It was a tiny comic bit: Behind a cupped hand, the gangster sniffed what could have been a bump of coke. Blink and you’d miss it, but the crowd in Toruń exploded with laughter. I exchanged puzzled looks with an American colleague: Poles love drug jokes?
We were part of the U.S. delegation to Poland’s Kontakt Festival, as part of the Center for International Theater Development’s Linkages program. Despite having seen a range of styles and talked with many local artists, the humor here eluded us. Afterward, we would learn, the sight gag had crystallized Polish performance history and current politics into a flashed middle finger of resistance.
First, background: The play was Aleksander Fredro’s Zemsta (“The Revenge”), an 1834 comedy of manners about a feud between aristocrats who share a castle, full of vendettas, disguises, crafty young lovers. The revival was exuberantly directed by Michał Zadara, set in a quasi-contemporary demimonde of gangsters and pop music. The business described above came when braggart henchman Papkin (Maciej Stuhr, an acclaimed actor and stand-up comic) psyches himself for a meeting with his boss’s rival. Clad in a sharp suit, Stuhr did the sneaky sniffing lazzo which prompted the wild response.
What I didn’t know was that Poland’s real-life conservative candidate for president, Karol Nawrocki, had been taped doing the same gesture during a debate in May. Apparently, the substance of which he partook was “white snus,” a powdered tobacco illegal under Polish laws. According to Poles I met, hoovering snuff is the least of Nawrocki’s vices. I heard he was rumored to be a pimp and real-estate fraudster, an ex-bouncer and ex-boxer whom the Polish far right groomed to run for the presidency with a tough-guy image. In other words, a political lackey with corruption baked in.
Coincidentally, halfway through our eight days in Poland, the Trump-backed Nawrocki won the runoff election. As president, he now has veto power against laws put forth by liberal Prime Minister Donald Tusk, whose Civic Platform party beat the conservative Law and Justice Party (PiS) in 2023. Nawrocki won by about one percent of the vote (which recently led Tusk to demand a partial recount). In short, Poland appears split between wanting a moderate, pro-West government and empowering fascist crooks. I had to check whether I was still in Eastern Europe or had woken up back in New York City.
Now everything made sense: Toruń theatregoers had reacted as a Broadway crowd might if Hamilton’s King George broke into Trump’s signature double-fisting dance to “YMCA.” But it goes further than SNL-level political caricature: As theatre critic and translator Malgorzata Semil explained during the two-hour train ride from Toruń to Warsaw, the history of Polish theatre is about subverting the word and smuggling critique through image. For decades, the Soviet Union supported culture in satellite states not out of respect for local heritage, but because the arts were convenient tools of propaganda. Generations of Poles (and Ukrainians, Romanians, et al.) grew up learning to distrust the official word and seek ways to distort or undermine it.
No wonder, then, that deconstruction, extreme acting modes, and director’s theatre have long been the norm in Poland, in sharp contrast to the Anglo-American model of well-made plays with the dramatist as prime mover. The director is expected to challenge text, rearrange it, undermine it with media or grotesque performance modes—to make theatre urgent and dangerous again. In the case of past masters such as Jerzy Grotowksi and Tadeusz Kantor, dramatic structure was obliterated in favor of body-based ritual or an installation of “bio-objects” to exorcise memory.
The U.S. delegation at Kontakt attended plays from Latvia, Germany, Ukraine, and Poland, which ran the gamut of absurdism, music-theatre, avant-garde circus, and multimedia-enhanced naturalism. Frequently we saw artists responding to the times in work that addressed political crises, whether rising authoritarianism, war in Ukraine, or the instigator of that conflict, a Russian dictator bent on spreading his brand of totalitarian thuggery around the globe. The eruption of laughter at the snus joke in Revenge had an angry edge: The gangsters were spotlit centerstage, barely hiding their misdeeds.
