WYWROTY/SUBVERSIONS: on the 15th International Retroperspektywy Theatre Festival, Łódź (20-30 August, 2026)

"I didn't know who I was supposed to be...at fifteen," sang Taylor Swift, about two decades ago. Retroperspektywy Festival, by contrast, seems notably secure in is identity as it reaches that same birthday this year, even as the festival continues to grow, expand, adapt, evolve. 

Audience watching The Tiger Lillies concert

Disruptive, punky spirit, embracing warmth, social concern, intellectual depth, drive to experiment, and sheer lightness and fun remain the characteristics of one of Łódź's most exciting and vital cultural events, which combines theatre shows and concerts with workshops, "happenings," DJ sets, dance, discussions, and more. 

Tomasz Rodowicz in Konferencja ptaków

This year, the festival takes "Wywroty", or "Subversions," as its title. The idea is to work "against the limitations, closures, blockages and manipulations that currently exist on all fronts," in the words of Tomasz Rodowicz, Artistic Director of Teatr CHOREA, Retroperspektywy's founder. 

Ola Shaya

According to Rodowicz, the intention of this year's edition - one that resonates with the festival each year, really - is "to open people, to burst bubbles" through, as main programmer Ola Shaya puts it, the creation of "communal experiences where the divide between artists and audiences dissolves." 

Konferencja ptaków

The festival opened in characteristically bold fashion with Konferencja ptaków (Conference of the Birds), a welcome reunion for CHOREA and the crazy genius of director Łukasz Kos, whose  collaboration on Śmierć na gruszy (Death on a Pear Tree) made for a startling start to the festival's 2021 edition. Based on Farid ud-Din Attar's 12th-century Persian poem, which was notably adapted for the theatre in the 1970s by Peter Brook, Konferencja ptaków was slightly less anarchic than the previous collaboration but still wild enough, drawing on both the poem and Brook's dramatisation, and starting out as a species of delirious avian rave. 

Konferencja ptaków

Throughout, live music and sound effects by Maciej Maciaszek added atmosphere and texture, complementing the kinetic energy and dreamy beauty of the recorded and live camera work by Kamil Wallace Walesiak. CHOREA's commitment to finding both contemporary and eternal resonances in ancient texts was very much in evidence in this account of the epic quest of the Birds to meet a legendary, winged king. The show conveyed the effort of an attempt to find shared values ​​through the transformation of each individual.

 

Konferencja ptaków

Another layer was added to the performance by the strongly-felt spirit of one of CHOREA's signature shows After the Birds, including in the presence of some returning cast members. Rodowicz, Janusz Adam Biedrzycki, Joanna Chmielecka, Małgorzata Lipczyńska and Paweł Smagała formed a superlative ensemble, alongside memorable cameos from Wallace Walesiak and Kos himself. 

PlastSupper

A second striking addition to the opening night was Mi­cha­li­na Ko­stec­ka and Do­mi­ni­ka So­bo­lew­ska's PlastSupper, a culinary installation, its title a religious pun, evoking the vexed relation between humans and plastic, especially as it has entered the food chain. As white-clothed servers presented  coloured pasta and other delicacies at a ceremonial table to the sound of Marta Kluba's musical compositions, a surreal, ironic feast worthy of a Peter Greenaway cinematic tableau developed. 

Jan Ma­żew­ski's Kół­ko Gra­nia­ste

A more traditional but equally compelling exhibit opened downstairs at Fabryka Sztuki in the form of Jan Ma­żew­ski's “Kół­ko Gra­nia­ste” ("Square Circle"), a set of acrylic on canvas paintings evoking childhood imagination, solitude and moments of connection. I felt pulled back to these paintings again and again; Ma­żew­ski's work created a contemplative space for those attending the festival to return to: modest, soulful, and very beautiful. A festival regular, DJ Papa Bo Selektah, meanwhile, delivered a fantastic set to close the opening night. 

