (who committed suicide in 1939) had written his plays during the interwar period, most of them had not been staged during his lifetime, and the few that were produced had been poorly received. However, in the post-October liberalization, directors and literary critics rediscovered his works; these began to be produced, many of them for the first time. In 1962, Konstanty Puzyna, one of the Dialog critics, after years of negotiating with the censor's office, finally succeeded in bringing out a two-volume edition of all of Witkiewicz's surviving dramatic works. Once these plays were available, if only in a limited edition of 3,000 copies, Witkiewicz became a central writer in the modern Polish theatre. Daniel Gerould contends, "In the exciting period of artistic experimentation following 1956, it was Witkacy [Witkiewicz' s pen name], more than any other writer or artist, dead or alive, who opened the way for the younger generation of theatre artists" (Witkacy 340). Witold Gombrowicz, a novelist and diarist as well as playwright, started his literary career in the 1930s in Poland and thus is a contemporary of Witkiewicz; like Witkiewicz he was also rediscovered in the post-October era and became influential in his own right. His first play, Iwona, ksieiniczka

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Burgunda (Ivana, Princess of Burgundy), had been written in 1935 and published in 1938 in the interwar literary journal Skamander, but did not reach the stage in Poland until 1957. In the meantime, Gombrowicz had found himself in Argentina at the beginning of World War II, and elected to stay there after the war rather than returning to a Communist-controlled country. As a Pole living in emigration, Gombrowicz's writings were automatically suspected by the regime of being subversive. During periods of liberalization such as the Polish October, he was published and performances of his plays were allowed, but as soon as censorship tightened again, as during the small stabilization period, he was forbidden. Gombrowicz's second play, Slub (The Marriage) was written in 1946 in Argentina, published first in Paris in the emigre journal Kultura in 1953, and then published in Poland in 1957. His final work for the theatre, Operetka (Operetta), written after he had moved to France in 1963, was published in Kultura in 1967, at which point it was not allowed to be published or performed in Poland. Two out of Gombrowicz's three plays thus pre-date the Polish theatre of the absurd, but since they were available in Poland during the 1956-68 era they had an impact on that movement. Gombrowicz and Witkiewicz, along with the Western absurdist playwrights published in translation in Dialog, served as inspiration for a new generation of Polish playwright who emerged in the 1956-68 era. These playwrights used the style of absurdism not only to explore personal relationships as the French had done, but also to represent their own views of Polish reality, albeit in a roundabout way: The following decade saw the flowering of a type of play that could be called The Names of Power- the title of a celebrated work by Jerzy Broszkiewicz presented in 1957. These plays analyzed, in abstract and transposed terms, the mechanism of power. As parables they could be interpreted by the audience in a variety of ways, but they were always seen as oblique comments on political and social reality, utilizing allusion and metaphor. (Gerould, "Representations" 369)

Because of the restraints of censorship, "political and social reality" could not be commented upon directly, nor could the fact that the authorities (called in Polish wfadza - the power) had reimposed control over the population - a subtler and in some ways more dangerous type of control than they had exercised during Stalinist days. However, these themes were often expressed through the use of allusion and metaphor which the censors overlooked or (sometimes deliberately) misinterpreted. Many playwrights of this era in Poland could be described as writing these absurdist "parables of pewer;" besides Broszkiewicz, Leszek Kolakowski, Tymoteusz Karpowicz, Stanislaw Grochowiak, and Ireneusz

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Iredynski all wrote plays in the absurdist vein. The two best-known of these playwrights, both in Poland and abroad, however, were Slawomir Mrozek and Tadeusz R6zewicz. As mentioned in Chapter 2, Mrozek began his dramatic career with the student theatre Bim-Bom. He continued with a series of one-act plays written in the late 1950s and early 1960s which were published in Dialog; most of these were produced, starting in 1959, at the Dramatyczny (Dramatic) Theatre in Warsaw. Mrozek is the master, in these one-acts, of dramatized metaphors for power. The characters are forced to undergo preposterous ordeals for obscure reasons which they do not understand. Nevertheless, they are easily talked into accepting their fates and even become enthusiastic about them. Mrozek's most fully developed work in this era was his full-length play Tango (1964), written after he had already emigrated from Poland in 1963, and produced by director Erwin Axer at the Wsporczesny (Contemporary) Theatre in Warsaw in 1965. As in Gombrowicz's later play Operetta, Tango gives us a version of twentiethcentury Polish (and by extention, all European) history. The other major Polish playwright of this era is Tadeusz R6zewicz. Previously known as a poet, R6zewicz made his theatrical debut with Kartoteka (The Card Index) which was published in Dialog in 1960 and produced the same year at the Dramatyczny Theatre in Warsaw. He followed this with Grupa Laokoona (The Laocoon Group) in 1961 and Swiadkowie, alba nasza mal-a stabilizacja (The Witnesses or Things Are Almost Back to Normal) in 1962. R6zewicz' s dramatic structures are more complicated and less linear than Mrozek's. He tirelessly experiments with the form of his dramatic works, introducing various innovations in form in each play. R6zewicz's is a personal vision, rather than a strictly political or satiric one. Nevertheless, his plays include references to Polish realities. For example, the subtitle of The Witnesses, when literally translated from the Polish, means "our little stabilization" - a clear reference to Gomulka's political slogan. In this play, poetry readers recite: "Our little stabilization/may be only a dream" (qtd. in Czerwinski 42). Another example occurs in Wyszedr z domu (Gone Out1964) when Eve tells the daughter, Gizela, to instruct her father in the ways of the world: "Now go and remind him about all those sociologico-political problems. About political systems, about the road to socialism, to capitalism, to feudalism. In other words, make him conscious of the world he lives in" (Card Index 114). Though his plays weave a more complex fabric of imagery and allusion than Mrozek's, they are no less political. The Polish Theatre of the Absurd, in the 1960s, took over some of the satiric and comic energy that the student theatres had generated in the 1950s. The fact that censorship was no longer allowing direct cultural criticism of the political situation forced the theatre to become indirect, and the idiom of

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the absurd was a perfect vehicle for such indirect criticism. Student theatres participated in the rediscovery of Witkiewicz and Gombrowicz and the creation of a Polish absurdist movement. As mentioned in Chapter 1, Krakow's Teatr 38 gave the Polish premieres of many absurdist plays, and even the world premiere of Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape. In general, however, absurdism was an avant-garde innovation that was fairly quickly taken up by the Polish professional theatre. Nevertheless, the sensibility of the absurd did have an influence on the development of alternative theatre in Poland. Student Theatre 1958-1968 Student theatre was more negatively affected by the "small stabilization" policy of the Gomulka era than professional theatre. The hand of the censor abruptly got heavier, the atmosphere changed, and suddenly political satire was no longer an adequte raison d'etre for student theatre groups. Poet Marian Grzesczak, in an article on Poznan student theatres, comments that: in connection with the so-called stabilization in the main plan of student theatres it was possible in the beginning of the sixties to notice certain reappraisals. The view came into existence that the run of luck which they had had up to that time had finished for student satiric theatres. (249)

Yet most of these groups continued to exist, and they therefore had to find new artistic reasons for being. Critic Jerzy Koenig wrote in 1961 of a crisis in confidence in the student theatre movement: To the question "I wonder if the student theatres still really exist?" there is not even an answer. To the more reasonable question: "Has something changed?"- the answer is short: they have ceased to be a revelation. This obviously does not mean that the phenomenon itself has become automatically a lot less interesting, by any means. Simply, together with the stabilization of cultural life, the function and position of academic theatres has changed quite radically. )"AD 1961" 139)

Student theatre, in other words, no longer was able to fulfill the journalistic function of commenting on politics. It therefore began to function more like avant-garde theatre elsewhere and less like an expression of the opinion of the whole intelligentsia. It became more hermetic and less popular than it had been. According to journalist and ex-STS member Andrzej Drawicz: The form of expression of the movement became more introverted, turned inward, rather than extroverted as it had been in the earlier period. In its outlines this movement is beginning more and more to recall analogous phenomena in amateur theatre in the rest of the world ... ("STS" 90)

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This introversion was an effect of the Party's cultural policy, but it may also have been caused in part by the advent of a new, less political generation of students in Polish universities. Boguslaw Litwiniec, the founder of the Wrodaw student theatre Kalambur (Pun), contends that in 1958-59, "A new generation began studying at institutions of higher education; to them the radicalism of the rebellious Youth Unionists, which had determined the ideological force of the groups up to that time, was foreign" ("Studenckie teatry" 221). At any rate, from the beginning of the sixties to the end of the decade, student theatres tended more and more to turn away from political satire. They began, instead, to experiment with different themes and theatrical forms. At the beginning of this period, the end of the fifties and beginning of the sixties, several groups presented shows which were, in fact, still political, but not about Polish politics. Critic Konstanty Puzyna, writing about the Second Students' Cultural Festival in Gdansk in 1961, remarks: Clearly outlined is the fact that points of interest are shifting. The student movement is as vividly concerned with politics as in preceding years, but the scope is different. Interest in home affairs used to predominate, now it has shifted to international affairs. The Congo, Hiroshima, militarism, peace -are themes tackled in performances such as Cieniom (To the Shadows), in memory of the victims of Hiroshima, by Witold Wirpsza, [and] Wolanie do Mungu [Call to Mungor -a montage of Negro poetry. (qtd. in Berwid-Buchner, "Adventure" 4)

Student theatres wanted subject matter that would be acceptable to the censors but did not compromise their own integrity. They aslo began using other formats than the revue of short skits so popular in the October period. In addition to groups such as Teatr 38, which had always specialized in presenting already written dramatic texts, other groups which had previously always created their own material now began to occasionally present already written plays or to adapt other literature, such as poetry or fiction, for the stage. Groups which specialized in pantomime or other kinds of visually expressive theatre also appeared. The movement away from political satire was accompanied by an increasing interest in all types of artistic experimentation. Eugeniusz Mielcarek writes in his article "The Functions of Student Theatre": At the beginning of the sixties most student theatres concentrated their interest on the artistic matters. That one-sidedness could not but affect their social potentialities. Yet, their novel Often in the literature Polish titles are mistranslated into English. Sometimes different translations are used by different commentators. In these cases, I have tried to select the best translation, and substitute it in square brackets for the mistranslation or variant.

1

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Alternative Theatre in Poland ideas with regard to the manner of staging, the means of expression, and attempts made to combine different kinds of dramatic art, have certainly brought new values into our entire theatrical life. (6)

By the end of the sixties, student theatre became known much more for being the artistic avant-garde than for its concern with specifically Polish questions. Sociologist Aldana Jawlowska writes: This was an experimenting theatre and maybe this alone established the common characteristic of groups having different aesthetic conventions, penetrating different areas of reality in their theatrical explorations. This did not establish any basis for forming a community; on the contrary, the groups were always competing in discovering new scenic possibilities, new means of expression and themes. (139)

This competition among theatres to be the most avant-garde made student theatre very exciting for theatre professionals during this period, but tended to lessen both its popularity in student circles, and any feeling of a cultural movement that student theatre had had during the Bim-Bom and STS days. At the same time, student theatre became much less ad hoc and more of a regular institution in Polish cultural life. Krzysztof Miklaszewski comments that "the student theatre became firmly established and institutionalized" (10) in the 1960s. ZSP, the Polish Students' Organization, continued to be its financial sponsor, and also organized an enormous number of festivals which encouraged groups of various types to become active: A variety of reviews take place in Polish towns, where ensembles belonging to one type of school, or engaged in the same type of stage activity, provide an opportunity to compare dramatic achievements and to appraise the overall progress made. There are, for example, reviews of the ensembles of the Medical Academies, reviews of satirical theatres, of poetry theatres. Every two or three years, the patron of the students' cultural movement, the Polish Students' [Organization], organizes All-Polish Culture Festivals - large-scale events at which the artistic achievements of students' ensembles find their expression. These festivals are like milestones marking new tendencies developing in the students' cultural movement, particularly in the theatre. (Berwid-Bucher, "Adventure" 3)

These festivals, in turn, gave the young creators of student theatre opportunities to meet, to compare notes, and to form artistic judgements. The festivals, in fact, worked against the fragmentation that the movement was experiencing. Critic Konstanty Puzyna, on the occasion of the First International Student Theatre "Festival of Festivals" in 1967, comments that: student festivals make a certain additional sense which for the most part professional theatre festivals in this country do not .... [I]n the case of student theatres, comparisons, competition, exchanges of experience are not quite empty words. Here obviously the festival becomes an

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occasion for meetings, comparisons, and disputes, sometimes very vehement and stubborn, though not always coming about during the official discussions - more often they take place during the intermissions, on the streets, accompanied by coffee, vodka, and big beat recordings. ("Pierwszy" 127)

In these informal meetings at festivals, the nature and purpose of student theatre was hotly debated. Festivals such as the First International Student Theatre Festival of Festivals provided Polish student theatre practitioners the opportunity to discuss these issues not only among themselves but also with their counterparts from the USA, Africa, South America, and Eastern and Western Europe. Though there was little agreement at this stage, there was a feeling that student theatre needed to be something more than an imitation of the professional theatre with cheaper tickets. Thus, though the trend toward aesthetic experimentation tended to fragment the Polish student theatre movement, participation in festivals, and especially international festivals, encouraged the feeling that there was a world student (or "young") theatre movement, and that Polish student theatre was part of it.

Satiric Theatres and Cabarets Student satiric theatres continued to exist during this period, but they became, necessarily, less biting in their satire. Already, at the beginning of the 1960s, commentators were saying that the student satiric theatre was dead. Koening writes: Of the formerly excellent tradition of satiric student theatres very little remains today. Of course, groups - old and new - still function, are somewhat successful, improve their workshop skills from year to year, and are in the end something far more ambitious and sympathetic than the professional satiric theatres and cabaret "pot-boilers," but something in them clearly has gone out of joint. ("AD 1961" 141)

This crisis was caused by a complex combination of factors. The "stabilization" and consequent toughening of censorship was only one. The success of the "veterans" like STS, Bim-Bom, and PstrQ.g in the 1950s had led to a proliferation of imitators without their own artistic visions. Many of these theatres did not have a stable of their own writers and therefore were very weak textually even though they strove to follow the model of STS and PstrQ.g which were, essentially, literary theatres. In addition, as the theatres themselves became more sophisticated, they were no longer satisfied with a sort of theatrical "mooning" (Koenig, "AD 1961" 141)2 the authorities; they wanted to go artistically beyond that. 2

wypinanie si~ -literally, "showing one's backside to somebody in contempt".

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The theatres which survived and continued to prosper were those that had a solid literary basis. This was the case with Warsaw's STS. In about 1959, according to Andrzej Jarecki, they felt a need to change their artistic direction a bit: Well, what was to change? Not the content or the form, but that little grasped element which falls between these two ideas, fashions them, connects with itself, and defines itself; the element which fills a role as a common subject of all component parts of a theatrical performance and especially of a cabaret performance. One may call it style; it was to be the simplest counterpart of our new life attitude: reconciliation with the epoch, a comfortable optimism, an ironic distance from the objects of our satire. We wanted everything to become a manifestation of a return to the principles of common sense which already once at the beginning of our career had led us to our proper road. (436-37)

This "new attitude" or "new style" was introduced in their revue, Usmiechnic;ta twarz mtodziezy (The Smiling Face of Youth), which premiered March 14, 1959. It was a style that attempted to give up the role of "theatrical political newspaper" which they had filled in the days of the Polish October, but to maintain some kind of political role. They continued, throughout the 1960s, to provide this type of performance, which they regarded as a kind of tradition for them, but they were (in the words of Jerzy Koenig) "finally gravitating clearly in the direction of a rather more 'cute' and 'nice' entertainment than an aggressive one" ("AD 1961" 141) As the same time, they began to experiment with different forms. In 1958, Wojciech Siemion, an extremely versatile and talented performer, had joined the company, and in November of 1959, STS presented a one-man show starring Siemion, Wieia malowana (The Painted Tower), based on Polish folk poetry and songs. Siemion performed in folk dialect and was accompanied on the stage, in another allusion to Wyspiaitski, by four straw effigies. This began a series of one-person shows starring Siemion and others, including Zdrada (Betrayal- premiere 1961), based on stories by Isaac Babel and Listy panny de Lespinasse (Letters of Mile de Lespinasse- premiere 1956). Eventually the "theatre of one actor" (as it is called in Polish) form became popular in other theatres as well, and in 1966, there were enough of these types of performances to initiate a festival of one-person shows. In addition to one-person shows, STS began to present one-act plays written by their own authors, and at the end of 1960, they introduced yet another new form, the full-length "fact-montage" based on documentary material. Theirs, entitled Widowisko o Rudolfie Hoessie - wrogu ludzkosci (A Show About Rudolf Hess- Enemy of Mankind), was based on the diaries of Rudolph Hess, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. According to Jaroslaw Abramow, one of the members of STS, "Hoess [sic]

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was shown not as a madman, but as an honest man, dutifully fulfilling the orders of his superiors - a blindly obedient fanatic who murdered thousands of innocent people for [the] good of the higher ideals of the German race" {8). More fact-montages, such as Oskarzeni (The Accused premiere 1961) based on trial transcripts, followed, and soon other student theatres were copying STS and rifling through documentary material. Thus, while continuing to be regarded as a "satiric theatre" STS began to drift more and more away from satire, and to regard their other work as more important and artistically fulfilling. Pstr?g (Trout) Theatre of L6dz followed a similar course. In 1959, in their revue Lunapark, they still felt free to mock the mediocrity of the "small stabilization" straightforwardly and unambiguously with such lyrics as: I know you guess what I'm going to say Our country has fallen into a stabilization. And I? I, the old initiator Should go into a museum, but how? A stabilization -of cushy jobs A stabilization -the old state of affairs goes on A stabilization -a fashionable threadbareness A stabilization - oh, to sort of hit the mark A stabilization - the taste of chickens A stabilization- enough! That's not it! (Skrzydfo 117)

However, not all the satire in the program was so pointed; it was largely directed at social foibles. In addition, much of the program was devoted to situation comedy and song. According to Leszek Skrzydlo, a member of Pstr{lg, a certain nostalgia for the October period was noticeable in the program as well: Some kind of sorrow was felt for what had passed, a sorrow that life is as it is - that politics concerns us less and less, that our own personal affairs are closer to each of us than the more general affairs which not so long ago completely absorbed our intellects. It could be seen that "the trouts" did not part company without a certain melancholy with the period when political satire was their most popular commodity and the theatre thanks to this scored a considerable number of successes. (118)

By 1959, then, Pstr{lg already felt that the period of their strongest satire was over. Like STS, they continued producing satiric revues; in 1961, for example they produced Niemoiliwosci staro sie zadosc (Impossibility Has Been Achieved), described by Koenig as "not only smooth and nice, truthfully even a little too smooth and nice for a student theatre, but also 'thoughtful,' or rather, let's say 'scatter-brained in a positive way"' ("AD 1961" 141).

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However, they too began to experiment with other forms. In 1958, they produced Wiecz6r poezji Lechonia (An Evening of [Jan] Lechori's Poetry) and in 1960 Wiecz6r poezji Wierzyriskiego (An Evening of [Kazimierz] Wierzyriski's Poetry, both devoted to the works of poets who had emigrated from Poland during World War II. In 1959, they tried a "pantomime and song" program, Panowie, swiat jest zielony (Gentlemen, the World is Green) directed by Ryszard Ronczewski. In 1963, Pstr~g, under the influence of SIS's A Show About Rudolph Hess and The Accused, produced their own fact-montage, Rogate dusze (Stubborn Souls) based on letters written by citizens of the Polish People's Republic to the editors of newspapers and the radio. In 1960, they also tried their own show based on L6dz folklore entitled Si6dme, nie flatruj (The Seventh Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Lure Away Thy Neighbor's Pigeons), which they called a "vaudeville." They continued to try more shows based on poetry, such as Sokrates tariczqcy (Socrates Dancing- premiere January, 1963), based on the poetry of Julian Tuwim, Gatczynski, and Robert Burns; Petnym gtosem (In Full Voice- premiere March, 1963), based on the Russian "new wave" poetry of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrei Voznesensky, and others; and Bal (Ball- premiere December, 1965), based on Solomon's Ball by Gakzynski and Ball at the Opera by Tuwim. In addition, they did some adaptations of prose works, such as Mir;dzy wojtem i plebanem (Between the Chief and the Vicar premiere April, 1963) based on The Little World of Don Camillo by Giovanni Guareschi; Klucz niebieski (The Blue Key - premiere March, 1965) based on Leszek Kolakowski's philosopical tales; and Podr6ze Guliwera (Gulliver's Travels- premiere March, 1966). Thus, like STS, Pstr~g drifted away from their traditional form of satiric revue; however, they often tried to adapt material (such as Gulliver's Travels) which had its own satiric edge. Generally, those satiric theatres which started up in the post-October period avoided political satire, and instead chose a gentler social and moral satire as their subject. In Marian Grzesczak's words: "In short: entertainment took the place of satire" (249). This was true of L6dz's Cytryna (Lemon), Wrodaw's Co Nie Co (It's Not That), Warsaw's Stodola (Barn), Gdansk's ToTu (It's Here) and Krakow's Piwnica pod Baranami (Cellar Under the Sign of the Rams), among others. L6dz's Cytryna was typical in that it did not organize its programs around one, defined issue as satiric theatres had been wont to do in the October period; instead it more closely resembled a variety show. Koenig describes a typical program of the period: A few staged songs, a pinch of literary parody, a little bit of Review [A television program]for and against, a few Polish/Slavic blackout sketches, alcoholism, personal hygiene, economic embezzlement, cowboy skits, kindly mockery of the youngest literature, love, the crowd in the trams- properly speaking, one should have been happy with this, because there are quite a lot of benefits that are usable in everyday life in these high-minded programs - if you don't

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remember student theatres who were at one time "about something," who had ambitions of intruding into life, who, with natural, unceremonious youthfulness, remembered inalienable, but forgotten rights. The word is trite: one does not feel in all of it anything deeper, anything that would still be alive several years after the engagement. ("AD 1961" 142)

The hard-hitting satire of earlier years had been transformed into cabaret. Many of these theatres, however, did not aspire higher than to produce very good cabaret programs. Probably the most popular of these cabarets was Piwnica pod Baranami (Cellar under the Sign of the Rams), in Krakow. Wieslaw Dymny, a member of the Piwnica company, writes about the situation there in about 1958: At that time the Piwnica cabaret experienced its "golden period." Crowds were streaming in the doors and windows. The public split its sides with laughter. It was no longer the "thawed" audience, still a little frightened. Now the chairs were filled with people who laughed boisterously, sat comfortably, and demanded entertainment. This audience already had refrigerators, televisions, washing machines, and always heavier cars; of course everything on the installment plan. They were already bored by jokes about neighboring states. (174)

Times had changed, and the public now wanted to relax in the theatre rather than hear about politics. Theatres which could cater to this taste became much more popular than theatres which had ambitions to make political or artistic statements. By the mid-sixties, the satiric impulse that had been powerful in the October period had almost completely died. Many of the original veterans of STS, Bim-Bom, Pstr{l.g, and other theatres from the fifties had become theatre professionals, and therefore their tongues became tied by the more powerful censorship that professional theatre was subjected to. Wieslaw Dymny writes three anecdotes to illustrate the movement of student satire from the fifties to the mid-sixties: 1.1956

Man: We have so much to say that we could shout to the whole city. We will create a gigantic all-human theatre, but we don't have any money. Audience: It doesn't matter- we'll lend it to you. 2.1959 Activist: Friend, we have money, a stage, good conditions, actors. Make theatre. Man: If you have everything, why don't you make it yourself? 3.1964

Representative: Mr. X, we know whose side you're on and that's why we've come to you. It is necessary to give the people theatre, good theatre. We have a little money for it, but you, after all, belong to the Author's Union ... and so we return to you. Man: (is silent). (179-180)

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These anecdotes show how student satire moved from a phenomenon which enjoyed enormous good will from the audience during the October period through a stage where it felt tremendous resentment because it was no longer allowed to be what it had been, to finally, an embarassed silence. Though student cabarets continued to exist, increasingly the adventurous branches of the student theatre movement were involved in other forms of theatrical activity.

Dramatic Theatres Student dramatic theatres continued to exist in this period. In addition, many theatres which did not exclusively perform already written plays occasionally would perform one. In general, these theatres tried to perform plays which had not already been done by professional theatres: student theatres at the Silesian Polytechnic in Gliwice presented the Polish premiere of Gombrowicz' s The Marriage in 1960 and the world premiere of R6zewicz' s Spaghetti i miecz (Spaghetti and Sword) in 1965. In addition, student theatres were often the first to introduce various playwrights in their towns. For example, before the professional theatre in L6dz, the Nowy (New) Theatre, presented Mrozek's play Indyk (Turkey), the student theatre Forum had already presented Striptease and Na pernym morzu (Out at Sea). Some theatres also tried innovative stagings of classics, and others cultivated their own circles of playwrights. As Leszek Skrzydlo of Pstr~g points out, the criteria for choosing the repertory depended on the group of people in the theatre: One might be interested above all in the theatrical values of a text which would enable it to be performed on the stage or experimented with in the fields of stage design or direction (eg. Witkacy's The Madman and the Nun in Clash Student Theatre); another might look for intellectual values, for matters relating to contemporary man. (130)

Sometimes a student theatre was able to make stronger political statements through the metaphors that a playwright such as Mrozek or even Witkiewicz had written than they would have made if they had performed their own satiric revues. Teatr 38 of Krakow continued to be the most well-known of the student theatres that relied mainly on dramatic texts. While Waldemar Krygier directed the company, it continued to be best known for presenting the work of the absurdists, many for the first time in Poland. After Krygier resigned from the theatre in 1960 in order to join Grotowski's company, "T38" still continued the artistic line he had established for some time, producing the Polish premiere of Michel de Ghelderode's The Actor's Exit in 1960, and the premieres of Zielone Rekawice (The Green Gloves) by Tymoteusz

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Karpowicz and Amedee or How to Get Rid of It by Eugene Ionesco in 1961. However, gradually the company changed direction, slowly working out a new style and repertory. They began to focus more of their attention on staging new Polish plays, on experimental stagings of classical texts, and on poetic shows. With the staging of Wolfgang Borchert's play The Man Outside in 1961, Teatr 38 began to look for texts "which would contain ... problems from the borderline of ethics and morals" (Kajzar, "Teatr 38" 196). Experimentation was the byword at Teatr 38 in the 1960s; texts were torn apart, rearranged, and given new interpretations. Wieslaw Dymny quotes the actors as saying: In our theatre, the principle has predominated for years that all tricks are allowed; in other words, every method which leads to the goal is good. We have held consistently to this principle; in light of this, some amusing situations have come about: authors have not recognized their own plays but after a few performances, they finally became convinced. (172)

Teatr 38 thus gained a reputation for being in the forefront of the avantgarde, not only for their choice of repertoire, but also for their innovative stagings. An example of the type of thing which was common procedure could be observed in their 1965 production of Shakespeare's Richard III. The new director of the group, the playwright Helmut Kajzar, used poetic images from the epic material of the history of Richard III as well as fragments of Shakespeare's play, and produced a story about moral corruption and evil. Maria Berwid-Bucher calls this production a "poetic morality play" ("Adventure" 6) and Konstanty Puzyna comments on the "artaudization" which the director had submitted the story to: In the black and white, tattered, consciously grubby ... set of Ewa Czuba, red splotches stand out sharply: the spectacle wants to be bloody and mournful at the same time. Almost the whole time Richard, the embodiment of evil, a demon, writhes on the stage; the other characters sit in a line near a wall upstage: they get up when it is their turn to step onstage and go back again to their places- black costumes, faces covered with white make-up, unmoving, characteristic of Chinese or Japanese masks. A ritualized, well-nigh magical story takes place: a history of the annihilation of a demon through nothing but the collective hatred of those gathered, through the curses and imprecations of women, uttered sacrally like incantations, as if the words were those pins which are stabbed into dolls in order to kill someone. ("Pierwszy" 129)

Many American and European theatres in the sixties were fascinated by Antonin Artaud's theories; Puzyna comments that quite a few of the student theatres at the First Student Theatre Festival of Festivals in 1967 reflected this fascination. This transformation of Richard III into a theatre of cruelty piece shows that Kajzar was in the mainstream of alternative theatre trends of the time.

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Kajzar's taste for experimentation led Teatr 38, along with STS and Pstr?.g, to try adaptations of poetry as well as already written dramatic texts. In fact, Krygier had presented "poetic shows" in 1956, 1958, and 1959, and this series had been continued by other directors after his departure in 1960 and 1961. However, in 1963, with Kajzar's staging of 23 strony maszynopisu (23 Pages of Typescript), a montage of the poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky, Teatr 38 abandoned the notion of using the setting to create a mood or to dramatize the poetry. According to Kajzar: In this montage the existence of people reciting the verses was not concealed. They walked on the stage and took their assigned places, as if they were performing on a platform at a school anniversary recital. They were given several props, chairs, a tape-recorder, a recording of Mayakovsky's voice made in 1922, a few carnival masks, a screen. With the help of these props they had to make the verses flare up into scenic metaphors. And thus, chairs in the hands of actors could be guns, platforms, barricades, stages, and then return to being chairs. Clashes of contrasting intonations - the rhythm of scenic movement prompted by percussive instruments, a simple melody sung by a girl - were also used for this purpose. ("Teatr 38" 195)

By these means, Kajzar hoped both to reanimate Mayakovsky's poetry and to investigate the notion of finding some kind of formula for the staging of "lyric" theatre. Nevertheless, Teatr 38 remained much better-known for its innovative productions of dramatic works than for its stagings of poetry. Aside from those of Teatr 38, there were a few other student productions of dramatic works in the 1960s which became landmarks not only in the student theatre but also in the course of Polish theatre history in general. Two of these were productions of Szewcy (The Shoemakers) by Witkiewicz. Written in 1931-1934, The Shoemakers is one of the many plays by Witkiewicz that were never performed in his lifetime. Milosz describes it as "a fantastic parable on intellectual and moral decay and on two successive revolutions, one fascist, the other Marxist" (History 418). In 1961, the theatre connected with the State Higher School of Plastic Arts in L6dz presented a production composed of fragments of Witkacy's text, directed and designed by Jerzy Grzegorzewski, at that time an art student but later to become a well-known professional director. It was highly acclaimed, winning two prizes at the Second Students' Cultural Festival in Gdansk in 1961. Four years later in 1965, The Shoemakers was given its first full premiere by Kalambur Theatre in Wrodaw. Elzbieta Lisowska, one of the members of Kalambur, writes about this production, directed by Wlodzimierz Herman: "It was recognized as the best production in the student movement at that time, and some reviewers even declared that it was the best Witkiewicz production in the country" (41). This production was also awarded several prizes at festivals and performed

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over ninety times all over Poland. Significantly, however, during this period and until the 1970s only student theatres were allowed to produce this play with its specific critique of Marxism. Sometimes, student dramatic theatres would present plays written by local playwrights. At one stage, for example, Hybrydy (Hybrids) Student Theatre in Warsaw "assumed the self-imposed task of producing contemporary Polish dramatic works which had not been staged before" (Szopinski 37). Playwrights Janusz Krasinski and Stanislaw Grochowiak were first produced there. Another notable example of this phenomenon occurred in 1963 when Teatr Rozm6w (Theatre of Conversations) of Gdansk presented a play by Jerzy Afanasjew, previously one of the actors and authors associated with Bim-Bom. This play, entitled Olaf Grubasow, satirized the stupidity of bureaucracy. The official "assistants" of Director Grubasow, the twins Plim and Plum, were made up as cavemen, and dashed about on a huge canvas spread tight above the stage. They changed into, successively, a policeman, a minister, a secretary, and a prisoner. When the production traveled to Monaco in 1965 as Poland's first entry in the International Festival of Amateur Theatres, it provoked a good deal of discussion by the audacity of its vision and of its staging. The director and designer used many surrealistic images such as an angel with his head severed or a head changed into a lemon. Despite the redoubtable accomplishments of student dramatic theatres, presenting already-written plays became less and less popular throughout this period. Poet Marian Grzesczak comments, "The student dramatic theatre lost popularity .... In numerous reviews and festivals of student groups, dramatic theatres were more and more rarely encountered" (244). Since student dramatic theatres did not have their own repertoire, those that continued to exist often simply chose plays which were published in Dialog, but, as critic Jerzy Koenig comments, this usually did not do justice to playwrights' works: At the moment when any dramatic theatre ... has the right to perform a work, when it is known from the law of probability that the resources of amateur theatre will dismally compromise a contemporary author's work - when writing for the theatre one expects if not imitative virtuosity then at least craftsmanship - then there is not really any sense in rehearsing something which is "fashionable" or which the director of the group likes very much but which is either not well understood (Mrozek!) or cannot be appropriately modified to suit the talents of the actors in an amateur group. ("AD 1961" 142-43)

More and more strongly, practitioners and critics alike felt that student theatre ought to avoid competing with professional theatres and should make its own contribution rather than relying on existing dramatic literature.

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Visual and Pantomime Theatre During this period several groups emerged that emphasized visual spectacle, rather than text. This trend ran counter to the tendency previously mentioned to adapt documentary material (the fact-montages), poetry, and prose, as well as to use already-written dramatic texts. Many of the visually oriented theatres were located in Gdansk and were offshoots of Bim-Bom and its "thearicalized poetic metaphor." The presence of the Art Academy, which was originally located in Sopot and later moved to Gdansk, led the Gdansk student theatres to continue to be dominated by artists rather than by literary people. The result of this domination by artists was that three theatres emerged in Gdansk, all of which had visually-oriented emphases, yet were, at the same time, all very different: Co To (What's That), Cyrk rodziny Afanasjeff (the Afanasjeff Family Circus), and Galeria (Gallery). Co To, called a "theatre of hands," was a kind of puppet theatre, except that instead of puppets, the hands of the actors, light, objects, and music told stories. Founded in 1956 by Romuald Frejer and Ewa Rouba, two students of graphic art at the Art Academy, Co To continued to exist up through 1963, producing six shows, all of them collections of short skits. Jerzy Afanasjew, formerly of Bim-Bom, wrote song lyrics for the theatre. In his memoirs, Kaidy ma inny swit (Everyone Has Another Dawn), he compares the atmosphere that Co To created to that of the paintings of Henri Rousseau and painters of stilllifes, especially Van Gogh. Each object, presented against a black screen, possessed its own scenic life: It turned out that an object could be funny, affecting, or also could get cold, haughty, elevated,

like ... a classical ballet dancer. A knife, through its shape and predatory form, is always "bad." ... Big scissors are rather bad, but little shiny ones can be used for noble purposes. However, if alongside the small scissors, for example, a flower finds itself- the flower stands defenseless and only depends on the nobility and heart of the scissors not to be ravished. Of course, the audience member is happy if the flower can trick the scissors, and the rose resigns itself to its tragic fate of death through cutting, undergoes a metamorphosis, changes itself into a butterfly, and takes off. (119)

Co To carefully structured its balletic fables, with each story having a beginning, middle, and an end which was usually a well-aimed, pantomimic punchline. Its performances were evaluated differently by various commentators: Jaroslaw Abramow of STS writes that it is "a theatre stirring small emotions over little problems," but with an approach which "is always fresh and interesting" (8), whereas Witold D~browski, also of STS, counts their performances among the peak points in the student theatre in the 1954-66 period (262).

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In 1958, Jerzy Afanasjew founded the Afanasjeff Family Circus (Cyrk rodziny Afanasjeff). Afanasjew, who later became a film director, was involved in many different student theatres in the Gdansk area: as mentioned earlier, he wrote for and acted in Bim-Bom, he wrote songs for Co To, and his play Olaf Grubasow was performed by Teatr Rozm6w. He also wrote for and performed in the cabaret To-Tu. The Circus was a direct outgrowth of the parodied circus act which Afanasjew had played the director of in Bim-Bom's program Ahaaa in 1955. This Circus differed from the one in Ahaaa, however, in that it was much smaller and as in commedia dell' arte, each person always played a fixed character: Afanasjew played the circus director, Polichinelle; his wife, Alina Ronczewska-Afanasjew, played Columbine; and his brotherin-law, Ryszard Ronczewski, who had directed several productions for the PstrQ.g theatre in L6dz and was an accomplished mime, was the clown. As Daniel Gerould points out, "It was, in actual fact, the Afanasjew Circus Family playing themselves" (Twentieth-Century 74). Afanasjew spelled his name the Russian way in homage to the Soviet circus, and so his circus family became the Afanasjeff Family Circus. Like Bim-Bom, the Afanasjeff Family Circus emphasized the visual, rather than the written. Gerould writes that "for Afanasjew ... the performer is the creator, the scenario does not exist independently from the production, and theatre should be purified of literary text rather than subordinated to it" (Twentieth-Century 76). However, the Circus put more emphasis on the actor than Bim-Bom had. In an interview in 1986, Afanasjew declared that the Circus was an actor's theatre which referred to the tradition of Charlie Chaplin and the Marx brothers. He and his wife invented gags for the actors and as a director he worked with the actors onstage. Stories were born through improvisation, he selected which ones should be used in the final performance, and he wrote some short, minimal texts himself. Thus the company discovered for themselves some of the rules of a boulevard theatre without words which, despite its wordlessness, makes a strong point. The Afanasjeff Family Circus created five programs. The first was an experimental cabaret program the Afanasjews (Jerzy and Alina) tried out on the stage of the To-Tu cabaret in 1958. Their first full show, however, was called Tralabomba, and had its premiere in May of 1958. This was followed by Biare zwierzc;ta (White Animals), in both a theatrical and a film version, in November, 1960, Komedia masek (Comedy of Masks) in 1961, and their final, most full realization, Dobry wiecz6r, blaznie (Good Evening, Clown) in 1962. In all these shows, Afanasjew and his company were concerned with creating a special brand of humor, a humor based on street-fair theatre, clowning, and the demasking of theatrical illusion. In an essay entitled "Swiat nie jest taki

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zly ... " ("The World is Not Such a Bad Place ... "), which was also the title of a song in Tralabomba, Afanasjew writes: Our "Circus" is not the true circus. It is an etude on circus themes; it is our poetic homage to the art of mimes and comics, an art that we, as young people, have not yet known. The art of gesture and gag. The theatre of which we are disciples is clearly distinct from the question of literature and film, without at the same time keeping us from having our say in all these disciplines individually. A theatre of the kind that our "Circus" represents compels us to take up and study purely visual matters. Drama becomes the composition of faces ... hands ... the sculpture of expression. (266)

The Afanasjeff Family Circus was not strictly a pantomime theatre, however. Though words were kept to a minimum, they were used in all performances with the exception of White Animals. Moreover, the emphasis on "gags" kept the theatre from becoming anything like a dance or even a pantomime theatre. The touch was always light: "The question is," Afanasjew wrote, "how to make people laugh" (qtd. in Gerould, Twentieth-Century 75). Despite its affinities with commedia dell' arte, mime, and slapstick, the Afanasjeff Family Circus was permeated with the humor of its own times. Roman Szydlowski writes, "The theatre was distinguished ... for its abstract humour- very much in the style of the absurd" (141). In Good Evening, Clown, Afanasjew as Polichinelle, the Circus Director, addresses the audience: Every evening we see your tears, or your merriment, because as a matter of fact, even though a good many of you are ... (discreetly) ... "pilferers." What unites us is a common love of the theatre: for You, it's the Theatre of Money Making: for Us, it's the Theatre of Playing Roles for You ... with Us as beggars. So it would follow from that ... that you're not the ones who come to the theatre to amuse yourselves, but just the absolute opposite! (260)

Yet the humor of the Afanasjeff Family Circus has perhaps even more in common with that in films and in poetry than with that in absurdist drama; besides Chaplin and the Marx brothers, Afanasjew counted Jacques Tati, Jean Cocteau, e.e. Cummings, and Charles Baudelaire among his intellectual forebears (Kaidy 138-140). The third visual theatre in the Gdansk area, the Galeria (Gallery) Theatre of Plastic Forms, was founded in 1963 by Monika and Jerzy Krechowicz, who were members of an artists' group of the same name. Jerzy Krechowicz also designed the scenery for Afanasjew' s play Olaf Grubasow in 1963. However, the Krechowiczes' own theatre, Galeria, was more of a "plastic" theatre than the Afanasjeff Family Circus or Teatr Rozm6w. In their productions, the scenery and other visual elements played as much of a role as the actors. Andrzej Cybulski writes: "In the case of Galeria one should use the word theatre as an agreed-upon convention. For it does not denote what

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we usually understand by that term. One could venture the opinion that this is not theatre here at all" (50). Indeed, the Krechowiczes were working on the borderline of visual art and theatre, much like their contemporaries, Tadeusz Kantor in Krakow and Allan Kaprow in New York. Galeria moved steadily away from theatre and toward what would later be called "performance art" in their performances. In their first production, Kolonia karna (Penal Colony- premiere 1963), based on Franz Kafka's short story, the actors recited their texts suspended from the ceiling of the stage while on the floor of the stage a huge, floodlighted engine of torture sat and changed its appearance by means of lighting changes. The second production, Pies, a takie brak psa (A Dog, and No Dog- premiere 1963) went even further in minimizing the role of the actor, making of him a composite creature, a "man-beast": The actor, rendered unreal by his make-up, has become an object, a prop, like other inanimate things, a detail which provides for a brief space of time the effects of a mobile composition. The conventional gesture has lost its meaning. The stage, lighted from behind, reminds one of the interior of a tunnel passage, and the silhouettes of persons deprived of their real existence, who move about in it, resembling neither figures nor shadows, are shown in a multitude of dimensional aspects in the play of lights. (Berwid-Buchner, "Adventure" 8)

In the third production, Termitiera (The Termitary- premiere 1965) amoebalike puppets moved through space at the same time that a huge moving machine was being projected onto a moving screen. This multiplication of movement created an illusion of a constantly moving city, the city of the termites. The fourth production, Traktat (Treaty) premiered June 6, 1966, and featured the movement and fighting of monsters created from material and lighting effects. Only a picture of a man appeared for a split second near the end of the production. Thus, the Krechowiczes gradually eliminated "acting" from their theatre and replaced it with the movement of scenic elements. Not all visually oriented student theatres were located in the Gdansk area, however. A phenomenon which appeared during the 1960s was the emergence of student pantomime theatres. These were influenced by the worldwide popularity of Marcel Marceau and by Henryk Tomaszewski's Pantomime Theatre in Wrodaw, a professional theatre which attained the peak of its popularity in the 1960s. Tomaszewski's innovation was the production of fullscale, many-character mime-dramas rather than the individual studies that Marceau and his teacher before him, Etienne Descroux, had specialized in. Student pantomime theatre came into existence in 1961, and during the sixties at least four groups existed at one time or another: Gest (Gesture) of Wrodaw, the Pantomime Stage of Warsaw's Hybrydy Theatre, the Student Pantomime Studio Group of the Szczecin

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Polytechnic, and the Pantomime Group of the Step Theatre of Gliwice. The popularity of this form among student theatres is especially surprising when one considers the level of technical expertise required to produce mime performances. The most accomplished and well-known of the student pantomime theatres was Wrodaw's Gest, directed by Jerzy Puzilewicz. This theatre maintained connections with Tomaszewski's theatre, and developed the technical skills of its members to a high degree. Puzilewicz commented about the work of the troupe: By studying the history of the pantomime and by watching its present achievements, we try to give the theatre an original expression entirely its own. We want to produce shows that extend over the largest possible scale of topics, from a grotesque or lyrical joke to tragedy. We want to express by gestures every human feeling, every thought, we want to express life as it is, exactly as does the poet with the use of words, and the painter with colour and line. (qtd. in Berwid-Buchner, "Adventure" 7)

Puzilewicz's group produced both mime-dramas ala Tomaszewski (though not full-length ones) and individual studies ala Marceau. The content of their programs varied from political and social commentary to light-hearted love stories. Gest's programs tried to focus attention on human beings: their problems with their environment, their lack of time, their inner conflicts. The first program that Gest presented, Mowa Ciszy (The Language of Silence premiere 1963) contained the mime-drama "Granica" ("The Frontier") which set up an opposition between the concept of "frontier," something created artificially to separate people of good will, and the concept of "nature," something that breaks down the differences between people of different races and beliefs. Another mime-drama in this program was called "Klatka i ptak" ("The Cage and the Bird") and explored the relationships between the value of freedom and that of other ideals. The second program, Ich oblicza (Their Faces- premiere 1965) contained the mime-drama "Mur XX" ("Wall XX"), a summary in scenic form of the changes that had taken place in Poland since 1945. "Wall XX" used a poster as background which acted on an almost equal footing with the actors. Hitting a lighter note, this program also contained the individual study "Parasol" ("The Umbrella"), and the pantomime skits "Pojedynek" ("The Duel") and "Kalendarz mitosci" ("The Calendar of Love"), based on Raymond Peynet's Les amoureux. The development of visually oriented theatres from the seeds planted by Bim-Bom was important. Though the numbers of these theatres remained small in the sixties, they made an enormous impression, precisely because they were strikingly different from most of what had gone on previously in

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student theatre. Moreover, unlike most of the other student theatres, who were busily adapting documentary material, poetry, or prose for the stage, or producing already written dramatic texts, the visual theatres were devising their own original creations. Furthermore, the visual nature of these theatres' creations made it much more difficult for censors to control their work to the extent that was possible in shows with written-out scripts. In the 1970s, other student theatres were to re-learn some valuable lessons from the experiences of the visually-oriented theatres.

