We Can Try to Imagine This

Abstract

The article takes as its starting point the premise that to cast the director Anna Karasińska in the role of an autodidact just starting out in theatre doesn’t fully grasp the conceptual background of her work for the stage. The five productions she has completed to date (Ewelina’s Crying, The Second Performance, Birthday, The Fantasia, All Imaginary)can be regarded as a highly coherent, well-conceived project. The present analysis concentrates on paradoxes inherent in Karasińska’s theatre, recurring and abandoned artistic gestures which bring about a peculiar interdependency between actors, the production and the audience. The article’s main focus is an attempt to characterise The Fantasia, staged at TR Warszawa in 2017, as the ultimate theatrical situation in which to observe the position of an audience member, an actor’s presence and the role of language. Karasińska’s works are examined from the perspective of institutional critique, meta-theatricality, auto-theatre and the effect of strangeness in a certain understanding of the term (Random Disconnects). The article further demonstrates that Karasińska’s pieces don’t exist in a vacuum, but relate in a number of ways tothe works of other artists from the performative-arts field including the company Forced Entertainment and artists Ivana Müller and Tino Sehgal.