DJ Papa Bo Selektah

Saturday's events took place across a trio of venues that, just like Fotofestiwal a couple of months ago, revealed the dynamism and creativity of Łódź's revitalised spaces. 

Lament/ر ِ ﺛﺎء” 

Despite currently undergoing renovation work, the festival's usual centre of Fabryka Sztuki still remained open for performances. It hosted, among others, Lament/ر ِ ﺛﺎء” , Aurora Lubos's haunting show inspired by the destruction in Gaza. This found Lubos picking her way back and forth across a miniature set of destroyed, smoking buildings, her precise movements variously expressing grief, despair, and defiance. 

Labyrinth

A tonal contrast was offered in next door's Fuzja complex, which hosted Fabian Krestel's Labyrinth an absolutely delightful interactive mix of juggling and art-making. And the day ended spectacularly at the Central Textile Museum, with Radar, a transfixing acrobatic dance piece by Il Posto/Wanda Moretti and Marco Castelli Small Ensemble performed on the walls of the White Factory to music ranging from Delibes' Lakmé to Home Alone-sampling polka-techno. 

Radar

Brilliantly, the connective tissue between the spaces and events was provided by more Italians, the adorable company of clowning musicians Compagnia Samovar & Banda Storta. These six avuncular fellows led delighted attendees from place to place with whoops, song and brass accompaniment - sometimes roping unsuspecting passersby into the divine madness.

Compagnia Samovar & Banda Storta

On Sunday, Janusz Adam Biedrzycki directed CHOREA's Intergenerational Group  in Brainrot, a broad, sharply funny show, which began with a 2001: A Space Odyssey homage and, in a series of short scenes, offered a satirical look at the contemporary challenge to communicate, taking in everything from selfie culture to religion, advertising, the cosmos, and fashion.

Brainrot 

Reminiscent in form and tone of the extraordinary devised Łódź Film School Diploma shows directed by Mariusz Grzegorzek in 2018/2019 and 2019/2020, Brainrot provided a great showcase for the talents of the current group. 

Grief//bot

It was followed by Teatr Kombinat's Grief//bot which modishly but effectively made Artificial Intelligence a protagonist as - like the BBC's recent sitcom hit Ann Droid - it examined how AI might assist the bereaved in working through loss. With a bot based on the biography and data of the late singer, poet and filmmaker Natasza Czarmińska, and audience members invited to ask questions of the model in the final section, the show boasted a tour de force performance from Paweł Palcat, which gave a deeply human face and sense of longing to what sounded in synopsis simply like a tech exercise. 

The Sin of Pride

Maternal loss was also a starting point for Asher Lev's The Sin of Pride, which began with the artist recounting how the death of his mother prompted his move from Israel to Belgium. But the primary inspiration for this piece was Lev's guilt and conflict over the current Gaza war. 

The Sin of Pride

The deceptively gentle, therapeutic opening - with the soft-voiced Lev welcoming the audience and inviting them to write their own current concerns down on pieces of paper - became a radical performance art provocation, with the artist gyrating, chanting and miaowing, before smearing himself in blood and spewing blue liquid over a representation of the Star of David, a symbol he proceeded to destroy in a snarling feral display.

As a gesture of externalised Jewish self-excoriation, The Sin of Pride wasn't something to be easily shaken off. But by the time Lev was encasing his legs in rubber tubing and propelling himself across the performance space the piece seemed to have degenerated into sheer exhibitionism. Finally washing off the blood, reciting a Palestinian poem, and encouraging the audience to pat their hearts in rhythm to a song, Lev himself appeared to conceive of the piece as a cleansing, bonding collective ritual. But the unsettling result undoubtedly proved the most polarising piece presented on the festival's first weekend. 

The Tiger Lillies

An event that definitely did succeed in creating a united audiences was the Saturday concert by cult British band The Tiger Lillies, whose mix of Weimar cabaret and music hall brought longstanding fans to Fabryka Sztuki and clearly won over many new admirers. With their signature white-painted faces, singer/pianist/accordionist Martyn Jacques, Adrian Stout (double bass, jaw harp, theremin) and adorably gurning percussionist Budi Butenop seamlessly interwove tracks from last year's Songs From the Sewer record alongside older material. As ironic and macabre as some of the band's material can be, the concert was somehow deeply life-affirming - closing with a tender "Birds Are Singing in Ukraine" - and a cheered swipe at Putin.  

