***

Akademia Ruchu (A.R.) is a creative collective established in 1973 in Warsaw. It was active within the student theatre movement, after its political turn in the early 1970s. It constitutes a good example of combining artistic experimentation with social engagement, which was typical for the movement. At the same time A.R. has always been a separate case, operating on the intersection of various disciplines: theatre, visual arts, performance art and film. The collective has found its original language and aesthetics, which A.R.’s leader, Wojciech Krukowski, encapsulates in the formula of ‘visual narrative theatre’. A.R. also initiated activities within open city space, pioneering at the time in Poland, having carried out several hundred actions, from anonymous interventions, through participatory projects, to huge street performances.

The collective has presented its creative output all over Europe, in both Americas and in Japan: for instance, at the World Theatre Festival in Caracas and Nancy, the Kaaitheater Festival in Brussels, the International Theatre Festival in Chicago, LIVE Art Festival in Glasgow, at the DOCUMENTA 8 in Kassel and Performa 2013 in New York, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts ICA in London, the Museum for Contemporary Arts PS1 in New York as well as the Museum of Modern Arts in Yokohama.

***

One of the as-yet unexpressed narratives about the collective Akademia Ruchu [A.R., or the Academy of Movement] is hidden in the chronology of its relocations, changes of address and successive work spaces. What has always distinguished A.R. is their interest in a certain type of space in which one could not only perform a show but also stay longer, to plan a wider programme – to create a ‘social place’.¹

This aspiration has accompanied the group since the mid 1970s, when they were responsible for the programme at the ‘Dziekanka’ Centre of Artistic Circles in Warsaw. In January 1979, when several student theatres became professionalized, A.R. chose the status of a theatre centre, not simply a theatre company, and not without reason. The need of a premises became all the more pressing since professional status brought subsidies for activities but did not provide the collective with a permanent base.² The subsequent history of A.R. is determined by changes in location of the Theatre Centre: Stara Prochownia (1979), the Cora Garment Production Company in the Grochów district (1980), the Divine Mercy Parish on Żytnia Street (1983–1985) and Cinema/Theatre/Tęcza in the Żoliborz district (1989–1997). A.R. also carried out single-programme elements separately, frequently in several spaces simultaneously, for instance in the Ksawerów Community Culture Centre (1980), the Academy of Music (1985), the Ochota Culture Centre (1985–1988), and as a ‘flying artistic centre’ [in the tradition of clandestine education] in smaller towns in Poland (1983–1988): Lubawa, Starachowice, Kościan, Olecko, Zamość, Ostrołęka, Świnoujście.³

Tracking the chronology of relocations and programmes of the successive A.R. centres proves that it is impossible to consider them independently from the artistic output of the collective, and relations between the two – activities involving the centres and A.R.’s artistic activities – seem crucial for understanding the collective’s determination in looking for a place of their own. Two moments in the history of A.R. are particularly significant here. The collective’s leader, Wojciech Krukowski, writes about the first in these terms:

Between our debut (1973) and the following year the name ‘Akademia Ruchu’ began to take on meaning. It no longer only concerned the practice of movement theatre or behaviour theatre. Akademia Ruchu in 1974 is already a term adequate to the idea of an open activity academy, omitting no aspect of communication in the social environment.⁴

The second year of the collective’s operations was crucial because their first city intervention was carried out. In addition, the collective’s activities going beyond theatrical production and theatre spaces increased during this period. The ‘entirely new, previously absent in Poland, formula of intermedia artistic activity’,⁵ shaped in this way, called for equally new categories of description. The term ‘activity’ used here by Krukowski would subsequently become the term he most frequently used, in both the singular and the plural, to describe various A.R. initiatives. The simplicity and informality of that word, and the fact that it is not allocated to any specialist discourse, best reflects the collective’s programme of diminishing the distance between artistic disciplines and life,⁶ and allows for a constant extension of the boundaries of their existing field of operation.

Another important year for A.R. was 1977, when its members addressed a letter to the student-theatre community in which they announced that over the next twelve months they would not be taking part in theatre festivals in the current form of the latter.⁷

They substantiated their decision as follows:

We are interested in finding new and living forms of impact. We don’t think we have found many of those – and we treat this decision as an incentive both for us, and for others […] We fear that without taking the necessary steps, young theatre [...] will remain a place of youth autodidactics (to which it is, after all, morally entitled – but then why speak about the social perspective of theatre manifestations created for their own sake). […] theatre elevating itself to the pedestal of hopeless heroism is too easy a target for censorship and journalistic routine – why then are there so many heroic suicides, and so little ground work?⁸

The above excerpts primarily concern the situation of the student movement at the time, but also speak about the social position of art in general and the possibilities of its various engagements. The risky decision on the part of the collective to step beyond the safe circulation in which it was created, and thus step beyond the proven circles sharing the same worldview, draws attention.

