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164 eight Shifting a Cultural Paradigm Between the Mystique and the Marketing of Polish Theatre Halina Filipowicz I It will not be controversial, I suspect, to suggest that post-communist Polish culture has sprung a not-so-subtle surprise on even its most astute interpreters. In the early 1990s, when I began research for this essay during one of my (all-too-) many furloughs from work on Polish cultural mythology, leading Polish intellectuals were enthusiastic about the prospects of culture in new democratic Poland. Scholars such as Maria Janion were convinced that the end of communism in 1989 marked the beginning of a new era of Polish culture. No longer trapped within a demoralizing system of ideological constraints and censorship restrictions, the cultural scene would thrive on openminded encounters with ideas and images. My own view was less optimistic. Where others saw a transition to participatory democracy and free enterprise, I saw shrines of patriotic martyrdom, litanies of accusations, and museums of taboos , so I went back to my project on Polish cultural mythology. A decade later, Janion conceded that the euphoric predictions of the early 1990s were ‘‘utopian illusions’’ (Janion 2001). According to Janion, the Polish cultural scene is fraught with complacency, obscurantism, and defensiveness, which make a free and open exchange of ideas difficult. ‘‘Something really terrible is going on in Poland,’’ she concluded (ibid.). At that point I knew I had Shifting a Cultural Paradigm 165 to return to this essay, at least in part as a way of working through the issues (and taboos) encountered in researching it. The post-1989 changes have been sufficiently intense (and we are sufficiently in thrall to hyped-up rhetoric) to compel some among us to call them revolutionary: the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe has been tagged ‘‘the quiet revolution,’’ ‘‘the Velvet Revolution,’’ even ‘‘a market revolution.’’ It is evident, though, that not every change affects every institution and cultural practice in precisely the same way. I want to focus on the dynamics of encounter and conflict, of resistance and exchange between the ‘‘East’’ and the ‘‘West’’ as they have played out in Polish theatre since 1989.1 The questions I want to take up in this essay are these: What effect does the post-communist transformation have on Polish theatre as a cultural practice as well as an institution? What new topics, issues, and problems does a shift to a different paradigm—to democratic values such as pluralism and to a competitive capitalist culture—bring into Polish theatre? How does theatre respond to the changes that are affecting Polish society? Does it still tack up a blazing, bracing seriesofwarningsignsontheperimeterofmainstreamculture,asitdid,famously, inthe1970sand1980s?2 Howcanadiscussionofpost-1989theatre,throughthe use of comparative and other dialogic techniques, enable something like a mutual interrogation between the ‘‘East’’ and the ‘‘West’’ to throw fresh light on the cultural contests of our own day and perhaps on those of the past too? I have enclosed the terms ‘‘East’’ and ‘‘West’’ in skeptical quotation marks to suggest that the line separating the ‘‘East’’ from the ‘‘West’’ is less a fact of nature than it is a trait of imaginative geography. The point I am making here is a rudimentary one: the concepts ‘‘East’’ and ‘‘West’’ are discursive constructs whose boundaries are under perpetual negotiation, but the constructs continue to exercise disciplinary power in the formation of new knowledge. One reason for this is that scholarship continues to be framed by traditional linguistic , ethnic, and national boundaries. For example, one can specialize in Polish cultural studies and know little about Jewish culture, and vice versa, in both cases ignoring the dynamic relationship of interaction and exchange between Poles and Jews over the past eight centuries. I will speak here as an expatriate Polish critic who examines Polish theatre and drama from within a cultural space that is heterogeneous and polyvocal. Within this space, however, the non-Russian cultures of Eastern Europe do not have the same institutional and intellectual status as Russian culture. As Richard Schechner has pointed out, for example, most young Americans who are interested in theatre do not know much about the Polish artist and theorist Jerzy Grotowski, even though he is ‘‘one of the four great directors of Western twentieth-century theatre’’ (Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, and Brecht round out the list) (Schechner 2001, xxv). To put these points another way, working on cultures which had been rarely considered in the American academy before may sometimes feel like swimming against...

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