EN
Lupa’s Widmokręgi is an essay exploring the relationship with literature as the dramaturgical basis for Krystian Lupa’s two 2024 productions of Balconies. Love Songs (Balkony – pieśni miłosne; from the Polish Underground Theatre in Wroclaw) and Les Émigrants (The Emigrants), ultimately staged at the Odeon in Paris. The essay starts by framing the director’s assumptions as complex biographical narratives using writings by Federico García Lorca and John Maxwell Coetzee in the first case and the staging of W. G. Sebald’s short stories from the volume The Emigrants in the latter one. An important role in these dramaturgies is played by the montage of non-obvious narrative structures rooted in the sought-after biographies of the characters: real and fictional characters. The author assumes that the plays can be written about together because they show a significant turn in the director’s substantive and aesthetic interests; they prove the historical and political engagement and the expansion of staging with cinematic parameters. The essay introduces concepts relevant for both stage performances, such as ‘prosthetic biography’ and ‘empathetic archaeology’ regarding the way of using literary sources and working with actors as co-creators of the staging.