The Dispossessed Spectator: Subversive Games with Viewer Passivity in the Theatre of Krzysztof Garbaczewski

Abstract

The author searches for the answer to the question of the strategies of reception designed and provoked by Krzysztof Garbaczewski by analysing the director’s productions of texts by Witold Gombrowicz, referring to the relational aesthetics of Nicolas Bouuiaud as well as Jacques Rancière’s conception of the emancipated spectator and Bojana Kunst’s ‘dispossession’. The objective of her analysis is to point to the possible critical potential in ‘dispossessing’ the spectator, subjecting him or her to passivity and indicating his/her loss of power within Garbaczewski’s theatre. This potential entails exploiting the theatrical contract to ‘dispossess’ spectators in order to show them a possibility different from the dominant way of building a narrative about oneself, and at the same time to encourage the question about identity in a world of postmodern systems for managing oneself.