Anna Karasińska’s ‘Fantazja’ will be shown from May 30 until June 1, 2019 at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels. On May 30, 2019, the play will be followed by a talk between Anna Karasińska & Marta Keil ‘Warsaw – resisting & rewriting polish theatre today’ moderated by Jonas Vanderschueren (in collaboration with Etcetera).


About “Fantazja”
A woman whose feelings no one understands, a person who has wrapped your packet of raisins in a far-off country whose name you don’t know, a traveller who waits for the bus in front of you, a man who goes for a dive in a river… These are all characters in Fantazja, and yet we don’t get to see them onstage. They only exist in our imagination. In this performance, Polish theatre author Anna Karasińska explores theatre as a place where fiction becomes reality. What contract do the audience and the artists conclude to bring a world into existence onstage that temporarily suspends our disbelief? Does our imagination have limits? Are there phenomena or things that we cannot imagine onstage? Using a live voice-over, Karasińska directs the actors in a rapid mix of minimalistic and humoristic scenes, in which improvisation plays the leading role.


About Anna Karasińska 
Anna Karasińska (°1978) is a theater director, filmmaker and playwright who is seen as one of the leading examples of the latest generation of theatre makers in Poland. As such, she has been alternatively described as a major proponent of ‘post-theatre’ or ‘auto-theatre’. Through the means of theatre, she questions the ways of communication between actors and the audience, problematizing the implicit hierarchy between performer and spectator in many conventional theatre performances. In this way she unmasks the mechanisms of art (re)production and how these are embedded in an institutional context. 

Her work is important in today’s art scene in Poland, but also within the framework of Polish repertoire theatre. The latter is still strongly influenced by the legacy of nineteenth-century Polish Romanticism, a tradition which is crucial to understand how and why theatre in Poland is made in the way it is made. As a traditional carrier of Polish national identity, theatre institutions and practices hold a prominence within Polish society which is almost unparalleled in comparable Western European societies.


About Marta Keil
Marta Keil is a performing arts curator, researcher and dramaturg. She co-runs the Performing Arts Institute based in Warsaw and curated together with Grzegorz Reske Konfrontacje in Teatralne (2012-2017) and in Teatr Polski in Bydgoszcz (2014-2016). She created and curates the EEPAP and teaches at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw. She is also the editor of the books Choreography: Politicality (2018), Reclaiming the Obvious:on the Institution of Festival (2017), Dance, Process, Artistic Research. Contemporary Dance in the Political, Economic and Social Context of “Former East” of Europe (2015).


About Jonas Vanderschueren
Jonas Vanderschueren (°1993) is a Belgian writer and researcher currently based in Warsaw. He writes regularly on Polish culture, theatre and politics, and has been published with Etcetera, MO*, Knackand Apache. For two years he was editor-in-chief of the Dutch-language literary magazine Kluger Hans, and he worked as an intern at Nowy Teatr and Troubleyn/Jan Fabre.


PRACTICAL INFORMATION

Fantazja
>>> Where: Zinnema, Rue Veeweyde 24-26, 1070 Brussels – map
>>> When: 30/05 at 19:00 | 31/05 at 20:30 | 01/06 at 20:30
>>> Tickets: € 16 / € 13
>>> Duration: 1 hour
>>> Language: Polish, French, Dutch
>>> More information here

Talk: ‘Warsaw – resisting & rewriting polish theatre today’
>>> Where: Zinnema, Rue Veeweyde 24-26, 1070 Brussels – map
>>> When: 30/05 at 20:00
>>> With: Anna Karasińska & Marta Keil
>>> Language: English
>>> Moderator: Jonas Vanderschueren
>>> FREE ENTRANCE
>>> In collaboration with Etcetera
>>> More information here