Meet the Delegation
Taking place in a handful of venues throughout the handsome medieval town of Toruń (160 miles northwest of Warsaw), Kontakt celebrated its 29th edition from May 30 to June 6. The first Kontakt took place in 1991, a mere two years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union; at the time it was the only international festival in Eastern Europe. Its mission, then as now, was to build bridges between East and West. Over six days, the Linkages crew took in eight shows, a film screening, a staged reading, and meeting with directors and students. More events were planned for the remaining time in Warsaw: dialogues with artists and administrators, and a performance of the Angels in America-inspired AIDS drama, Angels in Warsaw.
CITD’s Howard Shalwitz and Brandice Thompson organized and the led the delegation, offering helpful background from years visiting the area and building relationships with experts who included Semil, Zadara, and director Weronika Szczawińska, the latter also a professor at Warsaw’s National Academy of Dramatic Art. The U.S. cohort included New York-based playwright and director Nilan Johnson; Tasia A. Jones, a director, performer, and educator based in the Boston area; Michael Moran, co-artistic director and founder of the Oakland Theater Project in the San Francisco Bay Area; and playwright and librettist Melisa Tien. They were accompanied by Daniel Basila, a writer and CITD board member, who recently returned to NYC after a three-year stint in Budapest, where he was in residence at Arts Quarter Budapest (AQB).
In addition to American talent from across the states, the delegation was fortunate to include two representatives of Ukraine’s cultural scene. Nina Zakhozhenko, playwright, translator, and theatremaker, traveled from Lviv. The CITD group also welcomed Asia Pavlenko, a cultural studies scholar and program manager at the Ukrainian Institute in Kyiv. Both women provided a wealth of knowledge about the state of theatre in Ukraine. Noting that live performances are often interrupted by air raid sirens, some of which prompt theatre management to guide audiences to basement bomb shelters, the young Pavlenko sounded an unambiguous note about the importance of their work. “We operate in a really unstable landscape—emotionally and physically,” she conceded. “But we’re also seeing the renaissance of Ukrainian culture; people see it not as a privilege, but as an existential need. This is a part of our survival.”
At least two shows revealed how the war in Ukraine—the intensification of already existing hostilities that began around Feb. 24, 2022—led to a significant pivot in their development. With Black Swan, a sprawling meditation on Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot and Russian cultural imperialism, Latvian director Alvis Hermanis began with a desire to adapt the literary classic. But when Russian forces began invading Ukraine in Putin’s spurious “special military operation,” Hermanis knew the show’s ideological lens had to widen. The resulting ballet-themed satire began with a monologue by a shirtless, mad-looking fellow with a scraggly beard and copious tattoos, rhapsodizing about the spiritual ecstasy of epileptic seizures.
In affect and dramatic significance, this figure was an audacious composite of Dostoyevsky, his fictional creation Prince Myshkin (the titular “idiot”), as well as Tsarist parasite courtier Rasputin and Aleksandr Dugin, the latter a far-right political philosopher who has influenced Putin’s dreams of a new Russian empire. Underscoring Dostoyevsky’s controversial belief that Russia was a superior civilization that deserved to rule over neighboring countries, the text of Hermanis’s Black Swan was a mixture of semi-serious adaptation, satire of Russian aristocratic indolence, and an evisceration of Putin-era imperialist dogma. Throughout, the characters, costumed as ballet dancers, executed comically clumsy moves to Tchaikovsky’s swelling score to Swan Lake. Superimposing these icons of Russian culture—ballet and Dostoyevsky—Hermanis presented his irreverent critique of the Russian soft power which countries like Poland and Latvia are still grappling with.
Not that these cultural nuances were immediately obvious to the American spectators. It took a great deal of discussion, and context provided by Semil, to begin to appreciate Black Swan—which often seemed slow, overstuffed, and cryptic to foreign sensibilities. If I may translate the experience into American: Imagine a four-hour stage adaptation of Moby-Dick in which Ahab is simultaneously Melville, Senator Joe McCarthy, and MAGA tech monarchist Curtis Yarvin. Oh, and everyone is dressed like pro football players, tossing the pigskin around to Aaron Copland.
