THEATRE WITHOUT AUDIENCE
Experimental, 74min, Germany, 2015
Director: Paweł Kocambasi
Production: Knudsen & Streuber
Service: online, color grading, mastering
theatre-without-audience.net
As a teenager on the death lists of Hitler and Stalin, in 1966 ATW, not
yet forty, was catapulted through political events from Sovietized
Poland to the United States.
From his point of his interest in theatre, he was always fortunate to be
in the right place at the right time: With Kantor and Grotowski in
Poland, Bertolt Brecht and „Gruppe 47“ in Berlin, and Robert Wilson in
New York.
ATW taught drama and comparative literature at Harvard, Yale School of
Drama, Oxford, Stanford and the CUNY. In his New York lectures in the
Seventies he introduced Gertrude Stein, Brecht and Witkiewicz as
predecessors of the post-dramatic.
In 1982 he returned to Europe, though persona non grata and still
blacklisted in his native country, and established the legendary
Institute of „Applied Theatre Studies“ (Angewandte
TheaterWissenschaften) at the University of Giessen/Germany, seminary
for artists like René Pollesch, Hans Werner Kroesinger, Moritz Rinke,
Rimini Protokoll, Gob Squad and She She Pop .
Since then he has no inhibitions to call himself ATW, an anagram of Andrzej Tadeusz Wirth and of a discipline he invented.