CAMPO interviews Gosia Wdowik

“What’s the part of exhaustion in making change?”

A talk with Gosia Wdowik On December 14th & 15th we will close our fall season with a CAMPO production that premiered in May 2023 at Kunstenfestivaldesarts: She was a friend of someone else, the result of a collaboration with NOWY TEATR in Warsaw. In this performance Gosia Wdowik explores with powerful dramaturgy and minimalist direction the link between burnout and activism. She was a friend of someone else is the start of a longer trajectory at CAMPO. We had a talk with Gosia on how she started making theatre, how She was a friend of someone else was created and her thoughts on her home country. © Dawid Misiorny

Could you first explain who you are and when you started making artistic work?

I have always been interested in theatre even though I’m from a very small town in Poland and the closest theatre was super far away. So, if I wanted to watch a performance, I needed to make my own theatre piece.

My education would define my later artistic practice. I studied classical theatre and directing in Poland. There I was taught how to work with text and actors. At the same time, I did a scholarship in Giessen at the Faculty of Choreography and Performance where I learned a lot of choreographic tools. My last school was DAS Theatre in Amsterdam. What I’m mostly doing now is a mixture of choreographic, visual theatre and research-based work. In short, I like to mix different artistic languages and various aesthetics depending on the topic I am working on.

I feel that my artistic practice started two times. The first time was after school, the second one was during my burnout. Unfortunately, creativity is not an unlimited resource. My exhaustion forced me to redefine my values: how can I, as an artist, not only influence what I produce but

also how I want to produce it? I quickly realised that the system in which I was creating and where I could express myself was the same one that led me to burnout. It was a painful lesson.

I asked myself: where do I have agency and what is my position as an artist in a moment of crisis? I wanted to become part of something bigger than my healing process. I realised that even if I manage to cure burnout, after some years I might experience it again.

That is why I became a member of The Union of Polish Theatre Makers. This is an organisation created by freelance artists to negotiate their financial and structural support with government and municipal authorities. This union gave me the possibility to understand structural problems, like a lack of insurance, social care or any other care. These are the struggles of the precarious work that most of us do. Being part of this union, I could observe and analyse the mechanism which led me to my burnout. It was some kind of investigation that influenced also the work that I’m doing now, as it lead to a more political perspective. So I started to explore the space between exhaustion and agency by implementing methods from activism into my artistic practice.

© Thomas Lenden

How and when did you come up with the idea for She was a friend of someone else?

In the beginning, I considered the topic of a collective coming out of women who had abortion as a separate topic from burnout. I thought that it would be interesting to share the experience of a burnout on stage. My main questions were: how to own my exhaustion? How to make theatre from a place of exhaustion? It is a structural problem that teachers, activists, artists, cultural workers and many others are confronted with. Their work needs a specific engagement and because of that engagement they are burning out. Exhaustion is not an individual issue; it is a collective suffering that has social and economic causes. Awareness of shared experience brings us into a relationship with each other. And social structures can only be changed in relation to others. I started to think how to make exhaustion a public feeling. And there is no better place to do that than theatre.

During my first talks with Maria Rossler, the dramaturg of the project, I realised how much exhaustion is connected with women fighting for their reproductive rights. That was the topic I was working on in 2021 with the feminist collective TERAZ POLIZ and dramaturg Martyna Wawrzyniak. We made a project about abortion: I'll Just Say It and See What Happens, very soon after the Black Protests in Poland. We were really struggling with putting this topic on stage when the biggest performance happened on the streets. We thought that it was maybe

too early. Somehow, I felt that the project we did wasn’t really answering the questions, it was more raising them.

What Maria then said was really mind-blowing; a call for action combined with activism and exhaustion. It was already two years after the pro-abortion protest and the right moment to come back to this topic. I started to combine the two fields of research in one project with these central questions: how do we make change in times like we experience now and what’s the part of exhaustion in making that change?

In which way is theatre a more interesting place to tell your story than reality?

I would say theatre is rather a place of potential. I understand theatre as a place to create alternatives, to imagine scenarios, a place to rehearse life. That is why I don’t define my work as political theatre but as the practicing of my political agency in theatre. When I say “political agency” I don’t really think in terms of power, I think only in terms of my own influence on the world.

Theatre is a place of fiction where I can create any story I can imagine. Of course, this fiction can be based on reality as it was in I'll Just Say It and See What Happens and She was a friend of someone else. First, there was the idea to make a collective coming out in reality, but Agnieszka, the activist who wanted to do that, was struggling with a lot of problems. So, then the thought was: let’s use the theatre and see what would happen if we started that action there. What knowledge can we collect? Why is it hard to convince women to come out about their abortion in Poland?