Another pivot was easier to decode: a brutal, hair-raising version of Albert Camus’s Caligula from Ukraine. Director Ivan Urivsky began preparing his production (for Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theater) months before the 2022 invasion, but the war demanded a tighter focus. Cutting the Camus text to 80 breathless minutes and setting the action in and around a massive steel box fronted with sliding doors that slash open and slam shut, Urivsky’s Caligula was a study of power, betrayal, and madness. Though the industrial materials and aura of Soviet-era surveillance evoked Russian occupation, the mad Roman emperor played by a lanky blond, Oleksandr Rudinsky, was no Putin clone. Their faces slathered in ghoulish white makeup, the actors pushed themselves to physical and emotional extremes in the horror-film aesthetic that Urivsky conjured. At final bows, when the cast brought out the Ukrainian flag, the standing ovation was the most honestly earned and electrifying I’ve ever seen.
Kontakt and Context
For the Americans, the literary and dramaturgical context of each production was as challenging as the political milieu. Here we were in a country that over the past three years has admitted more than a million Ukrainian refugees, which has alarmed many conservatives. Everyone has beef going back centuries: Poland annexed parts of Ukraine starting in the 16th century and during the Polish-Ukrainian War (1918-1919). Poland was partitioned in the 18th century among Russia, Prussia, and Austria. In the region, there is a general ban on the Russian language and Russian culture (which made Black Swan even more problematic).
But not everything at the festival was a postcolonial commentary on Russia. Director Anna Smolar’s Antigone in Molenbeek retold Sophocles’s tragedy of filial loyalty and civil disobedience as a ritualized music-theatre piece performed by three women. Stefan Hertmans’s play is set among Muslim residents of “Little Morocco” in the Belgian town of Molenbeek, giving Antigone’s righteous battle against Creon the added drama of a young woman becoming radicalized in the face of Western patriarchy and bureaucracy.
Kontakt also included two supposedly tame genres: the marriage play and the dysfunctional family drama. Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin’s The Torment of Life (1989) explored despair and tenderness between an elderly husband and wife in the form of absurdist black comedy. Director Eva Rysová added climate-crisis visual cues such as piles of snow and an accordion-playing polar bear to lend the marital angst the heft of apocalypse.
When the Snow Melts focused on a Polish family fracturing in the aftermath of a teenage daughter’s suicide. Passionately acted and meticulously staged, Katarzyna Minkowska’s production for TR Warsawa blended high-definition naturalism from the ensemble cast—boozing, bickering, paralyzed by grief—and surreal touches achieved on video. A cousin of the deceased girl is a filmmaker, and when her cameraman enters the home to capture the mourning family, we don’t know if it’s happening in her mind or we’re watching a documentary reenactment. Clearly, the death of a loved one tears apart the fabric of reality. Here, the dramaturgy of domestic tragedy created space for surrealist flourishes without worrying about losing the audience.
Toward the end of the week, the delegation saw two classic Polish plays on the same day: the aforementioned Zemsta (cheeky and sweet) and Iwona, Princess of Burgunda, a vicious fairy tale by Witold Gombrowicz. First published in 1938, this farcical tragedy concerns a supposedly plain, mute commoner who becomes a spoiled prince’s consort. Beginning and ending outside the theatre with a spirit that evoked Shakespeare in the Park, the play was performed at fever pitch in director Adam Orzechowski’s carnivalesque approach, accompanied by an onstage jazz ensemble. At one point, the unhappy Queen Margarete (Katarzyna Kaźmierczak) applied red lipstick thickly, clownishly over her mouth. Moments later, in a fit of anguish, the distraught monarch spread the makeup all over her face. The moral: Royal families are psychotic. (A few days later in Warsaw, I learned from Weronika Szczawińska that the smearing-makeup-because-I’m-insane device is old hat in Poland.)
By far the splashiest show of the festival—in every sense—was Ophelia’s Got Talent. How to describe this audacious mix of circus and postfeminist body art by German choreographer and director Florentina Holzinger? It was an all-female and (mostly) all-nude phantasmagoria about the mythic and social significance of women and water, two and a half hours without intermission or any plot structure beyond escalating scale and craziness. Holzinger and her ferocious band presented cheek piercing, a woman getting a tattoo, a corps of naked dancers attacking a helicopter until it appeared to ejaculate gallons of goo, and hundreds of plastic bottles raining down into a pool where children swam. There was a Broadway-style sailor brawl, sword swallowing, a camera snaked down a performer’s throat, and dozens of other unforgettable stunts and tableaux. Performers delivered monologues about surviving rape or anorexia, but the effect was never sensationalist; instead they bore witness to strength and resilience.