I have chosen these two moments from the collective’s history because they provide insight into its worldview, which determined its greatly varied initiatives. The ‘transgression philosophy’ reconstructed here cannot in itself be narrowed down to but a part of A.R.’s activities, and the category of ‘activity’ requires the use of a comprehensive perspective. It is worth recalling the manifestos and programmes of the peripatetic A.R. Centre, to recognize in them signs of a subsequent intermediality, the search for new forms and communicative space, as well as ‘trust in the community’.⁹

A.R. defined the form of activity they adopted in 1979 as follows:

The Centre is a semi-professional artistic, cultural and research institution, which in particular continues and develops appropriate directions and forms of experience in the field of theatre, its links to the visual arts, as well as general cultural and didactic activity.¹⁰

This quotation from A.R.’s statute clearly reflects specifics of the Centre’s activity at the time and afterwards, which have never been limited to presenting A.R.’s own works, though that was the basis of its programming. It held performances by other artists, often world famous, including Robert Wilson, the Bread and Puppet Theatre, La Fura dels Baus, the Living Theatre, Odin Teatret, the Station House Opera, and Polish companies including Cinema Theatre, Dada von Bzdülöw Theatre, Kana Theatre, Komuna Otwock and Teatr Ósmego Dnia.

The broad perspective of A.R.’s interests beyond theatre was foreshadowed in the statute, in turn, by the phrase ‘links to visual arts’, which was visible at A.R. centres primarily through their exhibition programming. From time to time, that programming would take the form of a regular gallery: the Czynna [Active] gallery was run at the Cora Centre, devoted to artistic and social projects; the Dokumentu Gallery, where the exhibitions ‘Ikonografia strajków’ [‘The Iconography of Strikes’] and ‘Fotografia socjologiczna’ [‘Sociological Photography’] were held; as well as the A.R. Przyjaciół Gallery [A.R. Friends’ Gallery] run by Krzysztof Żwirblis in the Tęcza Cinema/Theatre, which exhibited works by Paweł Althamer, Katarzyna Górna and Artur Żmijewski as well as youth from visual-arts workshops operated by the Warsaw Housing Cooperative Żoliborz Centralny.¹¹

Film programming also had a permanent place in the activity of A.R. centres, which in 1983 took the form of the A.R. Cinema, with regular screenings at the Ochota Culture Centre, and subsequently also in the Tęcza Cinema/Theatre. Such series as ‘American Film Vanguard’, ‘English Structural Cinema’, ‘Varieties of Authorial Cinema’ and ‘Totalitarianism and Art’, festivals of works by Rainer Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Derek Jarman, István Szabó and the Quay Brothers, as well as consistent presentation of diverse film forms (an extensive programme of documentaries, animation, video projects, recordings of artists including Bauhaus, Łódź Kaliska and Józef Robakowski), are evidence of its original and distinct character.¹²

Another example of interdisciplinary nature in the programmes of A.R. centres were series of meetings with poets, such as ‘Poetry of the 1990s’ and ‘Brulion [Sketchbook] Generation’ as well as the Art Zin Festival in the Tęcza Cinema/Theatre or the Small Publishers’ Fair (1986). In the Tęcza, concerts played an important role, and in earlier A.R. centres musical themes were also present. In the Żoliborz district, concerts were given by Najakotiva, Pidżama Porno, Mazoll and Dezerter. In addition, a Spring Jazz Festival took place, as well as a performance by the Po Drodze group singing poems by Edward Stachura.

Repertoire of the Tęcza Cinema/Theatre, Akademia Ruchu archive, in a deposit made to Zbigniew Rasstitute Archive in Warsaw.

Repertoire of the Tęcza theatre-cinema, Akademia Ruchut archive, in escrow of Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Instiute in Warsaw.

