Girls
direction Gosia Wdowik
This performance has already happened once. According to the principle of experimentation.
This performance is happening again. According to the practice of recycling.
This performance will happen again – in the future. According to the principle of the longest suspense.
We first met with Stefa, Mimi, Jagoda, Victoria and Pola in 2016. We were preparing a performance together called “Girls” at the Studio Theater, in which we wanted to talk about the experience of being a girl and how her body – and symbolic figure – function in culture. The play was performed for two years, so over the course of the play the heroines began to change. They grew out of their costumes and grew out of their scenes.
Their adolescence also changed the show.
We were interested in how the passage of time can be captured and transformed into a performative form. How to tell a story in which both the climax and the punchline remain as yet unknown? What is experiencing the passage of time? Are time and story always the same thing?
Faced with all these questions, the idea of a series of performances telling the lives of five female protagonists was born. First: Girls. Then: women. Then – maybe Grandmothers.
Beyond all of this, we wanted to stay together in this process of growing up, maturing and aging in a changing political landscape.
Team
Direction: Gosia Wdowik
Script (based on materials from the girls’ rehearsals and improvisations): Weronika Murek
Stage design and costumes: Dominika Olszowy
Editing of archival materials: Agata Baumgart
Video production: Bartek Zawiła
Video consultations: Wojciech Sobolewski
Lights production: Klaudia Kasperska
Music, sound production: Sebastian Dembski
Cast: Jagoda Szymkiewicz, Milena Klimczak, Pola Pańczyk, Wiktoria Kobiałka, Stefania Sural
Premiere
13 October 2023
Awards
GRAND PRIX 28. Festival Korczak Today
“For daring to meet each other from the past, elevating personal stories to universal ones, and for directing a safe and artistic framework for the audience to meet the actresses.”
Bio
Gosia Wdowik ― theater director, chairwoman of the Guild of Polish Theater Directors. Her first success was the main award at the Festival of Young Directing in Cracow for the play “Footballers”, which she produced at TR Warsaw (2016). She collaborates with theaters in Poland and Europe. In 2023, she directed “Girls” at Komuna Warszawa Theater, with the same heroines with whom she produced “Girls” six years earlier at Studio Theater in Warsaw. Two years ago, she completed her studies at DAS Theater in Amsterdam, where she dealt with issues of burnout and explored the space between fatigue and agency by implementing activist methods into her artistic practice. She primarily considered the question of how to create theater and make change in a situation of exhaustion.
Reviews and publications
Anna Sańczuk, „Dziewczyny” Małgorzaty Wdowik: Opowieść o byciu nastolatką”, “Vogue”:
“Małgorzata Wdowik wondered to what extent theater, as a medium focused on the “here and now,” is able to make the passage of time a theme, and imagined a project that would last the entire lives of the characters. Like in the films of Czech documentary filmmaker Helena Třeštíková or British director Paul Almond, who observe the characters with a camera for decades.”
https://www.vogue.pl/a/dziewczyny-nowy-spektakl-malgorzaty-wdowik
Katarzyna Janowska, „Newsweek”:
They are maturing, they don’t like their camera-recorded childhood portraits, but their dreams of that time are still there. The authors and heroines of the play want to meet again in a few years. Theatrical girlhood can become a portrait, written out over the years, of a generation of girls born in the first decade of the 21st century.
Katarzyna Niedurny, “Dojrzewanie, przemijanie”, „Didaskalia. Gazeta Teatralna” 2023 nr 178:
The girls observe the girls they once were, and some of them struggle to accept them. After all, those faces, emotions, dreams and voices are gone forever. This automatically raises the questions that one of the actresses asked during the performance: what will be our relationship to each other in another ten years?https://didaskalia.pl/pl/artykul/dojrzewanie-przemijanie.
Katarzyna Lemańska, “Zawsze ktoś patrzy”, “Notatnik Teatralny”, 12.12.2023:
How does the “experiment,” as the creators themselves call their show, differ from Richard Linklater’s feature film “Boyhood,” which took twelve years to shoot, or the project of photographer Noah Kalina, who prepared an eight-minute film of 7263 selfies depicting his metamorphosis over 20 years? The series, planned for several installments (“Girls,” “Girls,” “Women,” and perhaps even – probably already without Wdowik and Murek’s participation – “Grandmothers”), speaks not only about growing up and successively entering adulthood, maturity and old age, but gives women at different stages of their lives a voice.
https://notatnikteatralny.pl/recenzje/zawsze-ktos-patrzy/
Co-financing
The event is co-financed by the Warsaw City Hall as part of the Komuna Warszawa – Social Institution of Culture project.
