Performance in Polish Villages

Extract

An unusually rich variety of forms of performance linked to seasonal, religious, and rural celebrations still survive in certain Polish villages, especially in the southern region. These performances are not staged for tourists as “folk theater” but are part of an authentic, on-going peasant tradition. They survive in surprising strength. Their existence does not seem to be well known among Poland's urban populace, perhaps due in part to the centuries-old schism between peasant and non-peasant classes in Polish culture.

Two examples of such performance are the King Herod Play, a short folk piece about the fall of King Herod performed by village school boys from door to door on Christmas Eve, and the mountain “Vagabonds”—groups of miners and farmers who dress up as gypsies, goats, horses, shepherds, Jews, Death, clowns, old men, devils and so forth, and run rhythmically through their village at New Year's, pausing occasionally to engage onlookers in improvised scenes, to play pranks, and to act out pantomime scenarios of probably pre-Christian origin.

The people involved in these events do not label their activity “theatre.” Nor do they use a theatre vocabulary to describe what they do.