UNDERGROUND ABSOLUTE FICTION
The Project
Against the backdrop of political resistance and upheaval, and told through two perspectives, viewers will piece together events from August to October of 2020 in Warsaw, Poland. UAF uses theatrical storytelling on film and live social media platforms to explore queer protest in contemporary Poland. This narrative is told through interrelated mediums: a fictional documentary about a Polish queer punk band shot by Lena—a Polish-Canadian settler—and the band’s social media accounts created by the lead vocalist and Poland-native Chlapa.
Artists
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(she/he/they) is a queer genderfluid writer, producer and performer. They are also a settler of Polish descent, based on occupied xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlil̓wətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territories. Anais’ work is multidisciplinary: through hybrid art, she grapples with the multiplicities that exist in gender, sexuality, culture and self. Their projects include creating the video-play hybrid Kill Your Lovers, (Buddies In Bad Times Theatre’s Rhubarb Festival, Toronto, and the Fresh Fruit Festival, NYC) and co-writing the slam poetry musical Poly Queer Love Ballad with Sara Vickruck (Queer Arts Festival, the frank theatre and Zee Zee Theatre, Vancouver, and Theatre Passe Muraille, Tkaronto.) Anais was the 2018 co-winner of PTC’s Fringe New Play Prize and the Georgia Straight Critic’s Choice Award, and has been nominated for two Jessie Awards, including Outstanding Original Script. Anais’ writing has been supported by Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council and the PuSh Festival, and they’ve been part of residencies with PTC’s WrightSpace, Queer Arts Festival, Rumble Theatre and Theatre Replacement’s New Aesthetics. As an actor, he has performed with Théâtre la Seizième, the Only Animal, Rumble Theatre, Savage Society and more. Anais is the Artistic Producer at the frank theatre company.
The Residency
Before the DDI
The project participants chose a faux documentary style and experimental social media narratives to explore story about a queer activist punk band in Poland in 2020. They focused on building community through the act of script writing as a group; the narrative they created together became the driving force for the project.
The team was interested in focusing on research questions and artistic explorations of how political engagement can be activated in social media and how protests and organization occurred online, drawing from recent events in Poland. The group researched how protests in Poland threaded through social media; people connected to entire movements on their phones.
During the residency
The group investigated how to integrate social media with the narrative they wanted to develop as part of their project. They explored how it was possible to engage audiences with political and social ramifications through social media posts and how to measure the interactivity.
The group connected political dissent and protest with social media; they also recognized that reacting to certain posts could actually lead to jail time and considered how to handle the material with sensitivity. TikTok became an important tool for the group as a kind of mini-performance and part of the research entailed testing how these performances work on TikTok versus IG.
This line of research led to the participants focusing on the question of how to create online messaging that would communicate with an audience in a short amount of time. The participants experimented with how to make TikTok and other forms of social media strong and legitimate forms of art while the process of creating for an ephemeral media engendered certain challenges.
There was a strong learning curve with how to work with and create for social media, since posts disappear quickly.
Post Residency
During the project, there was significant discussion about how to use social media to flesh out the world of this band and create a false sense of reality for audience members who were viewing online material. In the next steps for this project, the group will create an account for the band that will appear as if it was created by an utterly obsessed superfan. The website will add as many real world details as possible, such as T-shirts, or merch that people would hold up in photos, or graffiti in a real location with the band's name. There was extensive discussion on how to present imagery within the media and how various different aspects of contemporary culture meld together in the cultural sphere. For example, the group will continue to work with complex lines of cross-cultural experience- for example, the connection of the church to the Polish state and how a certain kind of toxic masculinity is recognizable through fashion and visible gendered stereotypes.
FInally, they will make a film with characters who will live on social media. They are also in interested in exploring ways of using anonymity in an artistic way, to provide more safety for queer folks who are presented in the media they share.
Tools Used
Film
Video
Facebook
Instagram
Twitch
TikTok
