Performans biografii

Abstract

The article reflects over the newest Polish theatrical plays, whose authors have in different ways utilized biographies of famous people. The presence of numerous works of this kind suggests a biographical trend in contemporary Polish theatre. The plays which refer to life-stories of extraordinary heroes of history or culture were created with regard for different source data, including both earlier biographical publication and many common opinions circulating in our cultural context. Interesting and somewhat paradoxical is the fact that the work of their authors who employ biographical material in writing for the stage often combines archeological meticulousness in referring to sources with creativity in its processing/composing. Jan Czapliński’s text Zapolska Superstar serves as an example of dominant compositional strategies of biographical plays: self-referentiality of the message, the confrontation of different kinds of discourses as a distinguishing factor of the verbal material of a text, the manifestation of the authorial perspective and composing the plot as a process of recreating/happening of individual biography. Due to these qualities of works designed for the stage, it can be stated that already at the level of textual recording a “performance of biography” is created, which then develops independently on two planes: in the act of individual reading and in the actor’s performance of words/actions of a character during a stage production.