Agon, Passion, Profanation: Challenges for New Political Theatre

Abstract

In this article, Bartosz Frąckowiak attempts to outline the challenges for new political theatre in Poland. The stake in political theatre is freedom, and the method is identifying power relations and transforming them. People are surrounded by and pervaded by processes and products (also from the symbolic sphere – today even the economy is becoming increasingly symbolic) which they produced themselves, and yet have lost control of. Political theatre should designate new dividing lines between positions, and undermine the existing ones. If theatre merely represents social phenomena, reproducing, reinforcing and legitimising the existing order, one forgets that it is also a device in which centres of power operate, and no performance is innocent. Perhaps a theatre of disillusion should be the answer to the problem of political theatre? This could neutralise various social fictions and deconstruct mythologies. Theatre should rather focus on what is specific to it and missing in other media: the directness of the meeting of the actor with the spectator, the actor’s ‘real’ presence. The space shared between the audience and the actors, the time they spend together, the (un)reality of the affecting bodies and those they affect. The theatre must discover a new aesthetic and new means to find a new shock potential.