Poetry Theatres While in the fifties, satiric theatre had been in most popular form of student theatre, in the sixties the most popular form became poetry theatre. The dramatization of poetry had its origins in the recitation contests which the Ministry of Culture and Art had established in 1954. By 1961, one hundred thousand participants had taken part in these contests. Many of these participants, trying to take their experiences a step further, and perhaps hearkening back to the wartime underground Rhapsodic Theatre of Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk in Krakow, now tried adapting poetry for the stage in various ways. This "mass outburst of poetry theatres," in the words of Maria Berwid-Bucher ("Adventure" 4), first made itself known in the early sixties. According to Leszek Skrzydlo of Pstr~g Theatre: Up to this point, poetry constituted, to some extent, a side product of various groups. If some poetic programs had already been made, it was above all with the thought of testing the acting of performers who had newly joined the group. Now the situation had to change radically. This phenomenon made itself heard with uncommon force at the student festival in Gdansk in 1961. (129)

At that festival, the Second Students' Cultural Festival, the poetry theatres were not only numerous, but also showed themselves to be an element having the potential to breathe new life into the student theatre movement, a movement which at that point felt itself to be somewhat moribund. The expansion of the poetry theatre form was encouraged by the ambitions student theatre had of becoming an alternative to rather than a copy of professional theatre. Jerzy Koenig comments: The matter is quite simple: it properly solves the most important problems of the repertory. With limited technical possibilities, a permanent lack of their own literary base, ambitions to look for artistic forms which are not copies of professional models, the poetic theatres, by making use - however outrageously - of the almost completely unexploited resources of a lively poetic creative community, are becomig the best chance for the student movement. Particularly at this moment when the traditional satiric and dramatic groups are clearly experiencing a crisis. ("AD 1961" 143-44)

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The poetry theatres, in addition to the few primarily visual theatres, became the avant-garde of the student theatre movement. Fewer specialized skills were required to adapt other textual materials for the stage than, for example, training a company of mimes or designing scenery which interacted with the actor. So the sixties became the decade of the adaptation: the fact-montages already mentioned, fiction, and, above all, epic and (especially) lyric poetry. The use of poetry as a textual basis did not mean that the theatres felt they had to confine themselves to a strict recitation of the text. They were aware that they had to "theatricalize" poetry before it would be interesting onstage. Indeed, many theatres felt it necessary to distance themselves as far as possible from their origins in the recitation contests. On the occasion of the Second Students' Cultural Festival, Konstanty Puzyna observed: Artistic interest is ... turning from satirical montages to poetic presentations. This means a break in the tedium of pathetic recitations under paper columns. The occasionally excellent plastic scenery, ingenious visual effects, light effects, the continuity and rhythm of the mounting, do not, as a rule, overshadow the poetic text, and lend to the poetry stage a fully theatrical appearance, new and fascinating. (qtd. in Berwid-Buchner, "Adventure" 4)

Since poetry theatre soon became the most popular form of student theatre, there were almost as many ways of solving the problem of how to stage poetry as there were theatres. Most theatres agreed with poet Marian Grzesczak that "The poetry theatre is the scenic form of a poem; the words of a poet translated into stage movement and a poetic image, a metaphor, translated into the motion of scenic images" (qtd. in Berwid-Buchner, "Adventure" 4). But the ways that they translated poetic metaphors into scenic ones varied greatly: Groups exist who are cultivating the traditional art of declamation, who are trying, so to speak, rhapsodic stagings, ... more ambitious groups who are clearly creating theatricalized, lightly "plotted" poetic shows, ... or montages equally composed of poetic fragments supported by expressive visual and sound effects,. . . or "total" poetic spectacles, played with use of a whole complicated theatrical machine, ... or finally, huge shows with recitations, almost monumental scenic composition, music, ballet, lively pictures, an orgy of movement and sound ... (Koenig, "AD 1961" 144)

The poetry theatre thus, at least at first, ran the gamut from a kind of readers' theatre with little in the way of scenery or staging to fully staged shows even incorporating music and dance. As the decade advanced, however, theatres became more and more free in the adaptations of the poetry they staged. By the end of the decade, productions purporting to be based on certain poems bore little relation to the original and only tried to be true to its spirit.

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The "poetry theatre" phenomenon tended to be somewhat ephemeral. A theatre would spring up, produce one or two interesting shows, and then disintegrate. For example, Pandora Theatre of Wrodaw existed from 1958-62 and specialized in recitation accompanied by pantomime interludes. Several short-lived Gdansk theatres performed interesting montages of poetry staged in various ways at the 1961 Second Students' Cultural Festival in Gdansk: the Kabaly (Fortune-teller's) Theatre produced Ludzie, ludzie (People, People) based on R6zewicz's poetry, Uwaga (Attention) 61 Theatre produced Call to Mungo based on African poetry, and Kontrapunkt (Counterpoint) Theatre produced Cztowiek w szarym ubraniu (The Man in Gray Clothes) based on contemporary Polish poetry. In addition, as mentioned earlier, satiric and dramatic theatres also produced many adaptations of non-dramatic material, including poetry, during this period. Besides the examples of poetic productions by STS, Pstr~g, and Teatr 38 already discussed, the Sigma Theatre of Warsaw University, usually a dramatic theatre, produced Lis, czyli wariacje asceniczne (The Fox, or Ascenic Variations) in May, 1965, based on the volume of epic poetry Mit o swietym Jerzym (The Myth of St. George) by Jerzy Harasyrnowicz. One theatre, however, stood out in this era both for its longevity and its artistic contribution: the Kalarnbur (Pun) Theatre of Wrodaw, under the direction of Boguslaw Litwiniec. Kalarnbur was founded by Litwiniec, an instructor of Physics at Wrodaw University, in 1958. Their first program was called The Confiscation of Stars (Konfiskata gwiazd) and was called a "socialpolitical morality play." Litwiniec writes: While planning out Confiscation, we knew that satire which took its themes from the street no longer had a raison d'etre .... We therefore looked for generalizations and prescriptions. Such a prescription was found in the skepticism of [Bertrand] Russell whose [Unpopular] Essays appeared on sale just then. He was supposed to confiscate a different sort of absolute in social life, human temptations to extremism as well as all principles in which the end is willing to justify the means. In our first show - as it turned out - he also confiscated our means of expression. ("Studenckie teatry" 220)

This first unsuccessful attempt at adaptation did not discourage Litwiniec, however. He continued to experiment with various types of cabaret-type entertainment, including a series of "Nights of Jazz and Poetry," which proved to be remarkably popular in the late 1950s. At the beginning of the 1960s, he began to concentrate the efforts of Kalarnbur mainly on poetry theatre. This concentration on poetry carne about partly as a result of Wlodzirnierz Herman's joining the group. Herman was a history graduate who was very interested in poetry theatre, and eventually became director of

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the Kalambur Poetry Stage. Litwiniec writes: "Wlodek Herman possessed the greatest inclinations toward poetry in the group. His ambition even aimed in the beginning at creating a separate Theatre of Poetry. However, we dissuaded Herman from his plan of secession by proposing the establishment of a Kalambur Poetry Stage" ("Studenckie teatry" 229). The establishment of the Poetry Stage, and the collaboration of Litwiniec and Herman proved to be extraordinarily fruitful. Critic Tadeusz Burzynski writes: Different personalities with a slightly different approach toward the poetic material, in some degree a certain rivalry, in the aggregate complemented each other remarkably well. In any case, I connected and I connect the rapid development of Kalambur in that period, the maturation of the performing group, and the large number of significant premieres in the course of only a few years particularly with this fact. (61)

During the 1960s, Herman and Litwiniec made Kalambur well-known throughout Poland for their poetic productions, as well as for innovative stagings of dramatic texts such as the premiere of Witkiewicz's Shoemakers already mentioned. From 1960 to 1968, Kalambur staged ten poetic shows; they were based on Russian poetry (especially that of Alexander Blok, Sergei Yesenin, and Andrei Voznesensky), Polish poetry (Bruno Jasienski, Witold Wirpsza, Marian Grzesczak, and the Polish futurists of the 1920s), medieval French poetry, and even Sumerian and Babylonian poetry. The first production, Dwunastu (The Twelfth) based on the poetry of Alexander Blok (1960), in Litwiniec's staging, constituted a departure from the way poetry had usually been staged up to that time. Previously, theatres had typically attempted to illustrate the words of the poems with movement and gesture, but Litwiniec attempted also to find analogues for the poetry in visual and sound design. He was assisted in this effort by a specially trained pantomime group who created "living scenery." From the start of their engagement with the poetry theatre phenomenon, Kalambur was determined to be innovative. They became known for a kind of monumental staging of poetry which used movement and song to great effect. Cieniom (To the Shadows), based on a poem by Witold Wirpsza (1961), was a huge show which was codirected by Litwiniec and Herman. They used the services of ballet dancers, an orchestra, reciters, a chorus of singers, soloists, a group of actors in comic episodes, and three designers. The production juxtaposed the atmosphere of a carefree carnival of youth with the bitter voice of a man whose shadow falls on a a wall in Hiroshima and warns of the imminent danger of nuclear annihilation. Another example of this tendency toward monumental staging was the production of Stowianskie wesela (Slavic Weddings), based on an epic

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poem by Marian Grzesczak, in 1964. Again, both directors worked on it, and used reciters, actors, an orchestra, and a chorus. Maria Berwid-Buchner describes the production as: a historiosophic poem dealing with the many centuries old conflict between Germans and Slavs - a subject difficult to put on the stage, especially because of its philosophical implications. It is presumably the first time in the history of the Polish students' theatre that so monumental a work was produced and used choirs reminiscent of antique tragedies with their speech-song recitatives in oratorio style, and solo melody-rich songs. ("Adventure" 6)

Herman and Litwiniec thus tried to create a kind of modern-day Polish version of the classic Greek theatre. Throughout the course of the 1960s, Kalambur evolved its own characteristic way of transforming poetic into dramatic material. In 1970, Litwiniec described Kalambur's four stage working process in an article originally written to be delivered as a lecture at the Internationale TheaterWerkstatt in Scheersberg, Germany: The first is the stage of restlessness in which the theatre experiences a need to declare itself on a subject which touches the moral sensibility of the collective. In the second stage of creative study, there follows a directing of our attention toward the poetry, an investigation of it as a source of energy inspiring the imagination of the theatre, provoking our own creative talents. The third stage comprises the process of organization and design of the artistic statement. This is the period of thinking in playwright's categories, of building the dramatic construction of a show. In the fourth, there follows the execution of the construction by the [performer's] body. This is the stage of concretization in which the theatre clothes its intentions in the material of pictures, words, song, rhythm, gesture, and so on. In this time it returns to the words of the poet, in those places where more effective expression is required. (Teatr mlody 62--63)

Wlodzimierz Herman used what he had learned in seven years of directing Kalambur's Poetry Stage in the staging of Futurystykon in 1967, based on the poetry and manifestoes of the Polish futurists as well as revolutionary poetry from the beginning of the twenty-year interwar period. This production, described by critic Tadeusz Burzynski as "like a demonstration lesson summing up these practices," translated the poetry of the futurists to the theatre by finding scenic equivalents in rhythms of movement, music, and scenery (64). Although, aside from Kalambur, few poetry theatres of any consequence were founded, the phenomenon itself proved to be long lasting. By the late 1960s, poetry theatre was the characteristic form of student theatre. This introverted form, created from ambiguous, multilayered verse, was, somewhat like the Polish absurdist plays, impenetrable enough so that

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the creators of student theatre could use it for political purposes. Nevertheless, for the most part, in the 1960s most theatres concentrated on artistic experimentation, and only occasionally tried the most roundabout political statement. Still, the stage was set for the next period to combine the artistic innovations of the poetry theatres with the political statements of the satiric theatres. Grotowski: Between Student and Professional Theatre

Jerzy Grotowski, one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century theatre history (both alternative and mainstream), was a student in the Krakow Drama Academy during the period of the Polish October. In 1955, when he was a fourth year student, he wrote an article in the newspaper Dziennik Polski calling for a young artists' club in Krakow. Slawomir Mrozek, at that time working with Bim-Bom on Joy in Earnest, replied: Let's assume that Grotowski is really on fire. Unfortunately, nobody really knows what's burning there. Pray, Grotowski, why didn't you give us some specific examples? You signed yourself a theatre student but there's not even a small mention, for example, of what you're trying to accomplish in the theatre. Grotowski, you want to knock something over or go somewhere, you shake your fists at someone, but pray, tell us what, where, who. (qtd. in Osinski, Grotowski 16)

Nevertheless, Grotowski was, in those years, part of the same movement for revisionist Communism that was embraced by Bim-Bom and STS. In fact, as Zbigniew Osinski, in his book Grotowski and His Laboratory, points out, when Grotowski entered public life in Poland a couple of years later, he was not known as a theatre artist, but rather as a national-level activist of a revisionist Communist youth organization, the Union of Socialist Youth- Political Center of the Academic Left (Polish initials POLA-ZMS). This organization, however, was tolerated by the authorities for barely a year before it was officially disbanded in late 1957 (Osinski, Grotowski 18-23). Instead of becoming a political activist, then, Grotowski became an experimental theatre director, and moreover, one who was far less political than many who had not openly identified with the revisionist movement. Jan Kott, in his essay on Grotowski, "Why Should I Take Part in the Sacred Dance?" addresses the question of Grotowski's relationship with the postOctober political scene: Grotowski's theatre developed at a historical moment of prolonged political unrest .... [I]n Poland the realization of a hopeless situation, and later the resignation to the dread this hopelessness provoked lasted for years. In conditions of arbitrary and unlimited political

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repression every public activity is a compromise. In the theatre a political compromise is always ultimately an artisitc compromise. Grotowski made the heroic decision to be uncompromising. But under the conditions of repression, such a decision exacts the price of supplanting politics with metaphysics. (Kott, Essence 140)

Grotowski, after his early flirtation with politics as a student activist, preferred to leave political statements to the absurdist theatre. Instead, he became engaged by an attempt to revolutionize the theatre itself. This opportunity to revolutionize the theatre was given to Grotowski by Ludwik Flaszen, a respected Krakow theatre critic, who had taken on the task of reforming a small theatre in a provincial city in southwestern Poland. According to Osinski, Flaszen and Grotowski "were both bored with the present state of theatre in Poland, and they both sensed that theatre as an art form trailed distantly behind other artistic disciplines, especially poetry and the plastic arts" (Grotowski 36). They decided to start their reform of Polish theatre with a single institution: Flaszen became the literary director and Grotowski the artistic director of the Theatre of 13 Rows (Teatr 13 Rzedow) in Opole. This theatre, according to an article in a Krakow newspaper, was to be "the only professional experimental theatre in Poland" (qtd. in Osinski, Grotowski 37). Flaszen and Grotowski gathered a troupe of actors together, and began to work on productions for the 1959-60 theatrical season. Despite the 13 Rows Theatre's unique position in Poland, working conditions in Opole were very difficult for the entire time that the theatre was there. Their subsidy was the lowest of any professional theatre in the country. They were resented as elitist by the cultural establishment in Opole, who were constantly lobbying to have the theatre disbanded. They had very small audiences, and also lacked support from social, youth, civic, or creative organizations. During the Opole years (1959-1965) the Theatre of 13 Rows (which soon changed its name to the Laboratory Theatre of 13 Rows) met with a reception by the Polish theatrical establishment which, with only a few exceptions, ranged from indifference to hostility. Nevertheless, largely due to the efforts of Eugenio Barba, an Italian who was studying directing in Poland and had worked with Grotowski's theatre in Opole, delegates to the Tenth Congress of the International Theatre Institute (ITI) were brought to see one of the Laboratory Theatre's performances in June, 1963. This began Grotowski's international reputation. Even after Grotowski's theatre began to be recognized in the West, however, it still met a rather cold reception in his native land. When the Laboratory Theatre of 13 Rows was offered the chance to move to Wrodaw, a much larger, more cosmopolitan city near Opole, the troupe was happy to make the move. Yet even in Wrodaw, Grotowski's theatre (which changed its name again, dropping "13 Rows"), did not really become part of the artistic

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establishment. As Jennifer Kumiega notes in her book The Theatre of Grotowski: Despite the support and credence of many influential individuals in theatrical and artistic circles, ... there was in general a distrustful reticence in Poland in response to Grotowski's statements and artistic achievements that for many years was manifested by a lack of serious response on the critical and literary levels. (49)

Polish theatre critics did not seem to know what to make of Grotowski and his theatre and they tended therefore to be prejudiced against him. For nearly the whole decade of the sixties, Grotowski was taken far more seriously in the West than he was in Poland; Jan Kott's pithy assessment accurately described the situation of the Laboratory Theatre, "It was in Poland, but really did not exist in Poland" (Essence 139). In the West, however, Grotowski' s vision became one of the most galvanizing theatrical notions of the twentieth-century. The Laboratory Theatre sought to separate theatre from other entertainment by defining the essence of what makes theatre special. Hence, Grotowski's concept of "poor theatre:" By gradually eliminating whatever proved superfluous, we found that theatre can exist without make-up, without autonomic costume and scenography, without a separate performance area (stage), without lighting and sound effects, etc. It cannot exist without the actor-spectator relationship of perceptual, direct, "live" communion. (Poor 19)

Grotowski therefore made two people, the actor and the spectator, the focus of all his investigations into the nature of theatrical art. For the spectator, Grotowski constantly experimented with the nature of the relationship between the actors and the audience. For the actor, he developed a new "method" which would rival Stanislavski's in enabling the actor to plumb his own psychological depths. 3 Throughout the sixties, Grotowski and his company, first in Opole and then in Wrodaw, developed a working method, an ethos, and a series of extraordinary productions which can be regarded as way stations on the road to what Grotowski termed "the total act" of self-sacrifice at which all actors must aim. The working method involved three categories of exercises: exercises plastiques, exercises corporels, and vocal and respiratory work. These exercises were all aimed not at collecting skills, but at creating what Grotowski called the "via negativa," the eradication of blocks: 3

For greater in-depth discussion of Grotowski's method, see Osinski, Grotowski and Kumiega.

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The education of an actor in our theatre is not a matter of teaching him something: we attempt to eliminate his organism's resistance to this psychic process. The result is freedom from the time-lapse between inner impulse and outer reaction in such a way that the impulse is already an outer reaction. (Grotowski, Poor 16)

Actors were encouraged to accept their bodies and use their own deficiencies rather than trying to hide them. On the other hand, they were also encouraged to make physical demands on themselves which went beyond what their bodies could previously do. In vocal work they were taught to discover their natural voices and natural ways of breathing rather than imposing an artificial "drama school" way of breathing and speaking. Grotowski's actors discovered "new" vocal resonators that had not been used by actors before in the West. When they appeared in New York, theatre critic Margaret Croyden wrote: "They spoke, chanted, whispered, sang, and intoned, creating an unrelenting rise and fall of sounds quite unlike anything heard before in the Western theatre" (137) The ethos, or rather the vision of the theatre that Grotowski and his actors introduced, was a belief that the theatre is a place where something sacred takes place. At first, this involved a search for "a modern secular ritual" (Barba, "13 Rzed6w" 154) in which both the spectators and the actors would take part. This was particularly evident in Grotowski' s 1960 production of Shakuntala, where he wanted to recreate: ritual in theatre, in a way meaningful for our times and our society, as a way of healing the many splits both within an individual and between people. From this arose at that time his image of the actor as sorcerer or magician, capable of far more than the spectator - and the first, groping, theoretical formulations of the actor as shaman/priest, capable of leading those who witness and participate into unknown territory. (Kumiega 114)

Grotowski referred to this shaman/priest/actor as "the holy actor" (Grotowski, Poor 43). As Grotowski noticed that induced audience participation in the sacre~ ritual of the theatre had an artificial quality to it, his vision began to metamorphose into one where the audience participated in the ritual by witnessing an act of self-sacrifice by the holy actors. Selfsacrifice took place on two levels: on the personal level, Grotowski's actors, by deeply plumbing their own psyches and revealing themselves on the stage, were sacrificing their own personalities, and on the level of the dramas themselves, the subject matter became increasingly preoccupied with "the individual action, founded on what is common and permanent in humanity, made on behalf of human society, involving suffering and ultimately salvation" (Kumiega 141).

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The major productions, including Cain based on Byron (premiere December 1960), Forefathers' Eve based on Mickiewicz (premiere June 1961), Kordian based on Slowacki (premiere February 1962), Akropolis based on Wyspianski (premiere October 1962), The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus based on Marlowe (premiere April 1963), The Constant Prince based on Slowacki's translation of Calderon (premiere April 1965), and Apocalypsis cum Figuris based on fragments from Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, Simone Weil, T. S. Eliot, and the Catholic Mass (premiere February 1969), paradoxically combined a search for sacredness with a kind of debunking of the very myths the plays were paying homage to. In Kordian and Akropolis Grotowski juxtaposed Polish Romantic or neo-Romantic classics with modern realities. Akropolis, which was co-created by director I designer Jozef Szajna, an Auschwitz survivor, was set not at Wawel Castle in Krakow, as Wyspiaftski specifies, but in Auschwitz; Paris and Helen are both played by men whom the other prisoners snicker at. The main character in Kordian, who in Slowacki's play is examined and found to be sane, in Grotowski' s version is clearly insane and a patient in a mental hospital. In Dr. Faustus, Grotowski switched from Polish myths to Christian ones, portraying Faustus as a kind of saint whose martyrdom is damnation. Grotowski explained this sacredness/profanity duality: In my work as a producer, I have ... been tempted to make use of archaic situations sanctified by tradition, situations (within the realms of religion and tradition) which are taboo. I felt a need to confront myself with these values. They fascinated me, filling me with a sense of interior restlessness, while at the same time I was obeying a temptation to blaspheme: I wanted to attack them, go beyond them, or rather confront them with my own experience which is itself determined by the collective experience of our time. (Poor 22)

This interplay between, on the one hand, Polish and Christian traditions and, on the other, the blasphemy and degradation of those traditions, was called by Grotowski "the dialectics of mockery and apotheosis" (Poor 72). Besides the quality of sacredness cum profanity, Grotowski's productions had two characteristics which later proved to be enormously influential, both in Poland and in the West: his relationship with the text and his view of a theatrical production as a process rather than a product. First, Grotowski considered the written text to be only a basis for production, not an end in itself. In his productions, he tore apart the script, cut it, re-arranged it, added material from other authors, and often even contradicted the original intent of the author. This tendency started early in his career, even before he became the director of the Theatre of 13 Rows, when he directed the 1958 production entitled Gods of Rain based on the play The Ill-Fated Family by

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Jerzy Krzyszton. In Gods of Rain, Grotowski used poems by contemporary Polish poets, speeches from Shakespeare including a soliloquy from Hamlet, and newspaper stories. There was also a filmed prologue built from snippets of other films, including an experimental film and newsreel footage. Journalist Konrad Eberhardt in the magazine Ekran (Screen) wrote: Grotowski threw himself on the Krzysztofl script aggressively, cut it apart, and adapted it for his purposes. Small wonder that the program notes for the production carry this epigraph from Meyerhold: "To choose a play does not necessarily mean to share the playwright's views." Grotowski strove. to transform this fairly traditional, small-cast play without excessive intellectual overloading into a more universal statement about the younger generation, modeled on the work of Piscator. (qtd. in Osinski, Grotowski 24)

All Grotowski's subsequent productions up to The Constant Prince were "based on" texts rather than being a faithful rendition of them, and finally in Apocalypsis cum Figuris, he dispensed with a "base text" altogether. As Kumiega points out, "Grotowski showed his readiness to enter into a polemical relationship with the written text (and by implication with spectators and critics, particularly those who take for granted the theatre's subsidiary role in a faithful presentation of text)" (20). This polemical relationship with the text was particularly evident in the Grotowski-Szajna Auschwitz production of Wyspianski's Akropolis. Nevertheless, Grotowski always, even in Apocalypsis, did use texts, according to Kumiega "as much for the poetry as for the mythic content" (79). Grotowski repeatedly turned to the great works of literature for the mythology and poetry of his productions but he felt no respect for their intellectual content. Secondly, Grotowski, during the sixties, evolved a view of theatrical performance as process rather than as product. His productions were not merely rehearsed, they were "constructed." This view was first articulated in 1964 when the troupe presented a "public rehearsal" rather than a "performance" of The Hamlet Study, based on Shakespeare and Wyspianski. This "rehearsal" was billed as "The scenario and direction: the troupe under the direction of Jerzy Grotowski" (qtd. in Osinski, Grotowski 77). However, the process view came to full fruition only in the course of working on the production of Apocalypsis cum Figuris: The performance ... arose exclusively from improvisational style work and formed in totality an objective network of interwoven myths, historical events, literary fable and everyday occurrences. But without the actors who performed it, it ceases to exist: for on one level it was drawn uniquely from the experiences of the actors involved, and the levels on which it operated were so completely interdependent that destruction of any single level results in collapse of the whole. (Kumiega 90)

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Grotowski's relationship with his actors changed during the work on Apocalypsis. Previously he had been quite dictatorial in his directing style, but during the course of working on this production he ceased instructing the actors and instead began to simply wait for them to make discoveries themselves. Also, since Apocalypsis was performed over a period of twelve years, it was constantly changed in order to keep it vital. Since the production was a process rather than a product, "in attitude, there was no division between periods of preparation of a production, and periods of performance" (Kumiega 138). This attitude, namely that the process of making theatre was just as important, if not more important, than the product produced by a given theatre, was particularly embraced by later alternative groups, both in the West and in Poland. After the production of Apocalypsis cum Figuris, Grotowski felt he had gone as far as he could down the road of creating the "total act" with the "holy actor" sacrificing himself for the good of the spectators. On December 12, 1970, he held a conference in the Town Hall in New York City at which he declared: It can happen ... that when we have achieved something which reveals our own life, we will sell it to others. But in that case we are sure to give it up for destruction: while, on the face of it, remaining the same, it will be utterly destroyed. Slavery does not leave room for truth. What matters is not how to secure the spectator's approval. One must not want the spectator's acceptance, but accept himself. The very word "spectator," for that matter, is theatrical, dead. It excludes meeting, it excludes the relation: man-man. ("Holiday" 120)

He had in his early productions experimented with the actor-spectator relationship, but then rejected attempts to make the spectators active participants as too artificial and manipulative. However, he still felt dissatisfied with the spectator only passively witnessing the actor's sacrifice. He therefore decided that the next step was to do away with the notions of "actor" and "spectator" altogether, and to devise experiences that the actors and spectators could participate in equally. At a question-answer session with participants at the Third International Student Theatre Festival of Festivals in Wrodaw in October, 1971 he said: Years ago we tried to secure a direct participation of spectators. We wanted to have it at any price, as it happens now with other groups. We compelled spectators to "perform" with us, to come out among us, sing with us, perform gestures, or movements suggested by us ... Today I realize that one cannot aim at identifying those who are prepared for the encounter and are called actors, with those who are coming for the first time; that no one of those who have come ought to be forced to do anything. But we must be able to prepare the meeting in such a way that a place could be found there for reactions of those who have come, active or passive reactions. ("Holiday" 129)

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For this he had to abandon theatre, to go outside it, and to cross the border into something which perhaps more closely approximates therapy: "The other view of the group seems closest to a genuine solution: that of an alternative community, where the basis is: meeting, man-man, the act" (Grotowski, "Holiday" 122). The activities the Laboratory Theatre conducted in the first years after Grotowski's exit from the theatre were generally known by the term "paratheatre," although Grotowski also used the term "active culture." The earliest years of this phase were taken up with private work among members of the group both in the Laboratory Theatre building in Wrodaw and in an old barn in Brzezinka, a village about forty kilometers from Wrodaw. Grotowski expanded his group of Laboratory Theatre participants by issuing an appeal which was broadcast in September, 1970 on Polish Radio's popular program "Afternoons With Young People" and published in several daily newspapers. The appeal was called "A Proposal for Working Together." It asked for those "who, simply because they need to, would choose to leave behind personal comfort and seek exposure in work, in an encounter, in movement and freedom" (qtd. in Osinski, Grotowski 123). About three hundred young people responded, and Grotowski had a meeting with seventy of these which lasted four days and four nights in November, 1970. As a result of this meeting, a ten-person group vyas formed which worked at first separately from the original Laboratory Theatre acting team and then together with them in Wrodaw and Brzezinka. By the end of 1971, only four of the ten were left. However, the original members of the Laboratory Theatre continued to perform Apocalypsis cum Figuris and to use it as a kind of recruiting tool: they would invite interested members of the audience to remain behind after a performance to meet and discuss the possibilities for work. In this way, three others came to take the places of those who had dropped out. Among the members of this new team was Wlodzimierz Staniewski, an actor from Teatr STU, a student theatre in Krakow. Grotowski's influence on the alternative theatre movement, both in the West and in Poland, was enormous. Interactions between student theatres and Grotowski started early in the Laboratory Theatre's career when it collaborated with Waldemar Krygier, the founder of Teatr 38 in Krakow. Krygier designed many posters for Grotowski's theatre, as well as directing the 1961 production of The Idiot, based on Dostoevsky. However, it was with foreign young people that Grotowski first seemed to connect when he attended the Eighth World Festival of Students and Youth in Helsinki in 1962 and took part in an international seminar on experimental theatre. As a result of this seminar, foreigners started to visit Opole, articles began to appear

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in the foreign press, and students began to arrive for periods of apprenticeship. At this stage, young people in Poland mainly knew about Grotowski if they happened to live in Opole. In fact, according to an article written by J6zef Klimczyk in the magazine Kwartalnik Opalski in 1963, the majority of Grotowski's audience in that town were older high school pupils and university students (qtd. in Osinski, Grotowski 69). After their move to Wrodaw in 1965, the Laboratory Theatre continued to perform for student audiences. His reputation among student theatre practitioners continued to grow in 1964 and in 1965 when Grotowski was a member of the international jury for the First and Second World Festival of Student Theatres occurring in Nancy, France, but again this was a relationship primarily with foreign student theatres. In 1965 and 1966, annual courses held at the Laboratory Theatre for visiting foreign students were institutionalized. In 1966 the company participated in the Festival of Young Theatre in Liege, France. Finally, Grotowski began to have formal contacts with Polish student theatres when in May, 1967, he presented a lecture for the International Festival of Student Theatres, held in Wrodaw. Grotowski himself always considered that he and the student theatres were akin. He believed if the theatre was to be renewed, this renewal would come from either from groups such as his own, "poor theatres with few actors" which might be transformed into "institutes for the education of actors," or from groups such as student theatres on the borderline between professional and amateur "who, on their own, achieve a technical standard which is far superior to that demanded by the prevailing theatre" (Poor 50). Accordingly, Grotowski gave the educational function of his theatre as much emphasis as their production activities. Eugenio Barba, who started his own Grotowski-influenced theatrical center in Denmark, the Odin Teatret, invited Grotowski and Ryszard Cieslak, the most famous of the Laboratory Theatre actors, there in 1966, 1967, and 1968 to give courses for actors. Peter Brook also invited them to conduct a workshop for the actors of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966. All of the Laboratory Theatre's appearances in foreign countries were accompanied by workshops in their techniques. This educational function of the Laboratory Theatre had an enormous effect on alternative theatres, particularly in America. This effect was not always welcomed by Grotowski, however, who claimed that American groups usually copied the mechanics of his exercises without copying their spirit. The only American company whom Grotowski acknowledged was Joseph Chaikin's Open Theatre. In a 1967 article in the newspaper Zycie Warszawy (Warsaw Life), the author quotes Grotowski on the Open Theatre:

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They have, indeed, taken something very essential from us: the search for spontaneity which has a disciplined and conscious character and which leads to structure. Outside of that, and this is most important, they do not ape us in anything. They seek their own way and at their own risk. Only this form of reference to our experiences with method can have any meaning whatsoever. (qtd. in Osinski, Grotowski 109)

Despite Grotowski's disavowal of his American imitators, he remained very influential for what Jan Kott terms "the theatre of the Contestation": "Grotowski was welcomed by the new theatres as the guru from Poland. He taught the techniques of shock. ... The theater of the counterculture felt that revolution could enter the mind only through the skin, as formulated in the gospel of Artaud" (Essence 144). Contrary to his influence on American and other Western alternative theatre companies, Grotowski was generally resisted by the Polish student theatre generation of the 1960s. After Waldemar Krygier of Teatr 38 joined Grotowski, Helmut Kajzar became the director of that Krakow student theatre. He, too, at first felt attracted to Grotowski's theatre, but later rejected it, writing in an article in the magazine Teatr in 1968: You cannot change the theatre into a liturgy - I keep on reminding myself- above all these productions are works of art, they are not creating a new religion, they are not regenerating my subconscious, they are not purifying me, they are not freeing me from the weight of my complexes. (qtd. in Kumiega 52)

On the other hand, the next generation of student theatre practitioners, the generation who came to the fore in the seventies, was enormously influenced by the Laboratory Theatre. Aldona Jawlowska comments: It is important to remember that training periods of various types and actions led by the group in this period [the 1970s] included over ten thousand people. The extent of the interaction both of the idea of active culture and of the method of the actor's work as well as other forms of creative training of the Laboratory was very great. Student theatres also found themselves within this compass. (36)

Different groups gained different things from their work with Grotowski. Many, despite working with Grotowski during the period of his so-called "exit from the theatre," were mainly influenced by the theories and performance techniques developed during the sixties. Others found the concept of "active culture" very powerful. Those student theatres which, at the end of the sixties, had started to adapt poetry and other nondramatic works for the stage, found a kindred spirit in Grotowski, and many came to work with him in the 1970s. Apocalypsis cum Figuris, which blended biblical texts with Dostoevsky, T. S.

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Eliot, Simone Weil, and others, became for them a kind of model of the "perfect" production. And these groups selected other aspects of Grotowski's theatrical work to emulate as well. They, like the Laboratory Theatre, also experimented with "environmental" theatre, or novel audience/ actor relationships. They tried to imitate Grotowski's training methods and exercises, and so the work of these theatres, which had originated in static reader's theatre, evolved much further toward physicality. Most importantly, as a result of Grotowski' s influence, they began to look upon theatre as a process rather than a product. However, like the American alternative theatre groups who had earlier "discovered" Grotowski, Polish student theatre groups sometimes learned the wrong lessons from him. Jawlowska writes: This influence did not turn out to be beneficial for everybody. It is possible to say, rather, that the personality of "the Master" weighed on the [student] theatre movement. A great many of its representatives participated in training sessions or other activities of the Laboratory. For the strongest groups, the maturer ones, it established the creative inspiration to investigate their own way, their own original means of expression suiting the possibilities of young actors and expressing their real problems and psychic states. The weaker succumbed to the temptation to imitate, creating mannered and untrue performances. In the mid-seventies, the fashion for Grotowski became the plague of student theatre. (36-37)

It was possible in the 1970s to trace Grotowski's theatrical influence, whether

beneficial or malign, in the work of virtually every student/ alternative theatre. Grotowski's concept of "active culture" also influenced the thinking of other alternative theatre groups in Poland. He felt that society (both capitalist and Communist) was set up in such a way as to force people to become either producers or consumers of artistic products. These roles degrade both the artist and the recipient of the cultural product. The artist is degraded because he is forced to produce products either according to the needs of the artistic market (in capitalist society) or on the orders of state institutions (in Communist society). The recipient is degraded because he is made into a consumer rather than a witness and co-participant in artistic creation. Grotowski, during his post-theatrical period, tried to abolish the distinction between consumers and producers of culture by abolishing the distinction between audience and performer; everyone who carne to a paratheatrical event actively participated in the creation of culture rather than just passively watching a theatrical spectacle. In a general way, this concept influenced the entire alternative theatre movement. Elzbieta Matynia writes, in article about Polish alternative theatre published in 1980: It is worth remembering the immensely mobilizing role of Grotowski in Polish intellectual life in the last years of the decade [the seventies]. And the kind of example he gave others:

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transcending, going outside the pattern of work, life, and creation for the educated in our culture. (107)

Some groups founded in the seventies took up the idea of active culture, and even expanded upon it in interesting ways. Political Retreat But Artistic Advancement Polish alternative theatre, in the period of 1958-68, seemed in some ways to have retreated from the course it was following in the 1954-58 period. In the fifties, Bim-Bom, STS, and Cricot 2 had linked early twentieth-century innovators like Mayakovsky, Meyerhold, Eisenstein, and Brecht with sixties American alternative groups like the San Francisco Mime Troupe, Bread and Puppet, and El Teatro Campesino, leapfrogging over the stage their contemporaries, the Living Theatre, were in. However, in the sixties, many Polish theatres seemed to have decided to go back and repeat the experiments the Living had already tried in the fifties. Thus, in 1958-68 the Poles were experimenting with poetic language in the theatre just as Julian Beck and Judith Malina had in their 1951-63 period in New York. Moreover, the Polish alternative theatre's retreat from politics occurred at a time when most alternative theatres in America were embracing political causes. Just as alternative theatre in America seemed to be gaining momentum as a social and cultural force, in Poland student theatre seemed to be losing the exceptional force in the culture at large that it had had in the fifties. However, there were predilections for certain kinds of experimentation which Polish alternative theatre shared with its alternative contemporaries in other parts of the world. Though the Living Theatre in the 1960s expressly avowed an anarchist philosophy, which was evident in their performances, their techniques resembled those of the nonpolitical Polish theatre. For example, the "fact-montage" which STS, Pstr~g, and other theatres in Poland performed extensively in the early sixties was quite similar to the Living Theatre's 1963 production of The Brig by Kenneth Brown, a documentary account of Brown's own experience as a prisoner in a U.S. Marine Crops brig in Japan. The Living's 1965 production of Frankenstein, based on Mary Shelley's novel, but using collaged passages from Mao, Walt Whitman, Marx, Bertrand Russell, Shakespeare, and current newspaper items, resembled many Polish poetry theatre productions. The tendency to "artaudize" productions which Konstanty Puzyna commented on in reference to Teatr 38's production of Richard III and which many observers could detect in Grotowski's works also could be seen in the Living Theatre's 1967 production of Antigone. Since the Living Theatre had toured Europe in

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1961 and performed exclusively in Europe from 1964 to 1968, and since many Polish theatres were also permitted to go abroad during that period and perform in various festivals, it is quite likely that Polish theatres would have either seen the Living perform, or seen one of the various Living-influenced Western European groups which sprang up in its wake. Polish alternative theatre also bore similarities to other well-known 1960s American alternative theatres. The 1966 production Viet Rock by Joseph Chaikin's Open Theatre (itself influenced by Grotowski), which used newspapers, eyewitness accounts, and letters as a basis for the improvisations that became the finished show structured by playwright Megan Terry, also resembled the fact-montages of STS and Pstr~g. The Open Theatre's 1967 production of The Serpent by Jean Claude van Hallie was mainly based on the Book of Genesis and thus resembled Polish poetry theatre productions. Afanasjeff Family Circus productions were based on the same commedia dell' arte traditions and even used the same characters as the San Francisco Mime Troupe's productions in the 1962-70 period. Galeria's combinations of plastic and theatrical art were indirect spin-offs of Allan Kaprow's "happenings" in New York; in fact, Galeria also called their productions happenings. In most cases, the cross-pollination from Polish to American and back to Polish alternative theatres cannot be so easily documented; however, it seems clear that certain types of theatrical experimentation and certain thinkers such as Artaud were "in the air" in the 1960s, and were as easily absorbed by Poles as they were by Western European alternative groups. As will be seen in subsequent chapters, in the 1970s, this cross-pollination was even more evident. Nevertheless, Polish alternative theatre was in a transition and development period during the years of "the small stabilization." The focus moved away from politics and toward aesthetic experimentation. This experimentation bore fruit in some stunning productions, particularly by Grotowski's Laboratory Theatre, but also by some of the student groups mentioned above. These productions, along with Grotowski's theorizing about the theatre, had an enormous effect on alternative theatres in other countries, many of which were political theatres. Still, the sense that Polish alternative theatre had in the 1950s of being "the life breath of the epoch" was missing in the 1960s. Indeed, the coded, deliberately ambiguous Polish theatre of the absurd plays seemed more in tune with the times during this period than the alternative theatre. It remained for the next era to combine the artistic sophistication acquired during the 1960s with the political force of the fifties.

