MOCK. BLACK BURLESQUE

(visuals)

script and direction: Konrad Imiela music: Grzegorz Rdzak, Capitol Musical Theatre, Wrocław (2019)

Mock. Black Burlesque is a performance inspired by Marek Krajewski’s crime novels about Commissioner Eberhard Mock, operating in the dark, pre‑war city of Wrocław (Breslau). The production blends a noir atmosphere with musical form and theatrical grotesque, creating a hybrid of crime story, musical, and burlesque. It is a tale of Mock’s life, obsessions, and moral fractures — a protagonist entangled in a city pulsing with mystery, violence, and an undercurrent of erotic tension.

Grzegorz Rdzak’s musical layer moves freely between aesthetics: from retro and pre‑war songs, through electronic textures, to unexpected reggaeton rhythms.

The visuals, co‑created with Piotr Bartos, were developed through “analog” transformations of photographs by Łukasz Gawroński. These images function as a kind of mockument — a stylized documentation of events on the border of Krajewski’s world. Filtered through noir aesthetics and theatrical convention, they build an evocative, at times almost hallucinatory space in which fiction intertwines with a supposed chronicle, and the viewer hovers between what is staged and what might have truly happened.

photo: Łukasz Giza

trailer from the performance