ANNA SMOLAR,
Succession
Premiere: 27 November 2026
Inspired by Calderón de la Barca’s Life Is a Dream, Succession looks at inheritance not only as something we receive, but as a system of power: within families, between generations and across society. Moving between the intimate and the political, Anna Smolar revisits Calderón’s radical experiment in upbringing to ask what we inherit from those who came before us — and whether we can ever truly escape the structures, privileges and narratives into which we are born.
ANNA SMOLAR
One of the leading voices of contemporary Polish theatre, Anna Smolar works between Poland and France, developing a distinctive form of collective, actor-driven theatre. Known for her exceptional work with performers, she combines intellectual precision with humour, intimacy and an acute sensitivity to group dynamics, using the rehearsal process to investigate contemporary social and political questions. Her work has been presented and recognised both in Poland and internationally.
GOSIA WDOWIK,
Heart of Stone
Premiere: 2027/2028
Gosia Wdowik’s new project takes Stanley Milgram’s infamous 1960s obedience experiments as a starting point to explore authority, submission and individual responsibility. She is particularly interested in reconstructing the experiment itself — how the situation was staged, how the actors were trained and how participants were gradually persuaded to act against their own moral judgement.
The project also looks at the experiment’s lasting psychological consequences and asks a disturbing question: what happens when a person discovers their own capacity to harm others?
Combining theatrical reconstruction with historical and sociological research, Wdowik connects Milgram’s experiment with contemporary forms of obedience — from institutional and workplace hierarchies to the ways societies respond to authority in moments of collective crisis.
[Seeking co-producers and residency partners]
GOSIA WDOWIK is one of the most distinctive voices of the younger generation of Polish theatre-makers, working across theatre, choreography, performance and social research. A graduate of theatre directing in Warsaw, the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen and DAS Theatre in Amsterdam, she is an associated artist at CAMPO in Ghent.
Her internationally presented works include She Was a Friend of Someone Else, premiered at Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels, Gloria – The Right to Be Desperate (Theater Neumarkt / Zürcher Theater Spektakel), and the recent DEEPER, produced by CAMPO. Her research-driven practice combines personal testimony and documentary strategies with a precise performative language, exploring how social, cultural and technological systems shape individual experience.
KAT MUSTATEA,
BodyMouth: Spellbound (NYC)
An international project by KAROLINA KRACZKOWSKA & KAT MUSTATEA, in collaboration with EdgeCut Arts, NYC
Premiere: autumn 2027
Continuing STUDIO’s experimental tradition, BodyMouth: Spellbound is part of an ongoing series bringing together performance and digital art. The programme pairs directors and choreographers associated with STUDIO with digital artists to explore new tools and languages for contemporary theatre.
The residency in July 2026 marks the first stage of a collaboration between choreographer and dancer Karolina Kraczkowska and New York-based multidisciplinary artist Kat Mustatea, creator of BodyMouth — an instrument for embodied speech. The artists will test the technology at the core of the project and develop its artistic concept.
Where does the body end and spirituality begin?
The project takes as its starting point a fascination with traditional women’s rituals — practices that for centuries used magic, folk knowledge and the body in attempts to influence an uncertain world. Bringing Slavic beliefs into dialogue with newly invented superstitions, the artists explore the dilemmas and desires of contemporary women.
Through text, movement and Mustatea’s unique BodyMouth instrument, ancient recipes for attracting love and averting disaster collide with today’s culture of manifestation, affirmations and wellness. The project reclaims the unruly power of the body as a site of ritual, transformation and rebellion.
[Seeking co-producers and residency partners]
MATEUSZ PAKUŁA,
The Case of the Holy Yogurt
Premiere: May 2027
THE CASE OF THE HOLY YOGURT, or more precisely Lucek, Ludwika and the Case of the Holy Yogurt, based on the book of the same title, is an original production by Mateusz Pakuła. It is a family show — about family and for the whole family: young audiences, their older siblings and their parents.
Ludwika and Lucek, their mum and dad, and their dog Ciumka set off to visit an uncle they haven’t seen for a long time. Not long before their arrival, the uncle spilled some yogurt on the table — only to discover that the dairy product had a face. It also turned out to be rather eccentric: it talks and claims to be holy. Soon the uncle’s house is under siege, with pilgrims arriving from neighbouring towns and villages. How will Lucek and Ludwika deal with the situation? Will they manage to help their uncle?
The Case Of The Holy Yogurt is a story about social mechanisms and manipulation, religiosity and atheism, magic and rationality, the search for consolation and the desire to question and understand. Above all, it is a story about kindness across divisions and the strength of family bonds.
MATEUSZ PAKUŁA is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Polish theatre — a playwright, writer and director known for his radical, darkly humorous and deeply personal work. His theatre combines autobiographical material, pop culture, philosophy and social critique, often confronting difficult subjects with irreverence, tenderness and an unmistakable sense of humour. His acclaimed How I Didn’t Kill My Father and How Much I Regret It, adapted from his own book, established him as one of the most compelling writer-directors of his generation in Poland.
TIANZHUO CHEN / ASIAN DOPE BOYS (China)
Tianzhuo Chen is a Chinese multidisciplinary artist and the founder of Asian Dope Boys, whose practice moves freely between performance, visual art, music, choreography, film and club culture. He creates immersive, highly distinctive worlds in which spirituality, mythology and ritual collide with contemporary subcultures and digitally augmented environments.
The human body occupies a central place in Chen’s work — as a site of transformation, belief, desire and transcendence. Drawing on Buddhist and Hindu iconography, religious ceremonies, internet culture, fashion, electronic music and queer aesthetics, he constructs intense, often hallucinatory environments that blur the boundaries between theatre, exhibition, concert, ceremony and rave. Technology in his work is not simply a medium or spectacle, but part of a broader exploration of contemporary forms of spirituality and altered states of consciousness.