3 THE FULL VOICE YEARS

The early 1970s have been considered the apogee of the student theatre in Poland by many commentators. Critic Tadeusz Nyczek, for example, entitled his book about this period In Full Voice: Student Theatre in Poland 1970-1975. During this period, student theatres returned to the political commentary that had made them called "the life breath of the epoch" in the 1950s. However, they managed to combine this topicality with a much more sophisticated artistic sense, a legacy of the "small stabilization" years. The result was an invigorated form of alternative theatre that became a cultural force among young people in Poland. The Events of 1968 The year 1968 was extremely important for the alternative theatre in Poland for in that year, three elements combined to alter the consciousness of the young intelligentsia. The first element was a state-sponsored campaign of anti-Semitism which was initiated partly as a response to the Arab-Israeli war and partly as a result of internal machinations by one of the factions of the Polish United Workers' (Communist) Party. The second was the chain of events started in motion by the banning of Kazimierz Dejmek's production of Adam Mickiewicz's play Forefathers' Eve. And the third was Alexander DubCek's "Prague Spring" movement in Czechoslovakia. The change in thinking that these three events brought about among student theatre practitioners enabled the next stage in the evolution of Polish alternative theatre to take place. Anti-Semitism has a long and disreputable history in Eastern and Central Europe, as does the cynical manipulation of anti-Semitism for political ends. Despite the fact that Polish popular opinion supported the victory of "our" Jews over "their" Arabs in the 1967 war (Davies, Playground 2: 588), the official government took the position (in line with that of all the Soviet bloc states) that Israel was waging a war of conquest. In the days following the Israeli victory over the Arabs, First Secretary Wladyslaw Gomutka made an anti-Israeli speech. Gomulka may not have intended the

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speech to be anti-Semitic as well, but a section of the speech could easily be (and was) interpreted by anti-Semites as condoning their sentiments: We have never caused Polish citizens of Jewish descent any difficulty in moving to Israel if they wished to. We maintain that every Polish citizen should have only one fatherland People's Poland. We cannot remain indifferent toward people who, in the face of a threat to world peace, hence also to the security of Poland and the peaceful endeavours of our nation, come out in favour of the aggressor, of the wrecker of peace, and who take the side of imperialism. Let those who feel these words addressed to them - irrespective of their nationality - draw the proper conclusion. We do not want a Fifth Column to be created in our country. (qtd. in Raina 110)

The "Partisans," a group within the Communist party composed mainly of ex-underground fighters who had stayed in Poland during World War II, seized upon this speech. These veterans fiercely resented their colleagues in the Party (many of them Jews) who had spent the war in the Soviet Union. This group, headed by the Minister of the Interior, Mieczyslaw Moczar, began a campaign to question Jewish loyalty to the Polish cause. By 1969, they had succeeded in ousting over nine thousand people from positions of authority, all of them either Jews or revisionists (Halecki 369). Meanwhile, in November, 1967, Dejmek's production of Forefathers' Eve premiered in Warsaw to wild applause and cheers. The audience interpreted the anti-Tsarist elements in the play as referring to Poland's thencurrent situation. Gustaw Holoubek, who played the role of Gus taw /Konrad, comments: "People received this performance with unprecedented enthusiasm. In my whole career in the theatre, which was thirty years long even then, I don't remember such an audience reaction. As we say in the theatre - a bomb went off!" (qtd. in Ascherson, Struggles 175-6). The authorities, embarrassed by the enthusiastic public reaction, ordered the play to be banned, its last performance to take place on January 30, 1968. At this final performance, a political demonstration instigated by students in the audience took place: the applause and cheers after the final curtain lasted a full half-hour and the crowd sang the national anthem. Then, the students led a march to the Mickiewicz Monument a few blocks away from the theatre. There, the police were waiting for the crowd; they beat the demonstrators, most of whom were students, and arrested thirty-five. As a result of these arrests a series of actions was taken which culminated in what were later called "the March events," a pivotal point in the thinking of the Polish intelligentsia. Throughout February, 1968, a "leaflet and petition war" was waged between supporters of Forefathers' Eve (students and intellectuals) on one side and nameless "patriots" (Ministry of the Interior propagandists) on the other. Warsaw University officials began

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disciplinary proceedings against students who had taken part in the demonstration against the closing of Forefathers' Eve, and on March 6, expelled two students who had been briefing a French foreign correspondent on the unrest. On March 8, there was a large demonstration at the University protesting the closing of Forefathers' Eve and demanding the annulment of disciplinary proceedings and expulsions. Again, the students were beaten (this time quite brutally) and arrested. The media coverage of this demonstration was so biased that the infuriated students took to the streets again. They also contacted their friends in other cities, and students in Gdansk, Katowice, Krakow, L6dz, Poznan, Szczecin, and Wrodaw staged sympathy strikes. Everywhere the student demonstrators were beaten and by March 23, 1,200 of them had been arrested in Warsaw alone. Lecturers and professors who supported them were fired. The impact of the March events upon Polish young intellectuals of the time can only be compared to the effect that the "events of 1968" in France had on the French intelligentsia at about the same time. The March events, through the actions of the Partisans and with the aid of Gomulka, became intertwined with the anti-Semitic campaign. The Partisans used the fact that a number of the protesting students were children of leading Communists, many of them of Jewish origin, to advance their goal of "purifying" the Party by ridding it of Jews. Articles in the press appeared contending that the demonstrations were a "Zionist plot," and identifying the original names of Jews who had adopted more Polish names after the war. A climate of anti-Semitism was created: journalist Michael Kaufman writes about this period, "Ministries, universities, and hospitals were asked to compile lists of staff people who were thought to be Jewish or have Jewish relatives, Jewish ancestors, or Jewish spouses" (169). The Partisans succeeded in putting enough pressure on Gomulka that he was unable to repudiate their anti-Semitism campaign, even though (or perhaps because) he himself had a Jewish wife. On March 19, he made a well-meaning but inept speech stating that not all Jews were Zionists. However, he only inflamed passions by dividing Jews into three categories: "patriotic Jews," "Zionists," and those who were neither Jews nor Poles but "Cosmopolitans who should avoid those fields of work where the affirmation of nationality is indispensible" (qtd. in Halecki 360). Gomulka also attacked the student "reactionary minority" and revisionist writers for trying to restore the bourgeois system in Poland. When the participants in the March events came to trial in late 1968 and early 1969, their ethnic origins were considered evidence against them. In historian Peter Raina's words: "If the prosecutor succeeded in establishing that the defendant was Jewish by origin, this proof was sufficient to convict him and to sentence him to three and a half years' imprisonment" (171).

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Persecution of Jews in Poland, in short, had reached a height unattained since Hitler's occupation. At the same time that the March events were brewing in Poland, Czechoslovakia was experiencing the so-called Prague Spring. The conservative Antonin Novotny was overthrown in December, 1967, and a new reformist regime headed by Alexander Dubcek came into power in January, 1968. The intelligentsia in Poland was tremendously excited by this development. Older intellectuals were reminded of their own "October" in 1956, and students hoped for a Polish version of "socialism with a human face." A popular jingle had it that "Cala Polska czeka (All Poland waits)/Na swego Dubczeka (For its own DubCek)" (qtd. in Davies, Playground 2: 590). Unfortunately any hopes for changes in Poland similar to those in Czechoslovakia were dashed on the night of August 20-21, 1968 when the armies of Bulgaria, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and the Soviet Union marched into Czechoslovakia. Poles in general, and intellectuals in particular, were outraged that Gomulka (unlike Ceau~escu in Romania) had complied with the Soviet request for "fraternal help" in putting down the Czech "counterrevolution." Young Polish males, who upon graduation were required to serve in the army, suddenly saw that in a few years they too might have to participate in violence against people with whom they were wholly in sympathy. Polish students' feelings about their government's participation in the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia resembled those of their contemporaries in America about the Vietnam War. Polish intellectuals and students tried to take some action to protest the invasion. The writers Slawomir Mrozek and Jerzy Andrzejewski wrote letters of condemnation which were published abroad. As a result, they were reviled in the Polish press and performance of Mrozek's plays was indefinitely banned. Polish students distributed leaflets in Warsaw protesting the invasion, and still more of them were thrown into prison. A group of young intellectuals, the so-called "Alpinists," engaged in a form of protest that hearkened back to wartime underground days. They collaborated with a group in Czechoslovakia to smuggle information about the March events in Poland and the reform movement in Czechoslovakia over the Polish-Czech border in the Tatra Mountains. Over fifty young people were arrested in this affair, which was brought to trial in February, 1970. The March events became intertwined with the fate of Czechoslovakia in the mind of the young intelligentsia. The significance of 1968 for the subsequent evolution of Polish oppositional thinking can hardly be overestimated. From 1956 to 1968, the Polish intelligentsia were under the spell of the Polish October, that is, of revisionist Communism. The student's demands in 1968 were very much

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within that tradition. They wanted, like their forebears in 1956, to reform socialism by liberalizing censorship and decentralizing the economy. They promised that they stood "on the ground of socialism; we defend social control over economic decisions" (qtd. in Ascherson, August 94). The students were destined to be cruelly disappointed in Gomulka; he was not the man he had seemed to be in 1956. Not only did he refuse to defend Jews and students, but he also participated in attacks on them. This weakened the link between the Party and the opposition: [A] whole tradition of intellectual opposition - that sceptical, marxisant, anti-clerical tradition which skirmished for freedom and tolerance between the Goliaths of Church and Party dogmatism -died under the clubs of the police in March ... The purges of Jews and liberals from the media and every creative pursuit permanently broke the back of the old "October" opposition, which never revived. (Ascherson, August 94-5)

The death of "socialism with a human face" in Czechoslovakia only confirmed the lesson taught by the anti-Semitic purges and the March events. Though it was not immediately apparent, 1968 marked the beginning of the end of the idea that Communism could be reformed. 1968 not only marked the end of the influence of the October generation of reformers, but also marked the beginning of the influence of a new generation of oppositionists, the generation which would eventually bring Solidarity into being. This partly resulted from the fact that reformers were purged, and many (especially Jews) chose to emigrate rather than spend the rest of their lives in mediocre, stifling jobs. Mainly though, it had to do with the convergence of the Polish March events with similar youth protest movements all over the world. Aldona Jawlowska argues that this brought into being a worldwide generational consciousness which gave the young Poles strength: The fact that in the period of the development of oppositional movements in the West a consciousness was formed not only of the young generation's community of interests but also of its cultural distinctness also has a vital significance. A vigorous wave of youth movements swept the whole world. The March events in Poland did not have much in common with the atmosphere of those movements. However, they became both the beginning of the awakening of youth's political activism and a generational experience which was important for the further fates of Polish and student culture. (140)

Youth culture, which at that time in much of the rest of the world tended to be pro-Marxist, in Poland became associated with a movement which was not yet openly anti-Marxist but was more and more disillusioned with Marxism.

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1968 also marked the beginning of the end of the Gomulka regime. In the short term Gomulka was strengthened by his support of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. As a reward, the Soviets vigorously supported him at the Fifth Party Congress in November, 1968, the Moczar fraction was checked, and Gomulka was re-elected party leader. However, many of those in positions of authority were, as a result of Moczar's machinations, forced to leave their positions, and were replaced with people who were ill-trained for their new jobs. Nowhere did this have more disastrous results than in the management of the economy; as historian Antony Polonsky points out, "The campaign against 'revisionists' and 'zionists' had meant that many of the ablest economists in the country had been dismissed" (Halecki 371). The economic reform plan which Gomulka tried to implement in the next two years was completely mishandled. In November, 1968, a series of price increases was introduced, and the country slid further and further into economic crisis in the next two years. On December 12, 1970, a new series of steep price increases, largely on foodstuffs, was announced on Warsaw Radio. On the following Monday, strikes began in the shipyards on the Baltic coast. These strikes were met with even more violence than the student demonstrations had been in 1968; at least 500 workers died at the hands of the police in Gdansk, Gdynia, and Szczecin. Gomulka, who had been brought into power as a result of worker protests in Poznan in 1956, was now removed from power as the result of new set of worker protests. The Central Committee elected as First Secretary Edward Gierek, a former miner and the head of the powerful branch of the party based in the Silesian coal mining region. Gierek immediately set about mending fences. He personally traveled to Gdansk, Gdynia, and Szczecin, spoke to the workers there, and convinced them to call off their strikes. He officially ended the policy of the "small stabilization," and put a new team of younger, better educated "technocrats" into place. He also, in the words of political scientist Adam Bromke "made a number of conciliatory gestures aimed at achieving a modus vivendi between the government and the intellectuals" (43). Among these moves was the release of the student protesters who had been jailed for participation in the March events. Once again, as in 1956, the leadership of the regime was changed, promises of reform were made, and censorship guidelines were liberalized. In 1970 though, both the intellectuals and the workers were far more wary of Gierek than they had been of Gomulka in 1956. Nevertheless, for the first few years of Gierek's rule, the economic situation seemed to be going relatively well. Gierek's "technocrats" decided on a policy of raising the standard of living. Ascherson notes: "The Polish

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population at last emerged from the bleak deprivation of the 1960s. The quality of life rapidly improved. Real wages rose by 40 per cent in the first five Gierek years, and at first there was much more to buy in the shops" (August 108). The restive Polish population was at least temporarily appeased by the bargain Gierek appeared to have struck with i t - an exchange of freedom for creature comfort. Novelist Tadeusz Konwicki describes the credo of the Gierek years as, "Consumer Communism - work a lot and earn a lot, attend Party meetings and visit your girlfriend in the evening, eat oysters and swap jokes with the maniacal dissidents, grovel in front of the Russians, and love Poland" (36). By raising the living standard so rapidly, however, Gierek also raised expectations, and since the deteriorating economy was not actually rebuilt, but rather only papered over with Western credits, people's expectations soon exceeded the government's power to fulfill them.

Mainstream Auteur Theatre

The years after 1968 were less fruitful ones for Polish drama than the 1956-68 period. The Polish theatre of the absurd movement, for the most part, died out. Just as in European and American drama the 1970s saw the decline of absurdism as a major force and the rise of what Daniel Gerould has called "a liberated neorealism free to use, eclectically, a variety of techniques" ("Representations" 370), in Poland dramatists also attempted to depict reality more straightforwardly. They turned away from drama based upon allusion and metaphor toward social satire. However largely becuase of restrictions imposed by the censor's office, Polish neorealism was unable to deal with many important subjects. No new young neorealist dramatists of the caliber of a Sam Shepard or a David Mamet emerged in Poland. The most noteworthy dramas in the early 1970s were written by playwrights who had started their careers in the 1960s: Slawomir Mrozek and Tadeusz R6zewicz. Mrozek's Emigranci (Emigrants- 1974) was a much more realistic, less allegorical depiction of the real psychology of a pair of emigres than his "parables of power" of the 1960s. R6zewicz' s Biate matienstwo (Marriage Blanc - 1974) continued his exploration of the stage's possibilities in an investigation of the biological nature of sex. The general trend, however, was away from the adventurous drama of the 1960s. In this era, Polish theatre became better known for its directing that for playwriting. Aside from Grotowski and Kantor, the most highly acclaimed director of this time was Konrad Swinarski, whose work, which began in 1965 at the Stary (Old) Theatre in Krakow, ended abruptly when he

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was killed in a plane crash in 1975. Swinarski was originally educated as a painter and later studied directing with Brecht at the Berliner Ensemble. His reputation was largely built on highly visual productions of Shakespeare and the Polish Romantics and neo-Romantics. Kazimierz Braun, a Polish director writing under the pseudonym Jerzy Tymicki, writes of Swinarski: "With his consciously calculated stage effects Swinarski disciplined these ... dramas, recasting them into expressive, even expressionistic form" (19). Swinarski was joined in his quest for a visual theatre by Andrzej Wajda, Jerzy Grzegorzewski, and J6zef Szajna. Although Wajda is better known outside Poland for his film work, he has long been associated with Krakow's Stary Teatr, the same theatre at which Swinarski directed. Wajda's most acclaimed productions were of his own adaptation of Dostoevsky's Possessed in 1971, Wyspia:fiski's November Night in 1974, and of The Danton Affair by Stansislawa Przybyszewska in 1975. Wajda, who was originally educated at the Fine Arts Academy, oftenalone or together with his wife, Krystyna Zachwatowicz - designed the scenery for his own productions. August Grodzicki characterizes Wajda's theatre as preoccupied with dramatic conflicts and images: with words and ideas taking second place. The dramatic and dynamic aspects of what goes on the stage provide him with an opportunity to interpret the world through art, stimulate the audience's sensitivity, stir their minds and ask disturbing questions about the past, the present and the future of the Polish nation. (177)

Though Wajda denies the presence of filmic effects in his theatre productions, his directing style is often called "cinematic." Grzegorzewski, like Wajda and Swinarski, was originally educated as a painter. He always designed his own productions. Grodzicki writes: "His manipulation of shapes and color, of movement and gestures is very characteristic of Grzegorzewski's theatre, in which literary thought is blurred" (66). Music was an integral part of all his productions; he collaborated with the composer Stanislaw Radwan. Grzegorzewski is also known for cutting and reshuffling the texts of the plays he directed as in his 1969 production of Wyspia:fiski's Wedding, his 1970 production of Zygmunt Krasi:fiski's Irydion, his 1971 production of Chekhov's The Seagull, and his 1972 production of Antigone by Sophocles. In his 1972 production of Genet's The Balcony, his 1973 production of Witkiewicz's The Shoemakers, his adaptation of Kafka's America (1973), and his 1974 production Bloomusalem (based on James Joyce's Ulysses), he attempted to create environmental theatre by making use of all the possible staging areas in the whole theatre building, not just the stage. In the latter two productions, he adapted

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nondramatic material to the stage. Grzegorzewski's theatre merged spectacle, music, and mood. J6zef Szajna, a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, also came to the theatre from a fine arts background. He started his professional career as a stage designer in the 1950s and early 1960s. His most important design was for the production of Akropolis that he and Grotowski co-created. Szajna' s remembered vision of the concentration camp in this production was as important to its final shape as Grotowski's work with actors. After this production, Szajna began directing at the theatre in Nowa Huta, an industrial town outside Krakow; his directorial vision did not fully mature, however, until the 1970s when he took over the management of the Studio Theatre in Warsaw. Here he became well-known for his composite productions: Witkacy (1971), based on They, Gyubal Wahazar, New Deliverance, and The Shoemakers; Gulgutiera (1973), based on a scenario by Szajna and Maria Czanerle; and Dante (1974), based on The Divine Comedy. His most famous production, however, was Replika (Replica - first version 1971), which conveyed the horrors of the concentration camp through movement, music, "plastic-spatial compositions," and inarticulate groans. Szajna' s theatrical spectacles characteristically utilized gripping imagery created with scenic elements, color, shape, masks, dummies, the movements of the actors, music, and light, with words playing only a minor role. All of these directors, as well as other, less well-known innovative Polish directors of the 1970s, such as Adam Hanuszkiewicz, were influenced by practitioners in the alternative theatre. Grzegorzewski, for example, started his work as a student theatre director in the 1960s, and the experimentation of the student theatre milieu had an obvious impact on him. He was also influenced by Grotowski: his cutting and re-arranging of already-existing plays and even some specific images such as the staging of Heliogabulus's mad scene in Irydion contained echoes of Grotowski's theatre. Working with Grotowski also clearly had an effect on J6zef Szajna; many of the images he had created in Akropolis re-appeared in production after production. In addition, Szajna's imagery had certain things in common with Kantor's grotesquerie and vice-versa: for example, Kantor's use of rubble onstage in the 1960s may have influenced Szajna in the early 1970s, but Szajna's use of the dummy may have influenced Kantor's production of The Dead Class in 1975. Grzegorzewski, Wajda, and Swinarski all used the theatre and audience in ways which probably would not have occurred if it had not been for Kantor's experiments in the 1960s. And Szajna, Wajda and Grzegorzewski all borrowed and combined texts for use onstage in a manner reminiscent of the student poetry theatre experiments of the 1960s.

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Student Theatre 1970-75 It was during the early period of Gierek's regime that Polish student theatre experienced a kind of revivification after the somewhat moribund years of the sixties. Despite the fact that most of the nation seemed relatively complacent during the early seventies, members of Polish student theatres realized that all was not quite as well as the regime's propaganda made it appear. Sociologist Jeffrey Goldfarb writes: Gierek and his colleagues promised to deliver the goods. Delivery was at first achieved, based on credits from the West. Repeatedly in official pronouncements, accomplishment in this regard was celebrated. Thus when accomplishment failed to satisfy rising expectations because the economy was not fundamentally improved, and the celebration continued, mass dissatisfaction was predictable, as was cultural criticism, which was most prominently expressed in Polish Student Theater ... (Cultural90)

During this period Polish student theatre combined its 1960s aesthetic experimentation with a new interest in politics generated by the events of 1968 without one overpowering the other. However, the members of student theatres did not immediately react to the events of 1968 as they might have been expected to do. Whether out of general timidity, because they had gotten into a pattern of formal, nonideological experimentation, or because of specific instances of intimidation by the regime, the student theatre produced spectacles in 1968 and 1969 resembling its productions of the 1958-67 period. As Krzysztof Miklaszewski, one of the members of Krakow's Teatr STU, writes of the year 1968: "This ... exceptionally intensive period both in the Polish and international student movement was simply ... overlooked by the Polish student theatre" (11). The Polish student theatre movement, which had previously been considered one of the most innovative in the world, had, to all outward appearances, become stagnant. However, on October of 1969 the Second International Student Theatre Festival of Festivals was held in Wrodaw, and this proved to be a turning point for the Polish student theatre. As Aldona Jawlowska reports: Groups representing different streams of the youth movement came there with "hot," fighting performances clearly taking the side of the values represented by that movement ... Against this background the Polish groups, fascinated by their own aesthetic explorations, seemed quite tame. The Festival was, for many young artists in Poland, an experience, a shock. Their equals from other countries said what they would have liked to say themselves ... " (140-141)

Even more shocking, the Polish audience at this festival preferred these "hot" performances to their "tame" Polish counterparts. Helmut Kajzar, the

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director of some of Teatr 38's most innovative productions in the 1960s, writes: The truth, that Polish student theatre finds itself in an impasse, was self-evident. We had been aware of this fact for some time, but this Festival was something in the nature of a funeral for illusions. Not one Polish group was among the favorite shows, and what is worse was that this was the opinion of the public. ("1969" 126)

The Polish student directors who attended this festival took this audience reaction to heart. At the Sixth L6d..Z Theatre Meetings held in December they organized a discussion for the participants entitled "The Student Theatre Committed and Up-to-Date." They also began working on new productions which would reflect their own social realities in the same way that the foreign groups who had appeared in Wrodaw had reflected theirs. During the following year student theatre leaders, particularly those of Kalambur (Wrodaw), Theatre of the 8th Day (Poznan), and Teatr STU (Krakow) developed these new shows, premiering them either for their home audiences or, in the case of STU, at an international festival in Rotterdam, and evaluating the audience reaction to them. By the time of the Seventh L6d..Z Theatre Meetings, held at the very moment that the strikes which would bring the Gomulka government down were occuring (in December of 1970), it was clear that Polish student theatre had undergone a transformation. Aldona Jawlowska writes: At the L6di Theatre Meetings in 1970 groups met who- each in its own manner- had gone down a similar road of "ideological maturity." Many participants in these Meetings think that exactly then the feeling of community emerged, a feeling of mutual closeness of people gathered around the theatre. In the days fraught with tension of December, 1970, in the process of reviving hope and in heated discussions, a theatre movement came into being which called forth performances that spoke straightforwardly for the first time in many years about that which was uppermost in the minds of all thinking, feeling people in Poland. (142)

The performances which set the tone for the festival were W rytmie sroftca (In the Rhythm of the Sun) by Kalambur, Wprowadzenie do ... (Introduction to ... ) by Theatre of the 8th Day, and Spadanie (Falling) by Teatr STU. They showed that Polish student theatre had returned to its roots- the political performances of the 1950s - without abandoning the sophistication of the 1960s aesthetic experiments. In the years immediately following 1970 these theatres and others which sprang up in their wake continued the trend toward political engagement combined with aesthetic experimentation that had shown itself at the Seventh L6d..Z Theatre Meetings. This change in emphasis from the preoccupation with formal experimentation which had characterized the

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1960s Polish student theatre was mainly motivated by the feeling that the intelligentsia was failing to fulfill its traditional role as the leaders of the nation. Tadeusz Nyczek describes a common feeling among the young intelligentsia of the time: [T)he structure of Polish art and culture is in large part anachronistic, inadequate to our own times and consequently the right which it claims to represent the whole ideological-artistic thought of our time is morally groundless. Professional theatre, divided into three trends philosophical-universal, formal-aesthetic, and farcical -fills with a vengeance the peripheries of today's audience's needs; unless I am mistaken, the audience-member is in need of that which is most central: a voice about the place and time in which he/she operates. (Pelnym 29)

The leaders of Polish student theatre in the 1970-75 period believed it was incumbent upon them to provide contemporaneity to the Polish stage. Along with a new generation of young fiction writers, poets, and journalists which started to be active at about the same time, the student theatre embarked on a mission to revitalize Polish art and culture by revitalizing the "nonprofessional," "amateur" branches of it they already controlled. Members of the student theatre movement in the early 1970s wanted to make their theatre the voice of their generation in the same way that the 1950s student theatre had been the voice of the Polish October generation. However, they were also deeply convinced that the young intelligentsia was not completely divorced from the rest of the nation in its desires and frustrations. Lech Raczak, the director of the Theatre of the 8th Day, writes: The voice of the theatre is not an official statement made on behalf of the generation; it can and should be treated as an expression representative for quite a large group of people ... The decisive fact is not only that young people are speaking here to other young people in their own language, but first and above all that they speak about their own affairs, and these are common to many. And so the theatre is no longer afraid of direct action, an innate function of this most ephemeral of arts ... After all, politics should not only be treated as a complex of current problems but also as a complex of universal moral, philosophical and historical questions. ("Some Notes" 21)

Essentially, student theatres came to look at political theatre as a moral imperative: they felt they had the obligation to make theatre which spoke about everyday reality in Poland. Since that reality was politicized, they had to make political theatre. Like their counterparts in the Polish October times, these young people were interested in reforming Communism, not in overthrowing it. Goldfarb, who interviewed many members of these theatres in the early 1970s, writes:

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[T]hese theatres clearly are not anti-communist and their members are not Polish counterparts of the Russian dissidents of whom we hear so much. Rather, they are a group of artists: playwrights, actors, directors, musicians, some of whom are Party members, who through a legal channel offer alternative views of Polish life: cultural, political, artistic and social. All works are censored, yet they push and challenge, always attempting to expand the possibilities of expression. Through innovative methods of expression, they often circumvent the barriers created by official censorship. ("Student" 158)

The difference between the student theatre activist of 1970 and the one of 1955 was that 1968 had occurred in the meantime. In 1955 the members of STS had been described as "disappointed Youth Unionists," but in 1968 the students were more than disapointed: they had been beaten and jailed themselves or had seen their close friends beaten, jailed, or exiled for their ideals or religion. They had also seen the demise of the Czech experiment in reform Communism. While Goldfarb's statement that Polish student theatre practitioners were not anti-communists is correct, it does not contradict the assessment by Ascherson quoted earlier that something had changed for the intelligentsia since 1968. The student theatres were not yet anti-communist, but they were farther along the road to anti-communism than they had been at the time of the Polish October. In any case, the issues raised by the performances themselves were never so crude as Communism vs. anti-communism. Such a formulation would never have been allowed by the censors, and even if it had been, the practitioners of student theatre were not interested in politics in a narrow sense, but in politics in the broadest possible sense: as a branch of history and especially, of ethics. Edward Chudziftski, one of the members of Teatr STU, writes that "the '68 and '70 generation has developed a total view of reality criticizing the established system of values and proposing a new one built on an ethical foundation. In effect ethics has been raised to an absolute ... " (27). The manifestation of this "absolute" of ethics differed from theatre to theatre and performance to performance, but the two ethical values which emerged as fundamental in nearly all performances, according to Jawlowska, were truth and responsibility. By "truth" was meant "an agreement of expression with one's own experiences and feelings" (146-7). This translated into discovering the state of consciousness of the members of the group and presenting that onstage. It also implied speaking straightforwardly about problems which the media had heretofore studiously ignored. By "responsibility" was meant "the feeling of responsibility for the formation of the social reality in whcih the young artists had come to live" (148). In other words, the members of student theatres felt that they themselves were capable of changing society, and that they were, in fact, morally obligated to do so.

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Wrodaw: Teatr Kalambur As mentioned in Chapter 2, Teatr Kalambur had existed since 1958, and was probably the foremost proponent of the "poetry theatre" genre so popular by the end of the 1960s. By 1968 it had developed its own characteristic ways of adapting poetic material for the stage, usually utilizing song, movement, and many other scenic elements. The political developments of 1968 had a profound effect on Kalambur: two members of the group went into exile in the West and another member was put into a special unit of the army because he had participated in the student strikes at Wrodaw University. Boguslaw Litwiniec, the founder and director of Kalambur, felt that the group had to make a statement in reaction to the events of 1968. He chose the poem "In the Rhythm of the Sun" by Wrodaw poet Urszula Koziol, written in 1968, as the vehicle to express not only the frustrations of the group, but also the basic idealism. Kalambur's production of In the Rhythm of the Sun (1970) was the culmination of all their formal experiments with poetry theatre in the 1960s, an example of the new trend which was to dominate the student theatre in the 1970s, and the last significant production which Kalambur was to create. In the Rhythm of the Sun was not just a staging of an already written poem; it was more of a collaboration between Litwiniec and the group on the one hand and the poet Urszula Koziol on the other. Critic Tadeusz Burzynski writes: "In the process of creating the spectacle Litwiniec followed not only the poet but also his own voice and his comrades' thoughts and emotions" (65). Litwiniec's method of adapting Koziol's poetry for the stage was first to take the sections of the text in which Koziol's "voice" expressed what he and the group wanted to express. He then eliminated sections and filled in the blanks with other works of the author. When the production was already mostly staged, he requested additional verses from Koziol to provide continuity. Koziol attended rehearsals and essentially rewrote a new version of her poem for the performance. Litwiniec had, of course, worked on poetic material before, and he had even worked in a collaborative way with poets before. However, this was the first time that he collaborated with a wellknown, respected author rather than with young poets just starting out. The result was a theatrical spectacle which combined Koziol's expression of the moral concerns of the generation of 1968 with Kalambur's own frustrations stemming from that time. The performance tried to physicalize certain abstract concepts contained in Koziol's poetry by showing through words, movement, and song the story of mankind from Creation through Heaven, Hell, and the flight of Icarus, to the future. The birth of Man is first shown as a mechanical assemblage of pipes, wires, sheet metal, and rags. This Man-Puppet is destroyed because he cannot catch the biological rhythm of life, the rhythm

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of the sun, and a "natural man" is born wearing a neutral coverall. He must choose between Heaven, depicted as a circle of conformist, obedient children, and Hell, depicted as an ecological nightmare of overproduction. He rejects both and wants to start anew. The Icaruses try to fly to the sun, but do not know how. One answer is provided by the Three Kings of Hypocrisy, Consumption, and Militarism who urge adaptation and survival as techniques for combatting the evil of the world. The People in White, on the other hand, urge purity, honesty, truthfulness, and passive resistance. The two answers become blended into one voice in which it is difficult to discern where truth and falsehood lie. The Kings round people up and make them march in step. A net falls, trapping the Icaruses, the dreamers, Man, Humanity. But a bell starts to ring, calling man to action, to uprising. The Icaruses tunnel toward the rescue line of the bell's rope. They reach it, and pull, increasing the sound of hope for the future. In the Rhythm of the Sun was staged simply: the actors went barefoot and wore jeans or simple costumes. Because of this and the fact that some of the songs had a rock-like flavor, it was compared to Hair (Goldfarb, "Student" 67). However, In the Rhythm of the Sun employed a more varied tone than Hair. Critic Tadeusz Nyczek describes it: The performance was now a rhapsody (the Poet's lines), now a masquerade (the scene with the Kings), now a musical (all the songs composed on the "concert-hall" model), now again constructivist, formalist theatre according to the best interpretations of Meyerhold' s biomechanics (especially the Hell scene). A trashy popular character alternates with a poetic monologue; the main principle is the contrast of moods- from serious to buffo. (Pelnym 154)

Like Hair, however, In the Rhythm of the Sun was basically optimistic. The "rhythm" of the title, the biological rhythm of alternating life-cycles, provided the unifying concept of the play. Because of the presence of this dialectical rhythm (after evil, good must follow), no matter how bitter or critical the performance was in parts, it had to end on the optimistic note of the final bell-ringing. In the Rhythm of the Sun was very influential. Along with the 1970 productions of the Theatre of the 8th Day and Teatr STU, it set the tone for the student theatre movement for several years to come. It was not only shown in Wrodaw and at student theatre festivals but also toured to other cities in Poland, as well as to various European student and alternative theatre festivals. It continued to be performed by the troupe until1974 when Kalambur went to Canada and the United States and performed In the Rhythm of the Sun in New York and Montreal. After the production of In the Rhythm of the Sun, Kalambur was never again able to produce another performance of such power.

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Paradoxically, however, Kalambur remained a leader in the student theatre movement for several years to come. This was mainly due to the theorizing and organizing abilities of its director, Boguslaw Litwiniec. Litwiniec's ideas, particularly his idea of student theatre evolving into something he called "open theatre," became very popular in the 1970s. In addition, his organization of a major international theatre festival provided forums for exchange of ideas between Polish groups and international alternative theatre companies. Further, he initiated an active publishing program, propagating his own ideas about "open theatre" as well as ideas of other Polish student theatre practitioners and alternative theatre practitioners from other countries. Litwiniec felt the need to give a name other than "student" or "young" to the kind of theatre that he had been seeing at his festival in Wrodaw in 1967, 1969, and 1971. In 1973 he changed the name of the festival from the International Student Theatre Festival of Festivals to the International Student Festival of Open Theatre. In an essay originally published in the program for this festival entitled "Why 'Open' Theatre?" he wrote: We acknowledge that for a certain time while searching for the most proper name for [this theatre] (and thus for the name of our festival also), we succumbed to the temptation of calling it by the terms traditional here: "experiment," "innovation" "avant-garde." We came, however, to the conclusion that these terms did not render the essence of the phenomenon that we met every other year in Wrocl'aw. They could suggest an inclination for, above all, formal experimentation, bring to mind an aesthetic basis when at this time one of the essential characteristics of the theatrical movement that interests us is its mistrust of art which, convinced of its social helplessness, is animated mainly by internal cultural motives. (Teatr mlody 97)

Open theatre in Litwiniec's conception was not only open to aesthetic experimentation, but also to the possibility of changing the society around it through art. He regarded it as "the voice of the generation of young people living in the rhythm of its time" (Teatr mtody 102). He preferred to think of it more as socially responsible theatre than as political theatre in the strictest sense. Because Litwiniec subscribed to a very broad interpretation of what open theatre was, he encouraged a great diversity of theatrical expression at the Open Theatre Festival. Marjorie Young, an American observer of the fourth festival, describes the differing views of the participants as to the nature of open theatre. The Hungarian University Theatre of Szeged, for example believed "in a theater which is clear, direct, which does not hide behind confused symbols," and which "is not a hobby or a way to kill time,

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but a social task we have chosen to undertake." Theatre Creation of Lausanne, Switzerland, claimed to be "an open theater capable of reacting immediately to current events." Eugenio Barba's Odin Teatret of Denmark defined itself as a "laboratory, a centre for methodological research and practical tests of certain hypotheses in the field of theatrical pedagogics." Argentina's Grupo Once Al Sur, on the other hand, wanted "to reach as many people as we possibly can" with its political message. Japan's Tenjo Sajiko Troupe sought to "make the spectators into co-creators of the performance." And Portugal's Teatro a Comuna saw theatre as "a springboard for dialogue with people" (qtd. in Young 125). Litwiniec continued to develop an aesthetic of "openness" in theatre in articles and books published throughout the 1970s. In the program for the 1975 Fifth International Festival of Open Theatre (the "student" appellation was dropped) he published two articles: "The Wrodaw Festivals Retraced Towards the Open Theatre" (Sladem Wrodawskich festiwali ku teatrowi otwartemu") and "21 Beliefs About Open Art" ("21 przekonan sztuki otwartej"). Kalambur also initiated an "Open Art" series of books, the first title of which was Theatre and Poetry (Teatr a poezja), published in 1975, in which Litwiniec's essay "Individual Art and Open Art" ("Sztuka osobna i sztuki otwarta") appeared. In 1977 the second volume of the "Open Art" series, entitled Community- Creation - Theatre (Wsp6lnota - Kreacja Teatr), was issued, followed by the third volume, Community- Creation Paratheatre (Wsp6lnota- Kreacja - Parateatr), in 1979. In 1978 Ossolineum, the publisher of the Polish Academy of Sciences, collected Litwiniec's essays about open theatre and published them under the title Young Theatre - Open Theatre (Teatr mtody- teatr otwarty).

Krakow: Teatr STU Teatr STU/ unlike other student theatres, was launched by students at a drama school rather than a university, polytechnic, or art academy. Students at the Krakow State College of Theatrical Arts (Panstwowa Wyzsza Szkola Teatralna- PWST), the same school Grotowski had attended ten years earlier, founded it in 1966. These students were dissatisfied with the nature of the conservatory training they were receiving at the Theatre School. Krzysztof Jasmski, the director of STU, later stated that "The training of actors was based on a narrow stereotype. Externals were used to get to the

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The name STU is always spelled in capitals, but is not an abbreviation of another name.

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inner truth" (7). In their early years their choice of repertoire was typical of student theatres in the 1960s: plays by Stawomir Mrozek, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Cocteau, Friedrich Diirrenmatt, and Jan Kochanowski alternated with cabarets and adaptations of nondramatic material. The only unusual thing about this repertoire was that there were so many productions in these early years; most university-based student theatres had neither the resources nor the time to produce so many plays, but the theatre students in STU could use some of their production work to fulfill drama school class requirements. The other thing which distinguished STU at this juncture from other student theatres was the intensity with which they worked on acting problems: while they were still students they founded an "actor's studio" to work with other, younger students. Nevertheless, it was not until 1970, with the production of Spadanie (Falling), that the theatre found its "full" voice. The production of Falling was based on Tadeusz R6zewicz's poem "Falling, or On the Vertical and Horizontal Elements in the Life of Contemporary Man" ("Spadanie czyli o elementach wertykalnych i horyzontalnych w zyciu czlowieka wsp6lczesnego"). This is a long poem in which R6zewicz conducts a kind of poetic debate with Albert Camus' existentialist ethics, using quotations from St. Augustine and Fyodor Dostoevsky to prove incorrect Camus' contention that contempory man had "fallen": Once upon a time long long ago there was a solid bottom on which a man could roll down However there was no bottom anymore the word falling is not the proper word it does not explain that movement of body and of soul in which passes and wanes contemporary man (qtd. in Milosz, History 466-468)

Modern man, contends R6zewicz, no longer falls vertically, he falls horizontally, by levels. The production used this concept of the "horizontal fall" as its central motif and framework. Between sections of the R6zewicz poem there was a collage of other literary texts by Charles Baudelaire, Allen

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Ginsberg, Maxim Gorky, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Polish poets Edward Bryll and Leszek Moczulski; interviews with Fernando Arrabal, General Giap, and Biafran mercenaries; Joseph Chaikin's theatrical manifestoes; fragments of reportage, feuilletons, and columns from the Polish press; some of Mao Zhe Dong's writing; and portions of political declarations of various Polish men of state of the 1968-70 period. The production thus combined the two most popular student theatre forms of the 1960s, "poetry theatre" and the "theatre of fact." Falling was staged simply and in the round. There was little in the way of set decoration: the main prop was a large rubber raft. Like Kalambur's In the Rhythm of the Sun it was a musical. The first part of the show was, in part, a critique of literary models. It juxtaposed scenes from various literary and nonliterary sources to make a kind of dialectic. For example, Satan's monologue from Gorky's Lower Depths was followed by a scene from Sartre's Flies. Then a Chinese fable about a God who liberates the working classes from under the yoke of imperialism and capitalism was followed by a song about America's problems with words by Allen Ginsberg. On the walls opposite the audience pictures from Vietnam, Biafra, and the Middle East were projected while onstage, an interview with Fernando Arrabal, acclaimed during the 1960s as a successor to Artaud, was staged. Writers and artists are shown to be armchair militants who portray death only from a safe distance. The second portion was more specifically Polish. Falling's first version, which had its premiere in Rotterdam in September and its first performance in Poland in Rzesz6w in November of 1970, took up the question of the role of youth in society. Statements of Western radicals were contrasted with statements by government and Party officials drawn from newspapers on the role of youth in a socialist society. It ended with the question "What is going on?" (qtd. in Goldfarb, Persistence 81-81a). After December, when Gomulka's government had already fallen, however, STU changed this portion of the play to reflect the change in the nation's political consciousness. As Tadeusz Nyczek stated in his review originally published in the newspaper Student in May, 1971, "A generational matter had become a Polish matter" (Pdnym 140). The second portion of the second version featured a "chorus of Poles" running from speaker to speaker listening to speeches full of pseudo-information and quasi-explanations, dreaming about fighting back, and finally being driven into a circle by Mulch, the character from Wyspianski's Wedding, who was portrayed in Falling as a film director shooting a documentary. The second version ended with the question "How do we go on and with what?" (qtd. in Goldfarb, "Student" 168).