Holzinger’s performers (many regular collaborators) come from all backgrounds, shapes and sizes: tattooed acrobats, aerial pole dancers, small-stature actress Saioa Alvarez Ruiz (who did a sultry dance as a “sexy repairman”), an exuberant young woman with Down syndrome. A defiantly anarchic pastiche of heady ideas, Holzinger’s work divided Polish audiences. It split the Americans as well; not everyone was so impressed with the outrageous carnal maximalism. I for one welcomed Holzinger’s generous vision, which pushed beyond shock into joy. I told one Polish festivalgoer that I felt the show’s exhibitionistic feminine energy was liberating. She told me it felt like watching Weimar cabaret on the eve of Hitler’s takeover.
Ukraine Culture War
Call it luxury, propaganda, or protest, but art never stopped a war. Yet it’s why we’re fighting. To artists in Ukraine, civilians as well as those who enlisted in the army, culture during wartime is more than a pivot point or metaphor; it is life itself.
A portrait of young people living in Ukraine during the outbreak of war, Nina Zakhozhenko’s I Am OK was presented in a vibrant staged reading at Kontakt on June 1, the day Poland elected its new far-right president. This one-act play takes the form of text exchanges and monologues delivered on a group chat among four friends from Bucha, Ukraine. Dasha, Sasha, Liza, and Mike are everyday teenagers (status-obsessed, too cool, deadpan) navigating a normal landscape of romance, social media, and hanging out in the park when their lives are upended by the invasion. Some flee the city, others join the army or go into hiding, but the action ends before we learn their fates. Will any of them live to adulthood? It made me think of Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening, but with drone attacks.
In a post-show panel, Zakhozhenko explained how she wrote the harrowing tale in the middle of the full-scale invasion. “The first version was six pages,” she explained. “I wrote in my phone while riding the evacuation train. Each sentence was really short so it could be in my phone.” For the writer, I Am OK is already a period piece, a snapshot of a time that seems very distant.
“Culture in Ukraine is very important and visible,” Zakhozhenko told the audience. “Many artists work every day. A lot are also soldiers in the war, writing about their lives, their feelings. Of course, it is about archiving our experiences. But also finding our roots. These days I write on different topics, not only about war, about ecological issues or social topics. All these pieces make a puzzle you can put together to see what Ukraine is like now.”
“When Ukrainians visit international festivals,” added Asia Pavlenko, “they’re always approached with questions like, ‘Is there any Ukrainian art that is not about war?’ And I think, isn’t war still a universal topic in the arts? When you Google ‘universal topics in literature,’ the first four top results are coming of age, love, death, and war. I think Nina’s play has all of these.”
After six remarkable days in Toruń, the group returned to Warsaw. We were planning to meet (among others) Anna Galas-Kosil, deputy director of Warsaw’s pioneering Theatre Institute, and Marta Górnicka, a choral director who creates powerful music-theatre pieces with singers from diverse backgrounds or opposites sides of a conflict (Israeli and Palestinian women, for example) to forcefully explore humanity and justice in song.
At the train station, Pavlenko bid us farewell; she was bound for the bus to Kyiv. Even after so short a time, and with differences of language and custom, the members of the delegation had bonded. I admired the self-possessed Pavlenko, a recent college graduate who was already confident and focused, with a dry wit and unflinching gaze. After she left, I realized I’d never hugged someone heading back into a country at war, fighting for its very freedom. I’ll give her the last word, from the talkback after I Am OK:
“There’s a lot Ukrainians can share with the world—not only about war, but about the creativity which allows us to bring our communities together and move forward despite the struggle. I encourage you: Stay curious, see Ukrainian plays and productions, and let us be your mirrors.”
David Cote is a critic, opera librettist, and playwright based in New York City. His reviews and reporting also appear in Observer and 4 Columns.