From Belgium, Italy, Britain, Israel, Poland, and Belarus the global artistic expressions presented at Retroperspektywy made for an opening weekend that was by turns comforting and confronting, but always energising. Following the four days of Robert Hayden's dance residency, the festival opens to the general public again today with a packed programme of events including children's shows, New Circus performances, queer cabaret, and free DJ sets. There's much more to explore; further details here. 

Photos by: Agnieszka Cytacka fotografia

Further reading:

Report on Retroperspektywy 2025

Report on Retroperspektywy 2024

Report on Retroperspektywy 2023

10 Great British TV Shows of 1976 (BFI online article)

I wrote about 10 British TV shows turning 50 this year for BFI online. You can read the piece here. 

Theatre Review: The Smile of Her (Marylebone Theatre)

Reviewing her Oscar-nominated supporting performance in Jonathan Demme's Swing Shift back in 1984, Pauline Kael described Christine Lahti as "one of the towering Venuses who are changing our image of women. Like Sigourney Weaver, Joanna Cassidy, Kathleen Turner and, of course, Vanessa Redgrave," Kael continued,

"[Lahti] is heroically feminine. She's also a rip-snorting comedienne, and she gives [Swing Shift] whatever spark and intensity it has."

‎‎Over 40 years on, Kael's great descriptions hold true for Lahti on stage, where she continues to "change our image of women," this time with a deeply personal work. 

(Photo: Mark Senior)

This summer the actress/writer/director is making her quite unexpected but very welcome London theatre debut in The Smile of Her, which premiered three years ago at the Berkshire Theatre Group's Unicorn Theatre in Massachusetts, in a production by Robert Egan.  

Unlike Susan Sarandon's very low-key first foray onto the UK boards last year as one of the five incarnations of Mary Page Marlowe, Lahti's stage debut here could hardly be bolder or more self-revealing. Not only is The Smile of Her self-penned, it's also intensely confessional; the play takes off from Lahti's book of autobiographical essays True Stories from an Unreliable Eyewitness (2018), which in turn originated from her performance of some of those pieces as monologues in small NYC venues. 

(Photo: Mark Senior)

The Smile of Her comes to London in a fresh, tweaked new production by Mêlisa Annis at the Marylebone Theatre. Girl-group pop warmly welcomes the audience into the show before Lahti, casually resplendent in red, takes to Sarah Beaton's spare, sofa-dominated set to begin her story.   

The female-fronted creative team seems appropriate for a play that feels very much of the #MeToo moment in its focus on Lahti's feminist awakenings. These are explored as they occurred on the home front - in memories of her middle-class Michigan childhood, her siblings, her authoritarian father and compliant mother (to whom the title refers). And also in the professional arena as she recalls her first forays into acting - inspired when she saw a production of Long Day's Journey Into Night and headed to New York, "where all bad bitches go to make their dreams come true."

Across 90 compelling, cathartic, frequently funny and sometimes gut-wrenching minutes, Lahti reveals her growing awareness of the power dynamics in her family and the wider inequalities they point to, and recalls some disturbing encounters with industry men. (Though celebrated by Kael, Lahti's height definitely wasn't considered an asset by some of those in power in her chosen profession.)

(Photo: Mark Senior)

The Smile of Her isn't quite a monologue. As well as serving as audience-addressing narrator, and  playing her family members in quick, revealing sketches, Lahti also interacts with her childhood self (well played by Isabella Ford). With notable wit, fierceness and generosity of spirit, Lahti moves fluidly between roles, moods and perspectives, keeping the proceedings pacey but also nuanced and thoughtful (she also dealt elegantly with a tech hitch on the night I saw the show). 