A.R. Centre programmes were not, however, limited to the presentation of art, but also opened a field for participation and common reflection. Permanent components included various performative-arts workshops, run both by A.R. members and by guests. Exhibitions, film screenings and theatre performances were frequently accompanied by a discussion or a lecture programme. It is also worth mentioning two seminars, presenting their subject matter for the first time in Poland in such a comprehensive way: ‘The Sun Rises at Midnight: Living Theatrical Cultures of Asia’ and ‘Theatre Cultures – Cultures of Life?’, devoted to theatre-culture traditions in Africa (1981). In the quote from the statute, such extensive programming is indicated by referring to activities as ‘didactic’, ‘research’, as well as pertaining to ‘general culture’. Opening itself to various fields adjacent to the artistic field was a constant practice of A.R. This is exemplified by sociological seminars and Zen Buddhism workshops run by Philip Kapleau, as well as open training sessions in tai chi and kung fu coordinated by A.R.

Programme materials from the Cora Company Culture Centre on Terespolska Street in Warsaw, which the group ran in 1981, provide interesting information on the participation in A.R. Centre activity of people from outside the collective. The centre, located in the Grochów district of Warsaw, was launched on the basis of cooperation between A.R. and the Cora Company of Solidarity, with support from the regional government of Mazowsze NSZZ Solidarność [the Mazovia region’s Independent Self-governing Labour Union ‘Solidarity’]. Such a contract was only possible in the period of relative freedom that followed the Communist government’s approval of the Gdańsk Agreement in August 1980. On the day that martial law was declared in December 1981, Cora Company management forced A.R. to vacate the centre.

The collective started its operation in Grochów by changing the existing name of the venue to the Theatre Centre, distancing itself in this way from stereotypical programmes of culture centres. The collective’s members wrote:

We don’t believe that the dissemination of ready values ascribed to the Culture Centre’s programmes (which in its basic idea implement the traditions of social culture circles) should remain its main task, if there are numerous professional institutions around established for the very same reason: cinemas, theatres, museums, philharmonics.¹³

The mission of the space they were creating was formulated thus: ‘The idea of the centre is the promotion and practice of active culture, which would attract the local resident community, the members of which become spectators but also fellow participants in artistic and cultural practice’.¹⁴

This participation, in the history of A.R. centres, has taken many forms – for instance, it consisted of making the collective’s creative process accessible by organizing open rehearsals and improvisation sessions with audience participation. However, the most important role was played by the various forms of workshops mentioned above.¹⁵ Today, with the popularity of workshops growing along with an ambiguity in that term, it is necessary to define what kind of participation and relationships were inherent in workshops run at A.R. centres. Their specific character is reflected by the form of classes planned for the Cora Centre, described as a ‘series of workshops organized with the assumption of treating all participants not along the lines of an instructor and pupil (amateur) dichotomy, but rather in the sense of cooperative multi-disciplinary creative teams’.¹⁶

In Grochów, the following workshop studios were launched: Podwórek [Courtyard] Theatre, run by Teresa Strzemięczna; Janusz Bałdyga’s Visual Arts Workshop for high school students; and the Photo/Film Studio (including personal film), run by Tomasz Konart. Workshops organized at A.R. centres were usually not limited to teaching specific techniques, but frequently assumed those would be utilized in participants’ projects. One example was the ‘Praga District Film Season’ planned by the Photo/Film Studio, which envisaged providing ‘interested local residents with 16-mm film cameras and expert professional mentorship so that they could make short films inspired by the problems of their environment’.¹⁷

The distinguishing feature of these workshop forms and other activities of A.R. centres was that they were carefully addressed to various social groups, and adapted in form and programme to the expectations of given participants. While in residence at Stara Prochownia, A.R. ran regular workshops for young people from the Zespół Ognisk Wychowawczych [Education Centre Collective]. At the Cora Centre, the group organized the series ‘Our Sunday – Family Sunday’, addressed to families and encompassing creative work with children, concerts, exhibitions, screenings and book fairs. In addition, Henryk Gajewski ran a ‘New Children’s Book’ Studio. At the Tęcza after 1989, Sunday film screenings for children took place, along with the series ‘Children’s Theatre’ and ‘School Theatre’, organized in collaboration with schools. For seniors, A.R. held art-history lectures at the Cora Centre, and free film screenings at the Tęcza. The programme of the Grochów centre was entirely addressed to the community of local residents and workers: ‘The Culture Centre operated by the Garment Production Company “Cora”, fulfilling by its basic premise the cultural needs of the company’s staff, also opens its activity to the working community of the district in which it is situated’.¹⁸ As part of the Tęcza Centre, in turn, A.R. ran a series of workshops for school pupils with special needs, culminating in a theatre performance. Before that, A.R. had also worked in day wards at psychiatric hospitals in Warsaw and Garwolin.

