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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2009
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.
1. Socha, Natasza, ‘Lato kultury’ (‘The Summer of Culture’), Wprost, No. 24, 16 06 1996, p. 97Google Scholar.
2. Valentini, Valentina, Theatre Outside the Theatre: Dramaturgical Implications, tapescript to be published in 1997Google Scholar in a book on site-specific theatre edited by Dragan Klaic and Juliusz Tyszka.
3. See Braun, Kazimierz, Nowy teatr na swiecie (‘New Theatre in the World’), Cracow, 1975Google Scholar; Braun, Kazimierz, Druga Reforma Teatru? (‘Second Theatre Reform?’) Wroclaw, 1979Google Scholar.