Teaching Recitation according to Maria Wiercińska: The Artist’s Publications from 1935–1938
Anna Chojnacka
Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5174-4155
Abstract
This article discusses Maria Wiercińska’s publications. The artist abandoned her acting career in the season of 1934/35, and she got qualified to work as a theatre director only after WW2. In the second half of the 1930s, she was occupied exclusively with recitation performances and—with real commitment—to teaching recitation at various levels; this is what all her publications are about. She wrote from a practitioner’s point of view. She distinguished the necessary stages of working on a recitation performance: taking interest, developing understanding, feeling the text, and delivering the presentation, with an emphasis on individual interpretation; the basis was to master enunciation. This was the model she herself adopted in her recitation work, and she proposed it to students of acting, teachers, school and preschool children. Working with children was particularly important in her view; she believed that teaching recitation not only gives them technique and expressiveness, but also shapes their aesthetic sense and social skills, and develops creativity. The article presents Wiercińska’s program in the context of the development of radio broadcasting, new pedagogical methods, publications for schools, and the popularity of school theatre. It showcases ordinary, under-appreciated work and retrieves an interesting but forgotten artist for theatre history. It thus fits into the framework of revising the dominant narrative of theatre history, focused on canonical titles and names, as well as into the feminist agenda in theatre research.
Keywords:
Maria Wiercińska, recitation teaching, recitation, school theatre, poetry on the radioReferences
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Authors
Anna ChojnackaInstitute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5174-4155
Anna Chojnacka - Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre History and Theory at the Art Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Documentalist and historian of theatre, editor and editorialist (among others of the writings and correspondence of Leon Schiller and Edmund Wierciński). She deals with the history of Polish theatre in the twentieth century, particularly with the biographies of theatre artists in the inter-war period and in the social and political context of the People's Republic of Poland.
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