(costumes, performance)
written and directed by Seb Majewski Jerzy Szaniawski Dramatic Theatre in Wałbrzych (2023)
The Night Porter. The Experience is a powerful performance inspired by Liliana Cavani’s film. The production presents war stripped of heroism – without winners, losers, or military pathos. War becomes a space of perversion, where the darkest instincts surface and the human being is reduced from philosophy to physiology.
The performance restores the memory of female prisoners forced to work in camp brothels – women whose suffering was silenced after the war and never compensated. At the same time, it exposes the moral ambiguity of the “most respectable Germans,” entangled in systems of dependence and politics that distort justice, leading to the unsettling question: who truly won this war. Set to the music of Bach and Strauss, the performance explores trauma, silence, and the untold stories of the victims of Nazism – Jews, women subjected to violence, and homosexuals. It is a look at a “lesser-known face of evil,” intended exclusively for adult audiences.
I also appear in this world – both as a fashion designer present on stage and as the creator of the costumes. One of the costumes is made live during each performance, in full view of the audience; it is the moment when I dress a newly arrived prisoner. This gesture is, for me, one of the most powerful elements of the production – it materializes the violence of a system that stripped women not only of freedom but also of identity. Creating a costume in real time becomes a form of storytelling that requires no words.
I consciously aestheticize this narrative through costume. In a world where the prisoner’s body becomes an object and her humanity is erased, aesthetics becomes a tool of resistance – a way to restore her visibility, dignity, and individuality. Beauty does not soften the cruelty; it exposes it. It acts as a counterpoint that allows the audience to see violence in its full, inhuman scale.
The costumes I designed combine the elegance of Yves Saint Laurent, the functionality of work overalls, and the softness of a kimono. The entire visual language is bound together by the motif of hand‑painted cornflowers – drawn directly from the text of the performance, which references the film Kornblumenblau. This modest flower becomes a sign of memory, a trace of something fragile that survived despite the brutality of the world. In my work, the cornflowers are like a breath of air in the suffocating space of the camp – delicate yet indelible. I build this visual language deliberately, balancing between aesthetics and cruelty, between beauty and violence, between stage and memory.
photo: Tobiasz Papuczys