text and direction: Bogna Burska
performed by: Klara Bielawka
duration: 50 min.
curator: Emilia Orzechowska (2015/16)
presented at: Teatr na Plaży in Sopot – ARTLOOP 4 Festival, 2015/16; BWA Zielona Góra, 2015; Galeria Szara in Warsaw, 2022; CSW Łaźnia in Gdańsk, 2023
photos: Bogna Kociumbas, Michał Szlaga, Joanna Rzepka

“Failure is both taboo and inevitable in capitalism,” writes Agata Pyzik. Because of this, it does not actually become a failure, but an inevitable, systemic defect. In the monodrama Pleasant and Useful (2015), as the waitress tells her story, she stutters like a computer that’s frozen up. The character repeats the same sentence several times, emphasizing the tediousness of the routine activities performed during her seasonal summer job in Sopot. The piece is a critique of the neoliberal belief in success and productivity, and shows that economic exclusion is usually gendered. A clear example of neoliberal absurdity is the dismissal of university cleaning ladies and their replacement with contracted law students. Hipster establishments are not at all blameless in reinforcing inequality: She also worked in several pubs for modern, leftist, or at least well-dressed young people and eternally young intellectuals in the very center of the capital, but they don’t pay on time there either. And for a broken glass bowl they deduct 60 zloty, which is eight times more than the price of that bowl at IKEA. […] The third time she was fired over the phone; her boss, a psychology graduate in a fancy turban and shoes from a young Polish designer, rips her off for 400 zloty, telling her at the same time to think about herself and her future. After hundreds of lawsuits from employees, another company, Robax, begins to regulate basic work issues, outlines with employees the scope of their responsibilities, pays them regularly, and “as many as” four out of ten people get an employment contract. My God, I don’t have the strength to hear that others have it worse, concludes the main character.

The title of the monodrama – as I mentioned – refers to the novel Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, in which women’s main activity is hunting for a good partner, which proves not at all an easy job. Written two hundred years ago, the novel turns out to be surprisingly up-to-date; the economic situation of women has not changed as much since then as one might think. In Pleasant and Useful, the woman becomes an allegory of work (she performs difficult and unattractive jobs), while at the same time being “pleasant and useful” from a man’s point of view. One of the characters described, enmeshed in a web of economic and social violence, is not fully aware of her situation, although – in a grotesque way – she experiences psychosomatic symptoms suggesting that she is uncomfortable (during sex with James, the pain in her feet becomes […] unbearable).

excerpt from the text Strangely Practicing All the World’s Imperfections. The Tragi-grotesques of Bogna Burska by Wiktoria Kozioł, catalogue Blood and Sugar. Works 2000–2021, published by Gdańsk City Gallery, Trafostacja Sztuki in Szczecin, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, 2021