Teatr Ósmego Dnia (the Theatre of the Eighth Day), established in Poznań in 1964, was a part of Polish student theatre. Between 1976 and 1981, it became one of the most important companies in the history of the Polish theatre, producing several masterpieces. It also became a legendary grouping of democratic, anti-communist opposition. The persecution it was subjected to was caused by censorship, the secret police, and the administration at all levels. However, the members of the group managed to overcome everyday fear, face the totalitarian authorities openly, and create unforgettable artistic works. Four of them, who belonged to the group from the early 1970s, still maintain the ethical principles and artistic strategies adopted at that time, and thus now clash with the ideology of the current ruling administration, which is the right-wing Law and Justice Party.

The legacy of Jerzy Grotowski twenty years after his death still presents a powerful challenge for theatre-makers, not only in experimental theatre, and theoreticians – which is also how it was during his life. This retrospect by Juliusz Tyszka on the Grotowski seminar organized by Robert Findlay and Robert Taylor for the Program in Educational Theatre, at New York University in February 1993, is a testimony to his achievements, offering insights into the opinions and reflections of American artists, critics, and scholars on the importance of Grotowski, and the impact of his theatrical output both on world theatre, and specifically in the US. Tyszka sets their views within the Polish background he shares with Grotowski. The climax of the seminar in a meeting with Grotowski himself, following a film recording of The Constant Prince, is fully described. In 1992/93 Juliusz Tyszka was a Fulbright visiting scholar in the Department of Performance Studies at NYU. He is an advisory editor of NTQ and a regular contributor to the journal. Since 2008 he has been Head of the Unit of Performance Studies, Institute of Cultural Studies, Adam Mickiewicz University at Poznań, Poland.

In 1996 the Polish theatre scholar Juliusz Tyszka was present at the gathering of the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) in Copenhagen. Here, Dario Fo – in company with his wife and theatrical partner Franca Rame, also a contributor – was among the few invited to participate in both sessions of the conference: ‘Performers’ Bios: Whispering Winds of Theatre and Dance’ and ‘Theatre in a Multicultural Society’. Though already seventy years old and still in recovery from a recent stroke, Fo was incapable of confining himself to a conventional lecture, but (against his doctor's advice) combined his talk with performing the points he was making, whether imitating the curves of a voluptuous girl or enacting a speech in his universal ‘language’ of ‘gramelot’. He was to live on for another twenty years before his death at the age of ninety on 13 October 2016, outliving Franca Rame by just three years. Juliusz Tyszka, an advisory editor of NTQ and a regular contributor to the journal, is head of the Unit of Performance Studies, Institute of Cultural Studies, Adam Mickiewicz University at Poznań, Poland.

Report on the seventeenth Conference of Performance Studies International in Utrecht, 25–29 May 2011.

Report on the conference, ‘Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority: Theatre Censorship Around the World’, held in Dublin from 30 September to 2 October 2010.

Polish student theatre was a unique artistic movement in the Soviet post-war empire, with a liberty of expression unparalleled elsewhere in the Soviet bloc. As in every political system, in any country, its creators and its public were students and young intellectuals. These theatre-makers used the umbrella of the Polish Students' Union – a surprisingly democratic institution in a totalitarian political order – and all attempts at their repression were usually appeased by the activists of the student organization, often the friends and supporters of the theatre-makers. After the creation of the Socialist Union of Polish Students these activists became more dependent on the Communist Party, but the Party establishment decided, in the period of the ‘thaw’ (1954–57), that the student artistic movement would be maintained as a kind of artistic kindergarten for avant-gardists and supporters of artistic and political revolt, to let them manifest their beliefs within the well-guarded, limited territory of student cultural centres. However, the young rebels overcame these restrictions and created a focus of artistic opposition which had a wide social and artistic influence, especially during subsequent periods of political crisis. Juliusz Tyszka was himself an activist in the student theatre movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Now an NTQ advisory editor, he is head of the Unit of Performance Studies, Institute of Cultural Studies, Adam Mickiewicz University at Poznań, Poland.

