Theatre
Theatre in Poland is popular and cheap (GBP4/US$6), and most towns with a decent-sized population have at least one permanent venue with the month's programme pinned up outside and elsewhere in the town. The serious stuff tends to go on in the often sumptuous fin-de-siecle creations established by the country's trio of Partition-era rulers - Habsburg opulence if you're in Krakow, Russian-tolerated classicism in Warsaw, Prussian austerity in Gdansk. Aside from the odd British or US touring company, there's little in English, though the generally high quality of Polish acting combined with the interest of the venues themselves - Poles go as much for the interval promenade as the show itself - usually makes for an enjoyable experience. Theatre's special role in Polish cultural life dates from the Partition-era, when it played a significant role in the maintenance of both the language and national consciousness. In recent decades Jerzy Grotowski 's experimental Laboratory Theatre in Wroclaw (disbanded in 1982 when he emigrated to Italy) gained an international reputation as one of the most exciting and innovative trends in theatrical theory and practice to emerge since Stanislavski's work in Moscow in the early part of this century. Theatre companies like the excellent Teatr Osmego Dnia (Theatre of the Eighth Day) from Poznan, who also moved to Italy subsequently, carried the torch through the trials of martial law in the early 1980s, developing a probing, politically engaged theatre that closely reflected the struggles of the period. Till his death in 1992, Tadeusz Kantor , an experimental director and performance artist of international stature and long based in Krakow, was another figure at the creative forefront of contemporary Polish theatre. Among a handful of companies currently in demand internationally is Gardziennice , a consistently innovative experimental group based in a village near Lublin of the same name who specialize in field trips to villages throughout eastern Europe where oral cultural traditions are kept alive. The resulting productions, led by the company's founder and director Wlodzimierz Staniewski , a close collaborator with Grotowski in the 1970s, are inspirational part-improvised, part-scripted happenings drawing on a wealth of dramatic resources. In the late 1990s Polish experimental theatre companies like the Wierszalin group from Bialystok became internationally renowned, carrying off prizes at the Edinburgh Festival, for instance.
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