A Question of Community: Jerzy Grzegorzewski and Jan Klata is an attempt to investigate such issues as the role of the national theater and the national artist, the relationship between the theater and social and community life, and the ties between nationality and gender. The scope of my interests is Polish theater between 1989 (apart from Forefathers’ Eve - Improvisations, which is from 1987) and 2013 (though in a few places I have brought things up to date) seen through the work of Jerzy Grzegorzewski and Jan Klata. I have thus attempted to locate the descriptions and interpretations of theatrical phenomena in a broadly defined historical, political, social, and cultural context. The basic thrust of my interpretation was marked out by the theories of the community developed by Benedict Anderson (taking into regard opinions of other critics who have noted the relationship between nationality and gender in this context), the interpretive community of Stanley Fish, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of performative acts, new historicism, psychoanalysis, and feminist and gender studies. This has been my framework for reflecting upon the ties between discrimination of women and national, cultural, and religious minorities in the sphere of the national community. I inquire as to how the political breakthrough of 1989 and the accession to the European Union redefined the traditional gender roles and pushed the borders of the national identity to include individuals who had theretofore been discriminated against, and how these changes are reflected in the work of Jerzy Grzegorzewski and Jan Klata, directors deeply involved in the life of the national community (Jerzy Grzegorzewski was director of the National Theater in Warsaw in 1997-2003; Jan Klata has been the director of the National Stary Theater since 2013).
LanguagePolish
Title in EnglishA question of community : Jerzy Grzegorzewski and Jan Klata