Performans w lodach

This article discusses Tomasz Kubikowski’s book Zjadanie psów [Dog-Eating] (Warszawa 2019), which combines the story of nineteenth-century polar expeditions – by John Ross, William Edward Parry, John Franklin, Elisha Kane and Fridtjof Nansen – with the concept of performance as “restored behaviour,”...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Published in:Pamiętnik Teatralny
Main Author: Małgorzata Szpakowska
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Polish
Published: Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences 2020
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.36744/pt.620
https://doaj.org/article/3c10ca5203574d26a9bb31f3a326b24b
Description
Summary:This article discusses Tomasz Kubikowski’s book Zjadanie psów [Dog-Eating] (Warszawa 2019), which combines the story of nineteenth-century polar expeditions – by John Ross, William Edward Parry, John Franklin, Elisha Kane and Fridtjof Nansen – with the concept of performance as “restored behaviour,” taken expertly from Richard Schechner. Excellently written, almost like a travel-adventure novel, the book presents Arctic exploration as a sequence of performances that owed their social significance to stories; without a story, getting to the pole was hardly worth the trouble, and all the above-mentioned explorers left such accounts. Kubikowski treats them as anthropological narratives, “stories of someone else’s experience”; he also reads in them what their authors were not aware of: for example, that the natives and their culture were completely invisible to the adventurers. The theoretical background of the book is rather complex, as the author has engaged with performance studies for almost twenty years, yet the book is (deliberately) written in such a way as to be enjoyed also by those who do not care for theory.