Dorman’s Open Archives

Marzenna Wiśniewska

Abstract

Besides his art practice, Jan Dorman was creating an archive of his life and work, which is a comprehensive collection of various types of theatre and personal documentation. Like Tadeusz Kantor, he dreamed that the collected resources would continue to be used, entering the theatre and research circuit and thus creating a “living archive”. In 2016, Iwona Dowsilas, Dorman’s daughter and promoter of his archives, donated Jan Dorman’s collection to The Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute in Warsaw, which contributed to a three-year project “Dorman. Open Archives” (2016–2019). It was based on the concept of performative archiving, in which archives cease to be a static collection, and can be set in motion and produce separate performances. The idea of performing archives was translated into a collaborative programme involving theoreticians and practitioners of the theatre, which resulted in the intersecting of four fields: issues of theatre documentation, history and theory of the theatre, theatre education and theatre practice. The current issue of Pamiętnik Teatralny is an outcome of annual research residencies (2018), which aimed to analyse selected areas of the previously unrecognized and little-known last decade of Dorman’s theatre practice (1977–1986).