Under the title "Awakenings," last year's Retroperspektywy Festival (RPS) celebrated the 20th anniversary of the festival's founder, Teatr CHOREA, initially by looking backwards. The opening event, What's Demeter?, was a compendium show that revisited scenes and songs from some of the company's previous productions.
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| Dzień Dobry, Pinky Mouse! during What's Demeter? (RPS, 2024) |
The result was sensational: a 3 hour rollercoaster ride that highlighted the depth and range of CHOREA's work in music, drama, and movement across two decades, and which reunited artists associated with the group's past and present. The show was full of surprises and delights; audience-inclusive from the start, it culminated in a magical moment of interaction that danced audience and performers out of the auditorium together.
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| Ragnarok during What's Demeter? (RPS, 2024) |
Supplementing its customary mix of performances, concerts, workshops, discussions and exhibitions with some fresh elements, this year's just-concluded edition of RPS took "In Form" as its title - as a theme, as an inquiry, and as a challenge. In the words of the organisers: "What does it mean to be in shape, in form, today - in a world of over-stimulation, tension and transformation? Artists from different countries answer the question: what form does theatre take today, in the face of crisis, social changes and technological revolution?" The festival programme provided responses - as well as further questions - of all kinds.
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| Ubu Roi |
If a warm, embracing tone defined What's Demeter?, the opening show of this year's festival was - in keeping with the idea of challenge - a more confrontational proposition, though one that generated plenty of audience laughter throughout. Premiered in 1896 when the author was just 23, Alfred Jarry's absurdist precursor Ubu Roi at least partially demonstrated its enduring ability to provoke in Konrad Dworakowski's production (eccentrically designed by the director and Marika Wojciechowska), a collaboration between CHOREA and Grupa Coincidentia.
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| Ubu Roi |
Dworakowski's staging leant hard into the play's Rabelaisian vision and scatological humour - existence as a cycle of consumption and excretion - as well as its parodic elements of Shakespearean tragedy, and its Polish provenance and afterlife. (Translated in 1936 by Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, the play was adapted as an opera buffa by Krzysztof Penderecki in the early 1990s.) The production also found plenty of topical political resonances without semaphoring them - at least until Ukrainian and Palestinian flags were brandished by the cast at the curtain call.
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| Ubu Roi |
Jarry's play remains clearly a young man's work, and for those for whom a little caricature and absurdism goes a long way, the evening had its lags, failing to match the kind of magnetic synthesis of elements that Dworakowski previously achieved with his great stagings of Bruno Schulz material, Schulz: Skrawki and Schulz: Pętla.
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| Ubu Roi |
Still, there's no denying the distinctiveness of the production's puppetry-and-punk aesthetic, or the commitment of the company, from the counter-intuitively cast Paweł Chomczyk as a decidedly un-obese Ubu, to Dagmara Sowa as the grasping, acquisitive spouse, plus CHOREA stalwarts Joanna Chmielecka and Janusz Adam Biedrzycki as Byczysław and Król Wacław/Queen Rosamund respectively, and the Belarusian actor Siarhei Artsiomenka as Captain Bardior.
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| Divny Sad exhibition, Anastasia Rydlevskaya |
Work by Belarusian creatives was in fact an integral component of this year's festival. It was a poignant one, too, since several of the featured artists have settled in Poland after fleeing Lukashenko's Belarus, and reflect on the experience of exile in their work in contrasting but equally creative ways.
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| Snake Charmer |
Anastasia Rydlevskaya, now based in Gdańsk, not only contributed the art exhibition “Divny Sad” (“Wonderful Garden”) to RPS, and designed masks for the Tylko dla dziewczyn (Just for Girls) events; she also delivered a terrific outdoor concert performance, mostly drawing on material from her third album, Snake Charmer (listen here).
