Polish Studies Annual Picnic

Saturday, September 13, 2008 12:00-3:00pm
Bryan Park Woodlawn Shelter
(intersection of Woodlawn Street and E. Southdowns Drive)

Our annual potluck gathering to welcome friends of the Polish Studies Center to a new academic year.

Please bring a dish to share: salads, meats (there will be a ready grill), side dishes, deli items, desserts, etc, as well as a non-alcohoic beverage. All picnicware will be provided, including cups, plates, forks, knives, napkins and ice. Polish dishes are highly appreciated if you are able.

A Horizonts of Knowledge lecture by Dr. Robert Blobaum
Eberly Professor of History, West Virginia University

“A Warsaw Story: Polish-Jewish Relations in the First World War”

Thursday, September 24th at 5.00 pm
University Club of Indiana University
Faculty Room

Spy scares, accusations of profiteering and speculation, suspicions that the Jews had privileged access to ever-scarcer food and public assistance, and anti-Jewish boycotts: Warsaw in World War One seemed ripe for a pogrom, like the one that wracked Lwow in November 1918. Yet a pogrom did not happen - why not?

Sponsored by: The Polish Studies Center and The Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program, Horizons of Knowledge, with the support of the Department of History and the Russian and East European Institute.

A play by: The Theatre of the 8th Day
"The Files"

Thursday, November 13th, 7.30pm
Friday, November 14 th, 7.30 pm
Saturday, November 15th, 2.30pm (polish language version) and 7.30pm

John Waldron Arts Center
122 S. Waldron Arts Center
Bloomington, IN 47408

The Files, directed by Ewa Wójciak and Marcin Kęszycki, the founders and directors of the Theatre of the Eighth Day, premiered in Poznan, Poland, on January 10th, 2007, and was recognized by critics as one of the most important performances of the last few years.

The Files is a special and unusual performance for the Theatre of the Eighth Day (famous for fighting the regime only through art), because it uses Secret Police reports on the Theatre’s actors written during the period from 1975 to 1983 (reports that by definition also covered the actors’ contacts, friendships, and meetings), juxtaposed with the actors’ private letters at the time the reports were written, as well as parts of old performances to which the reports referred. For the sake of clarity and because the reports were so voluminous, the company decided to narrow the action of the play to the 1970s, since that was when they were active only as artists. (Later, in the 80s, they began to be more directly active in politics.). The inspiration for this play was their discovery of a typical report on one of their earlier plays that was written by a Secret Police officer from Crakow, whose intellectually over-ambitious analysis of the play’s subversive tendencies was so grotesquely uncomprehending that it was hilarious.