Women behind bars: Scene from the production by Maja Kleczeska
Image: Teatr w Krakowie
A theater director is punished: The case from Kraków is an example of how the Polish state tries to put cultural institutions to the ideological curb.
Dhe Polish actress Maria Peszek sings in her new album: “There used to be a city here. This is where my house used to be. Why is it so dark?”, noting: “Poland existed, and it died.” She summarizes the experience of protesters who took to the streets in 2021 against the Warsaw government’s policies: “Run, flee, blood is seeping into the concrete .” Peszek processes her powerlessness and fear of a state whose president claimed that LGBT members are not human. Increasing symbolic violence characterizes political debates on the internet, on the street, on television and in parliament.
What sounds like the soundtrack of a documentary film about the counter-public to the rule of the Law and Justice Party (PiS) could now be fatal for Kraków’s Juliusz Slowacki Theater. Its director, Krzysztof Głuchowski, has been criticized for inviting Maria Peszek to perform. The idea that the 48-year-old artist could present her radical contemporary criticism to the pounding bass in the venerable theater made the Kraków provincial administration nervous. In her songs, Peszek refers to the persecution of those who think differently and homosexuals in the German Reich in the 1930s. In the song “Virunga” she warns: “They have taken everything from us. You want more. I’m a pink angle. I love in hiding.”
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