She was a friend of someone else is a performance by Polish playwright Gosia Wdowik. In the play, she explores the link between burnout and activism: the fear that rights cannot be acquired for life, and the moment someone is not paying attention, they can disappear. Using a personal story, she describes the commitment to women's rights in Poland. With subtle choreography, the viewer is drawn into the life of a woman who decides one day, instead of protesting, to stay in bed, only to get out again someday.

The project originated in a country where women have limited access to contraceptives and where abortion was declared illegal in January 2021. Despite immense protests, women's rights still remained disregarded. The original idea behind She was a friend of someone else was that women could unite and publicly admit that they had had an abortion, without feeling guilty or afraid, and that this would change or affect the law.

Wdowik brings the story from Poland as a universal warning for a need to protect democratic values, as well as a portrait of exhaustion and resignation - as main enemies in her long-lasting activism.

Biography

Theater artist and current GILDIA (Union of Polish Theater Makers) member Gosia Wdowik was born in 1988. Despite having her heart in Poland, she often imagines herself elsewhere. She worked with the subject of burnout and explored the area between exhaustion and agency during her Master's studies at DAS Theatre (2020–2022) by incorporating activism-related techniques into her artistic practice. In her performance Shame (Nowy Theater in Warsaw), she explored social shame related to working-class origins in her own family over three generations of women. Her main concern was how to create both theater and change from a place of exhaustion.