The Polish Theatre Perspectives Project

Polish Theatre Perspectives (PTP), is a peer-reviewed journal and research initiative that brings together Polish and internationally based practitioners and scholars in exploring a wide spectrum of topics across theatre, drama, and performance. Working in English and in Polish, and through multiple platforms (print, audiovisual, live, and electronic), PTP provides a dynamic forum for critical and creative exchange in the field — with particular, but not exclusive, focus on developments within the Polish-language context. The project has two major aims: to facilitate international access to Poland’s rich and diverse theatre and performance cultures, past and present, and to bring them into dialogue with other traditions and paradigms of artistic and theoretical practice. Taking a broad perspective, PTP seeks both to open up new spaces for conversations about Polish discourses and theatrical practices in their local, regional, and global contexts, and to create new opportunities for comparative, collaborative, and interdisciplinary research and knowledge creation across cultural and linguistic borders.

 

The project includes four main research initiatives: two peer-reviewed publishing projects and two forums for more ’immediate’ and informal exchange and discussion:

● The refereed Polish Theatre Perspectives journal, published twice yearly in English, with accompanying audio-visual materials (DVD or DVD-ROM). See below for more information.

● The PTP Collections series, published alongside the Journal and comprised of edited collections of primary materials in translation. Contents include written reflections and interviews, artistic statements, working notes, and journal entries by directors, dramatists, performers, technicians, and others involved in performance practice. The PTP Collections are published in connection with major research and performance events and programmes, allowing readers to delve into the histories and backgrounds of developments in Polish theatre that are the focus of current activities and debates within the field. Click here for more information about the first edition in the PTP Collections series: Voices from Within: Grotowski’s Polish Collaborators, published following the Unesco ‘Year of Grotowski’ 2009.

● The PTP Research Network: including a bilingual, online research forum in Polish and English, aimed at facilitating direct contact and exchange between Polish and international researchers, practitioners, and students (forthcoming winter 2011-2012). Click here for further details.

● Working Groups dedicated to cross-cultural investigation of current issues in the study of theatre, drama, and performance. The first working groups will focus on Gender Studies approaches to performance, and on Practice-as-research, and will be launched in early 2012. More details and calls for contributions will be posted on this site shortly.

 

 

PTP Journal

Aims & Scope

The primary focus of the PTP journal is on the theory and practice of contemporary theatre, performance, and dramatic literature. It also seeks to apply new critical perspectives in addressing the broader contexts and historical developments relating to Polish theatre, especially where coverage of these areas has previously been limited in English.

The Journal seeks to contribute to the expansion and dissemination of applied and theoretical research by promoting an exchange of materials and perspectives across the Polish and various international research contexts. The journal thus covers not only Polish theatre — from grassroots developments to internationally recognised figures and ensembles — but aims to provide a common forum for discussion and debate between Polish and international scholars and practitioners about current issues and debates in research and practice. These include, among others: the relationship between tradition and innovation, local and global movements in art and culture, the anthropology of theatre and performance, training in educational and professional contexts, interculturalism, interdisciplinarity, the application of critical theories to performance, and practice as research.

The publication includes a range of Polish and international contributions, and regularly invites contributions from specialist guest editors. Its target audience is extensive, consisting of performance practitioners, critics and academics, and students, and, more broadly, those with an interest in Polish and East European theatre and culture. Although the journal is published in English, new articles will also be considered for publication by our editorial colleagues at Polish-language theatre journals, thus enabling exchanges to be conducted across both languages.

 

Journal Contents

In order to respond to the demands of this innovative and dynamic field, PTP publishes contributions in a range of formats, including research articles, interviews, reviews, artists’ pages, comment pieces, reflections on performance and training, debates, and manifestos. Texts are accompanied by extensive annotations, illustrations, and additional biographical and bibliographical information where appropriate, in order to ensure the accessibility of all materials to non-Polish readers. Audio-visual material, including footage of performances and training will also be included regularly, in the form of accompanying DVDs or CDs.

 

The Journal includes both archival texts that have not been published in English and new contributions. The latter are solicited through internationally circulated calls for papers, in English and Polish. The Journal aims to publish new translations of texts and performance documents that will facilitate wider access to material that has previously only been available in Polish. In the first issues, this will provide non-Polish speaking readers with unprecedented access to primary materials and critical perspectives on the work of internationally renowned practitioners such as Krzysztof Warlikowski (PTP 1.1), Polish collaborators of Jerzy Grotowski (PTP Collection), Tadeusz Kantor (PTP 1.2), and Krystian Lupa (PTP 2.1), as well as Polish traditions of ensemble theatre and musical performance (PTP 2.2). These issues will also present Polish scholarship on world theatres, including essays on Japanese noh and laboratory research in Russia, and on contemporary debates in performance theory.

 

PTP contains a main, themed section, which is normally arranged by one or more Guest Editors. Each issue also includes the sections Articles and Encounters, and the back pages sections Forum, Documents, and Materials:

● Articles provides a forum for extended meditations on a broad range of topics relating the journal’s Aims and Scope. Regular calls for papers will be posted on this website; please see our ‘Calls for Papers’ page for details.

● Encounters creates a space for documentation and critical reflection on the interpersonal encounter, and responds to the emphasis that prominent Polish practitioners and ensembles have placed on immediacy and orality. From edited transcripts of interviews or creative exchanges to accounts of encounters through practice, this section attempts to negotiate the multiple resonances between the event and its articulation as testimony.

Critical introductions and annotations from specialist commentators will be included where appropriate, and the journal will endeavour to accommodate contributions that employ various documentation techniques, including innovative use of notation, typography, embodied writing, illustration, and audio materials.

● Forum provides a site for critical exchange and dialogue between Polish and international perspectives on pressing issues in research and performance practice, and their wider political, regional and historical contexts. The editors encourage topical interventions in various formats: from e-mail and web-based debates to roundtable discussions, comment pieces, manifestos, outlines of research activities, and provocations.

● Documents publishes archival materials previously unavailable in English which provide insights into the work of key practitioners and movements that have shaped contemporary practice and research in Poland.

● Materials addresses research and documentation related to Polish theatre and performance, and also presents Polish perspectives on key publications in Anglophone theatre and performance studies. This section adopts a multi-faceted approach to the analysis of recently published materials that are accessible to an English-language readership, including:

       - Reviews from both Polish and international perspectives;

       - Critical interventions and commentary;

       - Reflections by artists, researchers, and documentarists involved in the production of materials.