Monument

Upcoming 2024 shows in Margate and London, UK
Show available for touring

Monument is a one-woman comedy performance with audience participation, where I use spoken word and poetry to embody Bogdan - a fictional East European builder, working on a mysterious construction project. Bogdan is a relatable everyman, hard worker, focused on earning money and imagining the future it might afford him. He is also seeking love, connection with family back home and, fundamentally, life purpose, which lead him to questioning the status quo. In the show I adopt the builder’s uniform and delve into exploration of masculinity, its props and associated stereotypes. The story is immersed in a world mediated by digital modes of communication, affected by a constant barrage of news & information, misplacing the character’s sense of urgency and bearing on his experience of reality, distorting relationships with the past and future. In a way, Monument is a humorous imagining the end of capitalism.

The piece is inspired by the story of the largest monument of Stalin built in the 1950s in Prague (Czechoslovakia). This tragi-comic real life story is a source of reflection on the impact of ideologies on the lives of individuals and societies, individual and collective power in shaping the world around us, dangers of authoritarianism and using work as a tool of oppression.

Positioned side by side, two stories of Bogdan and of Stalin’s monument create a dialogue between two worlds, two societies and two moments in history that perhaps have something to learn from each other.

The Monument is borne out of my own upbringing in a former communist country - Poland in the 1980s, and my experience as a migrant worker in the UK.