Last year, Dog / Pies, Barbara Bendyk’s directorial debut, made a striking impression at the Boska Komedia / Divine Comedy Festival. While still a student at the Directing Department of the AST National Academy of Theatre Arts in Kraków, the artist presents her next project, Wyrwa / The Rift, co-financed by the AST and produced at the Łaźnia Nowa Theatre, which has always been wide open to young creators.
The sudden introduction of lockdown forces Girl to remain in a city she once called home. With hotels closed and trains off the tracks, city authorities seal the city off from the rest of the country. Girl finds a way to the apartment of Boy, who had long been preparing for this day. What starts as an unplanned visit turns into a year of cohabitation. Isolation, boredom, and the absurdity of the circumstances push them into fantasies of what it would be like not to be here and now, not to be themselves but – why not – a bird, a tree, or an unnamed organism living in a crack between concrete slabs. “The pandemic becomes a subject as soon as one character begins to consider it a cure against certain things. Other than that, trying to cope with the pandemic and lockdown, the characters escape into fantasy. Dramatist Maciej Bogdański and I believe that abstract thinking is a reaction to the fear of the unknown”, Bendyk explains. And Boska Komedia / Divine Comedy Festival reveals to us an artist with extraordinary empathy and sensitivity.
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Photos by Klaudyna Schubert
