Clean girl - a spectacle

Over a six-month period, Radek and Platt, working with biographical material (Zuzanna Radek's adolescent diaries) and commenting on it with improvisations (both dramatic and musical), write a feature-length script that universalizes the story of a young woman on her journey through the normativity of the body, sexuality, and mental health. The viewer witnesses her most lonely, intimate, and taboo moments, first by those around her, and then by herself. Zuzanna's alter ego, Wanda, spends hours talking to men who satisfy their sexual needs via online video chats, asking them to express their grief for her; she goes out into the streets at night to meet "those old and homeless people," and then takes mass photographs of her weeping face. Her daily life is defined by constant and repetitive patterns of rejection and memories of self-harming behavior from her eating disorder.

CLEAN GIRL is an image of femininity that is neither widely presented nor discussed in public discourse today. It is a femininity from the shadows, from the trash heap, for which exploring one's own needs and mechanisms is more important than discussing what is necessary, healthy, moral, and normal. This exploration is subversive and provocative, at times very painful and lonely.

The play was presented at this year's Young Directors' Forum in Krakow.

Artistic supervision: Bartosz Porczyk

Set design: Ewa Platt, Zuzanna Radek

The Nowa Szwalnia project is being implemented thanks to funding from the budget of the City of Łódź.