Plays

1989 is a production directed by Katarzyna Szyngiera featuring formal references to 'Hamilton'. Lin-Manuel Miranda's revolutionary musical introduced rap to Broadway, proposing a novel language of storytelling attractive to both younger and older audiences. The person behind the sound of our musical is one of the best Polish rap producers – Andrzej Mikosz "Webber", known e.g. for his long-term collaboration with "Łona".

The show, under the working title ‘Australia’, will invite the audience to an interactive encounter with anxiety-ridden characters, struggling with both latent individual phobias and the increasingly widespread fear of nuclear war. We will tell the story of a family that ends up in an airport in the middle of the night, frantically trying to get out of the country. In the intimate space of the Machine House, we will examine where our fears come from, how quickly we are able to transmit them to one another, and what they can lead to. We will ask: How do we distinguish between what appears to be valid and what might be considered paranoia? Just how bizarre states and reactions can anxiety lead us to? Is there a way to effectively make people feel safe? And how often is our own helplessness the source of our dread?

What does community mean today – in 2025, in the face of deep political and social tensions, rising populism and in a crisis of responsibility? What do we understand by the concepts of power, revolution and loyalty? Our Coriolanus – a figure elevated and then rejected by the same people – symbolises contemporary tensions between the individual and society, rationality and emotions, authoritarian rule and accountability for the whole.

The structure of the drama has been reduced to the dialogue between a chorus of women, representing citizens troubled by anxiety, and the lonely Coriolanus – a figure of a contemporary leader. Drawing on the wisdom and power of a text written four hundred years ago, we will try to find a theatre response to contemporary fears and raise questions about what kind of political community we need today.

[...] one cannot be satisfied with the role of an unwitting performer of existential activities. And inself-defence,
one must pursue the meaning of everyday life as if it were a lurking criminal.

We are going to philosophise. Though perhaps philosophising may seem like the wrong term in this case, because it is associated with the mind, and here it's about philosophising with the body, philosophising about what we experience, and how we experience it as carnal beings. As beings in female bodies. Philosophising is mostly associated with the "heights" of the human (meaning: male) intellect, and to many it seems the opposite of a daily routine filled with trivial activities. We, on the other hand, wish to philosophise about the ordinary, the banal, the trivial, about the cleaning up, the busyness, the puttering around and tending to everything. About the daily labour that is the essence of our existence. This is where we’ll be searching for the meaning and properties of our human-female existence. In the existential reality that takes the form of a washcloth, a cherry fruit or a piece of meat.

Enchanted by the worlds of Hobbit, Harry Potter and Game of Thrones, we often forget about our own home-grown mythology: our Slavic gods, heroes and beasts. They tend to live in our consciousness only in an infantile, primitive form. So how about trying to actually revisit this realm?

Flesh and blood, symbols of life and death, of what is natural and sacred. But whose flesh and blood? For a very long time, a woman's body did not belong solely to her. Subjected to patriarchal control, moral and religious prohibitions and commands, treated as a commodity by the capitalist system, pushed into the realm of taboo, it was both an object of male desire and female shame. The female blood belonged to a different category than the blood oozing from the wound of a male hero. It is ‘unclean’ blood, which has even been deprived of its colour, replaced by blue in the ads. The experiences of half of humanity, both ordinary and those particularly difficult, are still too often considered unworthy of disclosure, silenced and hidden. The women in the play ‘Flesh and Blood’, directed by Iwona Kempa, will speak about what is inappropriate to talk about, what is, at best, whispered about. They will talk about the experiences of women's bodies and women's blood from a female perspective.