Based in Poznań, Poland, Teatr Ósmego Dnia (Theatre of the Eighth Day) is now recognized not only as one of the most important companies in the history of Polish theatre, but as one of the leading avant-garde ensembles in the world. From its origins in a student theatre group of the late sixties, Theatre of the Eighth Day developed during the early seventies the artistically and socially radical methods of work and of living which have continued to be the hallmark of its work over four decades, but has remained in touch and in tune with the rapid changes in Polish life, first under martial law, and then in the new Poland of the ‘free market’ – towards which the company has sustained an attitude no less critical than to Communist authoritarianism. A number of its productions have accordingly left indelible marks on the sensitivities and even life choices made by two generations of Polish spectators. Juliusz Tyszka is Professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań. A contributing editor of NTQ, he has been a close witness of more than thirty years of the work of Theatre of the Eighth Day, and here sets the artistic development of the group in the changing context of Polish life and politics.

The Malta of this feature is not an island surrounded by sea but a lake surrounded by land – the artificial lake created near the Polish city of Poznań for the World Kayak Championships of 1990. However, since that event, and the momentous political changes with which it coincided, the lake has become the annual focus for a quite different event: a festival of theatre that has earned a reputation for both hosting and initiating important experimental work which is none the less rooted in the need to maintain close contact with its ever larger and more enthusiastic audiences. A range of illustrations of some of the oustanding productions accompanies retrospects by two regular members of those audiences – Juliusz Tyszka, who outlines the origins and development of MALTA, and Ewa Obrębowska-Piasecka, who offers a personal response to the achievements of the festival and to the philosophy of theatre underlying them.

Confronted with political opposition, an authoritarian regime predictably responds with force – but also with recognition of a knowable enemy. Confronted with anarchy and laughter, it can be caught wrong-footed – as happened in Poland in the aftermath of Martial Law, when a young surrealist, Waldemar Fydrych, self-designated ‘Major’, created what he called the Orange Alternative. In a series of published manifestoes and in the street happenings they proclaimed and recorded, the Orange Alternative tickled the soft underbelly of the Jaruzelski regime, and met with responses ranging from hostility to ostensible sympathy to simple bafflement. Juliusz Tyszka here records the progress of a movement and its moving spirit – who, disillusioned with democracy when it came, exiled himself to Paris to invent alternatives anew. Juliusz Tyszka is a past contributor on Polish theatre to NTQ, who teaches in the Institute of Cultural Studies at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan.

For most western theatre people, accustomed to the festival as an institutionalized annual ritual, the notion of a theatre festival as a celebration of true, holiday festivity – as signifying freedom from institutionalized ritual – comes alive more often in the pages of Bakhtin than on the stages of Edinburgh or other ‘festive’ cities. Yet Juliusz Tyszka, surveying no fewer than a hundred and fifty festivals that have sprung up or renewed themselves in his native Poland during the post-Cold War ‘period of transition’, finds that, while their economic success has been surprising in a straitened economy, the social causes which have ensured this success have to do with changed notions of communality and sociality. The festivals signify, he suggests, a rediscovery that joining together in celebration need not be an imposition of church or state, but can be a means of renewal for the national psyche after a long period of suppression. The following article has the quality rather of a heartfelt polemic – and, through lavish illustration, a celebration of the multiplicity of performance styles – than the academic analysis to which NTQ more usually subjects the new theatres of eastern Europe. It is none the less significant as a theatre document for our times.

AN ALTERNATIVE theatre movement emerged in Poland in the mid 1950s, following the post-Stalinist thaw. Its creators invented and applied new means of communication between actor and spectator thanks to their radical opposition to the mainstream state repertory theatres. This resulted not only in the internationally known achievements of Grotowski and Kantor, but also in the creation of thousands of independent student and amateur groups of great artistic and social importance. The new political and economic order in Poland has liberated these alternative theatres from their political duties and charged them with the even more difficult task of helping and supporting the search for new means of social communication.

The reception of most manifestations of Russian art and culture in Poland is linked inextricably with the political situation, and official and popular attitudes are often widely divergent. From the first visit of the Moscow Art Theatre to Warsaw in 1908, when most Poles boycotted the performances, through enthusiasm tempered by ignorance in the inter-war period, to the 'Stalinization' of Stanislavsky as official mediator of socialist realism in the late 'forties, Polish attitudes to the 'method' which was Stanislavsky's legacy are here examined by Juliusz Tyszka. Today, he concludes, Poles have largely consigned Stanislavsky to the lumber-room of history – though there are a few cautionary voices who urge his continuing relevance.