The Dark Continent: «African Tales by Shakespeare» and the Experience of Transitional Community
Dorota Sosnowska
de.sosnowska@uw.edu.plUniversity of Warsaw (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6073-460X
Abstract
This text is an analysis of Krzysztof Warlikowski’s 2011 production, African Tales by Shakespeare, tracing the project of community taken up in the performance. The central thesis takes this to be neither a national community nor a dispersed, intersectional coalition, as Bryce Lease has formulated the difference between Polish political and traditional theater, but rather a transitional community—unstable, unsuccessful, and rooted in the experience of political transition. The author, by invoking references to the visual arts present in the performance, points to other community projects emerging from the experience of transition while showing how, when appropriated for the purposes of performance, their meanings change radically. In the masculine, phallic, and violent world of African Tales, art and philosophy born of the experience of femininity are lost, twisted, and forgotten. Among the most important threads of analysis, however, is the way racialization and racism function in the play. From this perspective, the problematic status of the community the play establishes is most clearly seen: as a community of phantasmic, aspirational, transitional whiteness.
Keywords:
«African Tales by Shakespeare», Krzysztof Warlikowski, dark continent, feminism, Other, transition, critical artReferences
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Authors
Dorota Sosnowskade.sosnowska@uw.edu.pl
University of Warsaw Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6073-460X
Assistant Professor of Theater Studies at the Institute of Polish Culture (Department of Theater and Performance) at the University of Warsaw. She is a co-convener of the Historiography Working Group of the International Federation for Theater Research and an editor of Widok. Teorie i praktyki kultury wizualnej. She published the book about three actresses of the communist period in Poland, Królowe PRL. Sceniczne wizerunki Ireny Eichlerówny, Niny Andrycz i Elżbiety Barszczewskiej jako modele kobiecości (2014). She took part in the scientific projects devoted to the problem of performance documentation (ECLAP), theoretical status of sources, archives and documents in performance studies (Sources and Mediations) and performance and memory (Performing Memory). She published articles on the subject in Polish and international journals such as “Performance Research” or “Theatralia” and coedited a book devoted to the memory of worker’s theater (Robotnik. Performanse pamięci, 2017). At present, she is working on conceptualizations of the body in the art and theater of the decade of the Long ‘90s in Poland.
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