Society Acts / The Moderna Exhibition 2014 now in Malmö is a show worth visiting but director John Peter Nilsson's preface puzzles me: Perhaps "Poland and the three Baltic countries along the shore opposite Hanö were just a blank slate" for him "growing up in Scania in the 1960s and 70s". But with world-famous Tadeusz Kantor represented in the exhibition, he and his curators ought to have stumbled over the fact that the work of Kantor and Jerzy Grotowski (picture below) and other influential Polish performing arts groups were well known in Swedish art & theatre circles from appearances in Stockholm and all over Europe long before 1989.
And this was no one-way communication. Swedish artists and performing arts groups were seen at reasonably "independent" Polish festivals - except for the period of marshall law - and as it came to be, more often before than after 1989. Teatr Osmego Dnia, Kantor's Teatr Cricot 2, Teatr Gardzienice as well as Wajda's productions from Cracow's Stary Teatr performed to great acclaim in Sweden in the early eighties. My own group, Teater 9 of Stockholm, one of the hosts of several of these performances, already in 1977 started a collaboration with Teatr 77 of Lodz, titled Skryzowanie / Crossroads. This joint stage work, in part dangerously interactive, escaped Polish censorship because of the foreign participation and after its Stockholm premiere toured Poland as well as being presented in several Western European cities.
One could go so far as to say that this Polish interchange with the West almost came to a end when free travel and commerce over the Baltic sea became possible. A paradox? Perhaps they did not need us anymore? Perhaps the new society was no inspiration for these creators? Or were these groups and artists as well as their more or less metaphorical language of opression not needed anymore in the new political situation? Food for thought regardless if you passed this period in Stockholm, Warsaw or Northern Scania.
Ryszard Cieslak in Grotowski's (very free) adaptation of Calderon's Constant Prince, late 60s
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