This production comes to us from a country where women have limited access to reproductive health, and abortion is now illegal. Despite massive protests, women there were simply denied their rights. The project started with the idea that women could come together without shame or fear to publicly manifest that they had an abortion, and that this collective act would change the law. It could be an activist success story. But She was a friend of someone else is a story with too many beginnings, too few endings – and an exhausted narrator. With a powerful dramaturgy and a minimalist direction, Polish theatre-maker Gosia Wdowik explores the link between burnout and activism: the fear that rights are not guaranteed forever, and that the moment one stops paying attention, they can disappear. Through a personal narrative, she describes the commitment to women's rights in Poland. Her subtle storytelling draws us into the life of a woman who decides one day, instead of protesting, to stay in bed, eventually rising again.

English, Polish → FR, NL, EN
±1h

Gosia Wdowik (1988) is a theatre maker and active member of GILDIA (Union of Polish Theater Makers). Her heart is based in Poland but her imagination is always somewhere else. During her Master Studies at Das Theater (2020-2022), she worked with the topic of burnout and explored the space between exhaustion and agency by implementing methods from activism into her artistic practice. Her main question was: How to create both theatre and change from a place of exhaustion? In her recent performance Shame she explored social shame connected with working-class origins in her own family over three generations of women. Past works include If you lived here with Tamara Antonijevic, Transit Monumental together with K.A.U. kollective, Fiasko and Return of Goddess. With Girls and Football players she tackles the topic of bodily emancipation.