This constellation brings together two essays that address the questions ‘Where is Poland?’ and ‘What is Poland?’ Krzysztof Zajas argues that there is no such thing as one Polish culture, while showing how constructions of the ‘centre’, be it in the form of ‘Polishness’ or ‘cultural achievements’, not only homogenize but mask the work of Polonization and colonization in its attempts to subordinate Lithuanian, Ukrainian and Belarusian lands. Dorota Sajewska shows how after 1989 two narratives re-emerge simultaneously, the harmed Slavic subaltern and an interest in multicultural heritage paired with colonial influence in the borderlands. While she uses Stanislaw Wyspianski to constellate the local and transnational in order to position Poland within a global cultural archive, Sajewska’s primary focus is on racialized forms of violence and the sideways or peripheral glance at European history that allows new understandings of epistemological traditions in historiography and the decolonisation of knowledge production.

The phenomena Kris Salata and Tadeusz Kornaś refer to as ‘ritual theatre’ within the Polish tradition are closely related by influence and inspiration. In the first section of the ritual constellation, Salta investigates Juliusz Osterwa’s and Tadeusz Limanowski’s interwar company and institute Reduta, and subsequently, the postwar Laboratory Theatre of Jerzy Grotowski and Ludwik Flaszen. Kornaś addresses those theatres that emerged in response: Gardzienice, Węgajty, Studium Teatralne, Chorea, Pieśń Kozła (The Song of the Goat) and Zar. While each of these institutions developed its own practice and philosophy, they share in common a search for theatre as a transformative cultural action, performed by the actor-as-whole-person, acting on their own behalf in renewed encounter with the spectator. All operated on the periphery of mainstream theatre: as its grassroots alternative, but also literally – away from traditional performing venues and circles of established theatregoers, and often away from urban centres, thriving in close proximity to nature and to the remnants of folk rites and oral cultures.

Krystyna Duniec and Agata Adamiecka-Sitek question the seemingly incontestable values and lineages of standard historiographies that are foundationally patriarchal and evidence how theatre profited from the trade in women’s bodies, and Duniec notes that through theatre we can chart the move from marginalization to empowered presence for LGBTQ groups. Duniec focuses on the interwar period, which she interprets as a time of tremendous innovation in theatre practices that remain/repeat today. She notes that through theatre we can chart the move from marginalization to empowered presence for LGBTQ groups. The Polish People’s Republic, as Adamiecka-Sitek shows, proclaimed gender equality but in reality reproduced bourgeois gender relations that excluded women from empowered positions in theatre institutions. She then charts how women’s narratives emerged outside of a ‘homosocial’ order built on fraternal ties that she traces from the establishment of public theatre.