Everyday Tending Forgetting and Remembering Women’s Work in Twentieth-Century Polish Theatre
Everyday Tending Forgetting and Remembering Women’s Work in Twentieth-Century Polish Theatre

Summary/Abstract: The dominant narrative about Polish theatre privileges male playwrights and directors, confining women’s presence to the realm of acting. Throughout the twentieth century, women actively participated in the theatre sector, assuming the different roles necessary for play production, and yet they remained excluded from the official narrative. In this article, we ask about the social and cultural mechanisms behind the forgetting of women’s contributions to theatre practice in the Polish context. One such mechanism is the hierarchy of commentaries on theatre widely accepted by theatre historians, who opt for manifestos, declarations, and theoretical lectures while discarding more “intimate” forms, such as interviews, letters, and diaries, which are preferred by women artists. Hence, women’s thinking on theatre remains out of scope, on the margins, and “unmarked” (Phelan 1993). We invoke Paul Connerton’s (2008) concept of forgetting, especially what he terms “repressive erasure,” focusing on its most encrypted forms that allow the master historical narrative to maintain its privileged position without apparent violence. We are interested in how power relations replicate themselves through memory politics, dooming women’s theatre practice to sink into oblivion. We investigate this process by analysing selected cases of the remembering of women’s work in the domains of directing, theory, and drama.

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