Grzegorz Niziolek's The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust is a pioneering analysis of the impact and legacy of the Holocaust on Polish theatre and society from 1945 to the present. It reveals the role of theatre as a crucial medium of collective memory - and collective forgetting - of the trauma of the Holocaust carried out by the Nazis on Polish soil. The period gave rise to two of the most radical and influential theatrical ideas during work on productions that addressed the subject of the Holocaust, Grotowski's Poor Theatre and Kantor's Theatre of Death, but the author examines a deeper impact in the role that theatre played in the processes of collective disavowal to being a witness to others' suffering. In the first part, the author examines six decades of Polish theatre shaped by the perspective of the Holocaust in which its presence is variously visible or displaced. Particular attention is paid to the various types of distortion and the effect of 'wrong seeing' enacted in the theatre, as well as the traces of affective reception: shock, heightened empathy, indifference. In part two, Niziolek examines a range of theatrical events, including productions by Leon Schiller, Jerzy Grotowski, Tadeusz Kantor, Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Warlikowski and Ondrej Spisak. He considers how these productions confronted the experience of bearing witness and were profoundly shaped by the legacy of the Holocaust. The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust reveals how - by testifying about society's experience of the Holocaust - theatre has been the setting for fundamental processes taking place within Polish culture as it confronts suppressed traumatic wartime experiences and a collective identity shaped by the past.

Grzegorz Niziolek's The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust is a pioneering analysis of the impact and legacy of the Holocaust on Polish theatre and society from 1945 to the present. It reveals the role of theatre as a crucial medium of collective memory - and collective forgetting - of the trauma of the Holocaust carried out by the Nazis on Polish soil. The period gave rise to two of the most radical and influential theatrical ideas during work on productions that addressed the subject of the Holocaust - Grotowski's Poor Theatre and Kantor's Theatre of Death - but the author examines a deeper impact in the role that theatre played in the processes of collective disavowal to being a witness to others' suffering. In the first part, the author examines six decades of Polish theatre shaped by the perspective of the Holocaust in which its presence is variously visible or displaced. Particular attention is paid to the various types of distortion and the effect of 'wrong seeing' enacted in the theatre, as well as the traces of affective reception: shock, heightened empathy, indifference. In part two, Niziolek examines a range of theatrical events, including productions by Leon Schiller, Jerzy Grotowski, Tadeusz Kantor, Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Warlikowski and Ondrej Spisak. He considers how these productions confronted the experience of bearing witness and were profoundly shaped by the legacy of the Holocaust. The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust reveals how -- by testifying about society's experience of the Holocaust -- theatre has been the setting for fundamental processes taking place within Polish culture as it confronts suppressed traumatic wartime experiences and a collective identity shaped by the past.

Theatermachine: Tadeusz Kantor in Context is an in-depth, multidisciplinary compendium of essays about one of the most influential theater artists of the twentieth century. Hans-Thies Lehmann's theory of postdramatic theater and developments in critical theory-particularly Bill Brown's thing theory, Bruno Latour's actor-network theory, and posthumanism-serve to provide a previously unavailable vocabulary for discussion of Kantor's theater. Drawing on diverse approaches, the contributors write about Kantor from both global and local perspectives: as an exemplar of "postdramatic tragedy"; in relationship to Jewish culture and Yiddish theater; through the prism of postmemory and trauma theory; and in relation to Japanese, German, French, Polish, and American avant-garde theater. This comprehensive anthology arrives at a time when we grapple with the materiality of our modern lives-AI, technobjects, and algorithms-and might thus also be better poised to understand the materiality that permeates Kantor's theater. Theatermachine argues that while confronting the twentieth century's most pressing, but least comfortable, questions-those of a human's worth, dignity, essence, and purpose-Kantor might also have been, unwittingly, a harbinger of the twenty-first century's political, ethical, aesthetic, and critical discourse.

Theatermachine: Tadeusz Kantor in Context is an in-depth, multidisciplinary compendium of essays about one of the most influential theater artists of the twentieth century. Hans-Thies Lehmann's theory of postdramatic theater and developments in critical theory-particularly Bill Brown's thing theory, Bruno Latour's actor-network theory, and posthumanism-serve to provide a previously unavailable vocabulary for discussion of Kantor's theater. Drawing on diverse approaches, the contributors write about Kantor from both global and local perspectives: as an exemplar of "postdramatic tragedy"; in relationship to Jewish culture and Yiddish theater; through the prism of postmemory and trauma theory; and in relation to Japanese, German, French, Polish, and American avant-garde theater. This comprehensive anthology arrives at a time when we grapple with the materiality of our modern lives-AI, technobjects, and algorithms-and might thus also be better poised to understand the materiality that permeates Kantor's theater. Theatermachine argues that while confronting the twentieth century's most pressing, but least comfortable, questions-those of a human's worth, dignity, essence, and purpose-Kantor might also have been, unwittingly, a harbinger of the twenty-first century's political, ethical, aesthetic, and critical discourse.

Krzysztof Warlikowski's work stands among the most remarkable phenomena in post-1989 European theater. This book joins Warlikowski's theater with the dynamic changes in Polish society following 1989, using strategies borrowed from psychoanalysis, theater anthropology, performance studies, and cultural poetics. This book is not only about an artist of the theater, but above all about the theater production as an object of the audience's desire, an object evoking fascination, revulsion, aversion, and opposition. This is why the performances are analyzed as a series of flash-points, constellations with powerful affective impacts. It focuses on fragments of social rituals, material objects with major potential to spark audience emotions, and gestures of violence. The piecemeal narrative serves to cull out aspects of Warlikowski's performances that could be read as symptoms of social drama.