Gardzienice

Centre for Theatre Practices "Gardzienice" was founded in 1977 by Włodzimierz Staniewski, and formally registered in 1978. The name comes from the village where the theatre is located. The group gained international critical acclaim, and is classified as an experimental anthropological theater. In 1997 the association established the Academy for Theatre Practices. This carries out numerous projects: research, arts, music, and cultural investigation into the humanities.

Włodzimierz Staniewski was a former collaborator of Jerzy Grotowski, and in his choice of just such an isolated environment, Staniewski may have been inspired by his work with Grotwoski in Brzezinka, but with an important difference: rather than emphasising an isolating escape from urban existence, Gardzienice represented for him a pursuit of integrative existence within a community, albeit of a different sort. From the outset, Gardzienice sought to work with the local people, taking interaction with them as both inspiration for a way of life, and for a way of developing performance. It was in this environment that the whole basis for the group's early work, the 'expedition', was born. Staniewski describes the expedition as having "the character of a permanent journey through a chosen territory, with the possibility of not only touching on the culture of people, but also the "culture of the earth" . This may not constitute a strict anthropological exercise in the purely academic sense, and Staniewski may insist on a less clinical term, but at its heart is arguably an interest in the study of people. According to Richard Schechner, Gardzienice constitutes "the very heart and essence of Polish experimental and anthropological performance."