THE FREAK SHOW

Is it possible to express sadness in the teeth of the dominant ideologies of bodypositive and inspiration porn? How do you build your pride out of what is socially defined as images of failure? And how do you skilfully ‘disable’ popular cultural clichés, which render social optics sensitive to all manifestations of otherness?

The Freak Show, planned for the last day of October, comprises different forms of performative actions, from a monodram to an opera aria, to a drag show. It is an outlet for the performers’ own original creative expression for the experience of bodily oddity inside which they live.

The artists have been brought together by their shared thinking on disability as an artistic tool and their use of the ‘freak’ figure in their own diverse practices. They draw on the tradition of the freak shows and curio cabinets of the past, to claim back the idea of group performances, created independently of the labels of therapeutic art or special art.

They emphasize: Inducing laughter and fear in the viewer is part of the history of bringing bodies like ours to public display. What we want instead is to make a historic gesture while relying on our performing experience. Exploiting that form, we will speak of the empowered position of people with disabled bodies. With pride, with sorrow, we will refer to the culture we live in, pointing out its shortcomings, and we will claim the tropes related to our bodies back for ourselves. It has the additional goal of revisiting art history in as far as its participants have been people with disabilities – and they have been its participants chiefly by being omitted, by not being mentioned.

The October performance at the MSN is one in a series of features of an in-depth educational interdisciplinary project. The first part of The Freak Show at the Świetlica Krytyki Politycznej Jasna 10 will host a screening of a documentary from a visit of the show’s artists to Grand Hotel in Sopot, a site which went down in history as the place where Adolf Hitler signed death sentence on the disabled in the whole of occupied Europe.

The show has been developed as part of the 6th edition of the Programme for the Empowerment of Artistic Scene by Krytyka Polityczna under public funding of the action Jasna 10: Społeczna Instytucja Kultury, financed from the municipal fund of the City of Warsaw.

The project has been co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage under the programme Kultura – Interwencje. Edycja 2024 by Narodowe Centrum Kultury.