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Falling, especially when it had its first major presentation in Poland at the Seventh Theatre Meetings in L6dz in December, 1970. Nyczek describes the reaction of the student audience at the theatre festival as, "At first, shock, then applause every few lines, and at the end, a thunderous ovation" (Pelnym 139). Despite the fact that this version was regarded by STU as almost immediately outdated by the "December events," at the time it seemed extremely daring in that it actually brought up issues which had been festering in the minds of the young intelligentsia since 1968. The audience understood that the quotations of Polish politicians on the subject of "the proper role for socialist youth" were ironic since those same politicians had ordered the beatings and jailings of socialist youth only two years before. As Goldfarb points out, STU used "the symbolic disguise of the form of radical theater" (Persistence 80) to present an indirect critique of the Polish sociopolitical situation. The censor apparently understood the production as only an imitation of Western radical theatre and a critique of Western politics. Though the production was certainly both, the student audience was able to grasp the irony that Western youth was rebelling in order to attain socialism while "socialist youth" did not have the freedom to rebel. At the same time, Falling was also a theatrical polemic on the notion of political theatre as it was practiced in the West (particularly by those groups who had participated in the Second International Student Theatre Festival of Festivals in Wrodaw in 1969). According to critic Krzysztof Mroziewicz, STU imitated the methods of Western theatre groups and even quoted from their manifestoes partly in order to question what the essence of political theatre should be. Jasmski saw that most Western theatres were able simply to pose political questions onstage; this was, of course, impossible for STU. But he also saw that Western theatres had to resort to drastic means to gain the attention of the audience, while STU, with its more hidden message, easily held the audience's interest ("Sceny [1]" 118). Although indirection, equivocation, and nuance were forced on STU by the political situation, they came to regard it as the more artistic choice. Falling won the "Most Interesting Performance" award at the Seventh L6dz Theatre Meetings. The second, more explicit, version of Falling began to be performed in February, 1971 and continued to be performed up until December, 1971 in Poland and through 1973 at festivals abroad. In this version, the second part of the show was continually updated to make it au courant. Nevertheless, the "political" message of Falling came to have less force than the "moral" one. After the Third International Student Theatre Festival of Festivals in Wrodaw in 1971, critic Malgorzata Semil described Falling as:

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an attempt to find models and moral norms for use in everyday life and also a working out of moral criteria for evaluating social and political phenomena, permitting the individual and the whole society to have its own attitude toward recent events. Thus, it was an attempt at protecting society against a fall to "the moral bottom" and against the current, morally indifferent observation of the world. ("Schechner" 127-128)

Finally, it is this moral exploration which was the most valuable contribution that Falling made to the student theatre; it framed political questions in terms of ethics. STU's next production, which had its premiere at the Eighth L6d.Z Theatre Meetings in December, 1971, was Sennik Polski (Polish Dreambook). Its purpose was to explore the essence of "Polishness" as it was revealed in romantic literature and developed in contemporary works influenced by the romantics. Like Falling it was a collage but this time strictly of literary works; it was subtitled "a vivisection of the Polish soul according to the dreams of: A[dam] Mickiewicz, J[uliusz] Slowacki, J[uliusz] Kaden-Bandrowski [an interwar novelist], W[itold] Gombrowicz, S[tanislaw] Dygat [a novelist], T[adeusz] Konwicki, S[lawomir] Mrozek, and L[eszek] A. Moczulski" (Chudzinski and Nyczek 168). There were three heroes: Konrad, from Mickiewicz's Forefathers' Eve; Kordian, from Slowacki' s play of the same title; and Jasiek, the Polish "everyman." Konrad and Kordian represent the two sides of the Polish intelligentsia: Konrad is constantly desirous of action while Kordian is a dreamer, incapable of action. Jasiek, representing the Polish peasant or worker, is compelled into action, usually by something Konrad or Kordian have done or not done. STU wanted to show that contemporary Poles were still under the influence of stereotypes that were formed in the nineteenth century, and to question the power that these stereotypes still seemed to exert over Poles' thinking about themselves. Like Falling, Polish Dreambook was staged simply. The key piece of stage equipment was a table, symbolizing Poland itself, which was assembled by the performers onstage, destroyed, and rebuilt. The actors also danced on it, performed under it, and puppets popped out from behind it. In addition, there were three platforms, one at each side of the stage and one in the middle, which were performance surfaces. Dreambook was, like Falling, a musical, with original music by Krzysztof Szwajgier, the same composer who had created the music for Falling. The band - a violinist, guitarist, bass guitarist, and drummer - sat in one corner of the stage. STU considered Polish Dreambook to be an example of the "theatre of image and metaphor" rather than the "theatre of fact" as Falling had been (Mroziewicz, "Sceny [1]" 120). Dreambook was a series of fifteen dream images adapted from Polish literature. The image of Poland as "the Christ of

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Nations," taken from romantic literature, functions as the opening image of the production, for Christ's cross also serves as the crosspiece supporting the boards of the table (Poland). Christ, identified with Kordian, the romantic neurasthenic and poet incapable of action, measures Himself by deeds, and so when Jasiek, dressed as a soldier, runs up to him from the field of battle near Warsaw, Christ-Kordian commands him: "Attention! We will force our way through to England, and there I will be your captain. And now sleep" (qtd. in Mroziewicz, "Sceny [1]" 119). While the soldiers sleep, the captain (Christ-Kordian) loses his nerve and runs away, leaving his mission to Jasiek who cannot even understand what he must do. The character of Konrad, devoid of Kordian's doubts and complexes, and desiring action, shows up. He and Kordian debate, using dialogue adapted from Wyspianski's Liberation. Kordian, a nineteenth-century hero, does not understand contemporary people; he lectures the crowd about himself and his nation, and the crowd-nation responds derisively with "Hippies, the Vistula River is on fire!" (qtd. in Goldfarb, "Student" 173). Konrad and Kordian call forth ghosts in order to learn about the transformations which Poland has undergone in the last hundred years, but this seance becomes a tangle of pictures of conflicts, battles, coups d' etats, and revolutions. The table is destroyed. The seance ends with a song adapted from Leszek Moczulski's poem, "Blood Is Necessary." Konrad brings his fellows to reconstruct the table again, and once it is reconstructed he leads them in a polonaise, another symbol of Poland's nationhood. However, instead of dancing in the traditional row of couples, he dances the polonaise with all the couples at the same time by means of lines which are tied between him at the center of a circle and the couples at the outside. He turns this carousel faster and faster, and one by one the dancers fall from exhaustion. Jasiek, however, escapes from this vicious circle; when the captain had abandoned him earlier, he lacked the responsibility of leadership, but now he has it. He cries out, full of hope, "The sun is rising ... " (qtd. in Ryan 46). These words end the play. STU's imagery in Dreambook is complex and multi-layered. The performance was at once an homage to romantic literature and a mocking of its pretensions. It would be a mistake to identify the three heroes in the play too rigorously with present-day elements in Polish society as Paul Ryder Ryan does in his 1973 article about the Shiraz Festival in Iran. While Ryan is correct that "Kordian ... might represent the Church in Poland; Konrad ... could be the personification of the Communist Party; and Jasiek. .. could be taken for the Polish peasant" (45), the characters represent much more than just these things. Kordian, for example, represents the archetypical vacillating Polish intellectual, including, but not limited to, some members of the

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Church hierarchy. In an interview with some Africans taking part in the Shiraz Festival, two members of STU commented about Dreambook: Let's take the character of Christ in our spectacle. He has many meanings. There is the drama, the sacrifice, the beauty of the myth. There is also the inevitable alienation that He communicates and especially the use of it which has been made for centuries. A use quite temporal, political, social, economic. This poses problems at the level of a nation. ("Entretien" 42i

The other characters too are not so simply positive or negative. Konrad not only personifies the Communist Party, but also generations of Polish hotheads, going back to those who led the uprisings in the nineteenth century. Jasiek is not only the Polish peasant, he is also the hero of a whole series of jokes about a working-class youngster who seems to be stupid but turns out to subvert authority rather cleverly. In the play Jasiek represents the everyday fellow, the personification of the average Pole's image of him/her self as provincial but shrewd. The Polish audience would have been aware of the whole body of Polish romantic literature and Polish culture which gave the characters greater resonance. In Polish Dreambook STU was engaged in an examination of the national myths of Poland, an examination which revealed both the beauty and the grotesquerie of those myths. While Falling concerned politics and Dreambook concerned Polish national myths, STU's third major production, Exodus (premiere June, 1974) concerned humanity in general. Instead of being a collage of material from various sources, as Falling and Dreambook had been, Exodus was written by one author, the poet and lyricist Leszek Moczulski, who had written some of the poems included in the two earlier shows. This time he attended rehearsals and wrote much of the poetry specifically for Exodus. Like Polish Dreambook, Exodus was connected to the tradition of Polish romanticism. Moczulski called the production a "ritual poem," and Nyczek points out that this form, though new for alternative theatre, was not completely new in the Polish theatre: This ritua!-poem was neither a theatrical play, nor a collection of verses, nor an open form for "writing on the stage." It partook of all these somewhat, but at the same time most recalled the romantic convention of. .. Forefathers' Eve by Mickiewicz, especially Part Two of it. Perhaps it was not accidental that the "ritual poem" was a reference to that very poem? And to that very ritual? ("Rewolta" 45)

Besides attempting to create a modern day ritual similar to Mickiewicz's nineteenth-century attempt and to Grotowski's 1960s experiments, Jasiriski

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Quotations from this interview are in my translation.

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drew on two other alternative performances, Commune by Richard Schechner's Performance Group, which had appeared at the Wrodaw festival in 1971 and A Note by a Blind Man by the Japanese troupe Tenjo Sajiko, which had appeared at the same festival in 1973. Like Falling and Dreambook, Exodus was a musical, with music by Krzysztof Szwajgier and two other composers; however, it went further in the direction of opera with most of the text sung. STU attempted, in Exodus, to universalize some of the ethical concerns that had been touched on in Falling. There are four main characters in Exodus who represent generalized, rather than Polish, archetypes: the Angel, the Fireman of the Temporal Order, the Boy, and the Girl. The production begins in the lobby where the Angel recites political slogans as an indication that their world, the world of Polish everyday reality, is to be left outside the theatre. Inside, the audience sits in the dark on opposite sides of the stage, and listens to songs which seem to come from behind them. When there is enough light to differentiate characters, the Angel can be seen again along with a crowd of people who have come to the gates of heaven. Among the crowd are the Boy, the Girl, and the Fireman. The Angel tells the crowd that "No one is here," but the crowd thinks he is lying. Only the Fireman knows that the Angel speaks the truth, and he sets the Angel's wings on fire while jeering at the naivete of the arrivals. The imagery of fire and heaven are here used to mock people's tendency to cling stubbornly to beliefs even in the face of evidence against them. Despite STU's attempts to use imagery with a universal appeal, Polish concerns creep into the scenario. The Girl, who has been pulled in on a stretcher, is born anew and gets up naked, pure, immaculate. Between the Boy and the Girl, a curtain made of newspapers falls. The Fireman sets the curtain on fire in such a way that it looks like a huge, burning vagina. The Boy crosses through the gate of fire and marries the Girl. They return, now clothed in white, to a well of water and wash each other's eyes and the eyes of the others onstage. A song is sung with the lyrics "Let us pray to ourselves, if it is impossible otherwise, that the words bread, water, salt mean bread, water, salt." The Boy says "I see you as slowly you get up from your knees as you stand in the plaza and take the masks from your faces" (qtd. in Mroziewicz, "Sceny [1]" 121). Then he goes back to the Girl and asks her to be the mother of his child. She agrees. The juxtaposition of newspapers, symbolizing the lies and deceit of the regime's propaganda machine, with the naked purity of the young couple shows that Exodus made metaphoric virtually the same ideas that had animated Falling. In the end, STU revealed optimism about the ability of young people to change their world despite great difficulties. Around the well a crowd of

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singing actors and spectators forms. The actors set fire to the well-source. They follow the Angel who leads them in the direction of the door saying that he has not promised and does not promise them anything. They leave the fire and water, the symbols of ritual renewal, behind them, and go out of the theatre, singing with the Angel "Touch us with the morning arrow of the air. Open our hearts" (qtd. in Mroziewicz, "Sceny [1]" 121). The audience follows them, returning to the normal world. STU seemed to be saying in Exodus that truth, including the ability to look at reality without illusions, is the most important value. Exodus was related thematically to Kalambur's 1970 production of In the Rhythm of the Sun. Both used archetypal imagery to search for basic truths about human nature. However, STU's production attempted to create a more intensely moving atmosphere. British critic Noel Witts writes: [T]he piece produced from its audience the kind of gut reaction that perhaps only great music can produce. There is something intensely operatic about Exodus; it is about emotion, not intellect, about faith, love, innocence, rejection, trust -a collage of archetypal images and situations that are carefully manipulated to great theatrical effect ... STU is concerned to effect a change in our ability to feel, which the mass pressures of society have weakened. (27)

Perhaps because of STU's origins in the professional theatre school and hence its greater technical expertise, it was able to manipulate the audience's emotions in a more effective way than Kalambur had been able to with its earlier production. In addition, STU benefited from four more years of contact with the growing international alternative theatre movement. For example, the fact that Jasinski had seen the "environmental theatre" experiments of Richard Schechner and Shui Terayama, director of Tenjo Sajiko, probably led him to try to experiment with theatrical space and intense emotionality in much the same ways that they had. During this period, STU was probably the most respected of the student theatres. This was primarily due to "the high quality of their productions, and the talent of their director Krzysztof Jasinski. Jasinski started, while still a student, by working improvisationally with his actors. In a later interview he commented about that period "We were into improvisation, into all manner of psychodramas. We could not risk losing our personality" (7). However, by the time of Polish Dreambook, he was functioning more as the auteur of the production: [T]his spectacle did not leave much room for the actor's invention. It was above all a director's creation; the actors were used there as indispensible, it is true, but only as media for showing the main assumptions of the authors of the scenario and the director. The margin for improvisation, for a certain freedom of movement, was not left to the performers ... More

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While many alternative theatres during this period were moving more and more toward collective creation, Jasmski moved away from it, preferring to work with his two literary directors, Edward Chudzinski and Krzysztof Miklaszewski, or with a single author like Leszek Moczulski. However, many other trends that were popular in the alternative theatre of the time were evident in the productions of STU. These included: a tendency to eschew already-written dramatic material in favor of poetry and striking visual imagery, inventive uses of stage space ("environmental theatre"), continual revision depending on the reaction of the audience, and an enhanced role for politics. At the beginning of the 1970s, after its production of Falling, STU was regarded, along with the Theatre of the 8th Day, as being a political theatre which was daring to say things that had not been said before. They expressed the feelings of the generation of 1968 and were, therefore, quite popular with the student public. The members of STU, however, never felt that they were only a political theatre, even though their public wanted political messages from them. They began to feel quite quickly that the theatre should be more than just a political voice. In 1973, the two members of STU who were interviewed for L'Afrique litteraire et artistique declared: If it is only a revolutionary act, it is not theatre. There is an artistic, or rather, emotional side that ideology must not suppress. For militant work there is a political organization and for propaganda there are a lot of other institutions. We do not want to do what is done in many theatres in the West, especially in the political ones. It would be better in this case to write an article or go demonstrate in the street. ("Entretien" 43)

By the 1974 production of Exodus they were more concerned with universal questions of sincerity and honesty than they were with political questions per se. However, in the propaganda-saturated atmosphere of the officiallysanctioned media in a Communist society, even a simple statement like "Let us pray ... that the words bread, water, salt mean bread, water, salt" is regarded as a political statment. Though STU had moved away from the type of political theatre that they saw Western alternative theatres practicing, they could not help making political statements (such as burning the curtain made of newspapers) in their work.

Poznan: The Theatre of the 8th Day Like STU, the Theatre of the 8th Day (Teatr 6smego Dnia) was founded in the mid-sixties, but, as was more typical of student theatres, it was founded

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by students in the Polish Department of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan. The theatre's name came from a line in one of Konstanty Ildefons Galczynski's plays from the Little Theatre of the Green Goose: "On the seventh day, the Lord God rested, and on the eighth, He created theatre" (qtd. in Rusinek 182). The leader of the group at that time was a Polish major named Tomasz Szymanski, and two other of the most important founding members were Stanislaw Baranczak and Lech Raczak. In the earliest period of the theatre's existence (1964-67), Szymanski was the artistic director of the theatre and also directed all productions, Baranczak was literary director, and Raczak was one of the main actors. Like many other student theatres in the 1960s, the 8th Day was both a "poetry theatre" and a "dramatic theatre." Poetic shows included those based on the verses of Polish poets (Julian Tuwim, Jadwiga Badowska, Krzysztof Kamil Baczynski, Tadeusz Gajcy), Russian poets (Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam), and poets of other nationalities (Fran~ois Villon, T. S. Eliot). Plays produced included Lalek by Zbigniew Herbert, MaratfSade by Peter Weiss, Edward II by Christopher Marlowe, Escurial by Michel de Ghelderode, and Warszawianka (La Varsovienne) by Stanislaw Wyspianski. Up until 1967, the 8th Day was a typical1960s Polish student theatre. The nature of the theatre started to change in 1967 with the production of La Varsovienne, directed by Zbigniew Osmski. Osmski, then an assistant professor in the Polish Department at Adam Mickiewicz University, was interested in Grotowski, and he introduced the working methods and some of the imagery of the Laboratory Theatre to the 8th Day. This precipitated a crisis which first resulted in Baranczak's leaving the theatre, and eventually led to the resignation of Szymanski in 1968 and his replacement as artistic director by Lech Raczak. Also in 1968, Teo Spychalski from the Laboratory Theatre came to the 8th Day to lead exercises in Grotowski's acting technique. In 1969, Spychalski collaborated with Lech Raczak in directing an adaptation of novelist Stefan Zeromski's Duma o hetmanie (Ballad of the Hetman). Raczak said in a later interview that by the late sixties, the 8th Day had become a "Grotowskian" theatre: In that first period our methods of artistic research aped Grotowski. Actually, we sometimes copied and imitated the Laboratory, but we were searching for directions of our own. We were moving in the same frame of philosophical concepts and literary sources, trying to reach an understanding of them. (Howard 291)

During this period, the material which the 8th Day worked on did not differ much from that of 1964-67; however, Grotowski gave them a new way to approach that material.

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The events of 1968 impressed the members of the theatre with the need to find some means to express their political frustrations. Raczak commented in another interview: Our theatre really begins after March 1968. At that time we realized that it is necessary to deal not only with what's going on in the arts but also with what is happening in society. We wanted to make a theatre relevant to people living here and now, a theatre that would deal with everyday problems, with the simple facts of political and social reality. (Cioffi and Ceynowa 82)

At virtually the same time, then, as they began work on Grotowski-inspired exercises for exploring the Self and shaking off cultural inhibitions, the 8th Day was also searching for different material to work on with their newly expressive acting technique. They felt, according to Raczak, "a kind of duty - to cut ourselves free from those mythical concerns and move towards our contemporary problems" (Howard 292). The turning point for the 8th Day, the point at which they finally began to deal "with the simple facts of political and social reality," came in 1970, the same year that STU performed Falling and Kalambur In the Rhythm of the Sun, with the production of An Introduction To ... An Introduction To ... was a parody of the celebrations commemorating Lenin's birthday. It concerned a "Great Academy for Worship" in which there is a conflict between those who defend the sanctity of ritual, and those who are forced to help the first group against their convictions. The second group, the Young People, rebels against the first group, but they too are caught in the stereotypes which they have fought against. In the end, the leader of the first group, the Old Man, leads the Young People to obedient participation in the Academy. Nyczek summarized the performance: "[T]he centuries-old fight for 'a better tomorrow' leads to a revolution which in fact occurs; quite a few years pass from that time; as before not everything is ideal yet, so where did the mistake (or maybe the historical necessity) lie?" (Petnym 95). Texts used included quotations from Dostoevsky, Lenin, and Polish dramatist Bohdan Drozdowski. Appropriately enough, An Introduction To .. . was performed just a few days after its opening in Poznan at the Lublin Theatre Spring, usually just a Polish student theatre festival, but in honor of the Lenin anniversary transformed into an International Festival of Theatres from Socialist Countries. There it was regarded as a kind of ironic commentary on most of the other festival presentations which were glorifications of Lenin in the Stalinist mode. In general, though it was one of the performances which marked the change that the student theatre movement took in 1970, An Introduction To ... was considered more simplistic than Falling or In the Rhythm of the Sun.

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The Theatre of the 8th Day's next performance, Jednym tchem (In One Breath- 1971) was their most successful during the early 1970s. It used Stanislaw Baranczak's volume of poems by the same name, a series of poetic commentaries on the events of 1968 published after the December, 1970 strikes, as the spoken text of the production. The title poem (spoken twice in the performance) reads in part: In one bracket of breath closing a sentence in one bracket of ribs closing like a fist around the heart, like a net around slender fish, in one breath to close all and to enclose myself, in one shaving of flame whittled off the lungs to scorch the walls of prisons and to take that fire behind the bony bars of the chest and into the tower of the windpipe, in one breath, before you choke on a gag of air thickened from the last breath of the executed the breathing of hot barrels and blood streaming on concrete, like the heart in the ribs and like the fish in the net a sentence flutters stammered out in one breath till the last breath (Baraftczak, "In One Breath")

Baranczak had given the theatre his poems in manuscript before publication, and they had intended creating a performance based on the 1968 events, but after the strikes in Gdansk in 1970, the 8th Day shifted its interest to the December events. The setting was a blood-donor station where a television crew comes to make a flattering documentary publicizing the virtues of giving blood. While making the film, the Journalist discovers that people's motivations are not disinterested: some do it for money, others so a relative can have an operation. The Journalist, however, has to make his documentary, so he lies and forces the blood donors to lie in front of the the camera. At one point the information leaks through from outside that something is happening on the street. The blood donors rush out and come back carrying a dead body, an allusion to the Gdansk events. This was not a realistic portrayal of the interactions of a journalist with the patrons of a blood-donor station, however. The texts of Baranczak's poems (the only lines the actors spoke), and the ways the props and costumes were used lent the action secondary, metaphoric meanings. For example, the white hospital robes which the actors wore were also symbols of purity. The rubber hoses used for blood transfusions were used at different times as symbols of veins and arteries, a gallows rope, the ropes of a boxing ring, and the thongs of a whip. A canister was used as a container for blood

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and a can of gasoline. The illustration of the Red Cross was used at first only as a set decoration but while he is being interviewed, one of the blood donors, the Office Worker, takes the Red Cross illustration on his back and begins to mime the Passion of Christ. The action has a dreamlike symbolism and logic to it, freely moving back and forth between realistic actions such as blood donation and making a television documentary and symbolic actions such as Christ's Passion, a boxing match between the Journalist and another blood donor (the Young Man), the washing of hands by Pontius Pilate (the Journalist), and all the actors smearing their faces with blood (red paint). The way the Theatre of the 8th Day used Baranczak's poetry in In One Breath differed from the way Kalambur had used Urszula Koziol's poetry in In the Rhythm of the Sun. Kalambur had used Koziot as a kind of playwright-in-residence: she attended rehearsals and was asked to write new verses specifically for the production. The 8th Day, on the other hand, created In One Breath, which was originally called The Blood Donors, completely independently of Baranczak; he only attended the final dress rehearsal. Nevertheless, they tried to make their performance true to the spirit of Baranczak's volume. Baranczak had written in the introduction to his volume of poetry that the essence of poetry "should be suspicion. Criticism. Unmasking. It should be all that up to the moment when the last lie, the last demagogy, and the last act of force disappear from the Earth" (qtd. in Nyczek, Pefnym 159). Similarly, in the program notes for In One Breath, Raczak wrote: "Our program is simple: to be suspicious of everything in ourselves and outside of us and to awaken that suspicion in others" ("Text programu" 109). Baranczak was quite pleased by what the 8th Day did with his poetry, regarding the performance as a kind of interpretation. In an essay about In One Breath, which originally appeared in the book Theatre and Poetry published by Kalambur, Baranczak wrote: "So what is theatre for poetry? An opportunity for its popularization for sure; I myself experienced this. But maybe something more: a definite reading of it that can teach the author a great deal and show him meanings in his own verses which he barely foresaw" ("Czego doswiadczylem" 123). By setting Baranczak's lyric poetry in the rather sordid blood-donor station, by grounding it in everyday Polish reality, the performance created a darker, more pessimistic, grittier vision than the rather optimistic In the Rhythm of the Sun. In One Breath was a breakthrough performance for the Theatre of the 8th Day. Though they had settled on what they felt was their proper subject matter with the production of An Introduction To ... , with In One Breath they managed to achieve artistic success with this new subject matter. Zbigniew Osinski's critique, originally written for the student newspaper ltd (Etc), is typical of many laudatory comments:

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In my feeling it here has become something completely different - and on the whole more important - than a good or even a very good theatre. We have met the latter after all more than once. Even if, in recent years, we have met the spectacles In the Rhythm of the Sun or Falling. It seems to me, from many viewpoints, that In One Breath, however, is in general the most significant manifestation of the Polish student theatre from the beginning of its existence up to the current moment. ("Jednym tchem" 155)

It also won several awards: a prize for best spectacle in the International

Student Festival in Zagreb, Yugoslavia in September, 1971; a prize from the Ministry of Culture and Art, a prize for the scenario and directing, and the critics' award at the Eighth L6d.Z Theatre Meetings in December, 1971; and a cultural award from the city and province of Poznan in February, 1972. In One Breath achieved unprecedented power in its uniting of poetic material, a Grotowski-inspired physicality of acting style, and references to the political and social reality surrounding the viewers. With the critical and popular success of In One Breath came some changes for the theatre. Many young people saw the performance, contacted the 8th Day, and wanted to be part of its work. The 8th Day had founded, after the performance of An Introduction To ... , the Student Theatrical Academy (Studencka Akademia Teatralna) to help members of other young theatres in the Poznan area and young people who were not members of theatres but were interested in theatre to prepare for theatrical work. After the premiere of In One Breath, most of the people who were to become members of the 8th Day company for the next fifteen or twenty years joined the Student Theatrical Academy. In September of 1971, the 8th Day presented a second version of In One Breath which consisted of the original performance with a second part entitled "Daily March," which also contained texts by Baranczak. Lech Raczak wrote of this second version ten years later: We were forced into further work, into the realization of the second part of the performance, paradoxically, through the success of In One Breath. For we felt the overwhelming need to say to the wildly enthusiastic viewers, who were full of new faiths and hopes, that nothing had changed since 1971, that after the December tragedy, without anybody noticing it, we had taken up the same old routine, the well-known daily march. ("Po dziesit;ciu" 61)

This second version was more and more uncomfortable for the authorities to accept. It was taken on tour to the Netherlands and Great Britain in January, 1973, but after the theatre's return from that tour, the Provincial Committee officially banned the theatre from further performances. This was the beginning of many further troubles the theatre would have with local and national authorities. The next performance created by the theatre, Wizja lokalna (Inspection of the Crime Scene), which had its premiere in October, 1973, was subjected to

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intense scrutiny by the authorities. It was based on the writings of Albert Camus (The Plague, The Stranger, The Fall, and essays and short stories) and press reports of two teenage murderers, with song lyrics from the Bible and Sanctuary by William Faulkner. It concerned two young men who are condemned to death and murder several people whom they meet by chance. These immature young men identify with neo-fascist movements. The play thus gave the 8th Day a chance to explore the authoritarian mind-set. Unfortunately, the censor eliminated 80 percent of the original text, thereby forcing the theatre to rely solely on nonverbal elements of the production to give it coherence. This was, on the whole, unsuccessful. Evidently, the huge success of In One Breath made the local authorities in Poznan nervous about allowing the theatre to make untrammeled artistic statements. In 1973, the 8th Day acquired more young actors, and along with performances of Inspection of the Crime Scene the members of the company trained these actors in 1973 and 74. By February of 1975, they were ready for a new premiere called Musimy poprzestac na tym co tu nazwano rajem na ziemi? ... (Do We Have To Settle for What Has Been Called Paradise on Earth? ... ). This production used excerpts from William Faulkner, Smen Kierkegaard, turn-ofthe-century Polish novelist and essayist Stanislaw Brzozowski, and poets Carl Sandburg, Stanislaw Baranczak, Czeslaw Milosz, Jaroslaw Markiewicz, and Adam Zagajewski, but was mainly based on Dostoevsky's novel The Possessed. Rather than the ethos of suspicion on which An Introduction To ... , In One Breath, and Inspection of the Crime Scene had been based, Paradise on Earth explored the trust that members of a group must have for one another in order to live together. Tadeusz Janiszewski, one of the actors, comments on this performance: We tried to explore the disadvantages and dangers of staying within a group of terrorists. The situation - where one's dominated by old conventions and there is an attempt to break those rules -was important both for the performance and for our lives. (Howard 294)

The theatre's own situation, that of a group of people with common ideals, was analogized to the situation of of the terrorists in The Possessed. The feeling of community that a small, closely knit group has, clearly a beneficial aspect of group life, was shown to easily change into fanaticism. The production was based on the assumption that terrorism or plots against the authorities might break out in Poland. The theatre's audiences, however, were not able to empathize with the terrorists, feeling that their world was too closed and private, and the production was unsuccessful. It seems that in drifting away from the common man as hero in their production, they lost the sympathies of the audience.

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During the 1970-75 period, the Theatre of the 8th Day made two significant contributions to the development of Polish alternative theatre. One was the production of In One Breath discussed earlier. The other was the development of a way of working based on Grotowski' s methods but more grounded in the everyday concerns of average Poles. Work on a specific production began with discussion and improvisation. Raczak comments, "We begin with nothing. That is, we start from some problem or intuition that we ought to make a piece on some subject. We select a very specific- or very general- topic and begin improvising" (Cioffi and Ceynowa 83). In the case of In One Breath, the first improvisations were set in a restaurant, a crowded streetcar, a sports stadium, a hijacked airplane, a hospital, and student rallies from 1968. Through these early improvisations, the actors worked out character types, such as office worker, factory worker, and party activist, which would be representative of various attitudes in Polish society. They then hit upon the idea of the blood-donor station, and began to improvise various situations there. In work on In One Breath, as in all productions, the physical actions were worked out first, and only later were words added, in places where they were felt to be needed. These words usually carne from literature, although sometimes press clippings or propaganda leaflets were used. In One Breath was unusual in that it relied on only one author, and even this was a late decision made after several dress rehearsals attended by audiences. This method of working was very actorcentered; Raczak saw his work as helping the whole group to formulate the theme that was most essential for them to express, and then to realize the production themselves (Raczak, "Uwagi" 64-69). While all the student groups in the early 1970s used improvisation and derived their method of working from Grotowski, the 8th Day (especially their In One Breath) was the most successful in combining his method of physically expressive, intense work on the self with political content.

L6di : Teatr 77 Unlike all the theatres previously mentioned in this chapter, Teatr 77 started life after the crucial events of 1968. It was founded in 1969 by Ryszard Bigosiftski and Zdzislaw Hejduk, two ex-participants in another L6dz student theatre, Retort. Its name carne from its address, 77 Piotrkowska Street, the student club building of L6dz and local headquarters of SZSP. 77's first production was Rosjo, iono moja (Russia, My Wife), based on the works of Alexander Blok. A typical student theatre production of the early 1970s, it used Blok's poetry, journalism, letters, and diaries as textual material. It premiered in July, 1970, at the "Start" Festival, where it won first prize. During the next year 77 experimented with various forms common in the

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student theatre of the sixties and early seventies: it produced a program of songs based on Gakzyilski's verses entitled Dlaczego og6rek nie spiewa? (Why Doesn't the Cucumber Sing?), a poetry theatre program called Hommage a Apollinaire, a one-act play by Hejduk called Spisek (The Plot), and a mimedrama called Dzieje Tratwy Meduzy (The History of Medusa's Raft). Teatr 77's most significant work, however, began in late 1971, when they started work on a series of three plays which could all be characterized, in Richard Schechner's parlance, as works of "environmental theatre." Hejduk and Bigosinski never used the term "environmental theatre" to describe their work with Teatr 77, instead preferring the term "engaged theatre." It is, however, possible that they may have read Richard Schechner's article "6 Axioms for Environmental Theatre," (published in 1968) since their ideas closely parallel his. Certainly they would have seen the performance of Commune by Schechner' s Performance Group at the Third International Festival of Festivals in November, 1971, but this occurred the month after Teatr 77 had opened their own first environmental production Kofo czy tryptyk (Circle or Triptych). Like the work of the Performance Group in the early 1970s, Teatr 77's trilogy, beginning with Circle or Triptych and continuing through Pasja II (Passion II - 1972) to Retrospektywa (Retrospective - 1973), experimented with innovative audience-performer relationships, uses of performance space, and blurring the distinction between life and art. For the creators of Teatr 77, student theatre needed to become more centrally connected to life than it had heretofore attempted to he. Hejduk wrote: Theatre? - of course, but not on the margin of what in life seems most essential. Not as a temple of art isolated from everyday life where the aroma of incense covers usual and unusual preoccupations, but as a full-blooded political forum whose main raison d'etre is to bring the problems and defects of a society building its own socialist reality into the open. (116)

Teatr 77 chose to bring the audience into their productions in a way similar to what Grotowski had attempted in the 1960s, but added the incentive that their productions were actually about issues that affected contemporary Poles' lives. Teatr 77's first production, Circle or Tryptych, took place in three different rooms of 77 Piotrkowska Street. In the first room, the audience attends a press conference. Everyone, audience and actors alike, stands together like reporters around a stool with a microphone on it. However, instead of an actor playing a politician and giving a speech from the microphone, suddenly a taped voice is heard over a loudspeaker. It is the voice of the Interior Minister giving a speech in 1956 condemning the imperialist provocations in Poznan. Then, a fragment of another Interior

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Ministry speech from 1968 is played. Finally, the audience hears a third fragment of an Interior Ministry speech about the provocation in Gdansk in December, 1970. The similarity of the rhetoric and tones of voice used in the three speeches is striking. Someone in the crowd (an actor) throws out a question, another person answers him, and more questions and answers follow. The questions deal with the problems of the time, the problems that are on everyone's mind. Often, the audience would join in, and start arguing. Suddenly, the doors to an adjoining room are thrown open, and everyone is invited into a banquet. The audience, still mixed together with some of the actors, sits around a horsehoe-shaped table. The actors who are seated among the audience-members play host and invite them to partake of bread, cheese, sausage, herring, pickles, mineral water, and vodka (a typical Polish light supper). While the audience is eating and drinking, other actors in the center of the horsehoe begin to perform a pantomime of a "happy life": they sing, dance, march, kiss, hug, a boy pats a girl on the bottom, another girl provocatively tears off her shoulder strap exposing her breast, and then the actors depict more processions, festivals, marches, polonaises, political speeches, and slogans. The actors at the center of the horseshoe interact with the actors sitting at the table. Both the pantomime and the banquet get wilder as the audience drinks more vodka and someone leads a round of the drinking song "Sto lat" ("May we live one hundred years"). At a certain moment, one of the actors sitting at the table springs to his feet, bangs his fist, pulls off the tablecloth spilling all the food and drink, and declares "Enough! Enough!" He roundly condemns the senseless craziness of the "happy life," the empty words, the getting drunk. His final question (yet another allusion to Wyspianski) is "How long will we still toddle to the Mulch melody in the middle of Europe?" (qtd. in Nyczek, Petnym 180-181). The audience is led in a kind of procession to the third room where they stand around a large round table. The room is dark and the only illumination is provided by glasses of burning alcohol placed around the table. Over the loudspeaker, a voice recites the part of a poem by the nineteenth century Romantic Cyprian Kamil Norwid which also inspired the novel Ashes and Diamonds by Jerzy Andrzejewski and the film Ashes and Diamonds by Andrzej Wajda (Nyczek, Pelnym 181): Do only ashes and turmoil remain, Swirling in the chasm after the storm?- or 'Neath ashes does a diamond radiate, In a dawn of victory, forever morel ... (Norwid 69-70)

Jeffrey Goldfarb contends that the audience at this moment in Circle or Tryptych is meant to ponder whether Poland will fall into old patterns and

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come full circle to established, intolerable ways or will finally move into a three-part story; since it has been through the Stalinist period and the failure of Gomulka, will 1970 be the last new beginning from which Poland goes forward into the future, cognizant of the causes of past problems and avoiding them in the future? ("Student Theatre" 168). Teatr 77 wanted to underline that Poles have a choice: it is not their tragic fate to be condemned to repeat the same patterns over and over again; they can break out of the circle if they are made aware of self-defeating patterns of behavior. The next year Teatr 77 produced Passion II, a continuation of some of the themes and staging techniques that it had explored in Circle or Tryptych. The original performance of Passion, which became the first part of Passion II, consists of a pantomime of Christ's Passion. The actors, frozen into statues, depict scenes from the Stations of the Cross in various places around the room. The actor playing Judas animates them by a kiss on the forehead. The audience follows Christ to His death in a procession along the via dolorosa. After the crucifixion, the actors playing the crowd begin to fight over the red vernicle of St. Veronica with the face of Jesus imprinted on it. Sometimes some of the audience join the fight. A stroboscope goes on and off, actors with modern costumes appear among the Biblical characters, and gradually the fight metamorphoses into a revolt or revolution, a fight about authority. When the normal light goes on, the movement freezes. In the middle of the room, a dead man, an innocent bystander, is revealed, wrapped in the vernicle. In the second part of Passion II, the actors from the Biblical section sit on the floor with the dead body among the audience, and a new Savior and Apostles, dressed entirely in modern clothing, act out a new Last Supper. There is on the "table" (actually a carpet on the floor) in front of the actors a cake which may be eaten by anyone, actors or audience-members, who is righteous. No one reacts to this invitation. The new "Savior" begins a speech consisting of noble-sounding quotations from various authors that goes on and on. The "Apostles" revolt against the lack of action or even of a call to action. They start to sing well-known marches and hits and stamp their feet rhythmically to drown out the Savior's speech. The audience joins in. The Apostles start to leave, one by one. Finally, only the Savior-speaker remains, still speechifying, alone with the dead body and the audience. The production seems to suggest that through the ages people have missed the point and leaped into senseless action- fighting over St. Veronica's vernicle, making empty gestures of protest against leaders who do not lead - rather than taking the time which would allow them to avoid the mistakes of the past. Teatr 77's next production, Retrospective (1973), was its most ambitious both in its attempt to require audience involvement and in its

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environmental uses of the various spaces in the building on Piotrkowska Street. It was staged as an art gallery opening to which people requested invitations rather than tickets. With the invitation some excerpts from Witold Gombrowicz's diary were given to the audience members; in them Gombrowicz contends that Poles must cast off their "convulsive history" and their complexes in order to be truly fulfilled individuls. The audience was supposed to read the material by Gombrowicz and to think about it before coming to the opening. When the audience arrives at the opening, they are admitted one at a time and enter the formal atmosphere of an art gallery on the day of a new exhibit. The "art works" consist of groups of actors frozen into living sculptures: one group is a historical painting, one a group of people dancing the polonaise from Mickiewicz's epic Pan Tadeusz, one a scene from STU's production of A Polish Dreambook, one two soccer players from the recent Poland-England match (in the first performances, these players, who were from L6dz, agreed to appear themselves). In another portion of the room, the table from Circle or Tryptych is placed with herring, mineral water, vodka, and bread on it. Nonfrozen actors act as hosts and circulate with glasses of wine for the audience. After approximately a half hour of the audience's examining the sculptures, talking, eating, and drinking, the audience is asked to cast ballots which were given at the door. These contained one of the following two questions (given on alternate nights of the performance): (1) In casting off everything that, according to W. Gombrowicz, is degenerate in form, and in

this way compromises us, humbles us, deprives us of individuality, and so in casting off, for example, our "convulsive history"- do we obtain the chance of full self-realization? (2) In casting off everything that, according to W. Gombrowicz, is degenerate in form, and in this way compromises us, humbles us, does not allow us to realize ourselves in full, and so in casting off, for example, our "convulsive history"- do we lose ourselves? (Hejduk 121)