The language is sometimes crude, sometimes lyrical; pitched somewhere between Fleabag and The Year of Magical Thinking, the show emerges as something distinctive: part memoir, part drama, part social history, part therapy. 

Looking back, Lahti's film choices often displayed a feminist bent - the aforementioned Swing Shift, plus Housekeeping (1987) and Leaving Normal (1992), for instance. While it's fun to see some footage of her hilarious 1998 Golden Globes win, I'd have loved to hear more about her particular experiences on those films instead. 

But maybe Lahti prefers to be quite vague about aspects of her career in order to avoid solipsism and to give more space to the audience. For, ultimately, it's the family dynamics that cast the longest shadows here, as Lahti movingly honours the traumas experienced by two of her sisters and details a reconciliation with the mother who her college consciousness-raising had distanced her from. 

As a work of contemporary feminism, The Smile of Her is intergenerational but not "intersectional"; it might be viewed as an example of what's these days sometimes fashionably disparaged as "white feminism." Perhaps such labelling, with its reversed hierarchies of value, only serves to create more division, though.  Part of what the play conveys so powerfully is the Second Wave tenet that our most intimate, affective experiences often shape our political consciousness - and how our perceptions can shift over time. 

Lahti tells us at one point that she was drawn to acting for its ability to explore all of life's "messy, ugly and beautiful" aspects. Drawing on painful personal experience to deliver one of the year's essential stage performances, she ensures that The Smile of Her conveys all of that in spades. The show comes warmly recommended. And here's to Lahti's return to London after this run ... Long Day's Journey Into Night, anyone?

The Smile of Her is at Marylebone Theatre until 29 August. Further information here. 

Finest Hours: Danny Glover in To Sleep with Anger (BFI online)

 

On the occasion of Danny Glover's 80th birthday I wrote about his performance in Charles Burnett's To Sleep With Anger (1990). You can read the piece here. 

Spaces of Freedom: Reflections on the 25th Edition of Fotofestiwal, Łódź (18-28 June, 2026)

"Łódź is a city of contrasts, of four cultures, a promised land. The Polish Manchester. A city of women. A city of Lodzermensch types. A city of transformation and its consequences... It carries a whole range of associations and emotions." (Katarzyna Kończal, curator of the exhibition School of Seeing: The City, Herbst Palace Museum, Łódź, 18 June - 31 December 2026) 

The artistic and cinematic history of the Polish city of Łódź - with it famed film school, and strong links to the avant garde in painting and sculpture - continues to intersect with its post-industrial present in vibrant ways, including in the many cultural events that take place in the city's revitalised spaces. After almost two decades of encounters with the city, I still find myself surprised by it, discovering new facets to a prismatic and often still undervalued place. 

One such event is Fotofestiwal, which celebrated its quarter century this June with a spectacularly packed programme across 10 days. While its primary focus remains photography, the festival also ranges across arts and culture in their widest expressions - film, music, sculpture, performance - dissolving boundaries to create an event that's as inclusive and interdisciplinary as it is international. 

Vive la résistance, Marta Bogdańska ©️ Fotofestiwal

When it was founded in 2001, by students from several different academic disciplines, a decade after the post-communist closure of the city's textile factories had left Łódź at an economic low point, Fotofestiwal was very much an underground endeavour, with films shown from VHS tape and displays created from magazine cut-outs.

Vitamin, Augustin Rebetez.
©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź / Augustin Rebetez

Though much changed, expanded and polished since then, the festival still retains something of that raw, punkish energy today. For all the engagement with contemporary political and social ills in the art displayed, a defiant playfulness is also evident - both in the exhibits chosen by director/co-founder Krzysztof Candrowicz and the team of programmers/curators, and also in the city-wide locations in which the work is placed. 