For me that’s the potential: theatre is the place where we check those political actions. In real life the activists are encountered with law, with relationship problems, with stereotypes, with stigma, … In theatre, because it’s fiction, we can pretend, but at the same time we confront fiction with reality and collect the knowledge why something is working and why not. With this knowledge I can go back to an activist group so they can use that information for action in reality. So, theatre for me became a place for rehearsal for change in reality, in a weird way.

Next to you, Oneka von Schrader and Jaśmina Polak are also performing in She was a friend of someone else. How did you get to know them?

Me, Oneka and Jaśmina share an experience of burnout. We are from the same generation which wants to speak out about exhaustion as a structural problem. We don’t want to be ashamed of our need for rest or to treat it as a failure, quoting Trecia Hersey: our rest is resistance.

I worked with both of them before: with Jaśmina on Shame and with Oneka on my student project in DAS Theater. Jasmina was one of the women who decided to come out with her abortion already in I'll Just Say It and See What Happens. When the idea was growing to involve a second performer who speaks the text, she was a natural choice. I really like how she became a representation of this inner voice of an exhausted body. She guides the audience through the story of exhaustion of women fighting for their rights. She is close enough to that experience to sound personal but far enough to make space for the viewer’s own experience.

Oneka has a different task on the stage. She stays with exhaustion by accepting it. It took us a long time to find a quality of movement which isn’t too caring nor judging.

Me, Oneka and Jaśmina are three bodies representing one person: one exhausted body, one moving body and one body that tells the story. Each performer has her own function but together we are telling one story of the exhausted body of a female.

© Malgorzata Wdowik

She was a friend of someone else is part of I'll Just Say It and See What Happens. Can you tell us something more about that project?

Because of my burnout I think about how to redefine the way of producing art. One thing that makes it very exhausting for me is this constant need of producing something new. So, it was interesting to recycle some of the material from I’ll Just Say It and See What Happens in another performance, adding a different perspective on it.

As I told you before, I was invited by TERAZ POLIZ to work together with Martyna Wawrzyniak on a project about abortion. We decided to create the collective coming out and we worked on collecting the group of women, to treat the performance as a platform for women to come out and exchange their experience. It was a long and very emotional process, but also full of beautiful moments, like when a generation of women, remembering times when abortion was legal before 1993, decided to come out for the younger generation, for those who were raised in stigma.

I have been working on this project for some years and during that time so many things have happened, like when the American Supreme Court overruled the decision Roe v. Wade or when Justyna Wydrzyństa was convicted of helping another woman by giving her abortion pills. The sentence from the performance “rights given once are never given for ever” became more and more relevant, especially now when right wing parties become so strong in Europe.

For me, it was very important to include those facts into the material. Hopefully soon I will have to include information on the legalisation of abortion in Poland.

Meanwhile, there have been elections in Poland which turned out rather positive for the progressive bloc. Are you hopeful for the future of your country?

Yes, I am hopeful because so many people voted, among whom so many young people. So I believe change is possible. But it takes time. We all managed to overrule the conservative PIS party and I think that is very important. So, I’m hopeful for a new start, for new times, where change will happen. I decided to be naive for a moment.

But at the same time, I know that I shouldn’t be too hopeful, because the three opposition parties didn’t create the coalition yet and even more important: they don’t fully agree on abortion. Even if legal abortion was promised to women by politicians during the campaign. So it might not be a positive ending like we all like to have.

Nevertheless, I’m hopeful because for the last eight years women have created different tools to support each other, like the Abortion Dream Team which is the main pro-abortion activist group. There is an amazing network of solidarity in Poland; that’s something no one can take away from us. Whatever will happen, we will keep on supporting each other. However, without structural help activists will stay overworked and social stigma will stay strong.

One last question: can you tell us something about your other projects and, possibly, future work?

I did another project which had its premiere this fall: Girls. It is another example of recycling material from one project into another one. The idea for that started in 2016 when I made a performance with five little girls: they were between 8 and 13 years. At that time, I already had an idea to make a long-lasting project with those five girls, to make a new version of the performance every 7-10 years and to follow their lives together with the audience. It’s like the movie Boyhood but in the theatre. It is a performance about the passage of time. I like this idea of commitment that I as a maker and they as a character have, but also the role of the audience as those who keep their memory of those five girls for the next part which will happen in 2033.

Mimi, Jagoda, Stefa, Pola and Wiktoria are from a no future generation and indeed they resist imagining the future, but somehow this project becomes a promise of the future.

So now I know what my plans are for 2033. But besides that, this year was really intense and now I would like to rest.