storytelling/performance
Patrycja Dołowy and Michelle Levy
directed by Kathleen Amshoff

 

PAULINA is a performance that exists between life and death, the Holocaust and now, and the politics of Poland and the United States. Artist/storytellers Michelle Levy (New York) and Patrycja Dołowy (Warsaw), explore has transpired since they became partner-detectives in pursuit of a stranger’s story across Poland and Ukraine. Exploring the limits of what may be made visible when one woman’s testimony, from thousands, is revisited in the very places where it took occurred, PAULINA is a living, embodied folktale fueled by the forces of absence and connections made between strangers. 

PAULINA explores relationships between those who have been uprooted, and those who remained in the aftermath, and how our identities bind us to the legacies of past which continue to echo today.

 

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Ten pages of a testimony taken in Krakow in 1945, depict the actions of Paulina Hirsch, a Polish-Jewish woman fending her way throughout Nazi-occupied Poland. An impersonal, formal document, the woman behind the text remains a mystery. A note in the introduction states she entered the war with a husband and daughter, but now, she is alone. 

 

When Michelle Levy asked Patrycja Dołowy to translate the testimony of her relative Paulina, the two women entered a web of events that had been unfolding over decades. The spellbinding account of a woman’s survival that revealed itself before them united Levy and Dolowy, two women of Polish-Jewish descent, coming from different worlds. In the spring of 2019, with Paulina’s testimony text as their score, Levy and Dołowy set out on a road-trip to retrace Paulina’s wartime route across Poland and Ukraine: an adventure that led to a discovery beyond what seemed possible.  The crisis and transformation resulting from this experience are the heart of a story that continues to grow.