The Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute invites everyone to visit the new website showcasing the output of the Reclaimed Avant-garde project, available at the address: oa.encyklopediateatru.pl/en/. The website includes an archive of knowledge about theatre avant-garde in Central and Eastern Europe, including video recordings, articles, artist bios, a glossary of key terms, and a map of the most important sites related to the topic.
The Theatre Institute has run the Reclaimed Avant-garde project for 10 years. The first, still informal, meetings of a group of theatre avant-garde researchers from Central and Eastern Europe took place in Warsaw in 2015. Subsequently, we sought permanent funding to support research and events inspired by the ideas of the interwar avant-gardists from this region of Europe. In 2017, which was declared the Year of the Avant-garde in Poland, we managed to publish our first printed book, namely an anthology of source texts from 11 countries (Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Ukraine), translated from the original languages and edited by Ewa Guderian-Czaplińska and Małgorzata Leyko. The first of a series of conferences about avant-garde spaces was held the same year at the Theatre Institute. The project team organised other conferences, theatre performances, exhibitions, and meetings in the following years and produced more publications.
Owing to the many-year financing received from the National Programme of the Development of the Humanities (run by Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education), we succeeded in publishing 6 books, including the one-of-a-kind lexicon of inter-war theatre avant-garde in Central and Eastern Europe edited by Dariusz Kosiński, published in English in collaboration with Performance Research Books with the participation of 22 researchers of theatre avant-garde. The entire project timeline is available online at oa.encyklopediateatru.pl/en/. The website features many hours of video coverage from conferences and debates, information about all the project publications, introductions and selected chapters from the books translated into English and/or Polish, depending on the language of the original publication.
The website oa.encyklopediateatru.pl/en/ was created to spark contemporary theatre makers’ interest in the Central and Eastern European theatre avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s and to facilitate access to specialist information for theatre scholars researching the topic. Our objective is to make the collected materials available in Polish and English to the greatest extent possible.
The phenomena (persons – theatres – ideas) section, developed by the expert team for the publication, offers links to more information. The website features a map of the events and phenomena of the historical avant-garde and a map of key project sites. The maps provide a visual presentation of the different trajectories and mobility of people and ideas. A library of articles, citations from books, and video content allows readers to explore selected threads in the history of theatre avant-garde.
The website was designed by Janusz Legoń. The bios and contact details of the researchers collaborating on the project can be found under the Team tab. Krystyna Mogilnicka and Karolina Wyrzykowska edited the website, while Krystian Kamiński and Magdalena Szwedowska translated the phenomena section. Although we have completed one stage of the Reclaimed Avant-garde project, we sincerely hope it will be continued. We hope you will enjoy the website we created.
