Meeting with Weronika Szczawińska
Conducted by Marek Beylin

A meeting of the “Biography, autobiography, society” discussion club, this time with the director Weronika Szczawińska.

The two plays “Re-Wolt” and “Teren Badań: Jeżycjada” by Weronika Szczawińska shed light on the problems of our collective memories and biographies. “Re-Wolt” is a story about the social history of Róża Luksemburg factory in Warsaw, which no longer exists, and about the personal experiences of its female workers. This story has never been told before. The problem is complex: neither in the Polish historiography nor in our consciousness there exist any record of the daily routines of several generations of workers. What is the reason for that? Is it because the stories about today’s societies are build most of all around heroic riots or the material aspirations of the contemporary citizens?

The act of making one’s own life look heroic and the concern for a social superiority are some of the issues in the play “Teren Badań: Jeżycjada”, a witty examination of the series of novels written by Małgorzata Musierowicz, about a family of intellectuals from the 80. Szczawińska shows how an ethos of moral integrity and order together with the conviction of being on the right side ethically and politically speaking are the source of exclusions and arrogance, how they deride the alternative ways of life. But the play “Teren Badań: Jeżycjada” not only describes the past, it also reflects a continuous process that leads up to the present, to our conservative times, our desire of order and our low level of tolerance.

During the next and last meeting of the cycle, on 7th May, we will talk to Barbara Wysocka.