Each audience member is supposed to mark "TAK" ("Yes") or "NIE" ("No") on his/her ballot, and then to go upstairs to a different room depending on his/her answer. Those who cannot decide are to remain downstairs at the opening, although in practice very few audience members resisted the temptation to see what was happening upstairs. In both of the upstairs rooms, the action centers on the song "Red Poppies on Monte Cassino" ("Czerwone maki na Monte Cassino"); this sentimental song commemorates the Polish army's storming of a mountaintop monastery in Italy during the Second World War. The first room, where those who did not want to reject history gather, is completely darkened, and in a ceremony recalling the first part of Mickiewicz's

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Forefathers' Eve, one of the actors is designated as a medium who becomes a commander from the time of the nineteenth century uprisings. He challenges the people present to fight for the independence of Poland. Then suddenly a closed circuit television is turned on. On it is a journalistic piece staged by Teatr 77 about a party where the older generation start quarreling with the young people. The old people use their war service to patronize the young people. One of the old men suddenly takes off his wooden leg, throws it on the table and demands that the group sing "Red Poppies on Monte Cassino." The partygoers, many of whom are drunk, struggle to their feet, and begin to sing. The video is turned off, and the actors from Teatr 77 leave the room and lead the audience back downstairs. Tradition (in the form of the song) is here used as a weapon to bludgeon young people with; it is as if Teatr 77 was saying to its audience, "You didn't want to reject history, but look how history is used in this country!". The other part of the audience, those who wanted to disregard Polish history and tradition, is forced into a similar confrontation with its assumptions in the second room, where it is witness to a rehearsal of a musical group called "Columbuses 73" ("Kolumbowie 73"). The musicians are wearing uniforms and medals from the era of the World War II occupation but without any reverence for that period. They talk to the audience about a festival which they are preparing to attend; if they win first prize at this festival, they will be given a foreign tour. Their manager talks to them about the conditions of the tour and also about what they can buy and sell abroad. Finally, they start rehearsing, and it turns out that the song they are singing is "Red Poppies on Monte Cassino," but transformed so that the end is a Russian song, "Kalinka." Tradition (again, in the form of this song) is thus completely trivialized and ridiculed as if 77 was saying "If you throw out history completely, this is what you get." As Goldfarb points out "Each session disconcertingly plays to the professed belief of the audience" ("Student Theatre" 156). The third part of Retrospective continues to demand physical and mental involvement from the audience. Both parts of the audience meet again downstairs in the main room. They are directed to stand around the sides of the room and are kept out of the center area by a rope held by actors. In the center area, events from the last thirty years of Polish history are acted out. The first sequence depicts the war years when the nation was unified in its battle against the Nazis, but was internally riven with strife in the face of its "liberation" by the Red Army. Slogans and counter-slogans are bandied about: "Whoever isn't with us, is against us," "Not everyone who is with us is with us," "Everyone who isn't against us is with us" (Hejduk 124). This sequence ends ironically with Winston Churchill's speech to Stanislaw

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Mikolajczyk, the prime minister of the wartime government-in-exile in London: "You're a callous people who want to wreck Europe. I shall leave you to your own troubles. You have only your miserable, petty, selfish interests in mind!" (qtd. in Ascherson, Struggles 135). The next two sequences recapitulate the theme of Circle or Triptych by depicting the "circular" nature of post-World War II Polish history. The first shows the years of reconstruction and rebuilding immediately after the war. This period is portrayed as a festival: garlands of colored light bulbs are hung, a platform is set up and decorated with banners, and popular songs from the end of the forties and beginning of the fifties are heard. Suddenly, the festive atmosphere changes, and the platform becomes a tribunal from which the laws on collectivization are dictated to the people. Stalinism has arrived. This heavy atmosphere is broken, however, by the beginning of the next sequence, which depicts the Polish October period. The actors sing "Let's Look at the Facts Without Blinking" ("Sp6jrzmy prawdzie w oczy"), and the tribunal collapses. Tables are placed in a U-shape for a new presidium of leaders. Speeches are made, interwoven with joyful songs and dances: the "Warsaw Polonaise" ("Polonez warszawski") and "Everything for You, Beloved Land" ("Wszystko tobie, ukochana ziemio"). The presidium begins debating questions about the apparatus of power in a socialist society: centralized management of the economy versus decentralization, patriotism versus internationalism, and so on. Gradually the optimistic atmosphere again breaks down as the actors portraying those listening to the debates grow impatient. They start to complain about their own affairs: problems of their individual workplaces, problems procuring food, housing, children's clothing, and so forth. The actors begin to ask individual audience members for advice on how to solve their problems. In the meantime, the political elite at the presidium table debate on, each speaker citing Marx to make his point. In the final sequence, the separation between audience and actors completely disappears. The rope is dropped so that audience-members can come into the center of the room. To the sound of Chopin's "Polonaise in Aflat," the actors create the atmosphere of a marketplace. They urge the audience to buy and sell various items. There are quarrels about the prices of various goods on sale. The sound of Chopin grows louder and louder, eventually drowning out the hubbub. The lights dim, and in the darkness, the actors leave the space. When the lights come on again, the audience is invited to a discussion upstairs. The members of Teatr 77 considered this discussion to be "an important link in the journey from theatre to reality" (Hejduk 125). In introductory remarks, Zdzislaw Hejduk, the director of the theatre, states

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that Poland must confront its history and come to terms with it in order to plan for the future. He also invites the audience to discuss Gombrowicz' s statement, the problems presented during the gallery opening, and any other problems that seem important. The audience often had problems overcoming their reluctance to engage in public discussions of this sort. The meetings after the play often lasted until 4 a.m., developing toward openness and honesty, but sometimes never achieving either. Nevertheless, Teatr 77 felt it was necessary for Poles to be encouraged to discuss problems openly and to their logical conclusion, rather than being evasive, unclear, or unnecessarily dogmatic as was common in the media and in official public meetings. Thus, in Retrospective Teatr 77 went a step beyond the audience involvement they had achieved in their earlier performances; they tried to involve their audiences physically in the performances themselves and intellectually in the discussions afterwards. Teatr 77 was perhaps the student theatre most interested in its relationship to its audience. For them, the obligation to raise the consciousness of the young intelligentsia was more important than making a good piece of theatre. This led them not only to hold the discussion sessions after Retrospective, but also to collect the names and addresses of everyone who had come to see this performance and to have further meetings with as many of that group as cared to come. It also led to experimentation with the form of their performances which was parallel to Richard Schechner' s in America; they tried to actually create the performance in collaboration with the audience rather than just performing for the benefit of the audience. Zdzislaw Hejduk was committed to reforming socialism, not overthrowing it. Hence, be opposed capitalism as fervently in the last scene of Retrospective as he had satirized the Communist leadership in the previous scene. However, he rather naively assumed that his aim of building a more humane version of socialism would be accepted by the authorities; in fact, in the late 1970s they imposed more restrictions on Teatr 77, and it was never again to produce the powerful works of the early seventies. Part of the Worldwide Alternative Theatre Movement It was at this time that Polish student theatre became part of, and even a

leader in, the worldwide alternative theatre movement. Polish theatre groups were frequent visitors to Western European theatre festivals and even to some festivals in North and South America, Asia, and Australia. Due to the efforts of Boguslaw Litwiniec, virtually all the major alternative theatre groups in the world visited the Open Theatre Festival in Wrodaw. It was easy for Polish commentators to notice the similarities between the Polish groups

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and their counterparts in other countries. Tadeusz Nyczek contends that this similarity was greater than that between mainstream Polish theatres and alternative ones; Here oftentimes very different poetics and aesthetics are mixed (Grotowski and Kantor, Living [Theatre] and Grand Magic Circus, El [Teatro] Campesino and STU, Bread and Puppet and Pleonazmus, etc.) which are only united in their appeal to the sources of theatricality and not to the ... classical canon. From this -paradoxically- the difference is lesser, for example, between the European Grotowski and the Japanese theatre Tenjo Sajiko than between Grotowski and even Hanuszkiewicz, just as the connections between Kantor and the mysterylike spectacles of Bread and Puppet are clearer than those between Kantor and whatever European, and therefore also Polish, repertory theatre. (Pelnym 60)

This "appeal to the sources of theatricality," this going back to the very roots of theatre itself, is what Polish alternative theatre shared with alternative theatres elsewhere. In addition, Polish practitioners added their own particular contributions to the worldwide alternative theatre movement's explorations of those sources. Like many of its Western counterparts, Polish alternative theatre began to exhibit certain common characteristics. For example, some broad categories of subject matter chosen by Polish theatres and their preferences for certain types of performance styles tended to mirror that of their counterparts in alternative theatres in the rest of the world. Edward Chudzinski identifies the main trends which characterized Polish alternative theatre in the first half of the 1970s: The first led toward politics ... The second trend showed a clear preference for ethical problems, and forced the viewer to reflect on such elementary questions as how to live? how to be oneself? and on more complex issues such as how to preserve one's dignity and "clean hands" despite being active in life? (27)

These were trends which could also be observed in alternative theatres in the United States, Europe, Japan, South America, and elsewhere at the time. The trend toward l(Olitics, for example, could as easily be observed in the San Francisco Mime Troupe or El Teatro Camposino as in STU, 8th Day, or Teatr 77. The trend toward toward ethical problems characterized STU's Exodus and 8th Day's Do We Have To Settle for What Has Been Called Paradise on Earth ... ? but it could also easily describe Bread and Puppet's works, among others. Not only common categories of subject matter and performance styles but also a common lifestyle linked Polish alternative theatre with that in the rest of the world. In fact, unlike in North America and Western Europe where alternative theatre was only a marginal manifestation of youth

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counterculture, in Poland alternative theatre was one of only a few manifestations of youth counterculture and hence took on a relatively greater importance in the country's cultural life. The lifestyle of members of Polish alternative theatre was studied by sociologists in a much more detailed way than that of their counterparts in America or Western Europe where alternative theatre was considered to be the domain of theatre historians and drama critics. Sociologist Aldona Jawlowska contends that the essential characteristics of this alternative theatre lifestyle were: - The integration of all activities around a center of self-realization that was theatre, eliminating the division of life characteristic for many working people into two incongruous spheres: the sphere of constraint, routine, onerous duty and the sphere of free time only during which one could try to "be oneself." -An "anti-consumption" attitude especially clear ... when the high material standard in many milieux had become the only determinant of a successful life. - A searching for the forms of communal contact that were possible to realize in Polish conditions. (149-50)

These characteristics seem quite consistent with the countercultural lifestyle which developed in the mid-to-late-sixties and early seventies in Western Europe and North America. The main difference is that in Poland this lifestyle was more or less restricted to alternative theatre artists, whereas in the West it was common to many different groups of young people. The working processes that Polish alternative theatre developed were quite similar to those employed by other alternative theatres elsewhere. In general, theatres started with discussions about what they should make a given performance about. Members of the group shared common experiences with each other. On the basis of these experiences, through improvisation, they created typical situations which were then selected and refined by the director, and re-worked through more improvisation. A script might or might not be written down and rehearsed in a conventional way. The role of the director was quite important. According to Edward Chudzinski, the director's "dominant role" (28) was one of the things which distinguished Polish alternative theatre from the collective creation more common in alternative theatre elsewhere. Chudzinski cites Grotowski, Kantor, Kalambur's Litwiniec, STU's Jasinski, 8th Day's Raczak, and 77's Hejduk as examples. However, although collective creation was always embraced as an ideal in Western alternative theatres, many, perhaps influenced like the Poles by the examples of Grotowski and Kantor, eventually turned to strong director-figures such as Joseph Chaikin, Richard Foreman, and Robert Wilson. In America, only the earliest groups of the mid-sixties embraced the idea that everyone should be able to do anything.

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Like alternative theatre elsewhere, Polish alternative theatre in this period strove for a more dynamic relationship with its audience than mainstream theatre commonly attains. Sociologist Slawomir Magala writes: The first and basic requirement of the nonprofessional theatre ranked among the "open" groups is the requirement of the obliteration of the division between audience and actor, consumer and producer of cultural product. This requirement has various consequences from it, among others, results the liquidation of the box-set and the search for scenic space in the "normal" space of contemporary urban centers; the giving up of incidental "inessential" elements of theatrical art for the benefit of a more powerful exhibition of the basic elements; above all, the actor's experience and craft depending on contact with the audience-member and co-formed by that contact, etc. ("Teatr otwarty" 110)

The group which tried the hardest to make its audiences co-creators of the spectacle was Teatr 77, with its post-play discussions and environmental stagings, but all the alternative groups to some extent tried to involve their audiences. Some, like Theatre of the 8th Day, conducted workshops for interested participants. Others, like Kalambur, ran community centers which sponsored many kinds of activities for residents of the surrounding area. Still others, like STU, tried open-air stagings. All these tactics for increasing audience involvement proved to be less powerful than the fact that these theatres were generally saying in their performances what was already on people's minds. Critic Madej Karpinski contends that a theatregoer at a typical, professional production in the early 1970s would be more moved by the alternative theatre: Still-let's be frank to the end- the whole time we will feel that this by no means could be reconciled with the expresion of student theatre shouting "in one breath" about the most important affairs of our country, with the poetics of a theatre which speaks to our every tissue, frays every nerve, tells heart and brain to work more intensely. (136)

The remarkable unity of thought of the Polish intelligentsia of the 1968-75 period made every audience-member feel that these actors were indeed speaking for them. However, there were other traits which distinguished Polish alternative theatre from its counterparts in the rest of the world. One of these traits, according to Chudzinski, is "the close link between theatre and literature" (28). Where alternative theatres in other countries moved farther and farther from literary sources, Polish alternative theatre in 1970-75 stayed close to literature although the literature it used was usually non-dramatic. The legacy of the student poetry productions in the late 1960s to the "full voice" period was the use of poetry in theatre productions. Because the 1970-75 period saw the coming into existence of a generation of poets which

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was, like the theatres, concerned with contemporary events, the marriage of poetry and theatre proved viable, and in fact, the use of poetic language in the works of alternative theatres added to their power. Though general categories of subject matter were similar in Polish productions and alternative theatre in the rest of the world, the specific themes which Poles tended to be interested in differed from those present in its counterparts. As described earlier, many productions were specifically concerned with the idea of Polishness and the Polish identity. Many also used Christian imagery in a way that assumed everyone in the audience would be familiar with it (not an invalid assumption in a country in which over 90% of the population claim to be Roman Catholics). Aldana Jawlowska also identifies two main themes which turn up in almost every spectacle in Polish alternative theatre of this period. The first is the motif of a great promise and its unsuccessful realization. The second is unmasking the falseness of the picture of reality purveyed by official ideology and the mass media (115-116). These two themes, repeated over and over in various permutations, represent the reaction of the young intelligentsia of the time to Communism, an ideology which was always promising a better future but never attaining it and instead constantly celebrating in its official utterances false, trumped-up pictures of reality.

1. T!!catre of the 8th IJay, f'o "jlan: D o Io!Ve Have to Seiih for VC!mt fias ;Jcen Called Paradise on Earth? ... (1975). Photo courtesy of the thmlre.

2.

T h eatre of the 8th Day, Poznan: Discounts for Even/body (1977). P h o to co u rtesy o f the theatre.

3.

Theatre of the 8th Day, Poznan: Oh, H ow N obly We Lived (1979). Photo courtesy of the theatre.

4.

Theatre of the 8th Day, Poznan: M ore Than O ne Life (1981). Photo courtesy of the theatre.

5. Theatre of the 8th Day PoznaJ~: Report from a Besieged City ((1983). Photo courtesy of the theatre.

6.

Theatre of the 8th Day, Poznan: M iracles and M eat (1984). Photo courtesy of the theatre.

7.

Theatre of the 8th D ay, Poznan: A scent (1982) 1985 production. Photo: Leszek Biernacki.

8.

Theatre of the 8th Day, Poznan: VJorimvood (1985). Photo: Leszek Biernacki.

9.

Teatr 77, Lodz: Circle or Triptych (1971). Photo: A ndrzej Bogusz.

'to*.

10. Teatr 77, L6di: Passion JJf (This sequence also appeared in Passion II, 1972). Photo: Marek W ojciechowski.

11.

Teatr 77, Lodz: Passion III (This sequence also appeared in Passion 11,1972). Photo: M arek W ojciechow ski.

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13.

Teatr 77, Lf,di::: Retn ' 'rospectioe (1973). Photo: VVieshnv Prw;

Te.>ltr 77, t6d:;;:

Reirospective (i973l. Photo: Andrzej Bogvsz.

4 DECLINE BUT NOT QUITE FALL

Between 1975 and 1989, events that eventually led to the downfall of the Communist regime occurred. Paradoxically, however, the alternative theatre movement remained in some ways less affected by these events than it had been by the occurrences of either 1956 or 1968. While it could not stay entirely unaffected, inasmuch as the whole nation (and particularly intellectuals) traversed a path replete with emotional ups and downs, these momentous experiences had a more subtle effect than that of earlier historical turning points. These years, which can be divided into the pre-Solidarity, Solidarity, and post-Solidarity stages, represented a prolonged transition between a society where every activity is controlled by the state, and what was called a "civil society," namely, a society that organizes itself regardless of whether the authorities approve or not. The alternative theatre went though its own transition during this time, a transition which adapted itself to the everchanging demands of society. KOR, Solidarity, Martial Law

In the mid-1970s this transition period started with a repetition of two episodes previously seen several times in post-war Polish history: a protest by intellectuals against proposed changes in the Polish constitution and a strike by workers over food price rises. In late 1975, the Party published a new draft of the constitution which institutionalized the "unshakeable fraternal bonds with the Soviet Union" and the "leading role of the PZPR in the state" (qtd. in Ascherson, Struggles 191). Intellectuals immediately mounted protests, largely consisting of petitions signed by prominent intellectuals; the Church also joined in the denunciations. Surprisingly, the authorities gave in and modified the phrases so that they were less offensive and more open to interpretation. This retreat was repeated when in June, 1976, the government announced large increases in the price of food, and strikes broke out all over the country: the Prime Minister appeared on television that night and announced that the price increases would be withdrawn. Despite their admission of defeat, however, the authorities

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punished the workers by encouraging the police to arrest those who had gone on strike. Strikers were brutally beaten, sentenced to especially harsh jail terms, and in some cities all those arrested were dismissed from their jobs. Nevertheless, the opposition learned from these incidents that the Gierek regime lacked resolve: rather than risk the kinds of protest that had toppled previous governments, it would capitulate if enough pressure were brought to bear on it. The aftermath of the strikes in June, 1976 led to the formation of an alliance between workers and intellectuals that in turn led to Solidarity four years later. A small group of intellectuals decided to organize legal defense and family support for the workers who had been victimized after the strikes. This group, the Committee for the Defense of Workers (known by its Polish initials - KOR), also agitated for an amnesty for the imprisoned workers and a parliamentary inquiry into police brutality. It began publishing an underground newspaper called Robotnik (The Worker) which printed facts about oppression on the factory floor. Other opposition groups began to spring up. Journalist Timothy Garton Ash writes: "KOR was an icebreaker. In its wake, more and more intellectuals dared to participate in some kind of opposition activity. Within three years, Poland developed a whole opposition counter-culture without parallel in the Soviet bloc" (18). Besides the underground publication of both books and periodicals, a "Flying University" of unofficial courses taught in professors' apartments, like the flying universities of the Tsarist and World War II occupations, came into existence. The intellectual atmosphere of the late seventies, largely due to the opposition counter-culture initiated by KOR, had been transformed from the optimistic materialism of the early seventies into something much more conspiratorial. Though this conspiratorial counter-culture came under increasing repression, the regime was unwilling to use its full force to completely suppress it. The members of KOR, the printers of underground publications, and the Flying University students and teachers were often raided, beaten up, and imprisoned for short periods of time. However, instead of using its own officers for these tasks, the milicja (militarized police force) "relied on gangs of specially recruited hooligans and thugs" (Ascherson, Struggles 196). There were many individual cases of appalling harassment, including the 1979 raid on KOR member Jacek Kuron's apartment where his wife was beaten with karate blows and half-strangled and his son was given a concussion, and the 1977 death of a Krakow student supporter of KOR, Stanislaw Pyjas, who was found in a stairwell with head injuries presumably inflicted by one of these police gangs. Still, Gierek never allowed the security police to initiate a real Stalinist-type terror campaign: there were no mass

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arrests, show trials, or lengthy prison sentences. The reasons for this restraint have mystified analysts: perhaps Gierek was unwilling to antagonize the West on whom he was dependent for enormous sums of loan money, or perhaps he simply refused to believe in the power of ideas to excite masses of people to opposition. Whatever the reason, from his point of view, this toleration of what became an increasingly powerful opposition alliance among the intelligentsia, the workers, and the Catholic Church was an enormous miscalculation. The Catholic Church began in the late seventies to play a greater role in fostering this opposition. After 1976, the Church cooperated with KOR in collecting money to aid workers. Adam Michnik, a member of KOR who had been one of the students arrested in 1968, in 1977 published the book The Church, The Left, A Dialogue (Kosci6t, lewica, dialog) which argued for a new cooperation between intellectuals and the Church in order to nonviolently transform society. Though this book was published in an emigre press in Paris, it was smuggled back into Poland and widely read and discussed there. Further, the election of Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Krakow to the papacy in October, 1978 heartened the opposition. As Archbishop of Krakow, Cardinal Wojtyla had steadfastly supported lay Catholic groups that provided aboveground publication opportunities for opposition writers. Now these groups felt they had a friend not merely in Krakow or even Warsaw, but in Rome. To a certain extent, this paralleled the situation in 1830 when, in the "Great Emigration," the spiritual and moral leadership of Poland had been transferred to the West. The new Pope's visit to his homeland in June, 1979 was a galvanizing event for many Poles. The Gierek regime permitted young Catholic volunteers to order the crowds for huge masses and other meetings, thus reinforcing the notion that KOR and other opposition groups had been promulgating since 1976: that Polish society was capable of organizing itself without the "help" of the authorities. All these trends of the late seventies - the coming into existence of KOR and other opposition groups, the development of underground publication opportunities, the alliance of workers and intellectuals, and the increased influence of the Church- combined to produce the peculiar character of Solidarity. The strikes that brought it into existence, however, were a result of the ongoing economic crisis and the government's feeble efforts to alleviate it. Once again in July, 1980, the authorities attempted to raise prices, and once again, workers went out on strike in protest. This time, however, the work that KOR had been doing to raise the consciousness of the workers and to convince them that their plight was no different from that of the intelligentsia bore fruit. Throughout July and early August there were brief strikes all over the country which were quickly settled by the

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authorities; KOR acted as an "information exchange" to let strikers in one factory know what was going on elsewhere. The strike demands steadily escalated until they no longer dealt simply with pay levels but with issues like press censorship and trade unions free of government control as well. On August 14, the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, site of the bloody confrontations of 1970, went out on strike. This strike, led by an unemployed electrician who had taken part in the fighting in 1970, Lech Wal~sa, resulted in the legal recognition two weeks later of the "independent, self-managing trade union" Solidarity (Ascherson, Struggles 201-202). The sixteen months of Solidarity's legal existence were marked by an extraordinary feeling of liberation. Though the authorities continued to constantly harass and try to intimidate union members, barriers to independent expression which had existed since Stalinist times were suddenly swept away. Journalist Lawrence Weschler describes the reaction, especially of intellectuals, to the phenomenon of Solidarity: During the Solidarity time, speech had suddenly come unstoppered, it was free - but it was far from breezy. On the contrary, it was fraught with an overwhelming intensity. More than anything else, Solidarity, in the passion of its first bloom, was a revolution in naming calling things by their true names; digging up long-warped historical truths and burnishing them, restoring their true form; revelling in that form. During 1980 and 1981, to say was to do. ("Skirmish" 66)

Once more, as in the Romantic era, there was a congruence between the word and the deed. Intellectual advisors, some of them former members of KOR or other late seventies opposition groups, played important roles in Solidarity. Many went to work full-time for Solidarity as translators, press spokesmen, newsletter publishers, office managers, or strategists. Others joined the union, remained in their usual workplaces, and worked to transform them. Journalism, even the above-ground variety published by the party or the government, became much more open. The period from August, 1980 to December, 1981 was a time of feverish union organizing, discussion, planning, publishing and, most of all, of hope. And then, abruptly, in the early morning hours of December 13, 1981, martial law was declared, bringing all this feverish activity to a halt. Solidarity activists, many of whom were gathered in Gdansk for a meeting, were rounded up and thrown into internment camps; a few lucky ones escaped the police dragnets and went underground. All telephone lines were disconnected and a curfew was imposed. General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the Prime Minister, Defense Minister, and First Secretary of the Party, went on television to declare a "state of war" ("stan wojenny") against his own people. The ZOMO riot police, together with the army, used water cannons

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and, in some cases, tanks to break up demonstrations and strikes. Altogether, over 10,000 people were confined to internment camps or prisons and between fifty and a hundred were killed. It seemed that Stalinism had returned with a vengeance. Yet the brutality of General Jaruzelski's forces did not suffice to completely cow the Poles into submission. Compared to the years of state terror that Hungary endured after 1956 or Czechoslovakia after 1968, Jaruzelski's coup was just another Polish half-measure. Solidarity became, overnight, an illegal organization, but those of its activists who managed to evade arrest set up an underground committee which attempted to direct its members. After the first, terrifying weeks of martial law were over and the curfew was lifted, life returned, more or less, to normal. But Solidarity had left its mark: people defied the martial law regime in subtle ways. The Poles continued freely to say what they thought, and very little was done to silence them. They wore jewelry that expressed their opinions (miniscule versions of the illegal Solidarity emblem, V for victory pins, rabbit ears after the V-pins were outlawed), told jokes about Jaruzelski and the milicja, laid wreaths of flowers on sites of violently dispersed demonstrations, and painted graffiti on walls. Despite the fact that possession of duplicating equipment of any kind was illegal without prior government approval, an underground publishing industry even bigger than that in the late seventies revived. The declaration of martial law served, more than anything, to underscore the point that Poland had become a nation divided into "them," the authorities, and "us," Solidarity and the people. This bitterness against the powers-that-be persisted even after "the state of war" officially ended in July, 1983 and a general amnesty for political prisoners followed. The Jaruzelski government tried, like the Gierek and Gomulka governments before it, to reform the economy, but throughout the 1980s Polish economic indicators slipped steadily downwards. The regime claimed to be encouraging private enterprise, and indeed, a good number of small shops and businesses were started during this period, but the bureaucracy constantly put roadblocks in the way of these businesses. People, including members of the intelligentsia relatively unaffected during the 1970s, saw their standards of living plummet. A feeling of hopelessness, that things would never get any better, came over many. Young people especially became increasingly alienated, and some joined new illegal organizations such as "Fighting Solidarity" and "Freedom and Peace" that were more militant than Solidarity had been. Others tried to emigrate. On the other hand, cultural controls were gradually relaxed in the post-martial law period. The presence and variety of the underground press induced above-ground, official publications to become more and more open.

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The legal Catholic press now printed essays signed with oppositionists' bylines. Television began to show previously unthinkable films such as Dr. Zhivago or Jerzy Skolimowski's Moonlighting. The Church gained in influence, distributing foreign aid to poor families, providing forums for political art such as poetry readings and art exhibitions within its walls, and starting discussion clubs for youth. No matter how tolerant the Jaruzelski government became in the areas of free speech and the Church, however, the populace never forgave it for martial law and its incompetence in managing the economy. Eventually the combination of popular discontent, a disintegrating economy, and free speech brought about Solidarity's triumph in 1989. Once again, the government's announcement of price increases caused an explosion of strikes in 1988. Curiously, though these strikes were not directed by Solidarity veterans and were often discouraged by them, one of the strikers' principle demands was the recognition of Solidarity. Meanwhile, the economy continued to go further and further downhill, and finally, in an attempt to rally the support of the populace for his reforms, General J aruzelski decided in 1989 to initiate "roundtable discussions" with representatives of (the still officially nonexistent) Solidarity. Out of those talks came an historic compromise: in exchange for recognition of the union, Solidarity would agree to take part in a snap election, thereby officially taking some responsibility for the state of the economy. The elections were to be only semi-free; Solidarity was permitted to contest all of the seats in the newly-created Senate, but only thirty-five percent of the seats in the crucial lower house of Parliament. In the event, despite having to build its campaign organization from scratch, Solidarity won 260 of the 261 seats it was permitted to contest. Moreover, most of the Communists who had run unopposed (the top officials in the Jaruzelski regime) had lost their elections; the voters simply crossed their names off the ballot. This defeat threw the stunned Party-members into complete disarray. General Jaruzelski was elected President by the lower house of the new Parliament but only by a one-vote majority. He asked his Interior Minister, General Kiszczak, to act as Prime Minister and assemble a Cabinet that would be approved by Parliament. Kiszczak could not muster the votes among the Communist or allied parties, and Solidarity delegates refused to take part in a Communist-led coalition. However, Lech Wal~sa managed to persuade the two small parties, the Democrats and the Peasant's Party, who had been allied with the Communists for decades, to desert the Communists, form a coalition with the Solidarity parliamentarians, and elect their own Cabinet with Tadeusz Mazowiecki, an eminent Catholic journalist, as Prime Minister. By September, 1989, a Solidarity-led government was in place.

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In some ways the pre-Solidarity, Solidarity, and post-Solidarity periods resemble the pre-Polish October, Polish October, and post-October periods in post-war Polish history. Both Solidarity and the Polish October were prefigured by periods of activity, were initiated by workers' rebellions, generated a tremendous amount of optimism for a time, and were followed by periods of dejection. However, the nature of the intelligentsia's collective worldview had undergone a sea-change between 1956 and 1980. In 1956, intellectuals had wanted to reform, to "revise" Communism to make it less oppressive, but they still considered themselves Communists. In 1980, the Communists were regarded more as an obstacle to be maneuvered around than as a force capable of reforming the nation. Though many of the intellectuals active in KOR and Solidarity originally came from a leftist background, they had been through the crisis of 1968, had been purged from the Party, imprisoned, and had revised their thinking. During Solidarity's heyday, a residue of Marxism remained in the talk of a "third way" somewhere between capitalism and Communism, but that talk abruptly ceased after martial law was declared. As if purposefully, the Communists beat ideas of socialism out of the heads of the intelligentsia first in 1968 and then in 1981. In addition, by firing oppositionists from state jobs the regime also forced many of them into becoming capitalists and weakened support for some of the egalitarian ideas that Solidarity was originally founded on. By the time the Solidarity-led government took power in 1989, the only question hotly being discussed among intellectuals was how quickly the transformation from Communism to capitalism should be effectuated. Mainstream Theatre Becomes Politicized This period saw a major shift in the mainstream theatre from complacency to politicization. In an article entitled "New Dignity," Kazimierz Braun, a Polish director and playwright writing under the pseudonym Jerzy Tymicki, claims that Polish theatre in the 1970s had "a love affair with Communism" (Tymicki 13) which was only broken by the Solidarity period and martial law. To be sure, there were some interesting plays written and productions staged during the late seventies. For example, Tadeusz R6zewicz's Odejscie gtodomora (The Hunger Artist Departs), and Do piachu ... (Bite the Dust ... ) were published in 1976 and 1979; J6zef Szajna's last production, Cervantes, premiered in 1976; Andrzej Wajda directed acclaimed productions of Emigranci (The Emigrants) by Slawomir Mrozek in 1976, Nastasya Filipovna based on Dostoevsky's The Idiot and Rozmowy z katem (Conversations with the Executioner) by Kazimierz Moczarski, adapted by Zygmunt Hubner, in 1977; Jerzy Grzegorzewski directed The Marriage by Witold Gombrowicz in 1976, The Wedding by Stanislaw Wyspianski in 1977, and The Undivine Comedy by

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Zygmunt Krasinski in 1979; and Kazimierz Braun, the director of the Wsp6lczesny (Contemporary) Theatre in Wrodaw, directed Anna Livia, an adaptation of Joyce's works by Madej Slomczynski, in 1977. Despite their critical acclaim, however, these productions failed to consistently bring audiences into theatres. Braun/Tymicki writes: In the late 1970s the traditional, large, and attentive theatre public began to turn its back on that theatre which abandoned the social and political reality of its own country. The public abandoned a theatre which disconnected itself from the life of the Polish people. (Tymicki 23)

By the end of the 1970s, a time of increasing engagement and participation in opposition activities by intellectuals, the mainstream theatre appeared more and more irrelevant. This situation changed, albeit slowly, with the advent of Solidarity in August, 1980. Since theatrical seasons had to be approved in advance by the censors' board, the 1980-81 season had been submitted before August, and could only be changed with great difficulty. Consequently, there were very few productions dealing with the new state of affairs brought into being by Solidarity's legal existence during that season. Solidarity itself sponsored some performances such as the four-hour Tragedia romantyczna (Romantic Tragedy), adapted from Mickiewicz's Forefathers' Eve and Slowacki's Kordian, which was performed in a sports stadium in July, 1981, but these were sentimental appeals to patriotism. The repertories proposed for the 1981-82 season included more new, courageous works, including Slawomir Mrozek's play, Ambasador (The Ambassador) which had its world premiere in Warsaw the month before martial law was declared; it depicts a Polish ambassador whose state has collapsed and who barricades himself in his embassy, refusing to surrender to the authorities of the state (by implication the USSR). In general, however, the Solidarity period was not distinguished by an outburst of innovation in the theatre. Braun/Tymicki comments: New, important, great performances were not created. In the 16 months of Solidarity, Polish theatre did not do much from an artistic point of view. Too few performances expressed ideas and values dear to the emerging nation. Time was short. And let's not forget that the Party, the censorship, and the bureaucracy were still active, still fighting desperately against any independent thought, any anti-totalitarian idea. (Tymicki 29)

On the other hand, the consciousness of actors, directors, and other theatre workers was changed during this sixteen month period. Previously, many theatre people had been members of the Communist Party (PZPR) and some had even served on Party regional committees, presidia of Party congresses, and the Central Committee. Now, Solidarity cells were organized in all

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theatres, and many Party members (in some theatres 100 percent) tore up their membership cards. This change in consciousness became evident after martial law was declared on December 13, 1981. On the day after the coup, while normal television service was suspended, the independent actor's union (Polish initials - ZASP) called for a boycott of the mass media. Considering that most Polish actors ordinarily supplemented their rather meager earnings from theatre work with appearances on television, this decision showed courage. Throughout the whole of 1982, virtually all actors in Poland refused to be seen on television or heard on the radio. Despite pleas and cash inducements from the Ministry of Culture, the boycott remained unbroken, and Polish television in 1982 had to satisfy itself with reruns, panel discussions, and Soviet imports. The public showed its appreciation in a "Week of Solidarity with the Theatre" (organized by underground Solidarity and actually lasting several months) when audiences gave standing ovations, cheers, and flowers to every theatrical performance. Later, the regime managed to induce performers, starting with actors from provincial theatres who had never before had the chance to perform on television, to break the boycott. Still, as Braun/Tymicki points out, even in 1985 many of the best actors and directors were still refusing to work on television (33). From their 1970s passive acquiescence in the state of affairs under Communism, theatre workers had moved to a more activist stance. During the period of martial law, some mainstream theatres attemped to present performances that reacted to recent history, that is, to Solidarity and its repression. Often, these performances used metaphor, allusion, or historical disguise to pass censorship. For example, Wyzwolony (The Delivered) by Stanislaw Brejdygant, produced in 1982 in Warsaw and Wrodaw, depicts a Polish officer interned by the Prussians after the Insurrection of 1831 who refuses to sign a declaration that he will stop fighting for Polish freedom, just as many of the internees during martial law refused to sign such declarations. Spiewnik domowy (Home Hymnal) based on songs by Stanislaw Moniuszko and directed by Adam Hanuszkiewicz in 1982, consisted of songs of mourning from the Insurrection of 1863; it was "read" by the audience as a requiem for Solidarity. Ksiq.dz Marek (Father Marek) by Juliusz Slowacki, which was performed in Warsaw and Wrodaw, depicts an instance of treason which leads to a Polish city being conquered by the Russians in the eighteenth century. D:iuma (The Plague) by Kazimierz Braun, based on motifs from Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year and Albert Camus's The Plague, depicts communism and martial law as a deadly disease; it opened in Wrodaw in 1983. Though these productions were permitted by the censorship office, the bureaucrats at the Ministry of Culture

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considered them provocative and dismissed most of the directors of the theatres where they were produced. It seemed that, during the martial law period and shortly thereafter, even that amount of daring which had been permitted since 1956 in the mainstream theatre was too much for the Ministry of Culture to allow. However, the authorities did not consistently repress all theatrical expressions of solidarity with Solidarity throughout the eighties. Even during martial law, not all directors who produced controversial material were dismissed: the djrector of the Warsaw theatre which presented The Delivered was reprimanded but retained his post. Other Warsaw theatres produced productions of Antigone with Creon as a power-mad megalomaniac, and Yevgeny Shvartz's The Dragon, an anti-Stalinist parable. Later, after the lifting of martial law in July, 1983, the parameters of the allowable relaxed further and further. For example, in 1984, Andrzej Wajda directed another version of Antigone for the Stary Theatre in Krakow which included explicit visual references to martial law in the costuming of Creon's soldiers as ZOMO police. And in 1988, the Wybrzeze Theatre in Gdansk was allowed to present Stqd do Ameryki (From Here to America) by Wladyslaw Zawistowski, the first play produced in Poland to take explicitly the experience of Solidarity and martial law as its subject matter. At a certain point in the late eighties, the authorities in the Ministry of Culture who regulated theatre, like the whole Jaruzelski regime itself, seemed to tire of the struggle. Of course, not all mainstream productions in the eighties were attempts to incorporate politics into the theatre. Tadeusz R6zewicz's Pulapka (The Trap), an examination of Kafka's relationship with his father which many consider to be his finest play, was published in 1982 and saw production in 1984. Andrzej Wajda directed Zbrodnia i kara (Crime and Punishment), an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's work, in 1984 and Zemsta (Vengeance) by Aleksander Fredro in 1986. 1985 was the hundredth anniversary of Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz's birth, and many excellent productions of his works were produced by repertory theatres all over Poland that year. A new theatre named after Witkiewicz and dedicated to experimental productions of his plays and works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Calderon was founded in Zakopane by a group of young professional actors. Despite the high technical quality of these and other productions, however, audiences rarely flocked to see any work which did not contain political allusions of some kind. Halina Filipowicz writes: [O]ne could not help noticing that there was something amiss in the Polish theatre of the 1980s. Each season theatres registered sharply declining attendance. To be sure, productions such as Wajda's Antigone and Braun's The Plague drew large audiences. To what extent,

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however, was their success due to the personae of the authors of those theatrical events - to their personae not only as artists, but as victims of repressions and important figures in the democratic opposition? To what extent was their success due to the very specific political circumstances which called for a ritualizing of society's resistance against the Communists? ("After Solidarity" 78)

In other words, the audience's tendency to regard the mainstream theatre as generally irrelevant continued in the eighties, except that some artists (because of their reputations as Solidarity activists or as victims of repression) and some individual productions were now considered so relevant that they were not to be missed. Alternative Theatre 1976-1989

The institution that had been called "student" theatre became much less important during this period. This decline resulted from several factors. One was a confusion or blending of "professional" and "alternative" categories, so that some companies which had been called "student theatres" now became "professional theatres," and professional actors began to act in alternative or even "underground" venues. Another was a deliberate attempt by the authorities to marginalize student theatres and to punish them for engaging in politics. A third factor was a lack of innovation by these theatres themselves; many repeated the formulas of the early seventies without trying to find their own voices. Still another element was the fact that new types of producing organizations, which related to their audiences/ communities in different ways than the student theatres had, came into being. Finally, the effects of Solidarity, martial law, and the post-martial law demoralization which swept the intelligentsia were devastating on the student theatre. By the end of the Communist era in Poland this phenomenon had been gradually transformed from an almost unified theatre movement into a much looser configuration of independent theatre companies, some of them with absolutely no ties to the former student theatre movement. The blending of professional and alternative types of theatre, hitherto kept strictly separate in Poland (with the possible exception of Grotowski's Theatre Laboratory), started in the late 1970s. The Ministry of Culture decided that those theatres which had existed for some time and no longer contained students in their companies should no longer be funded through the socialist student organization, SZSP. However, the ministry did not want to fund these theatres directly, or to fund them at the same levels as the professional repertory theatres found in every city in Poland. So they were placed under the aegis of subsidiary entertainments funded by one of two

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organizations: the United Companies of Entertainment (Polish initials ZPR) or Estrada (Bandstand). ZPR normally funded diversions such as circuses, pinball rooms, or entertainment in eating establishments while Estrada usually worked with singers, cabaret artists, or striptease dancers. Paradoxically, these organizations were now the financers of avant-garde theatre, and they wanted these theatres, like their other ventures, to be "popular." The professionalization of the older student theatres began in 1976 when Teatr STU was placed under the patronage of ZPR. This change was good in a material sense for the theatre: the actors now began to receive salaries, they had money for equipment, scenery, and costumes, and even places to rehearse and perform. But it had an immediate impact on the tone and content of their performances. Though Krzysztof Jasinski continued to experiment with the form of his theatre works, he abandoned the "poor theatre" format of Falling, Polish Dreambook, and Exodus in favor of huge, entertaining (albeit still avant-garde), musical productions sometimes staged in circus tents. These productions, including Pacjenci (Patients- 1976) based on The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, Szalona lokomotywa (The Crazy Locomotive - 1977) based on works by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, Operetta (1979) by Witold Gombrowicz, and Donkichoteria (Quixotry- 1980) based on Cervantes, were musically and theatrically innovative, but they no longer expressed the collective preoccupations of their generation the way Falling, Polish Dreambook, and Exodus had. STU now employed professional actors and recent drama school graduates alongside amateurs. In all other ways, however, it had essentially become no different from other professional theatres with a taste for experimentation; by this time there were quite a few of these in Poland. The professionalization of the student theatres raised a number of questions. According to theatre critic Tadeusz Nyczek, professionalization changed the perspective of actors. When these actors had started out, they were very young students; now they were mature professionals. They now had to think about permanent employment in this type of theatre perhaps for their whole lives, they had to think about job security, and most important of all, they to think about how an actor in professional alternative theatre should define his work (Nyczek interview). Evidently, however, the Ministry of Culture was pleased with the effects of professionalization on STU, because in 1979, they also placed Kalambur, Teatr 77, and Warsaw's Akademia Ruchu (Academy of Movement) under the auspices of ZPR, and the Theatre of the 8th Day under the auspices of Estrada. Kalambur and 77 tried to follow the lead of STU in becoming professional avant-garde theatre companies, but they failed to produce any interesting new productions. The

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Theatre of the 8th Day and Akademia Ruchu, however, tried to develop their own aesthetic of alternative theatre. Therefore, it can be said that STU, 77, and Kalambur in some sense "left" the ranks of alternative theatres whereas the 8th Day and Akademia Ruchu remained within those ranks. Other developments in this period also contributed to the decline of the student theatre stream of alternative theatre in favor of a multiciplicity of types of alternative theatre. During and after martial law, for example, alternative venues for political theatre became common. Professional actors, as well as professionalized ex-student theatres, presented plays that had been forbidden or that had no possibility of being approved by the censorship office in private homes or in churches. For example, the Teatr Domowy (Home Theatre) presented five productions which toured apartments of sympathizers in Warsaw and Wrodaw starting in November, 1982. The first of these was entitled 0 przywracaniu porzqdku (On the Restoration of Order) and the last was a double bill of Vaclav Havel's Largo Desolato and Pavel Kohout's Tumbledown. Generally audiences for such productions numbered from fifty to one hundred people, or as many as the largest room in the apartment could hold. Some living room performances were broken up by the police the actors arrested, the audience-members interrogated, and the apartment owner fined. This kind of "private" theatre was advertised only by word of mouth, but church performances were announced in advance from the pulpit. Many of these productions were religious in theme, but had strong political overtones. Some examples of well-known church productions during the 1980s included Andrzej Wajda's 1985 production of Ernest Bryll's play Wieczernik (The Last Supper) in the Church on Zytnia Street in Warsaw, the actress Danuta Michalowska' s one-woman show based on the writings of St. Theresa of Avila in Krakow, and a play entitled Epitafium Swi?tem Kazimierzowi (The Epitaph of St. Kazimierz) which was performed in Wrodaw, and then toured to other churches all over Poland. Though home and church performances could be said to be "alternative" in the sense that they were either illegal or semi-legal, for the most part they were traditional plays being performed in untraditional venues. Nevertheless, by taking part in these types of activities, professional actors and directors, who had more to lose, took more risks than most of the participants in student theatres, who continued to perform, for the most part, legally. The lines between "professional" and "alternative" theatre continued to be blurred at the street theatre festival which was held in southwestern Poland annually from 1983 to 1989. This was sponsored by a professional theatre, the Cyprian Norwid Theatre of Jelenia G6ra, and its director Alina Obidniak, a woman who had been a member of the Presidium of the 1976

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Communist Party congress. Far from embracing socialist realism, however, she believed that "traditional theatres should not shun avant-garde experiments" (Burzynski, "2nd" 8), and she sponsored a number of events bringing professional theatre people and alternative practitioners together. The street theatre festival had an international dimension: it included theatre companies and individual performers from all over Europe, North America, and Japan, as well as Polish performers. The majority of the performances at this festival, which took place in small towns and villages in lower Silesia over the course of three weeks or a month at the end of the summer, were circus-type or mime entertainments. Each year, however, some of the groups which were invited attempted to make serious artistic or political statements using the medium of visual street theatre. These included foreign troupes such as Teatro Nucleo from Italy (a participant in the second, third, and fourth festivals); Brith Gof from Wales (second and third festivals); and Cosmos Kolej from France (third and fourth festivals); and Polish groups such as the Theatre of the 8th Day (first and second festivals); Akademia Ruchu (first festival); and Lublin's Teatr Provisorium (second festival). 1 The Polish groups' performances at this street theatre festival were politically as well as artistically provocative. During the 1976-89 period, then, the situation which had basically obtained from 1954 to 1975, of strict segregation of theatre into the categories of professional, amateur, and alternative/ student, completely broke down. Professional actors now sometimes acted in alternative venues and alternative theatre companies appeared at festivals sponsored by professional theatres. Some theatre companies which had started out as "student" theatres, funded by SZSP, were now "professional" theatres funded by branches of the Ministry of Culture devoted to popular arts. Some of these professionalized student theatres became quite similar to "regular," professional, state-funded, repertory theatres, others became like very amateurish versions of professional repertory theatres, and a few continued experimenting with avant-garde forms and political content. There were also a few student theatre companies which lost their official funding from SZSP, were not professionalized, but still managed to scrape together enough funds privately and sometimes from local Houses of Culture to produce occasional productions. Finally, theatre companies existed which were completely unfunded by any state funding agency. Consequently, the atmosphere vis a vis the alternative theatre by the end of the 1980s was far closer to that which existed in western European and 1 For descriptions of the first, second, and third International Festivals of Street Theatres see Dzieduszycka, "International;" Burzynski, "2nd;" Burzynski, "3rd;" Konic; and Swidwh1ska.

