Point of contact – about Puppetry Faculty in Wroclaw

On the façade of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Wrocław, located on Strzegomski Square and neighboring the building of the Aleksander Zelwerowicz National Academy of Theatre Arts at 59 Braniborska Street, there is Stanisław Dróżdż’s conceptual text composition Hourglass.

The word w i l l b e occupies the most space, positioned in the upper part of the hourglass. The barely noticeable word i s appears in its center, while at the bottom is the word w a s. Yet it is precisely w i l l b e and w a s that resonate most strongly. I s becomes the point of contact, the place where the other two meet. The word meeting will probably appear here more than once.

When the editor-in-chief of Teatr Lalek, Dr. Kamil Kopania, approached me with the idea of writing a text devoted to the Puppetry Department in Wrocław, I had just gotten off at Strzegomski Square. The words will be, is, was struck me as an excellent framework for what we had been discussing. At that moment—or so it seemed to me—they referred to the Department as a meeting place, where the present—is—touches both the perspective of was and will be (both of which shape its identity). At that point a very simple question came to mind: how is it? Immediately afterward came another, equally simple one: what’s up? A year ago, during the METAFORMY Festival of Puppetry Schools, we asked: what’s up, puppet? So I would like to devote these few paragraphs to the question: what’s up, WL?

For the sake of clarity: I will use the abbreviation WL interchangeably with the Puppetry Department.

What’s up at the Wrocław “Puppets”?

It is difficult to speak about this from an objective perspective. I will try to soften the subjectivity by relying on factual details and on what already was, or what will be. One feels inclined to write about good things. And not only because a professional journal is devoting several pages to WL in the form of a kind of “calling card,” as people in the casting industry might call it.

The question “what’s up?” can be answered both comprehensively and in general terms. One may focus on the curricular aspect, which was discussed at length in the article Ferment in issue 2–3/2021 of Teatr Lalek by the then Dean of the Department, now Vice-Rector of the Wrocław branch, Dr. Hab. Ewelina Ciszewska. Since the publication of that article, curricular changes have naturally continued to evolve. We observe developments in theatre. We respond. We listen closely to the biorhythm of contemporary puppet theatre and related fields. We draw from new technologies, contemporary and traditional acting and puppetry methodologies, and we experiment with artificial intelligence. Students are increasingly turning to this tool in their individual projects. Soon we will be co-organizing the interdisciplinary ArtTechScience conference at Wrocław University of Science and Technology. We are adapting our teaching to dynamic realities, while ensuring that puppetry and acting remain the central axis of the curriculum.

In answering the question of what is happening at the “Wrocław Puppets,” one might also focus on changes in teaching methods, communication, and ways of giving feedback. The past few years have brought a series of trainings and workshops devoted to nonviolent communication, both for employees and for students.

To decide what to write about, I return to Dróżdż’s mural. I now look at it in a completely different way. This time the word i s strikes me even more strongly—it visually binds the distant will be and was even more powerfully. It brings them together. It touches them. It makes them shared.

I would like to mention small situations, major events, and phenomena that connect and allow one to say that the Puppetry Department is a place of meeting—not only of diverse artistic, academic, and research perspectives, but also of collegial and simply human ones. A place where the w a s, i s, and w i l l b e mentioned at the beginning seek dialogue, understanding, and a point of connection. A place that is a community. So this is, in a way, all about community and what creates it.

And this is precisely where I hesitated over whether to revise the above paragraphs by entering them into ChatGPT.

La le, la le, la le la le laaaaaleeeee. It is a kind of song sung to the melody of the sports chant olleeeeee, oleeeee. It seems to me to be a sort of anthem of the students of the Puppetry Department. It always appears at moments that are important to the Student Community of the Department.

It resonates most fully when nearly a hundred people sing it. I can recall several situations in which I heard it—and even sang and jumped along to it. Most recently during the June exam session on the Main Stage, right after the showing for the Dance course under the pedagogical supervision of Zbigniew Karbowski, MA. We have a tradition that every year the Main Stage turns into a dance floor. A disco ball descends from above, the lighting team puts colored gels on the spotlights, and smoke machines are set up. For those few moments, the stage becomes a showcase of remarkable skills in classical, contemporary, and street dance. In the audience there is applause, support, whistles (for a moment we are not in the theatre, but on the dance floor).

I write about this because it is one of those moments when almost all year groups meet on one stage. There are not many such opportunities during the course of study. Most of the time, people work in small subgroups. Here it is different. For the final bows, EVERYONE comes out. Confetti shoots into the air, everyone jumps, everyone sings la leeee laa leeeeee. It made a strong impression on me this year. Even now, as I write this short paragraph, I get goosebumps.

