Blasted 1999. Sarah Kane’s Body Against the Archive

This research was funded in whole or in part by National Science Center 2021/41/B/HS2/01540 . For the purpose of Open Access, the author has applied a CC-BY public copyright licence to any AuthorAccepted Manuscript (AAM) version arising from this submission.

The body-archive category in Polish Theatre and Performance Studies is articulated as an emancipatory tool with the potential to reclaim the history of marginalised, oppressed, and silenced groups not represented in the archive, but as I claim, it still subsumes the body under the power of identity and meaning it gains through history. Looking at one of the most important 'dead bodies' in the archive of Polish contemporary theatre – Sarah Kane's body – and the way it was present and presented to the Polish viewers, I ask if the other model of the relation between body and history is possible. I find it through the notion of trauma and plasticity inscribed in Kane's text and realised on the Polish stage in the 1999 production of Blasted. Reading the remains of the performance I ask how it can be read in the context of Polish political transition and how it reflects the meaning of Kane's 'new brutalism' in Polish 1990s.