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Barbara Żarinow,
Doctor of Science, researcher of scenography and modern theater
The history of mankind is a sequence of smaller or larger events that we could call apocalypses. The public imagination in the 21st century is saturated with visualizations of the end. Nor does reality skimp on the scenarios: disasters, cataclysms, epidemics and pandemics, war experiences of the past and present. Liminal events, which, by the way, do not always deserve the name of apocalypse (with a capital A), nevertheless have a special impact on the imagination of Polish contemporary artists and coincide with the experiences and fears of society.
From the multiplicity of post-apocalyptic scenographic visions, I have identified three prototypical images, to which all these diverse visual solutions, marked by the individuality of the artist, could be reduced. They are: embedded in the past, the “post-war landscape” arising from armed conflicts, is rooted in the experience of the 20th century (it is the aftermath of two world wars and the Cold War, when humanity’s attention was focused on nuclear conflict and its consequences); being a sign of the present, the “post-industrial wasteland” which is the result of both systemic changes and the exhaustion of utopian social constructs of the industrial period; the image of the “utopian wasteland” associated in the public imagination primarily with ecological catastrophe is the most likely future scenario, for which humanity is already working hard.
In this article, in a very condensed form, I present the assumptions contained in my doctoral dissertation entitled Images of the Post-Apocalypse in Polish Theater of the 21st Century. I will analyze two plays that present the aforementioned two prototypical images. The costumes created for them can be represented for contemporary Polish theater. The first is Małgorzata Szczęśniak’s designs for the play (A)pollonia directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski, referring to images of armed conflict and the image of the victim. The second performance is Solaris by Klaudia Hartung-Wójciak with costumes by Hanka Podraza, which is a disturbing vision of the future.
Landscape after the War
(A)Pollonia by Krzysztof Warlikowski is a play that has been performed in Poland continuously for fifteen years, and has received great acclaim from both critics and audiences. It is based on the texts of the tragedies Oresteia by Aeschylus and Iphigenia in Aulis, Heracles the Mad and Alcestis by Euripides, as well as contemporary works including Apolonia by Hanna Krall, Elizabeth Costello by John M. Coetzee and The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell. The juxtaposition of ancient and twentieth-century works is a journey through the fate of humanity, which the show’s authors describe as “the great slaughterhouse.”
Costumes set in reality and in the present day, they tell a lot about the character of the protagonist and his mood. Attention is drawn to two female attributes — dresses and red lipstick. They carry with them a rich semantic baggage. Szczęśniak uses all the symbolic potential encoded in the cut and color of this part of a woman’s closet, additionally the act of putting it on or changing it is staged.
Iphigenia is wearing a communion dress. It is white and too short, and has an embroidered communion bread on the chest. The cut gives actress Magdalena Poplawska childishness. The sacrament of communion is a rite of entry into adulthood. The liminal nature of this event is emphasized by the gifts she receives from Agamemnon: her father offers her heeled shoes and earrings. Iphigenia eagerly puts them on and plays with them, proving that the femininity in her is purely symbolic.
A sisterly scene takes place before the death of Alkestis (Magdalena Cielecka). The young woman, who agrees to give her life for her husband, is nervous and terrified, but tries to be composed. In the later part of the play, she turns into Apolonia from Krall’s reportage, a woman who sacrifices her life to save the Jews hiding with her, leaving behind her young children. Alkestis holds a last supper with her family. She expresses her fear of death by obtrusively dressing up; she leaves the table several times and each time puts on almost identical dresses, airy, slightly flared, knee-length, with small polka dots, only the shade differs. As if she wanted to change the situation this way, but couldn’t. In the end, she takes the lethal injection wearing only a white petticoat. As with Iphigenia, the color symbolizes purity of intent. The underwear and the abandonment of the outward appearance emphasize her sincerity.
Lipstick as a prop repeatedly appears in the play, a substitute for blood. The grieving wife of the returning war hero Clitemnestra (Malgorzata Hajewska-Krzysztofik) paints her lips with red lipstick, but it heavily goes beyond the corners of her mouth, making her look like a clown. Agamemnon greedily kisses his wife, smearing the lipstick even further and rubbing it into his own skin. It appears on his face like indelible blood stains. The lipstick is also used by Orestes, played by the same actor — Maciej Stuhr. Eager to avenge his and his father’s death, he pulls a lipstick from his pocket and, using it like a folding knife, inflicts blood-red strokes on his mother’s body.
Alkestis, after taking poison with the help of lipstick, hastens death by “slitting” her veins. At the very end, this bloody weapon goes to Heracles the clown (Andrzej Chyra). His face is covered with a crimson, crooked smile. Later he will use the lipstick to kill Apolonia.
These feminine attributes play an important role symbolizing the act of sacrifice attributed to women in the play. And despite the multiplication of the image of the victims, they are the ones who play a key role, hence the choice of means. Lipstick, which is a symbol of blood, is very expressive and obvious. However, on the other hand it is frivolous, easily washed out, perhaps even ridiculous. It does not even pretend to be realistic blood.