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| Snake Charmer |
Quiet and modest in her demeanour during the festival's opening speeches, Rydlevskaya proved a distinctively bold artist both in her vivid, striking paintings, often evoking instances of painful or productive metamorphosis, and in her performance style, which combined playful energy and shamanic intensity, as it took place outside, under the (very appropriate) Black Moon of the festival's first Saturday night.
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| DJ Papa Bo Selectah |
Alongside Papa Bo Selectah, who delivered a dynamic DJ set, a third Belarusian artist mobilising music was Igor Shugaleev, whose Ich heiße Frau Troffea (My Name is Mrs. Troffea), a solo dance performance created with director Sergey Shabohin, proved an explosive highlight of the festival's first Sunday afternoon.
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| Ich heiße Frau Troffea |
Premiered at Teatr Nowy in Warsaw in 2022, Shabohin and Shugaleev's piece fuses present-tense immediacy and historical awareness as it links Shugaleev's experience of the Berlin rave scene to the mysterious "dance plague" that began in 1518, when one Frau Troffea began to dance frantically in the Strasbourg streets, apparently inspiring hundreds of other citizens to do the same over several days, resulting in many deaths.
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| Ich heiße Frau Troffea |
The overall structure of Ich heiße Frau Troffea is that of a club night in microcosm. Shugaleev enters wet-haired and nude, and proceeds to dress himself for the night's partying, as phone footage of Belarusian political protests and his own journey out of the country are projected on the screen behind.
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| Ich heiße Frau Troffea |
Across the following 30 minutes, Agnieszka Kryst's choreography then takes the performer from little more than a leg twitch into a violent crescendo of movements and contortions that are by turns disturbing and cathartic, and accompanied by pounding techno courtesy of Mikita Bubashkin & Gray Mandorla Studio, and Tomasz Jóźwin's high intensity strobe lighting.
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| Ich heiße Frau Troffea |
With Troffea herself also visualised on the screen in one section in images that add a spectral silent cinema dimension to the show, the piece draws a throughline between the dance plague and contemporary rave culture, presenting both as manifestations of rebellion by marginalised social groups.
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| Ich heiße Frau Troffea |
Historically dubious as this connection might be, it proves powerful in performance, as the show reimagines Troffea's action not in terms of medical pathology but rather as an expression of a resisting, revolutionary spirit that still abides today as a challenge to oppression.
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| Tomasz Rodowicz during Hoson Zes / Lśnij |
While Troffea twirled in the intimate confines of Fabryka Sztuki's Sala A_22 auditorium, this year's RPS was also characterised by, in the words of CHOREA's Artistic Director Tomasz Rodowicz, "a search for innovative forms in the performing arts that open up new ways of engaging with audiences."
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| Pipe Up |
This involved using some different spaces for events - from the neighbouring Fuzja complex where the Norwegian company Panta Rei Danseteater presented their delightful and quietly visionary family show Pipe Up at the former power plant, to the appearance of two trailers in the Fabryka Sztuki courtyard, one which became home to Teatr Compagnia Samovar's Officina Oceanografica Sentimentale, the other to Teatr Łątek Supraśl's Nosferatu - a Diary of the Plague.
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| Night Piece N° 7 |
By far the most experimental of the festival's offerings was Night Piece N°7 by Stuttgart's O-Team theatre group. Fresh from a recent presentation in South Africa, the piece takes the form of an all-night self-described "meditation ritual" which aims to keep participants in a liminal state between sleeping and waking across 11 hours,
blending object theatre, installation, concert, performance and staged exhibition elements - all with the bonus of a shared breakfast in the morning.
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| Happy Hour |
Other visiting shows pushed formal boundaries in less extreme but nonetheless striking ways. The Czech director/designer Jan Mocek's Happy Hour developed into a strangely compulsive relay of creation and destruction through the movement and (re-)stacking of 150 squeaky Styrofoam panels. These were transformed by the show's sometimes focused, somnambulant, distracted or disruptive trio (Tinka Avramova, Irina Andreeva, Arseniy Mikhaylov) into various simulacra: a stack of books, a graveyard, a mountain, a monument.