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North American countries than the atmosphere in the early 1970s. The trend, so popular in America and western Europe, toward performance art-visual theatre-happenings, in other words, toward theatre created by visual artists, which had already been seen in sixties Polish student theatre, revived in a new form in the late seventies and eighties. In addition, a kind of anthropological theatre, drawing perhaps on some of Peter Brook's experiments, emerged and concentrated on exploring the roots of theatre in relationship to its community and with folk culture. However, throughout this period, there was still a group of political alternative theatres which exerted a very powerful influence on the rest of alternative theatre, and, because of the volatile political situation, on the imagination of its audiences. Moreover, even this stream evolved away from its student roots. Thus, while there was less excitement about alternative theatre during this period than there had been in the early seventies "full voice" years, and the number of these theatres grew steadily smaller, there was an interesting diversification and enrichment which continued despite, in many cases, the authorities' efforts to suppress or marginalize it. During the late seventies, political alternative theatre produced by student or ex-student groups was still the predominant type of alternative theatre. However, the coming into existence of an opposition movement which soon began to produce cultural artifacts (underground books, newspapers, and magazines) that spoke much more plainly about Polish realities than the censorship office would allow the student theatres to speak, created a dilemma for the theatres. Should they become part of the opposition or remain part of the (Communist) establishment and try to reform it from within? Some student theatre leaders from the early seventies, notably Zdzislaw Hejduk of Teatr 77, became quite hostile toward the independent cultural movement. Jeffrey Goldfarb explains this reaction: Their position has been that Student Theatre is a continuously critical and visible cultural form, and any cultural development which, by being even more critical and independent, narrows the possibilities of public expression, is a negative development. Others see this as a self-serving rationalization, claiming that cultural life can be truly autonomous only in the opposition. (Cultural20)

The latter group of student theatre leaders saw the existence of the opposition as an inspiration for their own work. They saw the Theatre of the 8th Day, which decided in the midseventies to create their productions as if the censor did not exist, as their leader, and they began to imitate its bold critique of social problems. 2 2

Parts of the following section were previously published in Cioffi, "Alternative."

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However, censorship at this time started to get tougher. The Polish Student Organization (ZSP) had become the Socialist Polish Student Organization (SZSP) in 1973, and after 1976 it began to take a more and more supervisory attitude toward the theatres it funded. Those theatres which wanted to be more daring had to develop strategies to deal with both SZSP and the increasingly repressive censorship offices. Parts of plays or even whole plays themselves were forbidden. In response, some companies performed "banned plays" only for small audiences of invited guests. Other companies, such as the Theatre of the 8th Day, often had two versions of their plays- one for the censors, and the other "real" version with the censored parts restored, which they would perform in a given town after the censors had okayed the de-politicized version. This sort of trickery, though it won the 8th Day a special place in the hearts of their audiences, earned the enmity of the authorities. Perhaps recognizing student theatre's potential to link up with other parts of the increasingly vital opposition culture, the authorities during the late seventies began to treat the whole phenomenon much more suspiciously than they had during the early seventies. With the rise of Solidarity in 1980, many of the student theatres and other alternative groups suspended activities because what was happening in the streets, the factories, and the shipyards was more interesting. Others continued, but with mixed results. Jan Brylowski writes in the Catholic monthly Temperance and Work of those who continued to make theatre during this time: The animators of these groups slowly gave up "politics" comprehended on the spur of the occasion, in favor of creating a more, so to say, transcendental reality, which nevertheless contained the actual evolution of events. Realizing the dangers of simplification, of too short a distance, of the pressure of emotions, they tried to set up a universal perspective .... The audience expected something else: investigative journalism, simple messages, and especially political appeals and declarations. Young theatre did not "rise" to this new, inhibiting situation. (15)

An example of this failure to cope with audience expectations was the theatre festival entitled "Student Theatre for Workers" sponsored by the Gdansk student theatre Jedynka (Number One) as one of many attempts during the Solidarity era to bring the workers and the intelligentsia together. However, bringing this avant-garde phenomenon loaded with symbolism and allusion to an audience of shipyard workers did not succeed. Few workers came to see the performances and those that did were not really pleased with the plays. Alternative theatre of the type that the student theatres had developed in the 1970s seemed just as irrelevant to the workers as what was shown in the provincial state-supported repertory theatres.

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The declaration of martial law on December 13, 1981 immediately solved the problem of irrelevance, however. Many of those who had been participants in student theatres or ex-student theatres were either interned or imprisoned for many months: four of the men from Teatr Provisorium of Lublin, the entire troupe of TWA from Wrodaw, and two of the actors from the Theatre of the 8th Day. During the Solidarity period, most of the student theatres which had not been professionalized had been taken under the wing of NZS, the independent student union; when this union was banned, they lost the foundations of their material existence, and many of them lost their will to survive. Those that did manage to find the financial and spiritual wherewithal to continue to make performances, however, found their traditional student audience eager for theatre that dealt with the experiences that the nation had just been through. The only problem was that the authorities were equally eager to suppress any productions which either implicitly or explicitly took up the subjects of Solidarity or martial law. When martial law was eventually suspended, and student theatres tried to return to the situation they had been used to in the seventies, they found the landscape had radically changed. There were now fewer theatres, fewer journalists interested in the movement, fewer public discussions, altogether less hoopla and to-do. Theatre critic Marek Miller, writing about a student theatre festival in 1986, called student theatre in the 1980s the "third wave" after the 1950s "first wave" and 1970s "second wave" (6). He contends that these third wave theatres represented what he called "the aesthetics of silence:" they had to go about their work quietly so as not to arouse the authorities and to confine themselves to talking among themselves and privately with interested audience members. As the decade progressed further away from the experiences of Solidarity and martial law, however, these aesthetics of silence, and indeed, the entire student theatre movement, became so silent as to seem practically nonexistent. The authorities, by withholding or taking away funding, gradually starved the remaining seventies political student and ex-student theatres to such an extent that they were able to produce new productions only very rarely. The newer student theatres of the 1980s generally produced bad imitations of the successful student theatres of the seventies. Miller writes of the latter: "They believe that it is enough to fall into a fit of convulsions, and shout 'fuck,' 'vodka,' 'informer,' and 'queue,' in order to get to the bottom of things, to understand the essence" (6). After the 1987 START festival for student theatres making their debut, an article appeared entitled "Student Theatre: It Isn't, It Isn't, It Isn't" (Zi6lkowska). The student theatre, once so lively, had become moribund. On the other hand, even the bad, amateurish, student theatres continued to experiment with avant-garde formats and improvisational

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construction in their performances. Lech Raczak, the director of the Theatre of the 8th Day, pointed out in an interview in 1985: One thing seems important - and it is a new phenomenon in Poland - and that is that these youth amateur theatres ... now have a completely different shape. They don't model themselves on the classical theatre where you play nineteenth or early twentieth century stuff. Now they do theatre the way we do it or the way other theatres which are opposed to the official theatre do it. Which means that our type of theatre has been accepted by these young people as a model.. .. It is meaningful at least in this sense, that there is some wider feeling that the traditional theatre does not suffice as a means of expression for contemporary people in this country. (Personal interview)

In addition, taking their cue from the independent publishing movement, some groups of young people in the 1980s began to perform political theatre that was completely independent of the student theatre movement. At first these theatres tried to work through traditional student theatre structures, but they soon found them too confining. So, like their counterparts in underground publishing, they began to raise money independently, to rehearse without registering their groups with university authorities, to invite people to private performances without advertising, and to perform without submitting scripts to the censorship office. Some groups even began to arrange guerilla theatre "actions" on the streets of various cities. In the 1976-1989 period, then, there were three generations of political alternative theatre performers in Poland. First of all, there were still some "relics" left over from the "full voice" period of 1970-1975. The most important of these, the Theatre of the 8th Day, was the only theatre of this group which retained its aesthetic quality while still remaining true to its original mission to deal "with the simple facts of political and social reality" (Cioffi & Ceynowa 82). Secondly, there were theatres that came into existence during the late seventies. The most significant of these groups was Lublin's Teatr Provisorium, a group which began producing in the late seventies and continued in the eighties. Finally, there were those groups which came on the scene in the eighties. Some of these were self-funding but tried to some extent to work through student theatre mechanisms such as festivals; others, like Wroclaw's Orange Alternative, had nothing to do with the student theatre scene.

The Generation of '68: The Theatre of the 8th Day In the 1976-1989 period, the Theatre of the 8th Day came into its own. Although little known outside of Poland during most of this time, it gained celebrity inside the country as the most famous of the alternative groups. Many would assert that this celebrity was due to the oppositional stance

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taken by the theatre and to their consequent persecution by the authorities. Of all the political theatres, the Theatre of the 8th Day was the one which was most beleaguered by the powers-that-be and therefore gained a good deal of sympathy from audience-members on that count alone. Nevertheless, the 8th Day continued working on theatrical techniques they had developed in the early seventies and during this period matured into a well-honed, physically precise, yet emotionally intense group of dedicated actors. The high aesthetic quality of their work coupled with their courageous decision not to compromise in the face of greater and greater oppression by the party-state apparatus made the Theatre of the 8th Day the unofficial leaders of the alternative theatre movement. During the late seventies officials of various levels seemed particularly determined to bedevil the theatre. Even before 1976, the 8th Day had had problems with regional authorities and with the censorship office in Poznan, as mentioned in Chapter 3. After 1976, they were essentially regarded as "KOR's theatre" by the authorities, and were subjected to both major and minor harassment. In the 1976-1979 period, for example, there was a total press blackout about them. No officially published newspaper was allowed to discuss their work. In addition, 8th Day was not permitted to travel abroad during that period or to perform in some Polish cities, especially Warsaw. In general, the group endured many of the same intimidations that major figures in KOR, such as Adam Michnik or Jacek Kuron, did, including short-term 48-hour detentions without charge by the police, apartment searches and seizures of "suspicious material," and even two trials on trumped-up charges: one for "economic fraud" and the other for traveling on a tram without tickets and beating up policemen. Though the late seventies was a difficult period for the 8th Day politically, however, it proved especially fruitful artistically. In 1976, when group members began to work on Przecena dla wszystkich (Discounts for Everybody- premiere 1977), they decided to take the next step in their artistic development. Previously the textual material in their performances had consisted of fragments of already existing works - great literature, poetry, or journalism- mixed together. Now, they determined to use their own words and thus, in Lech Raczak's words "to make our productions fully our own responsibility" (Cioffi & Ceynowa 82). For this performance they collaborated with two musicians, Grzegorz Banaszak and Jan Kaczmarek, who adopted the name "Orchestra of the 8th Day," and later recorded albums under this name. Discounts was a breakthrough for the theatre in much the same way that In One Breath had been earlier: both productions caused the theatre to make contact with a wider public than that in the "ghetto" of student culture. With Discounts the 8th Day found its own voice: grotesque,

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ironic, musicaC non-realistic, yet firmly grounded in political and social reality. Discounts did not have a clear plotline as earlier 8th Day performances had. Director Lech Raczak commented in a later interview that: Discounts, in comparison to all the earlier spectacles, was unusually chaotic; at its foundation it was a spectacle in which we juggled almost all our social experience .... At the same time it was a continuation of our discussion about the social and political function of theatre, since we always showed what we thought of the world in which we live, which was crumbling more and more, escaping somewhere into the darkness. We weren't saying that the plaster was falling off houses, but- metaphorically- that plaster was falling off people, off brains, and in its place other plaster was being layered. (Raczak, "Na pocz{ltku" 78)

Realistic scenes alternated with fantastic nightmare visions, connected more thematically than in a cause-and-effect arrangement. There was a scene where drunks beat up a stranger, calling him "You Jew! Fucking student! Parasite! Decadent!" and their insults gradually transform into party propaganda slogans similar to those used against students in 1968 and workers in 1970 and 1976, "All these anarchists, terrorists, rioters, these crazy, mentally ill, hypersensitives - these others - must be beaten. We want him to regain tranquility and health" (qtd. in Jawlowska 91). In another scene, a demented uncle from abroad in a torn frock coat distributes money and presents like communion at Mass while teaching "Really, margarine is better than butter (there is no cholesterol and so many synthetic vitamins), artificial flowers don't wilt, vinyl gets less dirty than leather, and brass shines more than gold" (qtd. in Jawlowska 92). The company attempted to show in these scenes the corrupting effect that official lies had on people's private lives in Poland. In the 8th Day's view consciousness itself had been changed by the everyday compromises with the system that people felt they must make. In 1979, when the 8th Day was professionalized, their arduous situation improved somewhat. Estrada did not have the same political commitments that SZSP had, and at least at first was not particularly interested in what the theatre was doing. It was at this time that they produced Ach, jakZe godnie zylismy (Oh, How Nobly We Lived). 3 Like Discounts, Oh, How Nobly We Lived concerned itself with the interpenetration of philosophical issues and politics. It was set in a three-levelled mystery play world. Hell was on the lowest level, with earth represented by two narrow platforms running alongside it and heaven on a taller platform at one of the short ends of the rectangular space. Hell resembled the waiting room of a provincial railroad For other descriptions of Oh, How Nobly We Lived, see Januszczak; Masters; and Morawiec, "Osmego Dnia."

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station where a forlorn group of new arrivals comes, clutching worn-out suitcases. One of them, a drunken philosopher named, in an allusion to Grotowski's last production, Apocalypsis cum figuris, Cieslak-the Simpleton, argues with himself about the existence or nonexistence of God. In heaven, to a chorus of "Sanctus," an angel is hoisted on a hook like a side of meat and gives birth to pink plastic piglets which the inhabitants of hell scramble to catch. The Gierek years' materialistic propaganda is satirized: "A potato on every table!" (Raczak et al., Ach 78). The inhabitants of hell play a game of cards in which the stakes are Africa, Afghanistan, and Latin America. In heaven, heroes and heroines of the revolution stride out to the rhythms of Mozart's "Dies Irae" trailing long white banners. On earth, an assembly line cranks out toy cars. In hell, the inhabitants demonstrate with fury and then destroy the symbols of their aspirations. At the end, Cieslak-the Simpleton says to the audience, "We have the right to speak, and you have right to listen. We all have the right to disagree with this" (Raczak et al., Ach 92). In Oh, How Nobly We Lived the -8th Day used the same surrealistic nightmare imagery as in Discounts but this time connected the images to each other via the heaven-earth-hell trichotomy of the set. Oh, How Nobly We Lived premiered in May, 1979, and that same month was awarded the main prize at the Third Confrontations of Young Theatre in Lublin. Soon, however, there were new troubles for the theatre. In 1980, shortly before the strikes which resulted in Solidarity began, the 8th Day was invited to appear at the Theatre of Nations festival in Amsterdam. The Ministry of Culture agreed to the group's participation, provided that the organizers of the festival also invited Teatr STU and paid for both groups' expenses. The organizers agreed to the Ministry's condition, but then, at the last minute, after STU had already arrived in Amsterdam, the Ministry withdrew its permission for the 8th Day to attend the festival. It seemed that the apparat wanted to return to its 1976-1979 treatment of the 8th Day. At about the same time, there was an unpleasant incident on the last day of a series of performances that the theatre gave in the student club Stodola in Warsaw. Lech Raczak recalled in an interview that just before the performance was about to begin, suddenly some loudspeakers in the hall where they were to perform began blaring disco music very loudly. He rushed to find out what was happening and was informed by the director of the club that the performance was to be cancelled. About fifty audience members were already inside the building and approximately four hundred were waiting outside. The theatre company also learned that in various places around the building about sixty people were hiding, among whom were people from the "fighting squad" of the Sports Academy. This was the same squad which had perpetrated the notorious raid on Jacek Kuroft's

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apartment. Then the management of the club announced over loudspeakers that the theatre was cancelling its own performance. The crowd knew this was a lie because there were people there whom theatre members had just spoken to a moment before. The audience became so enraged that they were ready to storm the building. Adam Michnik, who was one of the audience-members already inside the building, came up to Raczak and, referring to the scene in Ingmar Bergman's film The Serpent's Egg in which the fascist SA storms a cabaret hall and there is a fight inside, said "Have you seen The Serpent's Egg? Because in a moment this scene will be replayed here." Suddenly Raczak realized that this whole incident was a police provocation: the authorities wanted the crowd to storm Stodola, then those sixty people would step in, the police would come, and there would be headlines in the next day's papers about a riot caused by the Theatre of 8th Day. He climbed out a window, exhorted the crowd not to attack the building, and the audience left in peace. He reported, "I only got really scared when the people had already left, and we, the ten of us from the company, were left in the club with those sixty guys" (Raczak interview). Both these harassments, the cancellation of their trip abroad and the intimidation before a performance, boded ill for the 8th Day's continuing ability to perform freely. However, Solidarity forced the authorities to behave more agreeably to the group during the sixteen months of its legal existence. When the 8th Day was again denied passports to perform in the Netherlands, Solidarity threatened to call a series of strikes in its support. A half-hour after Solidarity officials had called the passport office, Lech Raczak got a call to come pick up the passports even though it was after normal working hours. As he issued the passports, the official in the office kept muttering, "I've been working here for twenty years, and this is the first time something like this has happened to me" (Raczak interview). The group was also allowed to travel to Sweden, Italy, Great Britain, and Mexico to attend theatre festivals. The 8th Day returned the favor by performing in factories and during student strikes. In addition, Lech Raczak directed the ceremony for the unveiling of the monument to workers killed in the 1956 Poznan riots. Theatre member Ewa W6jciak, standing next to Lech Wal~sa, read Zbigniew Herbert's poem "Pan Cogito" to an audience of 600,000 people. The theatre's greatest accomplishment during this period, however, was its performance, Wit;cej nii jedno iycie (More Than One Life- premiere April, 1981). In More Than One Life, the 8th Day took a further step in its artistic development. 4 The subject of this performance was history and its effects on For descriptions of More Than One Life, see Kostrzewa-Zorbas, Howard 299-300, DeJongh, and W 6jciak & Raczak.

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everday people. It dramatized the story of a young boy, Jan M., which the theatre took from the real-life story of a high school pupil who was so terrorized by his history teacher before final exams that he committed suicide. This story was combined with depictions of subjects dealt with in history lessons in school, from the French Communards through the nineteenth-century Russian Decembrists to the present day. The 8th Day again used music in this production, mainly Czeslaw Milosz's poem "Waltz" sung at critical junctures by a "cabaret star." The play was expansive: each actor played several roles, changing costume in view of the audience, and the role of Jan M. was shared between two actors. Despite the darkness of the boy's suicide and the irony with which the historical revolutionaries are treated in the production. More Than One Life celebrates humanity's will to survive. Critic Grzegorz Kostrzewa-Zorbas comments: "In its previous productions the group always made use of pathos and mockery- now also a third tonation [sic] appeared, namely, lyricism" (13). The last performance of More Than One Life took place on the night of 12-13 December 1981, and finished after midnight when martial law had already been imposed. As soon as martial law was declared, the 8th Day's troubles started anew. One of the actors, Roman Radomski, was imprisoned for a month. The ban forbidding the theatre to perform lasted longer than in the case of other theatres- until June, 1982. However, during the time they were forbidden to perform, they worked on a new production, Przypowiest (A Fable - premiere June, 1982), based on Faulkner's novel. Critic Agnieszka Wojcik considered that this production was an evolution of the lyrical theme introduced in More Than One Life: The message put across by [A Fable] was -considering when it was performed- quite provocative. Hundreds of Poles had committed themselves wholeheartedly to work in the underground. For many this was the only purpose in life. Teatr 8 Dnia, without discrediting the moral beauty of the struggle against war put up by Faulkner's twelve apostles, stressed something else: the beauty of ordinary life in the name of which the struggle is undertaken. Ideologists - and every political movement automatically involves ideology - always need reminding that the imponderables of life resemble evenings on a river or country inn dances. And Teatr 8 Dnia was a reminder. (12)

On opening night of A Fable, Estrada tried to withdraw their governmental subsidy, in effect to "fire" them, but neglected to impose a media blackout about this information. As a result, there were reviews in newspapers of the new production coupled with announcements that the theatre was about to be officially closed. Consequently, professors at Poznan University as well as well-known actors and directors of "official" theatres wrote letters of protest, and so Estrada decided to give them back their subsidy. For the time being, the 8th Day was still an above-ground theatre.

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In the autumn of 1982, another actor, Marcin Kesycki, was drafted for military service. As a response to this event, the theatre hurriedly mounted Wzlot (Ascent) in December, 1982. Ascent was based on Nadezhda Mandelstam's two volumes of memoirs, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned, and presented the last months of Russian poet Osip Mandelstam on his way to and in prison. A character called simply Man and two others called the First and Second Travelling Companions enact Mandelstam's imprisonment and death on a long, thin rectangular stage which juts into the audience: SECOND: And here in a cattlecar on a bale of hay is FIRST: The descendent of Israelite shepards SECOND: The son of Emil FIRST: The pride of Russian poetry. SECOND: Sent by God to all of us. FIRST: Osip Mandelstam, messenger. SECOND: Born, condemned, having to live forever. FIRST: Full of mistrust he divides the roll in half and offers a piece to one of his co-prisoners, then carefully checking that it isn't poisoned, he hides his head in the flap of his coat, and quickly, greedily, eats his piece. (Teatr 6smego Dnia 99)

The Travelling Companions, played by Adam Borowski and Roman Radomski, are Mandelstam's jailors, but they are much more sophisticated than mere prison guards. They ironically quote his poetry, mock him for his squeamishness and naivete, and also at times narrate his humiliation. Much of the text of the performance consists of Mandelstam's poetry. Sometimes the Man speaks the words of the poems, and sometimes they are spoken tauntingly by the Travelling Companions. On a higher platform at one end of the main part of the stage sit two musicians and a Singer, who sings some of his other poems: Your narrow shoulders run with blood under whips Run with blood under whips, stoop under burdens. Your childlike hands will redden from frost Will redden from frost, from the bindings of ropes. Your sensitive feet will tread on glass barefoot, Will tread on glass barefoot, dampen the dirt with bloody dew I can only light a black candle for you, Light a black candle, fearing even to pray. (Teatr 6smego Dnia 97-9Bf This is a translation into English of the 8th Day's translation into Polish of Mandelstam's original Russian. It differs from more direct translations from Russian to English such as Brown and Merwin 74 or Green 81.

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The Singer, played by Ewa Wojciak, sings in what is known in Poland as "poezja spiewania style," a kind of deep-voiced Edith Piafesque rendition of ballads. Her songs provide lyric respites from the mental torture which the Travelling companions inflict on Mandelstam. The play tells not only Mandelstam's story, but Nadezhda's as well. In general, the Man, played by Tadeusz Janiszeski, represents Osip Mandelstam. The Singer, physically separated from the action as Nadezhda was from Mandelstam, visually recalls Nadezhda for the audience. However, sometimes it is the Man who speaks Nadezhda's thoughts: Then, Nadezhda Mandelstam stopped memorizing the poems. She understood that a man dies easily, that in one moment he can disappear behind the horizon as if behind a stone wall. And flimsy paper, a scrap scribbled hurriedly, hidden with the family, with friends, in nooks and crannies of libraries, in cracks of floors and wardrobes, in mattresses, sofas, on the other side of mirrors, inside picture-frames, on the bottom of suitcases, in old newspapers, in cupboards, in bedrooms, in bathrooms, in hallways, in attics, in cellars under stairs, behind the oven ... lasts, Because paper is indestructible. And some scrap lasts, prevails over the police, and saves the poet. And he, who has already died many times over, will live. (Teatr 6smego Dnia 100)

The complex narrative structure, with each character taking over pieces of the narration, and poetry intermingled with prose, carried on an 8th Day tradition of expanding the early seventies "poetry theatre" genre. However, in other ways this show was rather atypical. It relied far less on physical gesture than more characteristic productions such as More Than One Life. Like A Fable, it represented a retreat from the laborious process which the 8th Day had worked out of constructing original productions not based on outside textual material. Nevertheless, it proved to be quite powerful for a Polish audience just emerging from martial law. Wojcik wrote of Ascent: In spite of the hero's tragic fate, and at a time when the internment camps were still fulldays of disquiet for friends and neighbours- it was a story of the triumph of art, of personal memory more durable than history. It was also an appeal to the audience for fidelity to memory (11)

Not only Polish audiences, but audiences all over Europe responded favorably to Ascent. The 8th Day continued to perform it throughout the 1980s. In August, 1983, for the international street theatre festival at Jelenia Cora, the group created a third work which utilized literary texts, Raport z oble:ionego miasta (Report from a Besieged City), based on Zbigniew Herbert's poem of the same title and some other poems by Stanislaw Baranczak (all of them published in the underground press). In order to circumvent the censors, the 8th Day invited some thirty foreign participants in the festival to

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take part in the production, and the piece was announced as the work of the whole festival. Since works by foreign groups were not censored, the 8th Day was not required to submit their text ahead of time. The foreigners performed bit parts and stunts like eating fire. Like Ascent, Report "conveyed ... the triumph of the individual conscience over a regime of force" (Filipowicz, "After Solidarity" 76). The performance ended in an open square lighted by footlights made out of candles in jars. To the accompaniment of music from Carmina Burana, stilt people dressed as figures from the past (aristocrats, peasants, a Bolshevik student, a soldier) come wearily into the square. One of the group at their feet, clutching shoes (an extremely scarce commodity in Poland at that time) approaches the stilt people and denounces his companions as "democrats." Another man tries to run away but is forced to slap himself in the face with a flag. The stilt people seize torches and now resemble the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The group in the square run from them and try to climb up the walls of the surrounding buildings. A helmeted figure in riot gear hoses them with foam until their bodies slump and hang as if from the executioner's scaffold. Herbert's poem rings out: the cemeteries grow the number of defenders dwindles but the defense continues and will continue to the end and if the Town falls and one defender survives he will carry the Town inside himself along the roads of exile he will be the Town. (Herbert 48)

This performance, their first street theatre production, managed to combine the "poetry theatre" form which the 8th Day had used in the early seventies with the outsized theatricality demanded by the street theatre form. It enjoyed enormous success not only at the street theatre festival but also later when it was performed in church courtyards. The following year for the same festival they performed Cuda i mi?SO (Miracles and Meat), but this was a processional production which utilized a one-kilometer long space, and hence was not to be repeated again. The 8th Day's skirmishes with the authorities were not over. Between December 13, 1981 and August, 1985, authorities at various levels cancelled twelve foreign trips for the group. Starting in 1983, there were progressively more and more restrictions on where they could perform: they were refused permission to present plays at several Warsaw venues, in Krakow, in Szczecin, and in Torun. Finally, in 1984, the local provincial governor of the Poznan region sent them an official letter withdrawing all governmental subsidies, but this time the authorities imposed a comprehensive media blackout on all information regarding their official disbanding. Ironically, this

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disbanding occurred only two months after the theatre had, for the first time, been given their own auditorium to rehearse and perform in. After twenty years of performing under the auspices of official institutions, first as a student theatre under ZSP and SZSP and then as a professional theatre under Estrada, the Theatre of the 8th Day was now officially nonexistent. Nevertheless, they still managed to exist, in Raczak's words, "on the other side of the barricade" (personal interview). Practically speaking, this meant that they could perform only in churches or in parish halls belonging to churches. Even while they were still officially employees of Estrada, they had performed in 1983 and 1984 in the Church on Zytnia Street in Warsaw since other state-supported Warsaw institutions had been denied permission to sponsor their performances. They now simply expanded this activity. In fact, they received so many church-sponsored requests to perform that it proved impossible to respond to all of them. Moreover, they no longer had to submit their work to any censorship office since the church was totally outside the authorities' sphere of influence. In addition, they met a new audience in the churches; previously they had performed mostly for the intelligentsia whereas after moving into the church's sphere of influence, their audience often consisted of people who had never been to the theatre before. Still, there were disadvantages to performing in churches. First, by accepting the church as their sponsor they were accepting another kind of limiting factor on their work. While not the same thing as censorship, exactly, this involved a sort of religious coloration their performances acquired simply by being placed in a church setting. Actor Marcin K~szycki reported: The priest announces our performance, saying 'Come, it's interesting.' And in the little towns, in districts like Nowa Huta, the priest is really important. If he says 'Come' it means 'Come!' -like an order. So people come, and they don't know for what. Sometimes they are shockedby form, by politics, by everything. They are not used to seeing performances like this in church. We are playing what we want, but the people often do not understand what we want to communicate .... We build our set but people come and pray in front of our scenography. They don't see scenography, they see an altar. After the performance, the people stand and begin to pray. This is something we are not used to. (qtd. in Robinson 77)

Sometimes they could avoid this religious filter by performing in parish houses or in front of the church rather than in the church itself. Secondly, they survived financially by passing the hat after each performance, but this only provided a minimal existence for the company. If they stopped performing for awhile, they got no money whatsoever. Life underground, in other words, was not entirely satisfying either artistically or materially for the group.

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Nevertheless, in 1984-85, they managed to work on an entirely originaf production not based on literary texts, Piolun (Wormwood- premiere April, 1985), the first such work since 1981. In Wormwood, as in the earlier More Than One Life, each actor played several roles. 6 Despite the power of this new production, the 8th Day were aware that it represented some kind of an endpoint: [W]e realized that with this show we closed a certain road and returned to a departure point, the situation of years ago when we were finishing Paradise on Earth and starting Discounts. It has not been possible to go further in the same direction. We had exhausted it; everything that we had to say, we said. (Raczak, "Na pocz11tku" 87)

Practically speaking, it was now going to be difficult to take the time off from performing that was necessary to create new works. In the summer of 1985, the 8th Day was invited to Great Britain to perform Wormwood at the Edinburgh Festival. When they applied for their passports, however, only half the company were granted them, making it impossible to perform Wormwood, which required the full company. Therefore, instead of Wormwood, they hastily created a performance based on Tadeusz Konwicki's 1979 novel, Mafa apokalipsa (A Minor Apocalypse). The novel, published in the underground press, satirically depicts the story of a man who is asked to set himself on fire as a protest against the "sovietization" of Poland. The 8th Day's performance, entitled Auto da Fe, used imagery from the company's earlier productions as well as motifs from the Konwicki novel. It was awarded a "Fringe First" award at the 1985 festival, and consequently the group was invited to perform it all over western Europe. Meanwhile, the half of the company who remained in Poland created their own version, entitled A Minor Apocalypse, which used the novel as a kind of scenario and incorporated more of its actual text. In the "Polish" group's production, the role of the hero was shared among all three actors whereas in the "European" group's version, it was played by Tadeusz Janiszewski, the same actor who had played Mandelstam in Ascent. Although the division of the two groups was initially planned to only last about a year, the group in Poland experienced a renewal of harassment, and, after approximately sixty performances of A Minor Apocalypse in churches and parish houses, they fell into inactivity. In the meantime, the group in western Europe decided to stay in exile. For the rest of the 1980s, they became a theatre in exile in the West. The 8th Day and their fate came to symbolize the fate of the Polish nation for many during this period. But it is important to recognize their 6

See introduction for a description of Wormwood.

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artistic and philosophical achievements as well as the mere fact that they managed to survive. First of all, they expanded the theatrical formula that had been developed in the early seventies. On the one hand they took "poetry theatre" into the streets, and on the other, they abandoned poetry written by others in favor of their own poetry, a poetry which was communicated "more through gestures, movements, and the use of props than through texts" (Cioffi & Ceynowa 84). Secondly, through all hardships, they maintained an extremely high artistic level: their performances always had wit and high energy. Finally, they refused to regard themselves as solely a political theatre. In a 1985 interview, Lech Raczak commented: People often come to see 8th Day knowing about our "political" or "oppositional" stance. Because they know in advance what we are against they see in our work single definite answers to questions we think are as yet unanswerable. In our productions we try to ask questions, not answer them. Some spectators erase the question marks because they are conditioned to see only exclamation points. (Cioffi & Ceynowa 90)

Nevertheless, the 8th Day struggled against this tendency. They always connected political questions with questions of morality and ethics: "In our performances we try to remind people that behind the everyday world, or hidden somewhere in its drabness, are certain higher values. It is the calling and the destiny of every person to transcend the everyday" (Cioffi & Ceynowa 90). The 8th Day inspired many imitators during this period, but few were so steadfast in their devotion to artistic or philosophical exploration.

The KOR Generation: Teatr Provisorium The theatres which came into existence during the late seventies were inspired both by their "older brothers and sisters" from the generation of 1968 (mainly the Theatre of the 8th Day) and by the birth of KOR and the rest of the independent opposition in the late seventies. Many new theatres emerged during this period. Critic Eli:bieta Morawiec suggested in an article published in 1980 that these theatres differed from the early seventies groups: A characteristic feature of the most interesting theatres [coming into being in the late seventies] ... is the high perfection of the artistic language and a sense of responsibility for the broad communicativeness of the message. This arises from the fact that perhaps for the first time in its whole history the student theatre has identified itself with a specific traditon which was developed by the movement, as well as from the conviction that art as a revolt against the received world is continuous and indivisible from belief in the value of art that is called upon to broaden the intellectual and moral horizons of mankind. ("Prometeusze")

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Some of these theatres appeared, produced one or two very good productions, and then ceased to exist after martial law. Examples of productions which were very highly regarded at the time include Teatr lCD of Poznan's 1979 production Nasza lista przeboj6w (Our Hit Parade), Teatr Jedynka of Gdansk's 1979 production Diagnoza (Diagnosis), and their 1980 Odzyskac przepfakane lata (To Recover the Years Spent Crying). The most significant of the theatres which first arose in the KOR years and still continued producing work in the 1980s, however, was Lublin's Teatr Provisorium. Provisorium was founded in 1976 by students at Marie Curie Sklodowska University in Lublin. They took over the name Provisorium, a Latin word meaning "provisional state," from another student group which had started in 1971 but had become inactive. Provisorium's first production, entitled W pofowie drogi (In the Middle of the Road), was an adaptation of Witold Gombrowicz's novel Ferdydurke. It was performed sixty times in Lublin and at various student theatre festivals all over Poland and won an award at the 1976 Young Theatre Confrontations in Lublin. Working on adapting Gombrowicz's novel to the stage proved to be a formative experience for the group; they continued to use nondramatic works as the bases for most of their subsequent performances. The events at Radom and Ursus and the subsequent activities of KOR, however, played an even greater role in shaping the consciousness of the members of Provisorium. Radom and Ursus convinced the group that an oppositional stance was not only possible but necessary, and KOR showed them that it was possible to express themselves freely, to speak truth as they saw it. In Provisorium's first major production, Nasza niedziela (Our Sunday -premiere 1978), the theatre attempted to portray the ethical and practical dilemmas resulting from what it felt was the abnormality of Polish life under the Communists. The play was based mainly on texts from Czeslaw Milosz's 1974 volume of poetry Gdzie wschodzi sforice i k£;dy zapada (From the Rising of the Sun) and Marek Hlasko's 1956 novel 6smy dzien tygodnia (The Eighth Day of the Week). The production also constituted the group's first negative experience with the censor's office; because of the use of Milosz's poetry (published by the emigre Paris-based Instytut Literacki), the spectacle was banned in its entirety. Nevertheless, the theatre managed to perform it some forty-five times. Quite early in its career, then, Provisorium became known as an "oppositional" theatre. The first line of Our Sunday was a declaration of this oppositional stance: "The word. NO thrown in the face of evil possesses a mystic force coming from the depth of ages. The slave always says 'yes"' (qtd. in Jawlowska 96). Through the use of Milosz's poetry, the play evokes an apocalypse which has already started to occur: "Roads on concrete pillars,

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cities of glass and cast iron, I airfields larger than tribal dominions I suddenly ran short of their essence and disintegrated" (Milosz, "Oeconomia" 235). The characters want to separate themselves from this apocalyptic reality and to create a feeling of Sunday, of holiday, so they cover the large window onstage with mattresses. They try to shut out reality with false gaiety ("In honor of youth and love, hip, hip, hurray!" [qtd. in Jawlowska 971]). But reality continually intrudes, both into their conversations and into the final image of the spectacle where the actors uncover the large window only to find that now there are mattresses on the outside blocking the window. They are thus imprisoned both by the outside world itself and by their delusion that the outside world can be shut out. With this production, Provisorium declared its aversion to the phenomenon of "internal emigration," that is, of living one's "real life" with one's family or friends and ignoring the outside world instead of fighting against the status quo. The themes of imprisonment and antagonism toward emigration (both internal and real) continued in Provisorium's 1979 production Nie nam leciec na wyspy szcz?sliwe (It is Not for Us to Fly to the Islands of Happiness). 7 The title referred to thoughts of Mediterranean culture which Osip Mandelstam took refuge in during his imprisonment. Director Janusz Opryftski commented in a 1986 interview "We still can't afford to fly off into tha_t culture and ignore the concrete fact that so many personalities are broken" (qtd. in Howard & Kuhiwczak 281). The play, a combination of the actors' own improvised words and fragments from Mandelstam, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and early twentieth-century Polish author Stanislaw Brzozowski, was set in an anonymous men's ward or cell in a mental hospital or prison or concentration camp. The only props were iron bunk beds, headless soft sculpture effigies which acted as the actors' doubles, buckets of water, and tin cups. Over the stage a black bird with wings outstretched was perched, a symbol of menace. The group was now interested in exploring the limits of rebellion. How far can someone who lives in a repressive system go? Inhabitants of the cell/ward enact rituals of in which they play archetypes: Intellectual, Prince, Ironist, and Madman. The Intellectual, an unstable conformist, agonizes over his own weakness: "Every day I think it is worse and worse. Unmade decisions, procrastinated business, paralysis of the intellect.. .. By now I myself don't know- whom do I believe in, what do I believe in, whom do I serve, what am I suffering for?!" (qtd. in Jawlowska 112). The Prince, the patron of "obedient" artists, distributes prizes, scattering small change about For descriptions of It is Not for Us to Fly to the Islands of Happiness, see Jawlowska 111-114, Howard & Kuhiwczak 260-262, Chaillet, and Grant.