Chen studied at Central Saint Martins and Chelsea College of Arts in London and has developed an international practice spanning both contemporary art and performing arts contexts. His works have been presented by major festivals and institutions across Europe and Asia. Through long-form projects and collaborations with dancers, musicians, DJs and visual artists, he has developed a unique artistic universe in which ancient systems of belief meet the hyper-mediated imagery and anxieties of contemporary life.
[Seeking co-producers and residency partners]
ZUZANNA Grajcewicz,
The Charismatic Self-Development Enterprise
Premiere: 2 February 2027
Inspired by Eva Illouz’s Saving the Modern Soul, the production is a Kafkaesque parable about a woman who enters the world of therapeutic culture.
Where does self-development end and loneliness begin?
The protagonist embarks on a wild mission to heal her own soul. Surrounded by therapists’ offices, online wisdom and mindfulness practices, she learns a new, seemingly flawless language. She soon discovers, however, that this new code cuts her off from her family and locks her inside the cage of her own ego. The key to escaping this Kafkaesque world turns out to be the most difficult art of all: genuine communication.
In her theatre debut, film director Zuzanna Grajcewicz collaborates with dramaturg Martyna Wawrzyniak, with psychological consultation by Joanna Flis, to look beyond the framework of therapeutic culture — driven by the belief that few things can deconstruct reality as effectively as humour and the ability to laugh at ourselves.
What can we do to stop language from dividing us?
ZUZANNA GRAJCEWICZ is a Polish film director and screenwriter, and a graduate of the Łódź Film School. Her short films have been presented at dozens of festivals in Poland and internationally, including New Horizons, Warsaw Film Festival, INTERFILM Berlin and Tirana IFF, and have received several awards. Her films combine sharply observed social themes with dark humour, absurdity and speculative shifts of reality. At STUDIO, she makes her theatre directing debut, bringing her cinematic language into dialogue with live performance.
MALABAR THEATRE/ NATALIA SOŁTYSIK,
The Death of Vivek Oji
Premiere: March 2027
What happens to a person in a world where fulfilment in love and the freedom to define one’s own identity are forbidden? Based on Akwaeke Emezi’s acclaimed Nigerian novel, the story echoes the structure of Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold — a chronicle of a fate that seems predetermined by an unforgiving patriarchal order.
The story is narrated by a performer of Nigerian heritage (casting TBC) and propelled by live music. Together with actors from STUDIO and Malabar Hotel Theatre, they create a compelling, sensual and uncompromising theatrical experience centred on the power of self-determination.
NATALIA SOŁTYSIK / MALABAR HOTEL THEATRE
Natalia Sołtysik is a theatre director and co-founder of Malabar Hotel Theatre, an independent Polish company known for its distinctive visual language and unconventional approach to storytelling. Working at the intersection of dramatic theatre, object and puppet theatre, movement and visual arts, Malabar Hotel creates highly imaginative stage worlds in which form becomes an essential part of the narrative. The company has collaborated with major Polish cultural institutions while retaining the experimental freedom and artistic identity of an independent ensemble.
PRODUCTIONS READY TO TOUR
ŁUKASZ TWARKOWSKI
The Employees
An internationally acclaimed, hypnotic multimedia performance transforming Olga Ravn’s sci-fi novel into an immersive reflection on work, identity, desire and what it means to be human.
🡪 for more information, click the link
NATALIA KORCZAKOWSKA
AlphaGo_Lee: Theory of Sacrifice
Inspired by the legendary Lee Sedol–AlphaGo match, a transdisciplinary performance confronting human intuition with artificial intelligence through theatre, choreography and digital art.
🡪 for more information, click the link
CEZARY TOMASZEWSKI
I’m Fine
A characteristically subversive work combining humour, music and choreographic precision to look at contemporary Polish reality from an unexpected angle.
🡪 for more information, click the link
STUDIO GALLERY
KAROL RADZISZEWSKI / DIK Fagazine, Dirty Pages
17 SEPTEMBER – 30 NOVEMBER 2026
Karol Radziszewski’s exhibition Dirty Pages explores the queer archives of Central and Eastern Europe through his DIK Fagazine, which celebrates its 21st anniversary this year. Taking zines, underground publications and materials related to eroticism and pornography as its starting point, the exhibition examines them in the context of censorship and their circulation at the margins of mainstream culture.
The project looks at how sexuality, politics and geography intersect within unofficial forms of publishing and visual culture. Bringing together archival materials and contemporary artworks, it creates a polyphonic narrative around representations of the body and desire. Dirty Pages approaches publishing as a site of tension between visibility and exclusion, emancipation and censorship.
Curator: Michał Grzegorzek
🡪 for more information, click the link
ACOUSTIC CONFLICTS
14–15 MAY 2027
A project emerging from STUDIO’s everyday coexistence of different sonic environments: the theatre stage, art gallery and bar, all operating in immediate proximity to one another. Overlapping sounds, noise and interference are treated not as a problem, but as artistic material and a starting point for considering conflict as a fundamental condition of coexistence.
The project raises a broader question about how contemporary spaces — institutional, social and public — negotiate tensions between control, autonomy and the overlapping of different systems. Sound functions both as a medium and as a tool of perception, revealing otherwise invisible structures of coexistence and interdependence.
The programme brings together performances, works from the collection, site-specific interventions and sound experiments taking place across the Gallery and STUDIO Theatre. From this perspective, conflict is not a disruption, but a condition through which relationships, resonances and temporary forms of understanding can emerge.
Curator: Michał Grzegorzek
In collaboration with: Stefa Gosiewska