The play presents a picture of post-modern society, but at the same time proves that people have not changed since mythical times and are governed by the same mechanisms. On the murder of Apolonia, the chain of executioner — victim — executioner relations did not stop. The ending of the play is undecided, because these relations continue, they are the basis of the cultural order. The world depicted in the show is a post-apocalyptic vision of fallen ideas and values. It is secularized, even though the protagonists are gods, they are similar to humans according to Greek mythology. They succumb to emotions and get drunk. However, contrary to this tradition, the theme of the sanctifying role of sacrifice does not appear. The play leaves with the question of why the lives of others are deemed worth protecting and more important than those of the victim. The flashpoint that changes reality became the last world war, which mixes with all the previous ones. The past dissolves into enigmatic memories, it is difficult to recognize the beginning and the end, cause and result.
Utopian Garbage Dump
Klaudia Hartung-Wójciak’s play, which was created in collaboration with playwright Witold Mrozek and costume designer Hanka Podraza, treats Lem’s novel pretextually. Solaris is solely an inspiration for the narrative of cosmic fantasies, the exploration and conquest of space, futurological visions of the development of societies and machines, spun in the 1960s — 1980s. Only residual fragments have been preserved from Lem’s novel, which form the dramatic framework of the play. Threads from the novel are not presented chronologically or realistically. The play is a reflection of them, as in a distorting mirror.
It is a pastiche of Lem’s novel, which is made present primarily through costumes. Kelvin enters the stage in a costume representing that of a cosmonaut. Podraza made a one-piece suit of soft, white material with a sponge-like texture, on which an image of an authentic spacesuit is printed. A helmet is made of the same material. Its shape is conventional, flat and soft. In the middle it has an oval cutout for the face. The actress, playing Kelvin, looks grotesque and comical in it, which is further emphasized by the seriousness in the way this outfit is treated. In the likeness of a soldier, when she pulls off her soft helmet, she stiffly holds it up with her hand, pressing it to her chest, like a military beret. The outfit is completed with “fakirki” flip-flops, orthopedic shoes with colorful massaging tabs and white socks. Kelvin’s hairstyle is also eye-catching: the hair at the roots is raised and combed upwards, so that the entire oval of the face is elongated, giving an otherworldly charm, which is further emphasized by a streak of glitter along the floating tapir.
Snaut in the show is a kind of captain. This is reminded by the stars, which are a decorative element of his costume. The kimono cut blouse is made of stiff cotton fabric with a moro pattern. The cuffs are finished with a plush fabric with stars, which looks like it was cut from a bathrobe. The shoulders at the back are decorated with sewn-on colorful stars arranged in an arc. The gray-purple pants are made of shiny taffeta and take the shape of bells, popular in the 1980s. The silhouette is elongated and optically enlarged by boots on a big anchor, which resemble the so-called moon boot.
A typical princess from sci-fi reality is Harey. Her outfit can be described as beautiful kitsch. It is a fitted velour evening gown in the color of ripe plum. Its front is decorated with colorful crystals arranged in an abstract pattern reminiscent of shooting stars. The outfit gives the heroine’s evening dress a slightly tacky elegance. Her distinction and nobility are emphasized by white tights and transparent slippers reminiscent of Cinderella’s crystal shoes. A comical interjection is the flesh-colored sleeves covered with imitation black tattoos arranged in abstract doodles. Princess-like charm is added by her pinned-up blonde hair, trailing in a long braid reaching almost to her ankles. It makes her resemble the space diva Plavalaguna from the film The Fifth Element, who, like Harey in the show, impresses with her performance of an operatic aria.
The character who is simultaneously male and female is Natasza Aleksandrowitch, she lies in the refrigeration counter as the dead Gibarian, but at the same time appears as his phantom creation F, the great black woman Gorgia, to later change into the pilot Berton. Wearing black glasses, called optical implants by the heroine, Gorgia-Berton is wearing a richly decorated jacket, somewhat resembling a military frock coat in its cut. It is made of shiny material, with large shoulder buffets that transition to tapers on the forearms. It is cut off at the waist with a basque made of fabric with intense orange and blue prints, reminiscent of the Ankara pattern, an African way of dyeing waxed cotton fabric. The same material goes to the front of the jacket, where decorated buttons in the same colors are stitched in two rows. These mottled fabrics are further embellished with trims in the form of a ruffled collar, cuffs and a belt of red lace. To top it off, the ski-like pants are made of black slippery material with green-neon elements. The lower part of the pants, was decorated with fabric spikes. A fun addition are sports shoes with toes that look like a second inhuman skin.
Snaut, the only man in the show, looks like a geek who hasn’t left the house in a long time. He has a long plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a white sweater sleeveless top over that, leggings with a print that mimics the arrangement of muscles in his legs, and on his feet warm highland socks and clogs. His shoulder-length hair and corrective aviator glasses visually transport him to the 1980s.