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the stage: "For the theatres. For the props. For the wings. For the proscenium. For the playwright. For the audience-members. For the best actor of the year. For the worst actor of the year. Let him develop himself" (qtd. in Jawlowska 113). Two actors announce their belief in idealism and two in materialism; the idealists are "convinced" to change to materialism by their heads being dunked in pails of water. In the meantime, prison life goes on. Loudspeakers blare contradictory orders: "Dress!. .. Undress!" (qtd. in Jawlowska 113). Prisoners rebel by banging tin cups with spoons. The working title for the production was "A Matter of Resilience." It is Not for Us to Fly to the Islands of Happiness was highly acclaimed, winning first prize at the 1980 Confrontations of Young Theatre in Lublin. However, some friends considered it pretentious of Provisorium to create a spectacle on the subject of imprisonment when they themselves had never been imprisoned. Ironically, this situation was remedied when three of the four actors and the technician were interned at the beginning of martial law. After eleven months in internment camps and prisons, two of the actors were released, and they added a short sequence to Islands dedicated to all those still in prison, including actor Krzysztof Hariasz. They also began to work on a new production, Wspomnienia z domu umartych (Recollections from the House of the Dead- premiere 1983). Recollections was based on Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski's book Inny swiat (A World Apart -1953), which chronicles his two years spent in Soviet labor camps. Since Herling-Grudzinski's book, like Milosz's poetry, was published by an emigre press, Recollections, like Our Sunday, was banned from performances in Poland until 1988. Nevertheless, the company performed it illegally for five years for invited audiences. In addition, the group performed it in England and Western Europe in 1986 and 1987. In December, 1988, the authorities relented and Recollections had its official premiere. Recollections takes place in Siberia at a gulag. Its theme is the extermination of nations- the Poles, the Jews, and the Russians. The actors used their own martial law experiences to create short vignettes from the lives of the inmates of the gulag. The inmates tell their stories: 1: I was 24 when, at the request of the Party, I left my engineering studies at the Moscow Polytechnic and entered the naval school at Vladivostok .... When I was a child my father on his deathbed only demanded from me loyalty to my mother and to the "great achievement of the October Revolution." So I didn't even imagine that some third object of loyalty could exist in the world, and I didn't hesitate to choose the Polytechnic even though I'd always been attracted to literature. 3: They sentenced me to ten years because I opposed the use of scrap leather to sole new shoes. Whoever heard of using such rubbish for new soles? That in itself is nothing. You understand,

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men are jealous everywhere. I gave my son a good education. I made him a captain in the Air Force- how could they be expected to like it that an old Jew like me should have a son in the Air Force? [Numbers refer to the actors speaking.] (Teatr Provisorium, Recollections 1)

The prisoners are transported from place to place clutching suitcases containing everything they own. They arrive at camp, are assigned numbers, use their suitcases as walls on which they tap Morse Code messages to each other. The day-to-day grind of camp life goes on: grueling, backbreaking work, letters written home, paltry rations soon eaten. Roman Catholic, Russian Orthodox, and Jewish prayers mingle. The ugly story of the abuse of one of the camp's women is told and illustrated with a piece of women's underwear drenched with water: 3: In January, 1941, a young Polish girl, the daughter of an officer from Tarnopol, arrived with a transport. She was really lovely: slim and supple with a girlishly fresh face and tiny breasts whose outline could only just be guessed at behind the blue blouse of her school uniform. The girl held out very well. She walked out to work with her head raised proudly, and repulsed any man who ventured near her with darting, angry looks. In the evenings she returned from work rather more humbly, but still untouchable, still modestly haughty. 2: Tell the whole truth. Tell what we were. Tell what we were brought to. 3: After a month whoever wanted to could have her. On a bunk, under the bunk, in the latrine, in the clothing store ... (Teatr Provisorium, Recollections 3-4)

Relief comes with a visit to a hospital or sometimes a day off when the inmates can fantasize and play "shop," or watch the film The Great Waltz (a favorite of Stalin's). In the "bathhouse" sequence, steaming water is pored on an inmate's skinny body, and the prisoners recall favorite books read. Another prisoner is dressed in a white shirt to see a visitor, then undressed and led out again. In the end, the inhabitants decide to go on hunger strike, but are finally only left waiting for freedom: "1: Rome free, Paris free, Oslo free./2: Paris free, Paris. Paris ... " (Teatr Provisorium, Recollections 7). Provisorium's problems with the authorities were somewhat less dramatic than those of the Theatre of the 8th Day, but, in a sense, more debilitating. After the final actor was released from his martial law imprisonment, he emigrated to America, leaving only three actors in the company. In January, 1984, the university authorities ordered Provisorium to leave its walls. Together with two other alternative groups in Lublin, Scena 6 (Stage 6) and Grupa Chwilowa (the Momentary Group), the group attempted to found the Lublin Theatre Studio, but the authorities refused to officially register it, saying that it was "socially redundant." 8 From 1984 to 1987, 8

Program notes, English tour, 1986.

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Provisorium existed on very meager subsidies given by the Lublin House of Culture, where they had to share rehearsal space with such activities as dance courses, aerobics, discotheques, and scout sings. On the other hand, they were not officially disbanded, and were still permitted to take part in festivals and to perform at places other than church halls. It was while they were under the sponsorship of the House of Culture that they created their next performance, Dziedzictwo (Heritage premiere 1985), which dealt with the experience of martial law even more directly than Recollections had. The first part of Heritage, inspired by Jan J6zef Szczepanski's short story "The End of a Legend," took place on New Year's Eve in 1944, in a manor house in eastern Poland. The partisans from the Home Army return there, and resurrect images of the cruelty of the war as they try to celebrate New Year's Eve. They long for wives and girlfriends left behind while they are tortured by the necessary brutalities in which they have participated: 1: He asked me, begged me on bended knees, not to kill him. He showed me a picture of his wife and children. This coat, these shoes are taken from him. 2: It had to be done. 1: It's not true that we're less cruel. A pleading stare like a dog. But everybody urged us on with the work. Merrily. Without a wince. With a shovel. (Teatr Provisorium, Heritage 2)

Meanwhile Jews cower in the attic, straining for sounds from the celebration below: "2: Zuckerman, are you still there? I've brought some food. In two, three days you'll be able to go out./3: Have you heard what he said? In two, three days they'll be here." Partisans and Jews alike persistently question the future, including the necessity for emigration. Conrad is quoted: "We wander in our thousands over the face of the earth" (Teatr Provisorium, Heritage 3) The second part of the play takes place on the first New Year's Eve of martial law. Short scenes, like snapshots, show people still hiding, living outside the law, peering through curtains, and questioning the future. However, the characters seem to have lost the moral compass that the World War II partisans had. They still long for women, but now they satisfy their desires with prostitutes, played by large, goggle-eyed dummies: "2: Why are they so ugly? /3: The beautiful ones are upstairs. Drink some vodka and you'll like them/2: So let's drink." (Teatr Provisorium, Heritage 4). They quarrel and complain about the families they hide with. One of the men is dressed like a woman and sent to go buy macaroni. Another is arrested, and they make up packages to send to him in prison. Later, when he returns, they find it difficult to talk to him. Again, these oppositionists, like the World War II fighters, are faced with the question of emigration, but now Zbigniew Herbert is quoted: " ... the choice to stay here/Confirms every dream about

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palm trees" (Teatr Provisorium, Heritage 6). Another of Provisorium's actors emigrated after their tour of western Europe in 1986, and though he was replaced in 1987, the group created no more productions in the 1980s. Though they were often compared with the Theatre of the 8th Day during the late 1970s and the 1980s, Provisorium's style was quite different. Whereas the Theatre of the 8th Day depended mainly on physical gesture, Provisorium's effect depended mainly on words. This is not to say that visual imagery was unimportant in Provisorium's productions, or that some of their visual images were not striking. Images such as the steaming bathhouse scene in Recollections or setting fire to the manor house in Heritage had a powerful, visceral impact on the audience. However, the primary impression derived from the highly-crafted, allusive language they used. It was a kind of poetry in which every word had multiple meanings, but a poetry the actors put together themselves from their own experiences and from fragments of pre-existing texts. They also included musical passages that they played themselves on instruments onstage: an accordion, a violin, a guitar. The most striking value that permeated Provisorium's plays was the consciousness of where the Polish people came from and a concern about where they were going. Marek Miller writes: "For years Provisorium has been asking the same question. What has happened to us? Why has it happened? What are the results? They don't trust anybody, are suspicious. Stubbornly, they seek answers for themselves" (6). This investigation leads them often to the problem of roots, including the problem of Jewish-Christian roots. Before the Second World War, Lublin was a center of Hasidism, and the awareness of the death of Jewish culture permeated many of Provisorium's works in this period. The Holocaust was present in Provisorium's work not only as a tragic event in its own right, but as a kind of symbol for the sovietization of the Polish people. The problem of Russia was another constant theme. But the highest values which were present in their work were a respect for freedom and truth, and a belief that these values are attainable.

The Martial Law Generation: The Orange Alternative The theatres which came into being during and after martial law had a different temper from that of either the generation of '68 or the KOR generation. Their formative experiences were the enormous hopes that the Solidarity period generated, and then, the crushing of those hopes. Consequently, they seemed even more conscious than their older siblings of the absurdity of life in Poland. They were impatient with quasi-tragic trappings in plays that student and ex-student theatres of the older generations produced, even when those theatres were using those trappings

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to question the validity of old myths. They were also impatient with old institutions such as, on the one hand, SZSP, which was once again responsible for funding student theatres, and, on the other hand, Solidarity, which they saw as enforcing a kind of new conformity to its own line. They rejected professionalism, lyricism, irony, and Romanticism, and embraced amateurism, satire, defiance of the authorities, and above all, laughter. The only student theatre of any importance to emerge during the 1980s was called Wiatyk (Viaticum) Theatre. This was a group of native Silesians from the small town of Bytom in southwestern Poland. There are two things which set them apart from the rest of the rather mediocre student theatres active at this time. One was that they were consciously trying to foster the Silesian regional identity- an identity which is half-Polish and half-German. This went against the official line of Polish government propaganda that Silesia was Polish and had always been Polish, but it also went against the more common trend in Polish art which was to stress the unity of Pole with Pole, not the difference between regional groups. The second thing which set Wiatyk apart was the punk sensibility which they brought to Polish alternative theatre. Lech Raczak commented: "It is an attempt to make theatre out of something which up to now had its expression only in music. At times it is totally nihilistic and at times it is absolutely hilarious, consciously hilarious" (personal interview). Wiatyk created several productions in the mid-1980s. The best known were Hotel pod ciemnq gwiazdq (The Hotel Under a Dark Star- premiere 1984) and Swiqtynia i serce (Temple and Heart- premiere 1986). The Hotel Under a Dark Star portrayed the fortunes and misfortunes of Poles, the inhabitants of a "hotel" with a discotheque in which everything - even dreams - is dictated. Temple and Heart was a serious attempt to portray the history of Silesia and to explore the roots of Silesian identity. This production was banned by the censors, but Wiatyk still managed to play it several times in their native town before invited audiences, many of whom wept at seeing issues so close to their hearts explored in the theatre. Wiatyk existed on no subsidies whatsoever, and paid for their productions out of their own pockets. This resulted in a much more amateurish look than the productions of the 8th Day or Provisorium, but their lack of professionalism was in keeping with their punk sensibility. The theatre was allowed to take part in student theatre festivals unlike the (after 1984) officially non-existent Theatre of the 8th Day. Nevertheless, though they were widely imitated, they became inactive in the late 1980s. Unlike Theatre of the 8th Day, Provisorium, or Wiatyk, which were officially, at one time or another, "student theatres," the Wrodaw troupe Orange Alternative (Pomeranczowa Alternatywa) had absolutely no

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connection to the student theatre movement. 9 Led by Waldemar Frydrych, also called "Major," this ever-changing band of young people performed a kind of hybrid guerilla theatre/ conceptual art. Frydrych, a natural zany who nevertheless possesses degrees from Wroclaw University in history and art history, acquired the nickname "Major" in the late seventies when he escaped mandatory military service by pretending to be insane. The psychiatrist examining him became irritated and shouted that he was Frydrych's superior, so Frydrych began calling him colonel and referring to himself as a major. The name stuck. During Solidarity, Major, along with students at Wrodaw University and the Wrodaw Art Academy, formed the New Culture Movement and edited a newspaper called AA, in which Major's "Manifesto of Socialist Surrealism" was published. When later asked what he meant by "Socialist Surrealism," Major answered "Socialist Surrealism is the reality in which we live. That is, what surrounds us here, in this country, now" ("Who's Afraid" 40). During the student strikes at the university in 1981, the New Culture Movement began issuing a strike bulletin called The Orange Alternative. When martial law was declared, Major and his cohorts at the bulletin established a Military Academy of Art which invented the art of "strategic painting." The police would whitewash Solidarity graffiti, and the strategic painters would paint an elf or a circled letter "A" with a small flower over the whitewash. These symbols became the trademarks of the Orange Alternative. In 1983, the Alternative began to create "happenings." They dressed up as policemen in paper uniforms, stood at crosswalks, and attempted to direct traffic. Rather more elaborate happenings commenced only on April Fools' Day, 1986. Thereafter, on all major and minor holidays in the Communist calendar, the "Orange Ones" would create an event. There were happenings on International Children's Day (June 1, 1987), Police and Security Service Day (October 7, 1987), The Day of the Polish People's Army (October 12, 1987). the eve of the seventieth anniversary of the Soviet October Revolution (November 6, 1987), the day of voting in a national referendum (November 27, 1987), International Women's Day (March 8, 1988), the anniversary of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia (August, 1988), and, of course May Day (May 1, 1988). The Orange Ones also celebrated some Solidarity anniversaries, like the imposition of martial law (a happening on December 12, 1988), Church holidays like St. Nicholas' Day (December 7, 1987), and for good measure, they threw in some extra happenings on non-holidays. 9 For accounts of the Orange Alternative, see Marchlewski; Peczak; "Who's Afraid;" Tagliabue; Coburn 30; Filipowicz, "After Solidarity" 82-85; and Kaufman 82-83.

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Normally, a happening would be preceded by leaflets distributed to passersby on Swidnicka Street, the main thoroughfare and shopping area in Wrodaw. For example, for the happening Who's Afraid of the Toilet Paper? on October 1, 1987, the leaflet read in part: In these times of Socialist Surrealism, which is beginning to dominate the whole globe, toilet paper belongs in the realm of diplomacy - it is the White Paper of the White Elephant of Polish Hygiene ... Socialism, with its extravagant distribution of goods, as well as an eccentric social posture. has put toilet paper in the forefront of people's dreams .... To end it all - a short quiz: Are the queues for toilet paper an expression of: a) a call for culture?; b) the call of nature?; c) the leading role of the Party in a society of developed socialism? Tick the right answer. ("Who's Afraid" 39)

The actual happening itself often included an almost idyllic, carnivalesque atmosphere. During the celebration of Police and Security Service Day, for instance, a column of university and high school students marched through town carrying a banner which read "The Youth of Wroclaw - On Policeman's Day" and an 18-foot flower. The happeners played guitars and festooned patrol cars and police officers (including plain clothes police officers supposedly incognito) with decorations. Dancers singing "Sto lat" (the equivalent of "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow") surrounded a police van and then started shouting "Come With Us!" ("Who's Afraid" 39). Most of the time the happening ended when the police started making arrests, occasionally only of Major, but often of everyone who could be identified as taking part in the event (sometimes a hundred or more people). Even at the Police Station, however, the festivities were not always over: on St. Nicholas' Day, when Santa Claus was arrested, a few dozen other Santas danced around the Police Station in a ring, demanding the release of the "real Santa." The best-known of the happenings was The Eve of the Great October Revolution on November 6, 1987, a kind of re-staging-as-parody of the 1920 10 Soviet mass performance The Taking of the Winter Palace. In the leaflet advertising the event, spectators were exhorted to come to Swidnicka Street wearing red and "In case you don't possess anything red, buy a red hotdog with ketchup" (Marchlewski 44). Taking part were groups portraying the actual Bolshevik revolt in 1917: four young men playing the "Battleship Potemkin" with the aid of cardboard boxes that had a picture of Lenin's head painted on the side; another group of seven representing the "Battleship Aurora" using a large piece of canvas with holes cut in it and a Lenin mask

10

For a description of the original, see Bradby and McCormick 48-49.

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for the captain; an "Infantry" group wearing red sweatsuits; a "Proletarian" group of factory workers in red shirts carrying banners reading "I Will Work Harder," "We Demand the Return of Comrade Yeltsin" (Yeltsin had recently been expelled from the Soviet Communist Party at the time), "We Demand 8 Hours Work Per Day for Wrodaw's Bureau of Internal Security," and "We Demand the Rehabilitation of Leon Trotsky;" and a group of "Cavalrymen" with wooden horses and wooden rifles wearing Red Army Cavalry-style fur caps. There was also a quasi-religious element associating the "liturgy" of the Bolshevik anniversary with that of Christmas Eve: a "Carolers" group carrying a banner which said "Red Borscht" and a red star; and an "Angel of the Revolution" in a white garment, halo, and a long white wig with red wings attached to his shoulders. As each group attempted to reach the assembly point under the clock tower on Swidnicka Street, it was arrested by the security police who unwittingly thus played the roles of White Guardsmen. Bystanders also took part: at one point a black man wearing a red beret passed by the battle between the police and the Aurora crew, and everyone, happeners and policemen alike, froze in place and watched him. In the end, one hundred and fifty people were arrested, some of them only for happening to be wearing red. After being interrogated, they were released and on leaving, shouted "All the best!" and "Thanks for a nice evening" to the security policemen, some of whom replied "All the best!" ("Who's Afraid 39).

Though Major had himself been a member of Solidarity, he and his Orange troops did not hesitate to mock some of its sacred cows as well as those of the Communists. Halina Filipowicz declares: "The questioning of conventions, the spurning of all ideological dogma and hierarchies of every kind was the strength of the Orange Alternative" ("After Solidarity" 84). This included questioning the ideological dogma of the Church, an important Solidarity ally during the eighties which was very seldom questioned. It also included gentle travesties of Solidarity slogans: "There is no liberty without Solidarity" became "There is no liberty without elves," "Long live SEX!" was painted with "SEX" in the characteristic lettering of Solidarity, except that the "S" was shaped like a dollar sign (qtd. in Filipowicz, "After Solidarity" 84), and after the broadcast of a popular Brazilian soap opera on Polish television the graffito, "Freedom for Isaura and Political Prisoners," appeared on walls all over Wrodaw (qtd. in P~czak 53) America did not escape lampooning either: "Long live Bush! Long live bush and jungle!" (qtd. in Filipowicz, "After Solidarity" 84). This irreverence hearkened back to a different tradition than that evoked in other Polish alternative theatre productions; where theatres like the 8th Day or Provisorium reached back to the tradition of Polish Romanticism, the Orange Alternative's antics had more in common

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with the mock dadaist manifestoes that Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy) had issued. While the Orange Alternative was hardly a traditional theatre company producing rehearsed spectacles over and over again, it resurrected some older paratheatrical traditions in order to bring color and liveliness into an era in Poland which badly needed it. Miroslaw P~czak, in an article originally published in Dialog, compared the carryings-on of the Orange Ones to "Summer of Love" gatherings in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park in 1967, Woodstock, and even the "Events of 1968" in Paris (51-52). Filipowicz points out that, like happenings in the West, the Alternative's activities "were not grounded in a matrix of time, place, and character," and "were carefully planned events which readily opened themselves up to the improvised, the random, the unexpected" ("After Solidarity" 83). Like many Wrodaw intellectuals, Major had participated in some of Grotowski's paratheatrical workshops in the seventies, and the influence of Grotowski's idea of "holiday" is also quite evident in the work of the Orange Alternative. The difference is that for Grotowski, the "holiday" was for a relatively small group of people who were physically removed from their everyday lives, whereas for Major, the fun consisted in turning everyday life into a holiday and inviting everyone to join in. In this, the creations of the Orange Alternative recalled nothing so strongly as the medieval Feast of Fools with its inversion of authority, procession of strangely dressed characters through town, and mockery of ritual. The Orange Alternative became quite well-known through publications in the underground press, and soon splinter groups sprang up all over Poland. In L6dz, a group calling itself the Gallery of Manic Activities (Galeria Dzialaii. Maniakalnych) came into existence and created happenings. In Warsaw, on October 7, 1988, a year after the Orange Alternative's Independent Policeman's Day happening, a group of university students marched to Dzerzhinsky Square wearing red clothing, carrying portraits of Lenin and pro-Communist banners, and chanting "Long live the police!" and "The Party's fighting, and it's a winner!" (qtd. in Tagliabue). In Gdansk, a group of young shipyard workers staged a happening called The Smoke which resembled an open revolt with the throwing of stones, the manning of barricades, and the use of tear gas. The Orange Alternative had evidently struck a chord that many people, intellectuals and nonintellectuals alike, responded to. Individuals who reacted to theatres like 8th Day and Provisorium by saying, "These theatres are always telling me my coffee is bitter. I know my coffee is bitter. Now tell me how to make it sweet" (qtd. in Robinson 74), saw some kind of a solution in the Orange Alternative's playful nonsense- you make the coffee sweet by laughing at it.

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Part of the Decline of the Worldwide Alternative Theatre Movement?

In 1981, Richard Schechner contended in his essay "The Decline and Fall of the (American) Avant-Garde" that since 1975 the once-lively experimental theatre scene in New York had been dying. He contended that there had been, from the fifties to around 1975: [a] theatre engaged. Engaged for and against. Committed to a network of struggles: political, social, aesthetic, environmental. Against the war in Vietnam and America's involvement in it on behalf of the corrupt South Vietnamese government; for racial equality and opportunity; against environmental degradation; for nuclear disarmament; against the military-industrial corporate multinational state (a mouthful); for women's rights, gay rights. (19)

Since 1975, however, "the heart of the movement... stopped" (23), due to various causes, some artistic and some social, including "Dissolution of the groups and the concomitant rise of solo performing" (29) and "An end to activism in the society-at-large" (30). When Schechner's essay first appeared in two parts in the pages of Performing Arts Journal it stirred up a tremendous amount of controversy. PAJ devoted a special section of a third issue to responses to the original two articles ("Decline"). Many took issue with Schechner's characterization of American alternative theatre after 1975: "The best of our experimental theatre is formalist, frontal, nihilistic" (Schechner 29). Nevertheless, it soon became a commonplace that American alternative theatre, as it had existed in its sixties heyday, was dead. In Poland, the process of decline was somewhat different. Critic Tadeusz Nyczek contends that there too after 1975 the student theatre only repeated the old formulas discovered in the early seventies (Nyczek interview). Sociologist Aldana Jawtowska, however, believes that, although there was a crisis in the young theatre movement in the mid-seventies, in the second half of the seventies it "begins to revive itself again, aiming this time at the creation of a more effective operation. 1980 was the culminating point, at which both [young] theatre-as-art and [young] theatre-as-a-movement attained its greatest maturity" (52). Certainly, the late seventies saw an increase in societal activism in Poland rather than a decrease and a rise in the number of groups rather than their wholesale dissolution. It was, in fact, the rise of Solidarity in 1980, and even more, the imposition of martial law in December, 1981 which proved to be the undoing of the student/young theatre movement. Moreover, whereas in America, the end of the Vietnam War in 1973 seemed to take the steam out of the alternative theatre movement and turn it "formalist" and "nihilistic" in Schechner's terminology, in Poland, the comparable movement was deliberately crushed by the party I state apparatus.

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Interestingly, the method that the apparat used to crush the political alternative theatre was similar to another of Schechner's causes for the decline of the American avant-garde: "Lack of money coupled with the ways money must be raised and accounted for through applications and reports to foundations and various government agencies" (29). In the case of the Polish alternative theatre, where groups had been sponsored by various government funding agencies, they were simply "fired" by these agencies. Theatre of the 8th Day got their pink slips from Estrada, Provisorium from Marie Curie Sklodowska University. This financial squeezing of the groups made it extremely difficult to produce any new work. As the eighties progressed, it became evident that the government had succeeded in suppressing the student theatre movement. It was so successful in fact, that some members of the party had a change of heart; Alma-Art, the part of SZSP which sponsored some festivals in the late eighties, actually paid participants from some of the successful seventies alternative theatres (among them Janusz Oprynski from Provisorium and Marcin K~zycki from 8th Day) to be an Artistic Council and advise the young theatres at the START festival in 1987. The author of an article on that festival ironically made note of the paradox: "As a matter of fact, I don't know- what am I doing here?" confessed one of the members of the Artistic Council. And the good uncles from Alma-Art are in a dilemma: "We don't know whom to give money to!" (Zi6lkowska 5)

But by this time, it was already too late to rescue the student theatre as "the good uncles from Alma-Art" seemed to want to do. On the other hand, by the late eighties sources other than student theatre which had the potential to renew the alternative theatre movement seemed to be emerging. For example, the winners of one of the prizes at the above-mentioned START festival was a group from Bydgoszcz called The Third Theatre on the Road (Trzeci Teatr w Drodze) composed of three men who were not and had never been students. When Alma-Art attempted to deposit the cash prize that the group had won into their account, it was discovered that they had no bank account because they had never been sponsored by any agency and therefore had not had enough money to have a bank account (Zi6lkowska 4). Local Houses of Culture, whose mission was to sponsor amateur artistic and entertainment activities for young people, often employed youth leaders who were interested in drama and sometimes these people started groups who later evolved into interesting theatre companies, like the Theatre of Dreams (Teatr Snow) based in the Culture House in Omnia, a suburb of Gdansk. And of course, individuals like Major who had

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energy and chutzpah could bring together groups of people for guerilla theatre actions. However, partly because activism in society-at-large had been suppressed during martial law, and with a few exceptions such as 8th Day and Provisorium who bravely soldiered on despite adversity, the political alternative theare which emerged in the early seventies and reached its peak (according to Jawfowska) in 1980 was as dead as the American alternative theatre that Schechner wrote about in his essay. As in the American theatre scene, the baton of innovation had been passed to groups (such as those discussed in the next chapter) who were less interested in politics and more interested in the formal asnerts of exnerim e ntatio n .

14. 14 . Provisorium Theatre, Lublin: It is Nol for Us to Fly to the Islands of Happiness (1982). Photo: M ieczyslaw Sachaayn.

15.

Provisorium Theatre, L:.1hlin: Rccof!ectwns from till' House of file Dead 0 983). Photo:

Mieczyslaw Sachadyn.

16.

P rovisorium Theatre, Lublin: Recollections from the House of the Demi (1983). Photo: M ieczysJaw S achadvn.

17.

Provisorium T heatre, Lublin: Heritage (1985). Photo: A n to n i Z debiak.

1:

Provis;;rium The.1tn.:, Lublin: IIerita,gc (1985) T'hotu: Antoni Zdebiak.

19. Scena Plastyczna, Lublin: Moisture (1978). Photo: Stefan Ciechan.

20.

Scena Plastyczna, Lublin: The Wandering (1980). Photo: Stefan Ciechan.

21.

Scena Plastyczna, Lublin: The B ank (1983). Photo: Stefan Ciechan.

22.

Scena Plastyczna, Lublin: The Fettering (1986). Photo: Stefan Ciechan.

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5 THE AVANT-GARDE OF THE ALTERNATIVE

The 1970-1989 period witnessed a number of attempts to reach out beyond the confines of what was increasingly felt to be the hermetic world of student theatre and its fans to some kind of outside community. Attempts early in this period were generally made by groups called "student theatres" and funded by SZSP, but as time went on groups sprang up which were completely independent of the student theatre movement. Some of the groups were descendents of what was considered the "irrelevant" purely aesthetic student theatre of the 1960s. Others were artistic descendents of Kantor, of Grotowski in his paratheatrical phase or later of Teatr 77 in its aim of reaching out to audiences and creating a new audience/performer community. In many cases, these theatres picked up the strand of experimentation that the visual student theatres of the sixties had worked with; indeed, the animators of these experiments were usually trained as visual artists or art historians. These groups' explorations often aimed at changing the inner consciousness of their audience members/participants rather than offering the more obviously political commentary of other alternative theatre performances. By the late seventies this reaching out to the community had become as important to many alternative theatre practitioners as making political statements had been in the early seventies. Various practitioners, in fact, argued over whether this was an appropriate direction to take or whether the traditional function that student theatre had carried out - the creation of avant-garde spectacles that were more connected to political and social realities than those the official state theatres were able to provide - still demanded the attention of the alternative theatre. In April, 1979, a lively discussion was held in a student club at the Warsaw Polytechnic on the subject "Has Community Become a Value?" Critics and academics interested in theatre took part, as well as directors who represented various branches of the alternative theatre: a political ex-student theatre, a visual ex-student theatre which performed street happenings involving the audience, and a theatre which traveled to remote villages and attempted to get in touch with authentic folk culture (Antczak, et al.). By 1980, then, alternative theatre had

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begun to diversify, to escape its student roots, and to discover that it need not conform to a narrow notion of "engagement." The eighties brought on a certain weariness with student theatre, even among those who had been fans. It was perceived that this theatre had developed a set of conventions as rigid as those in the traditional theatre. During the Solidarity period, a Dialog article entitled "Nausea," appeared, in which Juliusz Tyszka, himself the former director of a student theatre, writes: The first time I was seized by nausea as I viewed the place of action - the empty hall illuminated by one oblique reflector placed in a corner. The sense of debility grew as I saw some young bodies ready for action, dressed in jeans, track suits, and loose shirts with rolled up sleeves. I somehow managed to survive the doleful tune played on the recorder and collectively hummed in ecstasy .... From then on I did not pay attention to the play any longer, to the poetry profusely adorned with sweat, brutality, constricted whispers, pointless running from corner to corner. (40-41)

Even the young intelligentsia seemed to find "their" theatre a bit beside the point when the whole nation was constantly in crisis. Despite the intense politicization of every aspect of life throughout this period, there was a paradoxical desire for an avant-garde theatre that was not necessarily apolitical but not solely political. This can be seen in those statements quoted earlier where directors of political theatres tried to justify their theatres on non-political grounds. But it can be seen even more clearly in the experimental productions -or events, happenings, actions, theatreposters, or whatever name the group invented- that will be discussed here. In many cases audiences received these in much the same way as the offerings of political theatres, but the intentions of the groups were less political than those of STU in its early seventies incarnation or of the Theatre of the 8th Day. Three kinds of experimentation characterize the alternative theatre of this period: experimenters with words, visual experimenters, and experimenters with the anthropology of the theatre. Word Experiments: Pleonazmus

An alternative theatre group of the early 1970s, Pleonazmus was founded after the events of 1968 which had such an impact on the other student theatres of the early seventies. Students at Krakow's Jagiellonian University started the theatre group in November, 1970, a year after Hejduk and friends had started Teatr 77 in L6d.Z. Significantly, Pleonazmus also began its work after Kalambur's In the Rhythm of the Sun, STU's Falling, and Theatre of the 8th Day's Introduction To ... had already premiered. Pleonazmus felt less compelled to be overtly political than the theatres mentioned in Chapter 3. At

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the same time, because other theatres had made it permissible to comment on everyday reality, and that reality was highly politicized, its work can hardly be called apolitical. In its first two productions, Pleonazmus sought its own theatrical voice. The first performance, premiering in March, 1971, called Teatr pana Biatoszewskiego (Mr. Biatoszewski's Theatre), staged some of the mini-plays that the poet Miron Bialoszewski (1922-1983) wrote for the "separate theatre" that he and two friends had performed in his apartment in 1955-1963. Pleonazmus also included some fragments from Bialoszewski's recently published Pami?tnik z Powstania Warszawskiego (Memoirs of the Warsaw Uprising -1970). The second production, premiering in October, 1971, called To co teatralne (That Which Is Theatrical), was based on the critical writings of Konstanty Puzyna and Ludwik Flaszen. From Bialoszewski, Pleonazmus inherited a love of linguistic experimentation - evident in all its subsequent productions. From Puzyna and Flaszen it inherited a dedication to finding new forms of theatrical expression. In its next production, it put those elements together in a way different from any other student theatre of the time. The first production bearing the theatre's unique stamp was Sztosc samojedna (Comings and Goings), 1 premiering in April, 1972. In this performance the group lived up to its name - the theatre of the pleonasm and paid homage to Bialoszewski' s linguistic experiments. It built a spectacle upon the repetition of phrases containing variations of the word "go." In Polish, adding various prefixes to the word "go" (isc), and changing the "i" to "j" provides other verbs of motion, such as "come" (przyjsc), "go through" (przejsc), "stop by" (zyjsc), "go around" (obejsc). "leave" (odejsc), "arrive" (dojsc), "enter" (wejsc), and "approach" (podejsc). The text of Pleonazmus' production consists of repetitive questions and answers containing the word "go" or one of the verbs based on "go." For example, the first lines of the spectacle are: 1. I have come 2. she has come

3. she has come 4. she has come 1. I have come 2. well and what of it that she's come 3. she's come so she's come [Numbers refer to the actors speaking] (Nyczek, Pleonazmus 36)

1 Comings and Goings is not a literal translation of Sztosc samojedna. The words sztosc and samojedna are, in fact, nonsensical even in Polish. A more literal translation might be something like Goingness Alone.

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This simple, repetitive opening becomes layered with more variations on and playings with the word "go" as the performance progresses. Comings and Goings is not, though, just a piece of linguistic wordplay. It opposes an individual who has come (Actor #1) to a group. At the beginning Actors #2-5 whirl, lie on their backs, stand on their heads, or walk on their hands, gradually coalescing into a many-headed collective being. This entity asks Actor #1 why she has come, what happened to make her come, how many times she has come, because she does not seem to have come by accident - someone must have sent her. Then the group proposes that Actor #1 march together with it, forces her to agree, and actually to lead the march. They march together with her in front, a leader under duress. They circle several times, but the collectivity gets bored and discontented. They blame Actor #1 since she is the leader and begin accusations which end in an execution: the collectivity crushes Actor #1, and carries her corpse to some undefined cemetery. Now there is no leader. However, the manyheaded collectivity, continually prattling about "going," has scarcely trampled Actor #1 to death when it discovers in itself a new leader whom it also persuades has come, divides from itself, gives birth to, pushes to the front, and marches in back of. The performance ends as it began, with the implication that the new leader will be trampled just like the old one, and that the cycle will endlessly repeat itself . The theme of the individual versus the collectivity was again taken up in Pleonazmus' next production, Strai poiarna by nie zmogta, jedna, druga, trzecia ... (The Fire Brigade Couldn't Manage Once, Twice, Three Times ... ) which premiered in October, 1973. Whereas in Comings and Goings, the performance was built around the word "go," this time the word which the production is built around is "wise." The actors come on (led by two couples with the women on the shoulders of the men) reciting: I am wise I am wise I am wise today wise tomorrow wise always wise lower wise higher wise I am wise where is a wise one where is a wise one there is a wise one there is a wise one there is a wise one I am wise I am wise I am wise here wise there wise everywhere wise lower wise higher wise I am wise (Nyczek, Pleonazmus 51)

The text goes on to introduce words related to "wise," such as "stupid" and "fire" (each actor holds a lighted candle symbolizing wisdom). Again, as in Comings and Goings, there is a collective being constructed of the intertwined bodies of the actors. Even though it declares itself to be wise, the collective being in The Fire Brigade needs a leader, just as it did in Comings and Goings. It also seeks an

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ideal. Three times it finds its leader and its ideal only to lose them and start seeking for them all over again. Ideals are lost because of dogmatism, betrayal by leaders, and boredom on the part of the collective. The collective kills one of its leaders, then mourns over him in a mock funeral ceremony: "we are wise, you were stupid." It laments that it was forced to take such an action. A fire brigade forms to prevent any new candles from being lit. Yet the fire brigade cannot succeed in putting out the fires of wisdom; new ideals will always keep rising up, and the play thus ends on a somewhat optimistic note. In Pleonazmus' next performance, Wybrane sceny z najnowszej naszej dekadencji (Selected Scenes from Our Latest Decadence), which premiered in October, 1974, the leader (or maybe the ideal) is dead, and the production opens with his funeral. Once again the principle of repetition and redundancy is adhered to, but this time, the text spoken by the group is much more complex. There is no single word which is a key to the whole production as "go" was for Comings and Goings and "wise" was for The Fire Brigade, but the words "lamented," "dirt," "inheritance," and "language" all serve as word-keys for this spectacle. An unspecified Lamented One has gone, and is mourned by the group. Nothing is left after his going but the dirt which buries him and everything else, which pushes into the ears and the eyes, paralyzing everything. Suddenly the tone changes and the group sings a song about a six-year-long "dream about the bordello" and "girls who give away love." It becomes clear that this, in fact, is what has died, a six-year period (1968-74) of fantasies, obsessions, and delusions from the past. The group of mourners looks for the inheritance the Lamented One promised them, and it turns out to be a collection of tee-shirts with typical Communist slogans such as "Let's Go As We Must Go," "Let's Go Together into an Always Better Future," "Progress Is Our Guarantee of a Joyful Tomorrow," "We Went, We Go, and We Will Go Toward Our Goal," and "Only Our Route Is Right." Words, the very language itself, have also proved to be barren and dead. The mourners leave in the same funeral procession that they entered in, but now they are lamenting the death of language itself (Nyczek, Pleonazmus 65-66). Pleonazmus' last production, Delirium Tremens, which premiered in October, 1975, examined many of the same phenomena that had been explored in earlier productions: the individual versus the collective, the nature of leadership, and the relationship of truth to fantasy. In this performance, the collective being of earlier productions is now a group of revelers eating and drinking in a restaurant or pub. They notice a nondrinker among themselves, and pressure him to drink. He refuses, which causes great consternation among the group. Finally he assumes leadership of the group, and proposes to lead them to the "naked truth." However, his various attempts to do so are unsuccessful. The group gives up, gulps down a last

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shot of vodka, and freezes into random positions indicating complete submission to fate. At this moment, a young woman appears, wakes the drunken sleepers from their daze, and announces that she has come to bring them joy and liberation. She dumps shoes out of her traveling bag and also distributes candies. The group, including their leader, the former teetotaler, is bewildered: is this supposed to be the better future they had been dreaming about? The shoes do not fit, and besides they are tied together by the laces and so they cannot be walked in. They begin to murmur against the woman, but she is seized by a ghostly dance, and wildly giggling and whirling, she wrests the shoes from their hands and shouts "delirium tremens, delirium tremens," to the sound of grating music as darkness falls (Nyczek, Pleonazmus 85-86). In this, their darkest production, Pleonazmus seems to be suggesting that the Polish people are incapable of pursuing the "naked truth," but instead get derailed by tawdry, drunken fantasies. Perhaps because their productions were filled with progressively less and less hope, Pleonazmus disbanded in 1976. In the four productions from Comings and Goings to Delirium Tremens, Pleonazmus took Polish alternative theatre in a slightly different direction from that it had been pursuing. First of all, though virtually all groups in this period created their performances through improvisation, Pleonazmus was more truly collective than the others in that they (after their first two productions) never used other texts as the basis for their own nor did they work with outside playwrights or poets. Secondly, their style was completely different from that of the other groups and incorporated elements of acrobatics, dance, and pantomime as well as more traditional "acting." Thirdly, they went further than any of the other major groups in the early 1970s away from a purely theatrical experience and toward an experience more akin to performance art. Their performances were more elliptical and metaphoric and therefore more difficult for the Polish audience to interpret than the allusions about previously forbidden topics that the performances of the other major groups of the period contained. Finally, they incorporated into their productions (particularly Selected Scenes and Delirium Tremens) a critique not only of the regime, but also of the intelligentsia itself as responsible for failures of leadership in Poland. Visual Theatre/Performance Art Experiments In the seventies, the stream of visual theatre, which had been a major trend in sixties student theatre but had been subsumed and combined with poetry theatre in the "full voice" years, reasserted itself. There were major

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differences between this new form of visual theatre and the sixties version, however. In the sixties, most of the theatres were offshoots either of Gdansk's Bim-Bom or of Tomaszewski's Pantomime Studio in Wrodaw. Despite in many cases being created by visual artists, these theatres drew from many theatrical traditions such as commedia dell'arte, clowning, puppetry, and pantomime. With the exception of the Galeria Theatre in Gdansk, the visual theatres of the sixties were well within the theatrical tradition; they did not approach the borderline between theatre and the visual arts. The new incarnation of visual theatre in the seventies, however, tended to be more influenced by trends in the art world, such as performance art. There were many groups in the seventies which put performance art into practice. For example, a group of young artists, the Salon-Gallery Repassage, staged Christo-like conceptual art events near Warsaw University. In one, they built a typical Polish apartment in the underground passageway across from the university, and attempted to live in it while people passed through. In another they built a huge labyrinth out of white material spread on masts, and invited people to enter. Repassage spawned a whole generation of performance artists in the late seventies and eighties. The actual term "performance art" gained wide recognition in Poland in 1978, when two galleries in Warsaw sponsored international symposia/ exhibitions: the "I Am" international artists' meeting sponsored by the Remont Gallery in April, and the "Performance and Body" conference sponsored by Labirynt Gallery in October. This phenomenon closely paralleled and built upon similar trends in countries in Western Europe and North America. Less connected specifically with the art world were groups that retained ties either with the student theatre movement or with Grotowski. One of the most ambitious groups of this type was Pracownia Olsztynska (the Olsztyn Studio), a group of art history and cultural studies graduates who began operating in the northeastern part of Poland in 1977. They received funding from the regional Social-Cultural Association and offered classes, workshops, meetings, and seminars to groups of (mainly) young people. These sessions had various aims: questioning the inauthenticity of culturally ingrained behavior, awakening sensory responsiveness, developing the body and voice, liberating spontaneous creativity, discussing artistic problems, and popularizing the work of other Polish and foreign alternative groups. The members of Pracownia took part in training sessions offered by Grotowski, had many contacts with student theatres, and themselves prepared street theatre performances at the end of the seventies, but they never called themselves a "theatre company" per se. For them, as for

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Grotowski in his post-theatrical period, the process of making theatre and other art was more important than the product. The two groups discussed below mixed varying degrees of involvement in the art and theatre worlds, as well as varying levels of engagement in politics and in the official student theatre movement. The first theatre, Scena Plastyczna KUL-u (the Visual Stage of the Catholic University of Lublin) is more "artistic" in that its offerings have moved further and further away from theatrical spectacles, yet paradoxically, it is the only major group which has remained a "student theatre" in that it uses students as its actors. The second group, Warsaw's Akademia Ruchu (the Academy of Movement) was, from its founding until 1979 officially a "student theatre," and then became a professional "theatre center," yet its varied activities have had very little in common with any conventional concept of "theatre."

