Bent – another recording in the Theatre Sławnik

There are performances that you leave the theatre silently. Not due to the fact that there are no words, but due to the fact that everyone would be besides light on what has just been shown. This was the case with “Benta” in Dramatic Theatre. This is another evidence in my Teatral Sławnik – difficult, uncomfortable, but needed precisely due to the fact that it does not let you to easy tame yourself.

Martin Sherman's "Bent" deprives the viewer of the comfort of a safe historical distance. Although he talks about Nazi Germany and concentration camps, he is not a lesson in history. It's a communicative about mechanisms that can come back in different ages and under different slogans: order, security, normality. How rapidly do we learn to accept exclusion as necessary? And how easy do we halt asking questions erstwhile it concerns “others”? The spectacle painfully shows that past begins to repeat not erstwhile we forget the facts, but erstwhile we halt reacting.

The communicative of Max and Rudy begins with hedonism and life outside the norm, but very rapidly this margin turns out to be an area of deadly danger. Exclusion does not abruptly appear here — it builds up, ensnars, enters everyday life, until it becomes ordinary. The show shows how the strategy forces the individual to make border elections: last or stay himself? And can both be saved in a planet based on violence? The most frightening thing is that the border between freedom and danger is almost unnoticed.

The pink triangle is the most visible sign, but not the only one. There are many dimensions: sexual, social, bodily, symbolic. There is simply a division between “better” and “worse” prisoners, on those who are allowed to live longer, and those who can be annihilated faster. Even in the camp there is simply a hierarchy of suffering. Isn't that the most shocking evidence that exclusion seldom stops on 1 group? Are we not dealing with specified exclusion today?

One of the strongest "Benta" threads is interior exclusion. The minute erstwhile a man – to last – begins to displace himself. Max is forced to deny his own identity, his own feelings, his own history. It's a drama that shows that the most severe force isn't always about physical suffering. Sometimes it's about making you live a lie. "Bent" is besides a communicative of exclusion as a process. It starts with a tongue, with labels, with a licence for insignificant inequality. Then comes symbols, signs, regulations. And in the end, all that remains is the administration of suffering. Do we truly believe that specified mechanisms belong exclusively to the past?

In Sławnik Teatralny I compose “Benta” as a informing performance. 1 that recalls that exclusion is never a substance of ‘only 1 group’. It is always a test – a test of how far you can go in taking others' right to be yourself. And how easy most people get utilized to it. This informing is not about history, but about our present.

It's a theatre you don't want to leave quickly.

And 1 you don't want to halt thinking.

Direction:

Natalie Ringler

Translation:

Rubi Birden

scenography/stitumes:

Aneta Suskiewicz

music:

Piotr Labonarski

choreography/stage movement:

Viktor Korszla

light direction:

Paweł Srebrzyński

production manager:

Natalia Molodowiec