Biogramat - nowa forma dramatyczna czy hybryda gatunkowa?

Abstract

Many contemporary Polish dramas are works inspired by biographies of fa-mous people, created on the basis of a “biographical pact” between the author and the reader. This writing practice is so frequent that the term “biograma” has appeared in the academic and critical reflection. Authors of plays “includ-ing biography in the background” often use two types of artistic expression: they construct their texts either as monologues of the protagonist (updating the convention of the monodrama), or as stylistically diverse, often narrative frag-ments, constituting a demonstration of fragments of someone’s life – usually autothematic and metafictional. In the first case, playwrights take on the role of a biographer who “writes with themselves,” establishing a strong, intimate relationship with the hero/heroine (e.g. Artur Pałyga). In the second case, they choose the role of a biographer-researcher, who confronts different sources and documents, revealing the method of dealing with the selected biographical material (e.g. Małgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk). Therefore, we can distinguish biogramas in the “bio” sense, i.e. texts constructed in the form of a monologue/monologues of characters, saturated with emotionality and corporeality of the protagonist’s speech act, as well as biogramas with an emphasis on the play/drama element, i.e. works created as an effect of the writer’s play with sources and documents. The dramatic texts discussed in this article form a distinct trend of bio-graphical writing in the area of contemporary theater production. However, they do not constitute a new dramatic genre. They are fragmentary and syn-cretic works, in which we can observe references to other, quite non-dramatic, forms of expression – to soliloquy and storytelling.