The situation on the Main Stage is a natural link to the finale of the 16th METAFORMY Festival of Puppetry Schools, which took place on the AST Main Stage. It was November 2024. The program had already been printed. On it was written: Festival Closing – Main Stage, 3:00 p.m. From the beginning, we knew how to open the Festival—with an opening performance entitled This Might Not Work. By design, it was highly improvised, and its main purpose was to bring together students from Wrocław’s universities: AST, the Academy of Fine Arts, and the Academy of Music. The performance succeeded. It gathered dozens of guests, students, and staff members in an improvised show. There was ferment.

The closing was meant to be a less spectacular bracket—also on the Main Stage. We knew we would invite everyone into one place, draw the curtain, have a purple-and-green cake, cosmic lighting, closing words, and a designated space labeled “open mic.” A few minutes before 3:00 p.m., thoughts appeared—what if no one says anything, what if no one has the courage to reach for the microphone? A moment later it turned out otherwise. Not only were many warm words spoken, but one of the actresses from the Berlin Academy asked whether we could play a song from the festival club and dance together. I think another tradition is that the musical choice is often something from Kayah’s repertoire (I remember that from my own student days as well). We were incredibly lucky that at that exact moment the photographer was documenting the event from the Main Stage balcony—we have wonderful documentation. Everyone danced, without exception. It will come as no surprise if I write that there, too, one could hear laaa leeeee…—only this time internationally. None of that would have happened without the atmosphere of community, encounter, openness, and diversity created by the Department community. My one-paragraph reflection on the laleeee laaaale anthem leads to two events permanently inscribed in the WL calendar—the International METAFORMY Festival of Puppetry Schools and the Lalka Nova Conference, whose third edition will take place in November 2025. When I think about building Community, I think of these two events. For the Department’s community, they are a true celebration. And we do like to celebrate.

The Conference

This year’s idiom of the International Lalka Nova 3 Conference is connections. This refers directly to the direction we are taking at the “Wrocław Puppets.” We are seeking connections with other fields of knowledge and art. We are deepening already existing discourses. In recent years, we have observed a clear shift in how puppetry is defined and practiced. The term nova—although it seems at first to point to novelty and innovation—remains in this context deliberately undefined. The lack of a precise definition is not a gap, but rather a strategy for opening up the interpretive field and inviting a multi-layered debate. One question that kept returning in different forms concerned the possible drifting away from the “essence” of puppetry as a result of these interdisciplinary explorations. Yet the very category of “essence” proved problematic—can it really be defined apart from the cultural and historical context in which the contemporary puppet functions? Or perhaps the essence lies precisely in the capacity for ongoing redefinition? For this reason, this year we are launching, as part of the Conference, the novy current. The conference curators, Dr. Hab. Ewelina Ciszewska and Aga Błaszczak, MA, write of it as follows: “a paradoxical current, one that ignores the pressure of technology and algorithms, a current against the stream—directed inward, toward the human being. The need for this current is as obvious and elementary as breathing.”[1]

This year’s thematic modules are: identities, hybrids/transgression, design, old/new – what next?, and of course novy current. Lalka Nova is a kind of open category—a conscious invitation to discuss a new paradigm of puppetry.

METAFORMY

The Festival is somewhat different. Next year we will propose a refreshed formula, expanded by the extensive popularizing cycle PUPPET-NET. We have received a grant for this from the Ministry of Science and Higher Education as part of the Social Responsibility of Science II Programme. What will PUPPET-NET be? An online platform enabling the promotion of the Department’s academic and artistic achievements. It will be a networking space that will allow a fuller view of what we do. We are planning a series of video blogs, podcasts, and academic articles which, I hope, will make the presence of the Puppetry Department of AST even more visible on Europe’s cultural map.

The Festival is now more than thirty years old. Two years ago, as part of a research project, a publication entitled Only One Copy was created, treating the phenomenon of the Puppetry School Meetings in a collage-like way. Indeed, I produced that book in only a single copy, which is now part of the library at the Wrocław branch of AST.

