ZAMEK Culture Centre

The performances are also accompanied by educational activities and workshops. COMMON THEATRE aspires for an equally powerful effect on the active participants and the audience alike. The effort of overcoming barriers and stereotypes should be made by both.

Performance is a part of the COMMON THEATRE - authorial performative project realize by Zamek Culture Centre in Poznan, which brings us performances created by people from milieus facing social or disability-related exclusion. The eponymous “commonness” denotes first and foremost the universal need to find oneself in a creative process. It is also a token of our intentions and efforts to make theatre created by the disabled or persons facing social exclusion a fully-fledged artistic phenomenon.

Working on the premieres of TEATR POD FONTANNĄ, the director invites the collaboration of musicians and stage designers whose contribution guarantees that the desired effect is achieved.

Responsible for artistic supervision is Janusz Stolarski, a direc­tor and actor with extensive experience acquired in both traditional and fringe theatres. Stolarski is a master of monodrama, creator of one-person performances which won awards and honorary men­tions at a number of competitions and international festivals.

TEATR POD FONTANNĄ is an informal group created in 2016 as part of the Common Theatre programme. It is composed of people attending theatre studios at two centres run by the Association of Persons and Families for Mental Health Zrozumieć i Pomóc, which works towards social and vocational rehabilitation of persons who have been affected by a mental crisis. TEATR POD FONTANNĄ can boast four performances developed year after year in the course of the project, all of which have been splendidly received by the critics and the audience.

premiere: October 10th, 2018

In their third performance, Janusz Stolarski and the actors and actresses of TEATR POD FON­TANNĄ took advantage of the greatly humorous poems and rhymes by English-speaking authors, which Stanisław Barańczak selected and masterly translated in the anthology entitled Fioletowa kro­wa. 333 najsławniejsze okazy angielskiej i amerykań­skiej poezji niepoważnej. Antologia. What captivated their attention was their nonsensical humour, which had little to do with Shakespearian mala­propism and served nothing but pure laughter. Nonsensical poets are not concerned with the so-called current ills: a tyrant can be disposed of, a missing litter bin can be put in place. A non­sensist is a funnier metaphysical poet – they are interested in those existential issues which cannot be solved anyway, while humanity has been striving to do so like a man obsessed since times immemorial. The goal of the performance had been determined by Stanisław Barańczak himself, who stated in the preface to the anthology that “the humorous effect of the poems collected here consists in satisfying a need which is still more fundamental, even more powerfully felt and even more shamefully concealed in official situations: our need to take revenge on the existence itself.”