Scena Plastyczna Like Pleonazmus, Lublin's Scena Plastyczna was founded in 1970, the same year that STU created Falling and Kalambur created In the Rhythm of the Sun. However, even more than Pleonazmus, it remained almost totally separate both in its thematic concerns and its performance methods from the student theatre movement of that time. Its founder and principal animator, Leszek Madzik, has been more interested in realizing his own personal visual imagery than in making any kind of political statement about Polish reality. Though nominally a third-year art history student at the Catholic University of Lublin (KUL), through the years Madzik has actually worked as a kind of artist-in-residence on campus. Where other student theatres created their performances communally and improvisationally by the actors under the guidance of their directors, Scena Plastyczna has remained fully an "auteur theatre." For most of its existence, Madzik's vision alone has shaped the performances of Scena Plastyczna; after the first two productions he has written, designed, and directed all of them. The students who have assisted Madzik in realizing his visions have functioned less and less as actors in any traditional sense of the word and more and more as props or animate pieces of scenery. Over the years, Madzik's productions have undergone an evolution. Various theatrical elements have been reduced or eliminated until only visual elements remained. Gradually, words, plot, characters, and finally concrete dramatic action disappeared from Scena Plastyczna's works. The visual elements themselves evolved from flat, scenery-like work toward threedimensional use of the whole theatre space. In addition, early productions had specifically religious themes whereas later productions have tended more toward the broadly philosophical. As Madzik's own artistic vision has

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evolved, he has sought new ways to express it, yet, as he himself often repeats, he is, in some sense, always mounting the same production (M;:tdzik, "Mysle" 101). The early productions of Scena Plastyczna were inspired by medieval mystery and morality plays. The first spectacle, Ecce Homo (premiere 1970), which was written and designed by M;:tdzik but directed by Joachim Lodek, still contained the spoken word. There was a masked hero/Everyman character who narrated his own lifetime journey through birth, unrequited love, search for God, erotic life, and death. Each stage in the hero's life was illustrated by a stained glass panel with a light behind it that was switched on at the appropriate moment. The second production, Narodzenia (Nativities -premiere 1971), also written and designed by MQ.dzik but directed by Jerzy Kaczorowski, eliminated words and introduced puppets as well as masks. The stage space, which had been rather shallow and flat in Ecce Homo, was now deepened and used symbolically to depict the wandering of Adam and Eve. In Wieczerza (The Last Supper- premiere 1972), the first production directed by M;:tdzik as well as written and designed by him, the role of light and music increased. The theatrical space now became so deep that it covered the audience area and the audience sat on what used to be the stage. The scenery, consisting of white screens, was able to move and to be co-equal with the actors who lost their identity as individuals. After these first three productions; religious themes no longer formed the subject matter of Scena Plastyczna's productions; however, the philosophical concerns of religionthe nature of life, of death, of the afterlife- remained central to M;:tdzik's imagery. M;:tdzik next directed two productions which developed further what Andrzej Kowalski, a participant in many of the early productions of Scena Plastyczna, terms his "code based on unconventional sonic-visual symbols" (97). In wt6kna (Fibers -premiere 1973), drama as fiction disappeared and the stage space acquired the appearance of limitlessness. Visual allusions to the Laocoon group, the Pieta, a chessboard, and a labyrinth - were made. His 1974 production, Ikar (Icarus), commented upon the Icarus myth by means of visual and musical symbolism. Light struggled with darkness and pop music with sacred music. Icarus's flight was portrayed by an actor running faster and faster in a circle which seemed to go upwards toward a red sky. After his fall, Icarus changed to a motionless figure confined to a wheelchair surrounded by silhouettes of huge puppets. The puppets opened their circle and framed Icarus in the wings of a triptych. Two huge scales symbolizing Justice swayed to a slow, monotonous rhythm. Finally, amid deafening music and dazzling light, a scaffolding filled with masked figures, the mirror-image of the audience, emerged from the depths and began to

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move toward the front of the stage. When it almost reached the audience, the scaffolding broke in two, revealing the dead Icarus. In this production, the character of Icarus became a symbol and it was no longer possible to speak of actors in Scena Plastyczna "acting" but rather "animating" the visions of ~dzik. M{ldzik's vision, of a theatre consisting wholly of visual and musical symbols, had matured. Scena Plastyczna's next two productions were inspired by the artistic works of others. Pirtno (The Seal- premiere 1975) was a kind of commentary on Ingmar Bergman's film The Seventh Seal. Lighting effects, from stroboscopes to candles burning, were fully utilized in this production. Men in helmets fastened hooks with ropes attached to the platform the audience was sitting on, and dragged the audience-members toward an open door. They stopped moving at the edge of a pit dug (apparently) in the ground. At the bottom of this abyss was the silhouette of a knight kneeling above a coffin. Zielnik (Herbarium- premiere 1976) drew upon the work of sculptress Alina Szapocznikow and explored what a British professor who saw the production termed the "macabre eroticism" present in her work (Hyde, "Diary"). Critic Pawel Konic describes the performance: It is enacted on two contrasting planes: a perfectly flat surface and endless depth. A man suspended on strings tosses against the background of white canvas in stroboscopic light, like a fly in a spider's net. Two white female figures approach him majestically. The background disappears and huge marionettes with feminine shapes emerge from the backstage. The man touches them. (Leszek 19-20)

In the final sequence, the house lights went on, and "shreds of cloth ... reminiscent of lacerated and withered bodies" (Konic, "Leszek" 20) were swiftly lowered from the flies closer and closer to the audience to the accompaniment of thunderous music. M{ldzik had found, in Icarus, in The Seal, and in Herbarium, ways to draw the audience in by playing with their perceptions. In Wilgoc (Moisture- premiere 1978), M{ldzik explored the biological nature of life itself. He declared, "My point is that we are condemned to moisture, which may lead to disintegration. Hence, our urge to get dry" (qtd. in Konic, "Leszek" 20). The stage was very dimly lighted with images coming out of darkness and going back to darkness. It was surrounded by black, pleated foil, giving the impression of something wet, or organic. Two small cabinets like television screens were lighted in turn. They revealed masks covering human faces, then humans covering their faces with cloth that formed masks. Later, a wet curtain revealed naked human legs hanging near the front of the stage with water dripping from them. Reclining human figures were raised in the air, then fell and vanished into the shadows. Large,

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empty, bag-like suits of clothes rose up, waved, then fell and became lumps devoid of life. Human torsos with legs cut off at the knee and stumps of arms circled around. The final image was of a human figure (but barely recognizable as human) slung like a wet rug over a rope, with long hair hanging down. Drops of water dripping could be heard. Whereas Moisture seemed confined to an inner, biological space, Scena Plastyczna's next performance, W?drowne (The Wandering- premiere 1980) despite also being "enacted on the border of visibility" (Konic, "Leszek" 20), suggested spaciousness. Images recurred over and over at various depths and in various positions and combinations on the stage: a thin man with long hair dressed in a loincloth (Jesus?), a long, rectangular box (a coffin?), two women in long dresses with white, dose-fitting headdresses on their heads, an icon-like picture of a man with a beard (again, Jesus?), a halftransparent cuboid of nondescript, moving, pale material hanging over the audience's heads, a group of standing, motionless figures, hanging figures of something hard to make out - people or birds or monsters. Also appearing were the images of fields consisting of golden-hued grass or grain, and an undefined, foggy material which swirled onto the stage and then diffused up above. The various changing images suggested associations with Christian ideas of the afterlife, as well as with organic cycles of decay and growth. P?tanie (The Fettering - premiere 1986) examined imagery of confinement. The first image depicted a bird caught in a lace curtain, trying to escape. A little blonde girl appeared and gazed up at the bird. Then the audience saw the girl running toward a lighted area. The next images were of coffin-like boxes with a woman writhing in the background as snake-like cloths moved over the boxes. The bird reappeared and pecked at a twisted, upside-down body of a human. The last set of images involved more coffinlike boxes. People were confined in the boxes, trying to reach through the walls of the boxes and touch each other, but unable to. Sometimes the marionette-like and mannekin-like people broke through the barrier of the boxes but they still did not touch each other. Then, half-naked men (slaves?) dragged the boxes like horses saddled to carts toward streams of water, but though these streams were right in front of the men, they did not drink. The men vanished and only the boxes were left. In a review of the production, Lydia Wojcik writes, "The overall atmosphere of [The Fettering] is that of hope and anticipation" (18), but the optimism here is clearly tempered by what M~dzik sees as people's inability to connect with each other. M~dzik's "theatre," in its mature form, is a series of three-dimensional pictures, which the audience is presented with and which slowly evolve to a certain point, and then change into other pictures. Everything comes out of darkness and goes back into darkness. There is no narrative

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thread; the important thing is the atmosphere created, not any narration. Mf\dzik expects the audience to "read" the fears, hopes, and other emotions which are contained in the images in the same way that viewers "read" art. He believes there is a "ghost of sensitivity" that makes the audience able to respond to these emotions, and that the work only exists as it is validated by the audience (Mfl.dzik, interview). Though M1_1dzik considers irrelevant the question of whether his performances are art or theatre, they are clearly much closer to art than the work of any other Polish alternative theatre company, and in fact closer even than most of what goes by the name of performance art in the West. The viewer must not, therefore, expect to respond to the work of Scena Plastyczna as one responds to a play, even an avant-garde play. The "world" depicted onstage has none of the narrative "hooks" which audiencemembers have become accustomed to hang things on. It is a depiction of Leszek Mfl.dzik's own mental landscape. It is in fact possible to respond to each image individually, thinking one stunning and another banal, the way one might respond to different paintings by the same artist in a museum. It is also possible to see the productions over and over again, responding to different images each time. The technical mastery with which one image progresses into another is impressively managed. Though the "actors" are students, there is not the least amateurism about the productions. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Mfl.dzik's vision is his treatment of the human form. In several of his productions, the body appears mainly in fragments - heads are disembodied or, conversely, torsos appear without heads. As in some of Kantor's work, puppets or mannekins are often used rather than live human beings. Or, we might see real legs and feet, then later mannekin legs and feet, a real face, then a mask of that face. Sometimes, inanimate objects are fused with human beings. The effect of these transformations and combinations is profoundly disturbing. Mfl.dzik seems to be questioning the very nature of humanness in his productions.

Akademia Ruchu Warsaw's Akademia Ruchu was founded in 1972 by a group of students from various disciplines: among them, art history, psychology, and sociology were represented. Their director, Wojciech Krukowski, had been trained as an art historian and had worked as literary director and stage designer with a Warsaw student pantomime theatre (Hybrydy) in the 1960s. In their earliest productions, Collage and Lektorat (Language Course), both premiering in 1973, the group promised to be nothing more than a typical pantomime theatre of the sixties. They dressed in tights and mimed short scenes resembling individual frames from a motion picture. The scenes took as their subject

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matter stereotyped collective and individual behaviors. In Language Course, these were counterpointed by the sounds of a recorded English lesson. The very name Akademia Ruchu - the Academy of Movement - promised an exploration of artistic problems that most observers of the student theatre movement at the time thought had already been thoroughly explored ad nauseum in the sixties. Nevertheless, though at this stage Akademia resembled theatres such as Gest (discussed in Chapter 2), they were already developing their own distinctive style of un-dance-like, un-mime-like, but still quite precisely executed movement. Quite quickly, Akademia began to move outside the confines of a "pantomime theatre." Still in 1973, they began to conduct "group exercises" and "workshops" to which audience members were invited. These sessions, called Ruch (Movement) and Rotacje (Rotations), were improvisatory in nature and explored the use of the body as a vehicle for theatrical expression and the organization of space through the actors' movements. In 1974, with the production of Gt6d (Hunger), they began to call their productions "TheatrePosters" (Teatr-Plakat) rather than "spectacles" (spektakl), the term common in Polish theatre. Also in 1974, they conducted a paratheatrical action entitled Czuwanie calonocne (All Night Feeling) which consisted, like Movement and Rotations, in movement improvisations for the purpose of building theatrical symbols, but this time with the participation of actors from other groups, visual artists, and ordinary audience-members, in addition to the members of Akademia. In 1975, they repeated this action but this time outdoors in the streets of Ciechanow, a Warsaw suburb. Also in 1975, Akademia premiered its first widely acclaimed performance piece, Autobus (Bus),2 inspired by a painting by Bronislaw Wojciech Linke of the same title. In Bus, the actors sat in formation, as if they were the driver and passengers on a city bus. Most of the actors were in profile and were almost completely motionless, but one woman sat full front and slowly tensed her whole body as if giving birth to a child and shouting out in pain. She repeated this silent mime over and over, always returning to passively sitting with an automatic smile on her face. There was also a couple sitting next to each other on one of the front seats and slowly, almost imperceptibly turning their heads toward and away from each other. This "living picture" was accompanied by a tape recording of production noises from factories, automobiles on the streets, sirens, radio or television news announcements, mass singing, and shouts from demonstrators. The volume of this recording was turned up so high that it was almost painful. The For further description of Bus, see Berwid-Oshl.ska 24; Jawlowska 84-85; Nyczek, "Akademia" 130-131; and Taranienko, "Akademia" 9.

2

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passengers on the bus slowly seemed to become, in some cases, more and more tense, and in others more and more tired-looking. The eyes of some of them watered from the bright lights. Just when it seemed that they could no longer endure the sound, the tension, and the bright lights, Krukowski pulled the plug of the tape recorder from its socket, the light went out, and the spectacle was over. Bus was recognized both in Poland and internationally as a new way of using movement (or rather, the lack of movement) on the stage. It was performed not only in Poland but also in Italy (Salerno and Naples), at the International Festival in Nancy, France, and at the Theatre of Nations Festival in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Observers tended to wax poetic when describing its effect on them. Tadeusz Nyczek wrote: Activity brought to a standstill, society reduced to "seats," the deadness of apparent life, the inaudible outcry of pain, the mutual alienation of the passengers, and all this enveloped in the deafening uproar of some mechanical, external existence, the onward rush of time - evoked associations with the cosmic void of captive existence, a vision of the unfulfilled journey and futile expectations. The paradoxically alive bus, a line to nothingness, and the seated passengers are as if transported to the pure state of Samuel Beckett's ideas. ("Akademia" 131)

This performance marked a breakthrough for Akademia Ruchu. With it they seemed to have achieved a maturity and uniqueness in their performance style. Immediately following their success with Bus, however, they abandoned the theatre for several years, in the sense that they abandoned creating "performances" which occurred indoors and could be repeated unchanged. Their next "theatre-poster," entitled Wie.ia (Tower- premiere 1975) did, in its first version, take place indoors, in a theatre setting, but it had little in common with a theatrical spectacle. The lights faded to black, as they usually do for the beginning of a performance, but instead of coming up again, the stage and the audience remained in pitch darkness for quite an extended period of time. During this time, the audience could hear sounds of tuning-up before a concert coming from the stage. When the lights finally did come up, however, there were no musicians onstage, and in fact, no people at all. The audience could only see what the members of Akademia had been doing in the darkness: hanging cloth banners which contained the type of slogans that typically adorned public places during the Communist era. This was the entire performance. Using the method of cognitive dissonance (the "tower" of Babel of the title) the "theatre-poster" made a powerful yet subtle statement about the whole organization of Communist society: there was a tremendous amount of drum-beating, yet what was produced in the end was only words.

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Tower was repeated many times, but constantly changed its form. At first, only the playing time varied from performance to performance, but eventually it moved outdoors, and because of the change of venue, the entire structure evolved into something different. In the open-air version, entitled Tower II, Academia brought their pieces of cloth with slogans on them to outdoor courtyards surrounded by apartment buildings. They would ask passers-by to lend them buckets of water and with the water wash the pieces of cloth and then scrupulously hang them up to dry on clotheslines around the courtyards. Often the tenants of the surrounding apartment houses would not only lend buckets but actively join the Akademia members in their task, which became, in this version, a kind of symbolic laundering of the nation's dirty linen. This was the beginning of a whole series of outdoor actions or happenings that Akademia would stage in the late seventies. From 1976 to 1978, Akademia completely gave up performing in theatres and only performed on the street. All together they performed over two hundred street actions. In 1976, they began a series of street actions entitled Lekcje (Lessons). These were improvisations on various themes, performed in various parts of the city, and addressed to various audiences. There were, for example, special Lessons for children (which the children themselves helped to improvise) and others for adults. Most often, however, the subject matter for these short, improvised street theatre pieces was drawn from the daily news and was called Gazeta nasza codzienna lekcja (The Newspaper- Our Daily Lesson). Group members would read excerpts from the newspaper, while others pantomimed them. The stereotypes that the tightly controlled Communist mass media presented would be parodied: for example, the ever-rising factory production figures, or the usual"here we are thriving, 'there' they are declining" presentation of foreign news, or television news visits to the homes of "average citizens" (Jawlowska 88). Akademia did not apply for permission from the censorship office for these performances, and sometimes they were disrupted by the police. On one occasion, however, when the police showed up, Akademia pretended to be making a film, and the police kindly started to redirect traffic so the filming would not be interrupted (Goldfarb, Beyond xx). Akademia premiered another street performance in 1976 entitled Koncert poetycki- Europa (Poetic Concert - Europe). This performance, presented in the evening in city streets or squares, in the lights of automobiles and to the sound of horns, used the lines of futurist Anatol Stern's 1929 poem "Europe" as its "text." As in Tower, the lines had been painted on banners, but this time the banners were carried by the members of the group who each entered the lighted area individually or in pairs, in rhythms different from each other but all stepping quickly or even running. Some

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lines were carried around for a shorter length of time, some longer. Then the banners were tossed into a pile, a symbolic garbage-heap of used-up words. Maria Berwid-Osinska writes of this performance: "The original versification of the poem fell apart. The poem was born anew at each performance. The text 'shouted' not about the situation in interwar Europe but about our world today" (25). This performance, which premiered at the 1976 Artistic Festival of Academic Youth (known by its Polish initials as FAMA) in Swinoujscie (a resort town on the Baltic Sea), was repeated many times in various locations in Warsaw. In December, 1976, Academia presented a kind of happening entitled Happy Day (the original title was in English). It was carried out in a very busy area of Warsaw, on a grey, dreary, rainy day. Suddenly, into the drab crowd of pedestrians and cars, came a group of around sixty young people clothed in brightly colored costumes and carrying trays of fruit, dishes of meat, horns of plenty and other festive props. They mixed with the crowd. In the air, a fragment of Vivaldi's Summer played. The whole event lasted only three minutes, after which the colorful characters disappeared as suddenly as they had appeared. Critic Tadeusz Nyczek compares the effect of their presence to emissaries from another world, characters from a fairy tale, heralds of a happy day. But on the other hand, real, contemporary. A spontaneous, joyful contrast with the greyness of the ordinary day, a flash of light in the dark clouds, a holiday in everyday life. ("Akademia" 133)

With this piece, which was repeated several times, Akademia began a series of "actions" or "events" designed to, in director Krukowski's words, "disturb everyday reality" (interview). The next important action took place during the L6dz Theatre Meetings in March, 1977. It was called Teatr miejski (City Theatre) and took place over the course of seventeen hours simultaneously at various points across the city. At one location, across from morning lines forming in front of stores, Akademia members formed lines which were mirror reflections of the real lines. At another location, a tram stop, a young man cleaned the windows of every tram that stopped there. At a certain newstand, "customers" kept buying the morning paper and then throwing it in a nearby garbage can without reading it. In the gateways between the Old City and the newer portion of town, members of the troupe portraying undercover policemen checked the identity papers of other members portraying ordinary citizens. In another place the group members who passed a certain point in the center of the sidewalk tripped on an invisible crack. The goal of this and other actions of the period was "to make reality more dynamic and make people more aware of where they live" (Krukowski).

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At the 1977 FAMA, Akademia arranged another event entitled Piechota (A Walk). This was spread out over several days. On the first day, a male mannequin dressed as a worker and painted entirely in grey, appeared standing in one of the small squares in Swinoujscie. On the second day, a female mannequin, also painted in grey, appeared standing next to him. On the third day, there was an eight-to-ten year-old boy mannequin in the grey family. On the fourth day, the family had been moved to the main intersection in Swinoujscie. On the fifth day, a Communist holiday, the family was seen, holding red carnations, in the window of a house. Later in the day it appeared on the way to the beach passing by the city jail. Finally, on Sunday, it appeared on the boardwalk among all the other families walking up and down. Also starting in November, 1977, Akademia prepared a series of Lectures on the theme "Contemporary Aspects of Socialism." These had the character of lectures but instead of slides, the actors pantomimed pictures to illustrate the lecture. They were delivered/performed in theatres but also in academic settings all over Poland. In 1978, Akademia worked on its most ambitious "intervention in reality" to date, the action Dom (House). This took place three times, the first during the Young Theatre Confrontations in Lublin in April, the second during the Street Theatre Festival in Santarcangelo, Italy in July, and the third during the International Meetings of Theatre and Open Art in Olesnica (a small town near Wrodaw) in September. Like A Walk, House took place over the course of several days but like Tower II it involved the participation of its audience. In Lublin and Olesnica, the two places where the most interesting results were obtained, the event started with two members of Akademia going around to the apartments which faced the "performance area," and telling the tenants "We're from the theatre. We're interested in these houses and their inhabitants. Maybe we'll make a film here. Do you have anything against this? .... Maybe we'll make scenery here. Can we count on your help?" (Akademia Ruchu 133-135). In Lublin, in three days of activity, they succeeded in getting the residents to participate actively in decorating their street as if for a holiday celebration, and they felt that they had succeeded in making the residents realize "that the process and result of the action is a more important document of reality than the shooting of the film that they first announced" (Akademia Ruchu 134). In Olesnica, where Akademia worked with the residents for an entire week, the occupants actually took part in and developed their own performance which reflected their buildings' history as well as the current state of their own lives. Critic Ewa Labunska was surprised at the high quality of the inhabitants' performance: "It was for me a surprise, an experience, a shock" (138).

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In 1979, Akademia was "professionalized." Like STU, they were placed under the auspices of the United Companies of Entertainment (ZPR), and began to receive their subsidy from that organization rather than the Polish Students' Organization. However, this had little effect on their activities, except, perhaps to widen their scope. In Italy, Akademia carried out an action similar to House entitled Town Project which took place as part of the same International Street Theatre Festival where they had attempted House the year before, but this time over the course of two full weeks in the small town of Verucchio. By now Akademia had developed a pattern of working in neighborhoods. Konstanty Puzyna, at the time editor of Dialog, describes this pattern: [T]he company begins work by the actors getting used to the residents and vice versa, which is followed by a demonstration of individual actions and little scenes, quite short or somewhat longer, that the residents may watch in passing, without committing themselves to anything. Thus the neighborhood is gradually drawn into technical collaboration, into co-participation in action, until it is able to initiate its own independent actions based on its own concepts. ("SZ.Owo" 129).

According to Krukowski, actions like House and Town Project were based on the assumption that artistic values would appear only when the company and the residents found a common language. Therefore, in some sense, the first phase of activity where the actors and residents got to know each other was the most valuable part, though the value was social rather than artistic (interview). In 1979, Akademia also returned to the theatre after its three years of contact with the reality of the streets. It created the performance piece Zycie codzienne po Wielkiej Rewolucji Francuskiej (Everyday Life After the Great French Revolution). This was, in a way, a return for the group to an earlier style of performance, the style that they had first begun to develop in Collage in 1973. But it was also a further refinement of that style. The performance took place on a stage which resembled a large white box. On this set very ordinary things went on. Policemen of various sorts (but never dressed as policemen) were depicted. They checked identity cards. Sometimes the person whose card was being checked would drop it. After it was checked, he/she would bow his/her head out of politeness to the policeman. A woman sold plastic bags and gloves on the street. Men wearing white shirts and little red bow ties sat on a bench as if posing for a photograph. Other men in overcoats, perhaps drunk, fell asleep on the bench. This performance not only depicted the life on the street that Akademia had been observing for the previous three years, but was also recognizable as an indictment of that life's absurdity and hypocrisy.

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In 1980, the group continued to work on street performance art and happenings. For example, they literally froze what they termed "elements of reality," such as propaganda posters, identity papers, food, and newspapers, and then threw the frozen items in the street. During the Solidarity period, Akademia had a special program for workers called, after Grotowski, "active culture." They created some patterns of programs which could be used to inspire children's imaginations. They did movement workshops with 9-14 year-old children from a club and school for "problem children," and eventually the children and their teacher created a drama group for themselves. They also worked with 5-10 year-old children at a House of Culture in a workers' district of Warsaw. In addition, they continued the work they had started in House by sometimes moving into an apartment building, getting friendly with the people living there, and then producing a kind of psycho-drama with the inhabitants at the end of the week. They began to travel to small towns and do workshops with 16-18 year-olds there in theatre, the plastic arts, street actions, and film. Much of this activity was banned with the advent of Martial Law, particularly the programs which involved workers or workers' children. After Martial Law strictures began to ease somewhat, Akademia was able to resume some of its workshop activity with children, though they were no longer permitted in the House of Culture or to do performances like House. In addition, street theatre works were sharply curtailed. For most of the 1980s, after the declaration of Martial Law, Akademia lived a kind of precarious existence. They continued to be subsidized by ZPR but there were rumors that ZPR was going to stop their subsidy as a kind of punishment for having been so active during Solidarity times. They had no rehearsal hall at their disposal. However, they still managed to create some interesting performance art during the post-Martial Law period. In 1982, Akademia produced Inne tance (Other Dances) and English Lesson (original title in English). Other Dances was a sixty-five minute collection of sixteen short vignettes, called "dances," accompanied by the music of Polish New Wave rock groups. Like Collage and Everyday Life After the Great French Revolution, this piece dealt with stereotypes. Each dance was intended to depict various social behaviors of the Martial Law period. There were scenes at a name day party, on the street during an identity card check, and running home before curfew. Other scenes satirized the pretentiousness of some Solidarity sympathizers, such as one where the actors posed as national martyrs. The government's behavior was also satirized in a scene where the actors, in army caps, kept turning them around on their heads and marching off in whatever direction the caps pointed. Since each actor's cap pointed in a different direction, the result was that all the actors were

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simultaneously marching in the same rhythm but in different directions. There were also more ambiguous scenes such as a prologue where the actors, dressed in elegant clothes, just sat and stared at the audience for several minutes. Various repeated visual motifs were likewise ambiguous but evocative. For example, the stage was covered by a groundcloth (symbolizing Poland?) which the actors sometimes walked on, but other times walked outside of, and still other times raised in the air in a kind of ritual. There was also a lot of changing of (ideological?) clothes in full view of the audience. Other Dances updated the ruthless observations of contemporary Polish behavior which had been part of Everyday Life After the Great French Revolution and added a level of symbolism. English Lesson, a shorter (thirty-five minute) and denser piece, was a continuation of motifs that Akademia had first explored in Language Course. In the first part, a group of actors sat in profile as if in a class, repeating English words and phrases coming out of a loudspeaker. At first they were timid, then more confident, and finally they began to combine the expressions given to them to make new sentences that were not mere repetitions of the speaker's words. However, this boldness seemed to disturb the equilibrium of the "class," so much so that they then began to shout over each other, to move from their desks, and even to attack each other with their desk lamps. At the moment when their shouting reached its loudest and their movement its most frenzied, a bright light was switched on in the pupils' eyes, the speaker went dead, and all action froze. Blackout. After a few moments of darkness the lights came up on the actors sitting now facing the audience. In their mouths they held small mirrors, and to the music of the Polish punk group Crisis Brigade (Brygada Kryzys), they played a game of "catching sunbeams" with the mirrors. Sometimes they remained seated, sometimes they stood on their chairs, sometimes they faced the audience, sometimes each other. At the end, the educational tape of the first section began to play again at the same time as the punk rock. Darker and more ambiguous than either Everyday Life or Other Dances, English Lesson seemed to be commenting on the dire consequences of using language as a weapon and the impossibility of true communication. For four years after Other Dances and English Lesson, Akademia produced no new works, concentrating instead on their workshops with young people. In 1986, however, they produced Kolacja. Dobranoc. (Supper. Good Night.). 3 Like Collage and Everyday Life in the 1970s and Other Dances during the Martial Law period, Supper. Good Night. was described (in 3 The sections on Supper. Good Night. and Carthage were previously published in Cioffi, Rev. 560-561.

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program notes for a British tour) as being about "the stereotyped image of Polish reality in the 1980s." Several large flats, black on one side, white on the other, were moved around at a rapid pace to form various configurations. As they were moved, the audience was shown various modes of behavior, both public and private. Sometimes people were crushed together by the flats as if standing on a crowded bus or tram. At other times, they were strung out on a line. Their movements were stiff, staccato. They displayed cards and buttons with defiant half-smiles on their faces, as if they were indecently exposing themselves, but more truthful moments were revealed almost by accident when the flats moved apart to catch someone unaware. The sounds were mostly harsh, metallic-sounding rock music or monotonous counting in German. At other moments, however, the audience heard someone read the contents of the propaganda leaflets the Soviet army distributed when they invaded Poland during World War II ("Workers, unite!" and so on). Later, a female voice, also in a monotone, could be heard enumerating the choices faced by many Poles in the 1980s: "It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees." "It is better to wait." "It is better to escape." As in Other Dances there was a lot of changing of clothes onstage. At first, everyone was dressed very plainly in dull colors: greys, browns, blacks. Usually, they were wearing trenchcoats and flat shoes. In one scene, three people took off their trenchcoats, rolled them up, and tried to toss them backwards, up over their heads and the wall in back of them. One of them repeatedly failed to toss it high enough, and the coat kept falling back down on her. Finally, she picked it up and walked off. Later, everyone changed into white and still later, in the final climactic sequence, everyone and everything was red - red people (even their skin was sprayed red) drinking red tea on red chairs in front of red tables while reading red newspapers. Suddenly one of the walls fell down and we saw a normally dressed woman in brown behind it. Whereas Supper. Good Night. was a continuation of Akademia's work on stereotypes, their 1987 production, Kartagina (Carthage), continued the stream of performances such as English Lesson where the group tried to develop a set of visual metaphors for Polish reality. Carthage began with a huge flat which was hanging at an approximately 120° angle and thus divided the stage space into two unequal halves. A group of four people sitting in a circle came on stage right and spoke all at once. It was difficult to understand what they were saying, but they seemed to be proclaiming artistic manifestoes. On the other hand, these manifestoes also sounded like everyday complaints, the kind which might have been heard on Polish streets in the eighties.

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The group got up, rotated the circle a quarter-turn, and so progressed in stages toward the flat, talking all the while. When the people reached the flat, they suddenly stopped speaking; music was broadcoast from the loudspeakers, and they flung themselves against it, to no effect. The flat was lowered to about 140°, and some of the people began to lean backward, to actually stand at the angle determined by the flat. Others threw little burning pieces of paper at it, or sat close to it, staring at it, or continued to fling themselves against it. The music stopped, the stage emptied, and a man came on stage left and began a new sequence. Carthage was, according to the program notes, about the possibilities for group activity. The flat, a geometric surface which divided the space, was a symbol of crisis. It put a brake on the active responses of the group and of its individual members, but in a way, it also acted as a stimulus and determined transformations. In the next sequence, the surface became a hill or perhaps a ski slope on which stakes were placed, some of which had flags on them, some had numbers, and others had nothing at all - were just naked sticks. Among this forest of sticks two people moved, slowly doing sit-ups and lunges as loudspeakers blared out short resumes of (their? other people's?) lives, like those often given for athletes, but the biographies were not athletic ones. One person left the hill and the other slowly came out (escaped?) from behind the entrapping sticks, flags, and numbers. She, too, left the hill, and some fashionably dressed people came out onstage, talked among themselves, and transformed the hill into a wall from behind which the audience could hear banging, and in front of which a woman writhed and wrote graffiti ("No faith," "No belief," "Yes," "No.") which she then immediately crossed out. In the final sequence of Carthage the flat was lowered to the floor, and on it, huge cut-outs of symbols of East and West were held up to the light: flags, snowflakes, Nordic gods, the Coca-Cola trademark, the hammer and sickle, the Empire State building, a foolish goat from a Polish children's story. Then these symbols were held up together, so that the audience could see ironic juxtapositions of one superimposed on the other. Finally, the symbols were tossed into the air and burned on the flat which was now hoisted up in the air with an actor on it who said, "This is only a rehearsal." As in English Lesson, the humor in Carthage seemed acidic and the world-view black. The analogy implied by the title, of Poland to Carthage, a city-state originally inhabited by the Phoenicians, then destroyed by war, rebuilt by the Romans, but in the end, destroyed once again by the new order, the Arabs, seemed to indicate that Akademia was not optimistic about Poland's prospects for the future. Carthage was Akademia' s last performance in the 1980s.

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From 1973 to 1987, Akademia passed through various stages in its evolution: first, it was a student pantomime group studying movement; then, a student group producing "theatre-posters" which explored the relationship between words and movement; later, a street theatre group which reached out to the outside community; and finally, a professional group which performed dense, somewhat ambiguous, but highly evocative performance art These stages, however, were not completely discrete phases but tended to blend together and even loop back on each other. For example, motifs which were first explored in 1973 in Collage and Language Course reappeared in 1979 in Everyday Life and 1982 in English Lesson. In addition, Akademia kept various pieces in its repertory for years, sometimes adapting them as new versions, and performing them alongside or as part of newer forms. For example, in the street theatre stage, the members might perform movement improvisations or theatre-posters to entertain the neighborhood where they were trying to create a community "production." Though Akademia had much in common with the political student theatres which dominated the alternative theatre scene when they started out, their artistic sensibility was radically different. The inspiration for the visual metaphors that they attempted to construct came more from film, photography, and other visual arts than from any kind of theatrical tradition. Akademia Ruchu developed this visual sign system into an artistic-theatrical language all its own. The "message," if there can be said to be one, was, like that of the political theatres, intimately bound up with Polish history in the seventies and eighties. Yet, paradoxically, this close connection with Poland did not preclude a kind of universality which was attained by Akademia Ruchu at its best moments. In some of Akademia' s work the transformations which the visual sign system underwent were immediately recognizable; in others, they were connotative rather than directly denotative. There was no narrative line, nor was there development of characterization. For this reason, the group was sometimes criticized as being "abstract" or "cold." And in comparison with "hot" groups such as the Theatre of the 8th Day, they were certainly more cerebral, more difficult for audiences to immediately identify with. Paradoxically, though they actually took their performances into the streets, to the audiences, the performances themselves required more effort to comprehend than those of theatres using more traditional theatrical means. On the other hand, as the feverish oppositional activity of the late seventies was transformed into the post-Martial Law discouragement of the eighties, their coolness or abstraction was seen by some as more in keeping with the sensibility of the times.

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The common thread that runs throughout Akademia's activities in the seventies and eighties seems to be an attempt to induce their audiences to see reality in new ways. In Czech writer Milan Kundera' s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, one of the characters, an artist, explains the theme of her work as "On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth" (254). Kundera's fascination with the differences between appearance and reality as well as his wry humor permeated Akademia Ruchu' s work. The themes that they treated were not only Polish: people who are unsure of what is happening to them, the dehumanization of life, non-communication masking genuine communication, the sustaining of activity in a crisis situation. Yet what was notable about Akademia's work was not their subject matter, but rather their complete refusal to indulge in any Romantic posing or cheerleading for the opposition. Outside the theatre, Akademia explored in a much deeper and more genuine way the reaching out to community that Teatr 77 had only begun. Inside the theatre space, Akademia's work wedded the stylization, precision of movement, and wit of a Laurie Anderson video to Kundera's philosophical preoccupations. Experiments in the Anthropology of Theatre: Gardzienice

In the late seventies in Poland an alternative theatre trend started which attempted to return to theatre's roots. Groups that were part of this trend were trying to continue the work that Grotowski had started in his paratheatrical phase. These groups tried to re-create the original bond between actors and audience which exists in primitive ritual, and thus to create a more profound sense of community between them. They worked in rural parts of Poland carrying on "active culture" but not with specially hand-picked participants such as Grotowski used or even the urban workers that Akademia Ruchu worked with, but with simple people, peasants who, for the most part, were unused to "artists," unfamiliar with "theatre." Several of these groups flourished in the late seventies and eighties. For example, in 1977 a group of young artists from Toruft and Bydgoszcz called Grupa Dzialania (the Action Group), settled in the village of Lucim, and undertook various para-artistic activities aimed at investigating and re-establishing the traditions of the village and creating new traditions for it. The best-known, most long-lasting, and most sophisticated of these groups, however, has been the Gardzienice Theatre Association. The Gardzienice Theatre Association, based in the small village of Gardzienice, approximately twenty miles east of Lublin, was founded in 1977 by Wlodzimierz Staniewski. Staniewski, from 1968 to 1971, had been a member of Teatr STU and had acted in the original cast of Falling. During a

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tour of Falling to Wrodaw in 1971, Grotowski saw Staniewski perform and invited him to join the Laboratory Theatre. From 1971 to 1976, Staniewski was one of the core members of Grotowski's group, and helped to develop the paratheatrical projects of that particular phase of Grotowski's activity. However, Staniewski says that in 1976 he, unlike other members of Grotowski's group, wanted to do theatre, so he "decided definitely to leave the Laboratory Theatre, but at the same time I had a feeling that I would be fired anyway. I have to ask Grot about this. I felt lousy and went as far away as was geographically possible" (Staniewski, "Rozmowa" 133). He moved to Lublin, on the other side of Poland from Wrodaw, and began working with Scena 6 (Stage 6), a student theatre, and conducting workshops in acting techniques for the Lublin Theatrical Culture Society, an amateur group. In August, 1977, with a small group of people from Scena 6 and the workshops, he started what is now the Gardzienice Theatre Association. 4 The basis for Gardzienice' s activity since 1977 has been the "expedition." On an expedition, the members of Gardzienice, sometimes along with guests, travel to remote rural villages in neglected areas, mostly in eastern and southern Poland, where the remnants of once-thriving national minorities stilllive. 5 It is here, in these villages, that Staniewski believes he has found a "new natural environment for the theatre" which consists in: -leaving the city, leaving not only the theatre building but also the city streets, -addressing oneself to people (audiences, consumers) who are undefiled by "routine behaviour," undefiled by inculcated and modelled reactions or a stereotyped scale of values. -entering space that is unknown or that has been abandoned by the theatre. ("Environment" 56)

Since many of the villages are inaccessible by road, the travellers on the expedition move on foot from village to village, pushing a handcart. Each participant in an expedition shares all duties, both artistic and housekeeping. The group literally moves into each village for a few days at a time, gets to know the villagers, and holds what they call"gatherings," assemblies where the villagers share old songs, dances, and folk-tales with the members of the company. The expedition serves as a dynamic method of research into genuine folk culture. In Poland during the Communist era, a great deal of money was

For more information on Gardzienice's early years, see Pasternak 28-33; Filipowicz, "Expedition" 54-71; Osinski, "More" 21-23; and Osinski, "Open" 41-45.

4

Parts of this section have been previously published in a somewhat altered form in Cioffi, Rev. 558-560.

5

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spent on a kind of packaged folk culture for the benefit of city dwellers. In a 1979 speech at the ITI Congress in Bulgaria, Staniewski declared: Large sums are assigned to folk art in Poland, this part of culture is treated with enormous esteem. There are large folk art movements. a whole army of instructors who teach tradition to the rural population. And the folk art has become as the city wishes to see it. ("Environment" 57)

In contrast, Gardzienice wants to learn authentic folk culture from the villagers it encounters. For gatherings, it seeks out the oldest inhabitants of the village, the ones who have been least contaminated by television and other mass media and who remember the "old ways." Gardzienice's relationship with the peasants is quite different from that of anthropologists': they neither take notes, nor stay in any one village (apart from Gardzienice itself) for an extended period of time. The members of the group come to a village for a while to sing, dance, and eat with the inhabitants, more like sons and daughters returning for a visit than like scientists. In return for the gifts of song, dance, and stories that the villagers have given Gardzienice, the company performs for the villagers. Their first "show" was called simply Spektakl wieczorny (Evening Performance) and was based on Gargantua and Pantagruel by the sixteenth century priest-satirist Fran