Creating conditions for activities of and expression by representatives of various groups regardless of their skill, formal education or experience was also manifested by running a kind of a residency programme, which consisted of providing free rehearsal space for informal bands and theatre ensembles. Depending on the capacity of the premises, this took place in various A.R. centres, with particular intensity at the Tęcza.

Inviting participants from outside the collective took another form, a more radical one, as well, as it assumed their participation in shaping the programming concept of the particular centre. This is best evidenced by programme materials from two spaces with especially deep roots in their respective communities: the Ksawerów Community Culture Centre¹⁹ which the collective attempted to take over in 1980, and the Cora Centre.²⁰ This conviction about the necessity of consulting an institution’s activities with those to whom they are addressed is also announced in ‘Wnioski w sprawie programu Zakładowych Domów Kultury’ [‘Conclusions Regarding the Program of Company Culture Centres’]:

The starting point should always be an attempt to consider and understand the company staff’s interests – and everything noticed as already existing expressions of their activity and needs. The expectations of the addressees are also manifested, of course, by confrontation with the programme teams’ new proposals – and the reception by the staff community. The most important task, it would seem, is awaking new needs in the community of potential recipients for Company Culture Centre programmes.²¹

Above-cited examples illustrate how different the programme concept at A.R. centres was, both against the backdrop of social activities (supported by Poland’s Communist government) at certain arts institutions, and at other culture centres. The original character of A.R. centres lies precisely in the radical concept of non-artist participation, disturbing existing power relations in the art field. The collective’s activities in the late 1970s and early 1980s, implementing postulates of audience empowerment and a democratization of institutions, return in the present day in such projects as a ‘participatory museum’²² and ‘audience development’,²³ which are still being viewed as innovative.

A.R. goes even further in the programmes of its centres, undermining the sense of the concept of ‘audience’ and rendering it negligibly important in descriptions of activities undertaken there. Unlike the new concepts of institutions mentioned above or the majority of contemporary educational programs carried out in museums and theatres, A.R.’s programming was not aimed at preparing the audience to receive the collective’s creativity. The centres weren’t set up to attract audiences; it wasn’t the logic to increase audiences that determined the course of their projects. Collective members often devoted more time to duties other than their own theatre work, actually, and entered new roles: of curators, workshop leaders, logistics specialists, documentarians, etc. They wrote about the readiness to take responsibility for the Grochów centre:

The decision requires a temporary limitation of A.R.’s purely artistic activity in order to focus on activities that create the basis of cooperation with the workers community of the Garment Production Company “Cora”, and subsequently that part of the Praga Południe district.²⁴

The project of practicing active culture, based on collaboration, is therefore closer to postulates of community arts and of the new museology movement.²⁵ At the same time, the artist’s position in A.R.’s projects remains strong, not as the main creator or sole author of the concept, but rather as an equal partner who retains the right to their own choices, where in community arts the artist primarily creates conditions for artistic expression by community participants. However, subjects and directions of action taken up at A.R. centres reflected interests of the entire collective, as well as its individual members. The collective’s own development justified the logic of successive initiatives: ‘More important than the dictate of external appraisal was the sense of a natural inner cycle of transformation, even if in the eyes of others they closed the group into a narrow circle of well-established specificity of experience’.²⁶ Precisely that combination of rejection of existing concept and role of the audience – questioning a division into actors and viewers, with simultaneous pursuit of empowering various participants of the joint action including the artists – constitutes the idiosyncrasy of A.R’s. centres.

Similar instances of ‘beginning with oneself’ are characteristic of various activities on the part of A.R. – many ideas and solutions concerning the outside world were first practiced within the collective. It would seem at present that, both in A.R.’s actions as well as in the centres’ programmes, interest in communication processes and the possibility of suspending control over the final work are rooted in the very form of member interaction as a creative group.

