The workshop will address the exhibition by Adriana Molenda and Anton Varga Here and Then at Dusk. It will be led by Barbara Prądzyńska, a theatre educator and director of social theatre and theatre with communities. The moderator will use a variety of theatre and theatre-related techniques.
Together with the workshop participants we will reflect on the change in the use of a given urban space and its use through history, often dramatically divergent at different periods and thus provoking different human behaviour.
After exercises to build mutual trust and stimulate individual and group expression involving drama and physical theatre, we will discuss examples given by the participants of the changes they have observed in the urban space around them. We will also discuss what such change might have resulted from, how we perceive it and what it entails.
We will then use the technique of drama and theatre improvisation. Participants will be divided into groups. Each group will be given a different photo and/or description of an important historical event/fact related to Poznań, including the history of the Jews in the city. Each group will be asked to prepare a "live photograph" of the event in question, which will trigger an improvised scene. Then a contemporary photograph will be arranged in exactly the same place, which will also come to life. Participants will have the opportunity to sense and see the difference in the situation, behaviour, emotions, etc. of the people in the old and contemporary photographs, resulting from the different use of the space in question.
The shared situation for all the groups will be the creation of “live photographs” to the film screened at the show Here and Then at Dusk, a “portrait of a place which is used as a recreation space and a place of contact with nature, often visited by residents of Poznań and tourists” and the fact of the “lake being built primarily by prisoners, first of all Jews, incarcerated in German Nazi forced labour camps across Poznań”.
The final outcome of the workshop will be a discussion with participants, summarising the experience gained during the event. We will reflect on how a given space and its characteristics affect the people who use it, and how people define the space through their behaviour.
moderator: Barbara Prądzyńska
registration / information: joanna.tekla@arsenal.art.pl, phone 692 202 068