Better 'Magua' Than Pain, Helena Majewska

              ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź/Helena Majewska

Take, for instance, Vitamin, by Augustin Rebetez, a deliriously anarchic combo of kitsch, cats and politics presented in the loft of the Biedermann Palace. Or Helena Majewska's Better 'Magua' Than Pain, a funky but also meditative reflection on Berlin and Warsaw club culture that took over the Machine Room of Fuzja, a historic former power plant, now a mixed-use site of cultural events, restaurants, and residences. 

Eclipse, Adrian Chmielewki
©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź / Adrian Chmielewski

Majewska's immersive exhibition was nicely complemented across the city, in the swish Brama Miasta surroundings of PKO Bank Polski's Galeria Koncept, by the display Przesilenie / Eclipse. Presided over by the kind and charismatic music manager, events organiser and concierge Eryk Czyżewski, this display of Adrian Chmielewski's exciting series of photographs taken at music festivals captured moments of artists' performances and revellers' communion with cinematic verve and even some fiery Sirât (2025)-style vibes. 

Meanwhile, the former YMCA swimming pool on Moniuszki Street was startlingly repurposed as a cinema for Kino UTOPIA, an uncanny evocation of past picture palaces as centres of imagination and ideas. Here short films by Taiwanese talents Ying-Ju Chen, Kuang-Yu Tsui, Jui-Chung Yao, and Zi-Fu Chen were screened in the pool, in a concept designed by Paweł Giza, with retro film posters adorning the walls of the upper level. 

Kino Utopia ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź 

More orthodox but still highly rewarding was the School of Seeing: The City display at the Herbst Palace Museum. This is an expansive reflection on 19th and 20th century urban experience and flânerie that transports the viewer from the Polish Manchester of the exhibition's location to Paris, London and other metropolises through carefully curated images and quotes. 

American Cycles, Philip Montgomery ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź, Philip Montgomery

In contrast, American Cycles, the exhibition of Philip Montgomery's photography at the City Art Gallery in Sienkiewicz Park, brought audiences right up to date with its focus on recent and ongoing US traumas, from the opioid crisis to BLM protests. The first time that the work of Montgomery, a regular contributor to publications including The New York Times, has been presented in Poland, the black-and-white images also brought intimacy to celebrated subjects, from amusingly startled Supreme Court Justices to Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, gently head to head. 

American Cycles, Philip Montgomery ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź / Philip Montgomery 

A street over, at Re:Medium Gallery on Piotrkowska, Izabela Łapińska's American Beauty collated the Polish photographer and filmmaker's portraits of individuals whom Łapińska had encountered on New York streets. With special attention to the subjects' lips, the exhibit offered a warm, affirmative display of US diversity. 

Pig, Feng Li @Fotofestiwal Łódź / Feng Li

Alongside the aforementioned Biedermann Palace, the festival's other central hub was at Art_Inkubator, the former complex of textile warehouses close to Fuzja, where the main programme was presented. Here the festival's central theme of relations between human and animals was most prominently in evidence. 

Memorable highlights included Pig, Feng Li's subversive take on domestication: a photographic document of family life with an ever-growing porker and other adopted animals in a Chengdu apartment that suggested a Chinese counterpart to Malcom Mowbray's A Private Function (1984). The photos in Vive la résistance, by Marta Bogdańska, hilariously and pointedly gave the gaze back to various animal subjects. Nikita Teryoshin's Backyard Diaries, meanwhile, was a moving, gritty display of photos of street cats from across the world: a sometimes painful but also vital antidote to Instagramable cuteness. 

 I'll Bet the Devil My Head, Carlos Alba ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź / Carlos Alba

Also asking tough questions about human/animal relations in an urban context, this time through a fable-like form, was Carlos Alba's I'll Bet the Devil My Head. Here photos of urban foxes prowling the London borough of Tower Hamlets were juxtaposed with images of city brokers to evoke the capital's wealth disparities.

