Culture Lab
Europe

June, 2020
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CFS:
The Participatory
Action Research

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23rd February 2021No Comments

How to make new creations and experience community together?

In recent years, a unique flow of creative work has emerged in work of the community gathered around the Association of Theater Pedagogues. Combining the experience of meeting: being with each other, exchanging personal experiences and accompanying each other in a circle, with the act of joint creation of a work to which viewers can be invited.
The process itself is life-giving. It helps its participants to live better, face difficulties more easily, experience support and closeness of others who are in somewhat similar and slightly different situations. Creators, artists, craftsmen and freelancers often lack such stable environments in which they can experience development.
On the other hand, the creation - a show, performance or podcast - allows you to process the dense material of real life in order to gain a new perspective, strengthen the sense of agency and influence on the course of your life (especially when in a pandemic everything flows around even more acutely than before).
The Boys Performative Group has been meeting in the circle for over a year in order to start creating a performance about masculinity together. During the Divers and Astronauts Festival, 2 creative moderated circles took place. For a group of Makers, craftsmen who often work and face the big challenges of their workshop alone. And a creative circle for creators ‘Without significance’ aimed at capturing what is live in the group, stimulating exchange and deeper inspiration.
We feel that the creative circle is a highly valuable method of work in which we respond to the hot challenges of XXI Century. To the experience of alienation and loneliness during the pandemic in a postmodern network society where we are separated by millions of screens from each other. But it’s a response also also for the challenge of creating something that has meaning together under these conditions. And how to communicate between our micro-bubbles in which we live.
Photos below come from rehearsals during which The Boys Performative Group created a performance based on its work in a circle on masculinity and shared experience.
Photos and text created by: Paweł Ogrodzki

16th February 2021No Comments

“We wanted to talk about manhood – we became friends” – online live performance

Couple of guys, more or less known to each other, but mainly unknown, formed a group - man circle. To talk about masculinity - what is it? Is it an essential category? We were a bit jealous of women because we knew they had already worked those topics out and they know what they want indeed and who they are. And we are a mile behind.
We started to talk to each other. We shared food, we gave each other safety. We talked about growing up, school, relations with parents. About abuse, dreams and sex. About being a boy and a guy in Poland. We created this space of intimate exchange, support, tenderness and vulnerability. Our performance shows where this group process took us. It is made from our words, touch and being together. We share our stories. We talk about what happened between us during this year.
“We wanted to talk about manhood - we became friends” is an innovative theatrical-performative project in which a group of men creates play about the experience of being a man. It is based on collective meetings and sharing personal stories of childhood, growing up and adulthood.
In our work we treat manhood as an intellectual concept which we deconstruct and reconfigure anew. We look at anxiety, violence, abuse, sense of community, sexuality and their connections to our diverse experience of masculinity. We consider the impact on modern men of traditional patriarchal and often toxic forms as well as of new versions of masculinity: open and adaptable which doesn’t require to be alfamale and gives total freedom in becoming who one wants to be. Our performance was collectively directed by three persons which is a good example of cooperation in opposition to extreme individualism so common in polish theatre which is a direct result of patriarchal values.

We enclose trailer:

creators // t w ó r c y _ c z y n i e:
THE BOYS PERFORMATIVE GROUP / Grupa Performatywna Chłopaki:
Rafał Aleksin
Robert Bigus
Kamil Błoch
Tomek Gromadka
Tomek J. Krynicki
Wojtek Mejor
Paweł Ogrodzki
Grzesiek Ryczywolski
Mateusz Wądrzyk
Marcel Bird-Wieteska
Julian Zubek
guest starring // z gościnnym udziałem:
Karolina Micuła
media and technical support // multimedia i obsługa techniczna:
Tomasz MakGajwer Grabowski
costumes // konsultacja kostiumograficzna:
Monika Skomra
music and sound // muzyka i dźwięki:
Ikarvs:
Aleksandra Badurska
Przemek Pstrongowski

26th January 2021No Comments

Online Performance ‘Lessons of Resistance’

April 2019. Polish teachers start a nationwide strike. Those who join the strike break the school system to a half. The society is divided. On one hand we have gestures of solidarity (supporting teachers in various ways) on the other - against acts of hostility (hate in social media). Teachers demand not only higher wages. The strike also stands for common values like dignity and demands the structural changes to the educational system.
Unfortunately, negotiations with the right-wing government fail. Support for the strike decreases among the society.
June. Summer break. The protest is suspended. Strike issues fade away. With the Covid-pandemia and the first lockdown the problems of the education system lose significance and fall into the background.
At this moment the Laboratory of Social Theater, a part of the Association of Social Pedagogues, starts working on a new performance about the strike - Lessons of Resistance.
We work using our own school memories and simultaneously collect teacher’s strike stories and transform them into pieces of art.
Scenario gets ready. The performance takes place in a former school building - located in the Center of Warsaw - the whole area is our stage.
Three weeks left to premiere.
November. The government bans all live public performances.
What should we do? Brainstorm. Decisions. Let’s do it on Zoom platform.
None of us know how. We do it for the first time. Euforia, trust, cooperation, compassion blends with doubts.
Time goes by. Common lunches and quick walks with the dog between rehearsals. Gimbals. Gigabytes. Strike banners. Promotion tools. Dec. the 15th 2020, day of the premiere. Final recordings and last scenography production.
Please wait till the host will let you in.
More than a hundred participants join us in each of the three days of performing Lessons of Resistance. Audience listens to a story of the strike for over an hour and half, and stays with us way longer to share experiences after. Some teachers say: thanks for this sign of solidarity, we’ve been waiting for this kind of support. We are the school. We all.
The performance Lessons of Resistance was live transmitted on zoom platform. It has been screened in more than three hundred home computers, laptops or other electronic devices.