2024
VERY CHEAP
This is the third and final part of the ‘Very’ trilogy, following ‘Very Funny’ and ‘Very Sad’. A theatrical cabaret treatise on the paradoxes of capitalism and the price of art, in which freelance artists don the masks of Shakespearean – and other – sex workers. Both art and sex work, despite operating on the fringes of the economy, have the status of commodities within the realities of capitalism. Both rely on generating lucrative products: authenticity and intimacy, creativity and desire. “Very Cheap” reminds us that morality is relative, and that attention should be directed towards the social and political grey areas.
“In a sense, the artists take the audience on a journey to the Middle Ages, a time when the jester, accused of lewdness and an unhealthy penchant for obscene antics, alongside the butcher, the gravedigger, the sex worker, but also the dancer and the tightrope walker, represented a group of ‘unclean’ professions, as they were closely linked to the body, and thus to the realm of taboo and the breeding ground of moral blemishes.”
Alicja Müller, teatralny.pl
Script, direction, choreography, dramaturgy, costumes, performance: Gruba i Głupia (Patrycja Kowańska/Dominika Knapik)
Music: Szymon Lechowicz
Lighting design, technical direction: Wolfgang Macher
Premiere performance accompanying the 28th International Shakespeare Festival. Project realised as part of the OFF Polska Programme.
Co-funded by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage.
PREMIERE: 3 August 2024, Klub Żak, Gdańsk,
Photos: Magdalena Kasjaniuk, Dawid Linkowski, Robert Siwek
REVIEWS
Gruba i Głupia operate in the space between dance and choreography on the one hand, and dramatic theatre on the other, developing a light-hearted genre they call the ‘performative epigram’. In *Very Cheap*, they make room for social and theatrical outcasts. They do not so much claim that the Middle Ages continue, as find allies in the bodies of the jester and the sex worker in dismantling theatrical hierarchies and the myths of high art, speaking not of the privilege of working in the theatre, but of the physical costs associated with it.
https://www.teatralny.pl/artykuly/dancing-for-money-3942
“Participating in the cruel transaction of putting oneself on display and the constant juggling of categories of authenticity, intimacy, desire and creativity within the unstable, precarious conditions of the off-theatre scene means that fatigue, fear and frustration are among the dominant themes of the final part. Gruba i Głupia, seeing the approaching twilight of the cycle, instead of cashing in on a tried-and-tested formula – are saying goodbye now: they are closing the venue uncompromisingly, on their own terms and in grand style.”
“Despite its somewhat controversial, even deliberately provocative subject matter, the performance should appeal to a large section of the audience. After all, the serious subject matter, which sets out to politicise art, is embellished with a soothing veneer dripping with kitsch and the grotesque. On more than one occasion, as we marvel at the creators’ recollections of their financial and artistic struggles, we burst out laughing. The same goes for the surprising performative elements that engage the audience, and the references to Shakespeare. Catch the Grubej i Głupiej shows – you won’t regret it!”
“Sex worker, actress, dancer – if you look at the cultural and historical connotations linking these professions, they don’t seem so far apart. After all, all these groups earn a living by using their own bodies, they defy simple social hierarchies, and as freelancers they grapple with issues related to … health and social insurance. The Gruba i Głupia duo, once again on the Gdańsk stage, reflect on artists’ working conditions, recounting in a bittersweet manner their own exhaustion and the challenges they must face in their creative work.”
Very good