Flipping the Bird,
Jaap Scheeren/Rik van den Bos  ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź / Jaap Scheeren

Jaap Scheeren and Rik van den Bos contributed Flipping the Bird, a brilliant 15 minute short film, or "photo novel," based around a walk across the Dutch dunes. As the journey progresses, pastoral rapture gives way to a subversive rebuttal from nature's perspective. By turns reflective, irreverent, sexy, meditative, confrontational, laugh-out-loud funny and profound, this was among my favourite exhibits of the festival. Do yourself a favour and watch it here. 

Luke Stephenson, An Incomplete History of Show Birds ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź 

A sometime collaborator of Scheeren's, Luke Stephenson brought his delightful An Incomplete History of Show Birds to the festival, an example of the photographer's heartening attention to the more eccentric, arcane and undersung elements of British culture. The pictures looked at once sweetly enticing and quite imposing in their outdoor display at Schiller's Passage on Piotrkowska Street, where the city's own birds could be counted among the exhibit's charmed spectators. 

The festival's biggest coup was surely its opening event, again held at Fuzja, and this time based around an unexpected collaboration. John Akomfrah's Listening All Night to the Rain was the celebrated artist-filmmaker's commissioned contribution to the 2024 Venice Biennale's British Pavilion. 

A further development of Akomfrah's series of collectively devised multi-screen film installations, Listening All Night to the Rain has been seen in a couple of iterations since its Venice premiere: at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, and, currently, at Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery.

 

The Fotofestiwal presentation of the piece was entirely unique, however, in boasting new music composed to the images by Hania Rani (a recent winner at the European Film Awards for her soundtrack to Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value [2025]). This was performed live by Rani on piano and cymbals at Fuzja. 

Listening All Night to the Rain ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź/ John Akomfrah 

This surprising audiovisual synthesis proved highly effective and quite emotional. Since his breakthrough film, Handsworth Songs (1986), Akomfrah's tender and radical works, combining freshly filmed images with others drawn from archives, have always boasted extremely intricate soundscapes of their own; they may not seem to require further sonic intervention. Here, though, some of the original sounds could be heard faintly beneath Rani's live playing, creating another layer, a kind of audio palimpsest, that added to the richness and surprise of the images. 

Listening All Night to the Rain ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź / John Akomfrah

The presentation of the piece as a 30 minute work on 8 screens meant that its original scope (which included around 30 hours of footage across 60 screens in 8 rooms in Venice) was considerably reduced. But Akomfrah's fluid, associative, haptic imagery - of drowned clocks and dancing bodies, ticking metronomes and James Baldwin on the telephone, political protests and pre-Raphaelite paintings - still offered plenty to absorb, with Rani's playing a by turns rapturous, delicate and discordant addition. 

Listening All Night to the Rain ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź / John Akomfrah

Akomfrah's bricolage filmmaking has always sought connections between apparently disparate aspects of the world. And with the screens fading in and out on the faces of different human subjects, suggesting a relay of experiences both deeply private and collective, this iteration of Listening All Night to the Rain wonderfully evoked the idea of each individual as a living archive of memories and incidents. For all the histories of oppression and crises they gesture towards, Akomfrah's recent works have a deeply cleansing, spiritual impact, and the new music accentuated that effect. "We might do it again," said Rani, of the performance. Let's hope so. 

American Beauty, Izabela Łapińska  ©️ Fotofestiwal Łódź / Izabela Łapińska

Akomfrah - whose first visit to Łódź this was but who, in his brief introduction to the performance, called the city a "mecca" for students of his generation - has described an important aspect of his work as "creating spaces of freedom" for audiences. In its remarkable range and its democratic showcasing of work by global artists - both those long established and those newly emerging - this year's anniversary edition of Fotofestiwal offered many such liberating, challenging and inspiring spaces for its attendees. The above remarks cover only a fraction of the festival's abundance of riches - its at times overwhelming array of events and exhibits, concerts, workshops, and talks. This unique and exhilarating festival continues to grow and evolve, and showcases Łódź at its best and most inclusive. Here's to the next 25 years.

Fotofestiwal took place in Łódź between 18-28 June 2026. However, some of the exhibits, including several mentioned above, continue to be displayed throughout the year. Further details here.