Festival audiences will have an exceptional opportunity to see the new work of Anna Karasińska, winner of the Grand Prix of the Boska Komedia / Divine Comedy Festival in 2022 for Łatwe rzeczy / Easy Things. Produced by Munich’s Residenztheater, Was ich vergessen habe / What I’ve Forgotten explores memory and the mechanisms of forgetting: processes that may be symptomatic of illness but also function as a defence against the need to confront history. Karasińska is fascinated by memory “as a magical connection between all that we consider human. Its loss denotes not only the loss of relationships but also the loss of identity and of connection with the entire universe of meanings. This is what I also endeavour to do in my theatre work: to give the audience an opportunity to question the established narratives about what reality is.” In What I Have Forgotten, the director returns to some of the motifs present in her earlier Dobrze ci tego nie opowiem / I Will Try To Tell You, But It Won't Go Well, which concerned the memory of war trauma and its impact on human relationships. Once again, she asks how we can live with memory, and what forgetting means, e.g. in the relationship between perpetrators and victims.

Karasińska’s German production bears the hallmarks of her theatrical language: the use of performative methods aimed at generating an intense experience of the “here and now” shared with the performers, poetic text, and intriguing staging strategies drawing from the sets, costumes, and sonosphere. The result is a poignant portrait of a society in which the fading of memory leads to the erosion of relationships and moral responsibility. What I Have Forgotten demonstrates both the strength of artistic strategies Karasińska developed and the need to keep on retelling the stories about what brings us together and what stands between us. Precisely lest we forget.

Produced with the financial support of the Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation.

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Photo by Sandra Then