Results found: 2

Search results

Search:
in the keywords: wartime conditions

Sort By:

Limit search:

Między słowem a formą. O dwóch teatrach podziemnych

100%

Flader K.

Pamiętnik Teatralny

2012

vol. 61

issue 3-4(243-244)

87-106

During the Second World War, the occupied Cracow saw the emergence of two theatres, the Rapsodyczny Theatre of Mieczysław Kotlarczyk and the Niezależny Theatre of Tadeusz Kantor. The two differed almost in everything. They differed in their approach to literary text as well as in acting methods, stage design concepts and their founders’ philosophical outlooks. Even though both of the Cracow artists had chosen to stage plays by Juliusz Słowacki, each of them used the Romantic works quite differently. To Kotlarczyk, it was the literary text that was of paramount importance, and thus the word had become the major means of theatrical expression. Synchronised with music, it revealed its full richness and meaning. The production of Król Duch devoid of any stage setting or costumes, and using only a limited number of props, was meant to induce the audience to use their imagination and focus on the poem’s content. For Kantor, the text was just one of many elements composing the theatre performance. The artist had rejected the logocentric concept of theatre and strived at a theatre viewed as an autonomous art. The text of Balladyna was just a pretext enabling artistic expression, in which the space, characters and their costumes were shaped by form. Even though Kotlarczyk and Kantor greatly differed in their understanding of theatre: the role of the actor, the function of the text and the scope and meaning of directing as such, they both created what Marta Fik called Separate Theatres. In a way, both these theatres, which emerged during the Second World War and continued to develop for many years, drew inspiration from the same source, i.e. the work of Adam Mickiewicz. Kantor used the theatrical ritual of Dziady to develop an original and individual theatre of death, whereas Kotlarczyk, following Lekcja XVI, developed a theatre of imagination and storytelling.

Ludzie teatru – więźniowie Pawiaka (1939–1944)

100%

Hera J.

Pamiętnik Teatralny

2012

vol. 61

issue 3-4(243-244)

37–86

In order to “solve the Polish issue”, which had always troubled the Germans and the Soviets so much, in 1939 the two invaders decided they had to kill the Polish elites of patriots who, after decades of being under the foreign rule during the partitions period, had managed to build the independent Polish state in just twenty years. Among them were teachers and university professors, priests, social and political activists, doctors, writers and artists. In Warsaw, the capital of the General Government of Poland, which was to become “as German a country as the Rhineland”, the process of “freeing the German nation from the Poles and Jews” often started at Pawiak, the Gestapo gaol on Dzielna Street, also known as the “human slaughterhouse”. This was the place where the Poles caught during random street arrests, or roundups, were detained unless they were shipped to the Third Reich for forced labour right away. They joined the prisoners arrested “individually”: potential troublemakers who might oppose the German rule, those accused of sabotaging German military equipment or “illegal activities”, i.e. working for the underground. They were penalised for un-Aryan descent or for rescuing Jews. They were tortured during bestial interrogations at the headquarters of the Nazi Sicherheitspolizei and Sicherheitsdienst on Szucha Avenue, and then they were shipped to concentration camps, sometimes with death sentences already. Others were simply executed right away. Such was also the fate of many actors and men of theatre gaoled at Pawiak. They, too, had been caught in roundups or arrested for their involvement in the underground. Some of them were to be remembered for many years to come by those few and fortunate who survived. Through their tales, recitations, song singing and theatre life gossips told to other Pawiak inmates at night, they were able to escape for a short while from the grim and terrifying reality, thus saving themselves and others from nervous breakdown. “By introducing patriotic notes, full of hope and optimism”, they sometimes managed to give fellow prisoners much needed encouragement.

Refine search results

2 Pamiętnik Teatralny

2 2012

1 Flader K.

1 Hera J.

Search results

Między słowem a formą. O dwóch teatrach podziemnych

Ludzie teatru – więźniowie Pawiaka (1939–1944)