The Festival evolves. It is a platform for meeting, exchange, and other forms of creative stimulation. We watch, we inspire one another, we discuss, and afterward we run to the festival club. There is ferment there too. It is above all a student festival. The strength of METAFORMY lies precisely in the involvement and active presence of students. Last year—even before the festival began—the meetings after classes, after rehearsals, in all that in-between time, proved invaluable. You could feel in the air that something important was coming—that METAFORMY was not just another event imposed by the school, but something that genuinely builds Community. I like the moment when there is already a Program, printed posters, lunch passes, festival bags—always too few, even though we always order too many—and all of it ends up in the hands of guests and students. The whole course of events. During the last edition there was an incredible energy of Community—the kind you want to write about in every grammatical case. The cyclical nature of the Festival and the Conference helps build a sense of community. I mention both of these events for a reason.

The dynamics of the world continue to surprise us. The authors of Social Responsibility in Polish Universities put it this way: “until recently, the changes occurring in the social world were slow enough to allow an assessment of existing social solutions and an analysis and possible critique of new proposals. […] Today, the speed of changes taking place not only in the social fabric (resulting from globalization, excessively rapid industrialization, as well as the triumph of pragmatics and the principle of efficiency) no longer allows for this, and therefore everything must proceed significantly faster.”[1]

Indeed, the world trembles; it keeps surprising us with new events. In the face of so much uncertainty, building a safe space becomes something truly important. For work, for study. We repeat it like a mantra: both the Department and the Academy as a whole are working toward being such a safe space for every individual. And so: Community, founded on very concrete principles. On the Statute, the Code of Ethics, the Development Strategy adopted a few months ago, and soon also on the Equality Policy that is currently being brought to life. Perhaps Community is some small antidote to the tremors of the contemporary world. I leave that thought open.

The Puppetry Department is part of a larger Community—the Aleksander Zelwerowicz National Academy of Theatre Arts in Kraków. This ever-declined “sense of community” has been built over many years. It is impossible to list all points of contact—that would require a separate article. Looking only at events from recent months, one might mention the conference held in April of this year, “AST START! The Graduate on the Job Market.” It was co-organized by all Departments of the Academy. The program consisted of lectures and simultaneous roundtable discussions touching on issues related to entering the labor market, employment prospects, and building one’s personal brand. Kraków, Bytom, Wrocław—we were all together. For some, it was their first time at the Wrocław branch. Many Western cultures build community through a shared meal—and here we had several opportunities to experience that in practice. A similar sense of being “at the point of contact,” in a shared circle, accompanied the Mono–Duo–Eco Conference in Bytom, co-organized by the Puppetry Department and the Department of Dance Theatre. The meeting was devoted to monodrama, duodrama, and the broadly understood relationship between human beings and nature, in the spirit of ecocriticism.

I have mentioned only two events that fit into the context of the Academy-wide Community. There are more; it is impossible to list all points of contact: interdepartmental collaborations, research projects, networking meetings. All of this builds.

At the Wrocław branch, we are not alone—at Braniborska Street we work together with the Acting Department. We share classrooms, a common faculty room, common teaching staff, and many shared points of reference. We take an interest in what is happening at WA and at WL, we attend each other’s exams and diploma performances, we participate in departmental celebrations, and Acting Department students also perform in WL directing exams. In November, the Dean of WA introduced dean’s hours so that students could attend performances during the METAFORMY Festival. That means a great deal.

What comes next?

Ahead of us are the Lalka Nova 3 Conference, the building of the PUPPET-NET portal, and METAFORMY 2026. Discussions about work/study-life balance, about equilibrium between fulfilling the study programme and having free time. This is very important. International trips, festivals, conferences, shared lunches in the canteen. New threads appear, intertwine, exchange. Quickly. Faster and faster. We try to keep up. I notice the words recurring throughout this text: meeting, shared, community, building. I do not know about you, but to me they sound very good indeed.

The slogan from the Museum of Contemporary Art still does not leave me in peace. After writing this text, I would turn that mural by 90 degrees into a horizontal position. It might better convey the definition of the position of i s that I am writing about. Now, at the very end, I remember one more fact: one of the year groups (the current second year) named itself on Instagram with the handle lalaland ast. Perhaps the Puppetry Department is a kind of Wrocław lalaland? I smile at that phrase. We invite you to Wrocław, to AST, to the Puppetry Department. And of course to spend a little time looking at the mural on the Museum of Contemporary Art. And naturally also on Instagram: @lalaland.ast, @ast_wroclaw_lalki, @lalenaprzypale, @ast.wroclaw.

[1] Social Responsibility in Polish Universities. The Perspective of Internal Stakeholders. Scientific editors: Agata Lulewicz-Sas, Ewa Jastrzębska, Piotr Wachowiak, Oficyna Wydawnicza, 2025.