When creating costumes, Podraza uses cheap clothing stores or theater warehouses, searching for costumes that are no longer used in performances. She loves tacky and unobvious things. She puts together mismatched items, giving the impression of chaos and disorder. It’s like a trash can, a collection of random things, which from a distance creates an aesthetic image, while a closer perspective allows you to find an individual meaning in each detail. Solaris. A Memoir from the Future is a non-optimistic vision of a symbolic tomorrow. The nostalgic ideas about the future, spun in the play, reflect, as in a mirror, today’s reality, with its problems and the past that shapes it.
Theater as a Bastion
The visualization of such a broadly understood post-apocalypse in the theater is a pretext for taking up deeper reflections on the past and the present. On the aesthetic level, it provides extensive opportunities to show the significant transformations of our era: changes taking place in the system of values, the development or crisis of ethics, the progress of science and technology. It is an expression of the fears that plague contemporary Polish society. One of these has materialized beyond our eastern border, through russia’s full-scale aggression against Ukraine. The theme of war is very strongly represented in Polish theater, referring to the past, inherited traumas from ancestors, but several hundred kilometers away this narrative is already taking place in the present tense. For me, as a researcher who deals with the visualization on stage of images of the post-disaster world, it was extremely important to visit Ukraine in December 2023, during a residency organized by the Lviv Scenography Gallery. The strongest image that stayed in my mind after that visit was that of the theater as a bastion. On the one hand, it was very realistic, because it gave real shelter to the audience and to nearby residents; on the other hand, it was metaphorical, because it defended Ukrainian culture, language and identity.
The shelter function of Ukrainian theater, in my opinion, is realized mainly by abandoning russian works and replacing them with domestic works by prominent artists. It is also noticeable in the turn to European drama, which is filtered through the current experience of Ukrainians. During a visit to Ukraine, I saw a production of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, directed by Ivan Uryvskyi, and it was surprising to me that this typically male story, full of amazing adventures and unexpected twists, was dominated by women. Only two men appear in the play: Peer Gynt himself (Ostap Stupka and Oleksandr Formanchuk as understudy) and his son (Oleksandr Rudynskyi, Pavlo Shpehun), the other characters from the Troll King to the Captain and the ship’s crew are played by women. The selection of the cast was not dictated by necessity, but was a conscious decision by the director that shows the reality (although the play was written before the full-scale outbreak of war). Ukrainian art, as well as everyday life, is dominated by women. They, for the most part, did not go to the front. They stayed in the country or left and their most important role is to narrate, to report on what is happening.
As an example, consider the performances Cossachka (Косачка) by Yuliya Lopata and Danse Macabre. Immortal Dance (Danse Macabre. Безсмертний танок) by Bohdan Polishchuk. Both performances using the technique of contemporary dance involve only women. Their heroines are not passive in the face of the threatening danger, but are active facing it. Of course, this is expressed in the choreography, but it is through the costumes that the image of unyielding female warriors is created.
In Cossachka performance, the main symbol of strength is a hairstyle in the form of a braid, it refers to the legend of an ancient group of women, Ukrainian amazons, warriors, who would be the ancestors of the Cossacks. Their distinctive feature was a hairstyle in the form of a braid. It is through the braid (“kosa” in Ukrainian) that the name “Cossack” can be interpreted. In the play, this distinctive hairstyle is a symbol of power, and the act of braiding them together has the dimension of a rite of passage. The costumes created by Asia Sutyahina are white dresses with a fitted top and an airy long bottom that does not restrict the dancers’ movements. The bodice is decorated with red flowers, which refer to traditional folk designs, but clustered together form traces of blood. White, as a universal symbol of innocence and purity in these creations is marked by struggle and sacrifice.
In Polishchuk’s performance, for which he created the costumes himself, the symbol of power is a real scythe. It is a prop used by dancer Oleksandra Mahera. The woman is half-naked, dressed only in flesh-colored leotard shorts, and the rest of her body is decorated with black stripes arranged in organic patterns. The first association that comes to mind is the image of death. Her dance, which is very primal, modeled on the way animals move and ritual rites, multiplies the meanings of the object as well as the performer’s body. There are also numerous references to folklore in the performance. The second performer Varvara Turta plays a traditional hurdy-gurdy and is dressed in a costume referring to folk costume, while symbols of the earth and its fertility, such as red bean seeds, also appear. However, the land in this context is understood not as a private “fatherland” but as a common territory, a state, whose borders and harvest in the form of culture must be fought for. In the image of woman created by Polishchuk, she is the ruler of life and death, but also the guardian of this territory.
Following the example of the prototypical images I have identified from Polish stage productions, one might be tempted to abstract from contemporary Ukrainian theater such an image that would unify visual tendencies during the war apocalypse. For me, that image is a bastion inhabited by women, who are the defenders of Ukrainian tradition and culture and the guardians of the shelter itself. The image of a strong woman is also what can unite Polish and Ukrainian theater. In every play I’ve described here, women have played significant roles. In Warlikowski’s, referring to ancient traditions, they played the role of a victim changing the fate of humanity. In Hartung-Wójciak’s, as in Uryvskyi’s, men are replaced by women, giving them back their causality. Finally, in Lopata’s and Polishchuk’s, they become female warriors inflicting death.
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