Bartosz Zurowski
Theatre Director · Filmmaker · Writer · PhD Researcher
Bartosz Żurowski works across theatre, film, installations, performative lectures, and participatory events. His practice explores the boundaries between ritual, rave, and critical theory, investigating how collective experiences shape perception, desire, and social power. Based in Berlin, he develops projects internationally while conducting practice-based PhD research on collective catharsis, framing and communal forms of celebration.
"Queeratorio" - a participatory perfo-ritual built on the power of singing together, the playfulness of drag, theatrical strategies, the pulse of techno and the bite of contemporary philosophy. The structure of the Holy Mass, repeated weekly over many generations, is deeply inscribed in our collective memory. This makes it an ideal object of deconstruction, in which long-present yet largely forgotten rituals can be reactivated through subversive gestures. Procession, confession, psalm, homily, and communion are all present but deconstructed. We invited the Evangelical Church to offer an apology to artists and queer community for the last five centuries of wrongdoing, and they did, two pastors came with an official letter and a moving private confession.
Garbicz Festival - Opening Ceremony 2026
Two parades, Slavic folk dances set to Brazilian techno, 19th-century romantic opera rewritten about drugs, a live cumbia band, and live mixes of German pop songs performed for more than 2,000 festival guests.
Xōchiquetzal, the Mexican goddess of beauty, pleasure and joy, forces her way with a colourful cumbia parade to marry her beloved Baba Yaga. But first, she must win the approval of Baldur, the Germanic god of Light and Order, who sets off in pursuit on his own musical platform. Mmore than 20 artists weave together Aztec, Slavic and Germanic traditions in a joyful wedding ritual.
"From a river to all you can see" - a dance performance (by Fifi Rutkowski), accompanied by a love poem to water, composed with pulsating electronic music was presented in a very crowded architectural icon of Mies van der Rohe, Neue Nationalgalerie, for the Festival of Future Nows. An experimental format inspired by an interplay between the festival’s artistic atmosphere and the museum’s unique architecture, inviting audiences to experience art as a material, ritualistic and social phenomenon.
"Sleep until the end" - a theatrical play exploring the legacy of the Holocaust in postwar Poland, based on the texts, poetry, and prose of Tadeusz Borowski, performed at the National Stary Theatre. Percussion instruments were designed from World War II ballistic missile casings. The music was composed by Wojciech Blecharz, and the set was designed by Maurycy Gomulicki.
"Dogtooth" - a play, based on a film by Yorgos Lanthimos was my directing diploma and my first official repertoire premiere in the public theatre. The original movie is about a confined, single-generation family in which the language and all actions are manipulated by the parents of three adult children kept in isolation from the outside world. I decided to put some references to social and political changes of the 1990s in the play to make it more relevant to the Polish viewers. Nevertheless, the message of the story remained unchanged. A laboratory for exploring universal instruments of power, possibilities of practising utopia, as well as political and linguistic systems which reveal new meanings when they are experienced on a microcosmic scale.
"Female revolt in the jungle" - a documentary follows Hushahu Yawanawa, the first female shaman of her community. The film observes a shift in ritual authority within a patriarchal structure, intertwining ceremony, music and political transformation. The documentary uniquely brings her story to life with music videos and presentation of her artworks, alongside rituals and secret music never captured before.