The Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute in Warsaw, together with the Laboratory for Transcultural Studies on Theatre and Drama of Post-communist Europe and Arts and Theatre Institute in Prague, would like to invite you to the webinar within the project And Prologue Again? Posttraumatic Drama and Theatre in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe in the Light of Systemic Transformation (1989/1991-2020).

The webinar, which will be held on Monday, 22th of November at 9.30 am – 4 p.m. on platform ZOOM will be devoted particularly to Czech, Slovak, Polish, Hungarian and German drama and theatre. The details and the link to the webinar are to be found in the programme below.

The idea of the project And Prologue Again? is an attempt to take a transcultural look at the theatre and drama of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe through the prism of common experience of systemic transformation symbolically sealed in 1991 by the dissolution of the Soviet Union the 30th anniversary of which falls in December 2021.

The pivotal challenge of the project is an attempt to find an answer to the question: how did the dramatic and theatrical works in the thirty-year period of the systemic transformation serve overcoming the negativity of experience (and the intensity produced by it), leading in the direction of optics of posttraumatic growth. In this context, the authors see posttraumatic drama and theatre as a kind of art that on the one hand stems from the transformative trauma, but on the other – it is the drama and theatre “after the trauma” that comes with new ideas, artistic quality, in its gestures inspiring to the transgressive cultural and artistic activism.

The whole project is accompanied by cyclical cultural events and scientific debates with the participation of foreign and domestic experts, cultural animators as well as drama and theatre authors from the Central and Eastern Bloc. The undertaking will also include the publication of a multi-volume anthology in Polish, which will comprise the translations of dramatic texts – e.g. Czech – along with their critical discussion.

And Prologue Again? is the result of partner cooperation between the Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute in Warsaw and a team of translators and scholars from: the University of Warsaw, the Jagiellonian University, the University of Silesia, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, the John Paul II Catholic University of Lubin, associated within a research network “Laboratory for Transcultural Studies and the Theatre and Drama of Post-communist Europe”, initiated by the Director of Center for Transcultural Post-totalitarian Studies of the Faculty of Letters of the University of Wrocław, dr hab. Agnieszka Matusiak, prof. UWr. Czech institutional partner is Arts and Theatre Institute in Prague, others partners are: Hungarian Theatre Museum and Institute, Center of Belarussian Dramaturgy, Theatre Institute in Bratislava, Croatian Theatre Institute, and Ukrainian Theatre Institute in Kyjev.

Link: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYlde-vrDsiGNVZ-nL_CKQgwkWQb__1RN2s