Our goal is active reaction between each other, and between us as a team, and reality. Also inspiring reality, revealing it. In addition, raising awareness in a non-stereotypical way among people who participate in the said reality, interacting with them in the creation of different forms of communication or different types of relationships.²⁷

We must therefore understand the form of cooperation within the group, as well as at A.R. centres, as an expression of the same aspirations as in other activities, performances and urban actions, which cannot be reduced to some separate technical-organizational order that would be functional toward some main current of activities. Perhaps it is here that the inspiration with conceptualism, repeatedly referred to by Wojciech Krukowski, manifests itself once more. Conceptualism is the source of the revision of art boundaries practiced by A.R., of course, yet ‘the impulse of conceptual motivation’²⁸ manifests itself most strongly in consequence by which the collective looks for various implementation forms for their ideas, treating all these forms as equal. For that reason A.R.’s activity turns out to be a rare breed of social engagement realizing itself at the same time, as if synchronically, both in the order of expression, the artistic discourse, and in the institutional order – the order of social practice. In this way, the activity of the centres, considered as a project, constitutes in A.R.’s experience yet another breaching of elitism, and therefore of the marginalisation of art discourse.²⁹

Only looking at the full spectrum of A.R. activity allows one to understand its creators’ persistent pursuit of building and running their own centres – it fully reveals the specificity of this particular model of cultural institution as designed and practiced for decades by the collective. Such an approach also provides an important perspective for researching the collective’s later history, linked to the history of another art institution. After all, it is difficult to analyse the form and programme of the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art (CSW) in Warsaw, directed from 1990 to 2010 by Wojciech Krukowski, separately from his experience as curator of previous A.R. centres. This article is not the context to closely examine that relation, though it’s worthwhile to note several significant features at CSW: interdisciplinarity, extensive programmes accompanying exhibitions, openness to audience activity and residency initiatives.

Krukowski’s long-term commitment to CSW also requires one to look back at his culture-centre projects, and allows one to understand the motivation behind them, which constitutes their successive implementation. Krukowski confirms the continuity of these objectives:

Building subsequent centres (Cora, Żytnia, Tęcza, or even the Ujazdowski Castle, the revitalization of which I attempted with support from Janusz Bałdyga and Piotr Rypson, among others) is essentially the same stream of energy and the result of a similar hunger on the part of the community.³⁰

Regrettably, it wasn’t A.R.’s fate to satisfy that hunger for longer, and today the collective doesn’t run their own publicly funded institution, in contrast to other independent theatres that became professionalized.

The chronology of A.R.’s relocations, therefore, reveals a very important clue for the interpretation of the collective’s achievements, and at the same time provides extremely interesting, often neglected material for discussing potential institution models as coherent ideological projects, in the sense that their programme, their organizational order and relations with their environment realize a single vision of culture and of participation in it.

Translated by Karolina Sofulak

Text published in Inicjatywy i galerie artystów, ed. Agnieszka Pindera, Anna Ptak, Wiktoria Szczupacka (Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Sztuka Cię Szuka, 2014).

Akademia Ruchu collective, ‘List otwarty do Wydziału Kultury ZG SZSP, redakcji “Studenta”, teatrów studenckich’, in Akademia Ruchu, ed. Tomasz Plata (Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Przyjaciół Akademii Ruchu, 2003)

‘International Movement for a New Museology’, www.minom-icom.net [accessed on 30 September 2014]

Krukowski, Wojciech,'***', in Akademia Ruchu. Miasto. Pole akcji, ed. Małgorzata Borkowska, (Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Przyjaciół Akademii Ruchu, 2006)

Ronduda, Łukasz, Akademia Ruchu, in Akademia Ruchu. Miasto. Pole akcji, ed. Kacha Szaniawska (Warsaw: Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski, 2012)

Ronduda,Łukasz, ‘Akcje miejskie AR. Przestrzeń wspólna, przestrzeń osobna’, in Akademia Ruchu. Miasto. Pole akcji, ed. Małgorzata Borkowska, (Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Przyjaciół Akademii Ruchu, 2006)

Simon, Nina, The Participatory Museum, ttp://www.participatorymuseum.org [accessed on 30 September 2014]

Typescripts:

Chronologiczny zapis faktów związanych z życiem grupy [1971–84] (typescript), 8, the Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute Archive in Warsaw

Ośrodek Kultury ZPO „Cora”. Ośrodek Teatralny „Akademia Ruchu” (typescript), in the Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute Archive in Warsaw

Ośrodek Teatralny Akademia Ruchu. Idea miejsca społecznego, in the Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute Archive in Warsaw

Program pracy Osiedlowego Domu Kultury „Xawerów” na rok 1980/81, Archiwum Instytutu Teatralnego im. Zbigniewa Raszewskiego w Warszawie

The Statute of the Akademia Ruchu Theatre Centre in Warsaw’, 2, in the Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute Archive in Warsaw

Wnioski w sprawie programu Zakładowych Domów Kultury (typescript), 2, the Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute Archive in Warsaw

[Wojciech Krukowski], Akademia Ruchu o sobie