ABSTRACT
Weronika Szczawinska has created performances in theatres and art galleries across Poland as a director, dramaturge, translator, and performer. Playwright and dramaturg Agnieszka Jakimiak has been one of Szczawinska’s closest collaborators. Their performances have been staged at the country’s most renowned mainstream theatres, including Teatr Polski Bydgoszcz and Narodowy Stary Teatr in Kraków, as well as Poland’s experimental independent venues, such as Komuna Warszawa. In Poland in the 1990s and early 2000s, we were obsessed with plays, but then plays and playwriting mutated into something we might call ‘writing for theatre’, that is texts, propositions, or scripts for theatre. This sparked the emergence of the role of the dramaturg. Dramaturges are rarely an extension of the theatre institution itself, but members of a creative team. They usually do not only have at their disposal the ‘distanced perspective’, but their work starts long before rehearsals, while they are working on the context, concept, and the whole matrix environing the project.
