Premiere: April 10, 2025
Upcoming performances: January 30, 31 and February 1, 2026
January 31 and February 1, 2026 — English subtitles
Running time: 2 h 15 min (no intermission)
Performance for audiences 16+
Director: Katarzyna Kalwat
Creators and team:
Co-production: Nowy Teatr, New Epiphanies Festival / Centre for Thought of John Paul II
Sarah Kofman – a French philosopher, essayist, Sorbonne professor associated with deconstructionism – was a close collaborator of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. Despite an impressive scholarly output spanning philosophy, art, psychoanalysis, literature and feminism, she never received her rightful place among the leading figures of world philosophy.
Analyzing the works of established philosophers and searching in them for what had been repressed, Kofman jokingly said that her biography was, in fact, a bibliography. An important element of her work was the pioneering act of introducing a female perspective into large, male-centered philosophical systems.
Kofman wrote many books and articles, but only toward the end of her life did she dare to speak about herself: about a childhood stretched between two streets and two mothers — a biological mother of Jewish origin and an adoptive French mother with whom she hid during the war. This “circulation” between rue Ordener and rue Labat became the source of her internal identity conflict.
The phenomenon of self-creation, considered both as an artistic theme and as a mechanism of social change, is key to understanding the conditions of post-medial society. In her last essay “Lesson of Anatomy” Kofman suggests that learned patterns of seeing in art divert us from what is authentically painful and prompt us to focus on what is conventional and easier to bear. Looking at Kofman’s personal history, we should ask ourselves: what are we actually looking at and whom do we really see?
The play participates in the 32nd Nationwide Competition for the Staging of Polish Contemporary Drama.
photo: Bartek Warzecha / bartekwarzecha.com
Visual identity: Kuki Iwański
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