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| Glory Game |
Best of all, perhaps, was Teatr Komuna Warszawa/Sticky Fingers Club's Glory Game, conceived and choreographed by Dominik Więcek. The show opened with its performers, Daniela Komędera, Dominika Wiak, Monika Witkowska, Natalia Dinges, Piotr Stanek, and Więcek, as dignified physical icons - noble and naked, a collective running back and forth in slow motion - before deconstructing that vision to reveal the often absurd aspects of competition and the contemporary mediatisation of sport. The piece's revelation of a sneaky, humourous side was delightful; the performers' physical control and expressiveness was breathtaking; and the concept felt fully realised, offering completely fresh, funny, exciting and subversive solutions to the staging of sport.
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| A Ty jak to widzisz? |
The CHOREA Youth Group premiered a "demonstration" performance of A Ty jak to widzisz? (And how do you see it?). Directed and choreographed by Janusz Adam Biedrzycki and Anna Maszewska, this proved to be
a lively, affectionate and often hilarious piece inspired by Dorota Kassjanowicz's book 30 znikających trampolin (30 Disappearing Trampolines) which presents the titular object in multiple short scenes; these vary wildly in perspective, tone and genre. The show will return in a full production in November, and deserves to be widely seen.
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| Stara kobieta wysiaduje |
Meanwhile, the veteran stage actress Irena Jun received a loving reception and delivered a tour de force performance in Tadeusz Różewicz's 1968 play Stara kobieta wysiaduje (The Old Woman Broods), here distilled and reconceived as a monodrama but with its metaphor of a monstrous garbage dump to describe the crisis of today's civilization still sadly resonant. Tadeusz Wielecki complemented Jun's vocal dexterity and supple command of the text with music played live, while old video footage of the actress and Różewicz in conversation made for a poignant opening to the intimate and charged performance.
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| The Dzidzias |
All of the concerts were of a high standard, and ranged from the sensuous sound of Karakal, fronted by the charismatic Turkey-born lyricist/vocalist Ayşe Abacı, through the punchy, progressive indie rock of The Dzidzias, to the off-kilter energy of the Ballady i Romanse concert by Ewa Żurakowska and Horsy. This set Adam Mickiewicz poems to thunderous drums and proggy arrangements, delivered with pleasingly uninhibited vocals, theatrical flair and encouraged singalongs by Żurakowska.
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| Grzegorz Wierus during Hoson Zes / Lśnij |
As often - 2023's LIVET: Suite for the Earth will live long in the memories of those who were lucky enough to see it - the festival concluded with a concert as well. Hoson Zes / Lśnij was the debut of CHOREA's new Chór Spółdzielczy (Cooperative Choir), made up of a mix of novice and experienced singers. Conducted jointly by Grzegorz Wierus and Elina Toneva the choir presented a deeply stirring performance of Ancient Greek music - a fitting finale for a festival in which dialogue between past and present cultural expressions stood out as a vital aspect.
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| Hoson Zes / Lśnij |
The above remarks focus on only a selection of highlights of RPS 2025. Thanks to the efforts of this year's main coordinator, Ola Shaya, and team, this edition of the festival felt particularly packed. It also sustained momentum, with careful attention paid to the themes and sequencing of each individual day, and with room for fun details - such as surprise cameos from Julia Jakubowska's wonderfully frenetic 80s-styled fitness instructor.
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| Julia Jakubowska |
Like many other attendees, I'm sure, I invariably leave RPS feeling changed "on a cellular level" (as certain Americans currently like to put it...): challenged and expanded intellectually and with a sense of inhabiting one's body more fully, purposefully and presently. At once playing to its strengths as a festival and broadening its horizons, 2025 found Retroperspektywy in exceptionally good form.
Photos by Agnieszka Czytacka fotografia
