Name: She was a friend of someone else
Start: 2025-03-27
End: 2025-03-28
Location: Hebbel am Ufer - HAU2

Gosia Wdowik

“She was a friend of someone else” tells the story of how women in Poland fight for their right to abortion. The theatre work is about protests, activism and burnout. It addresses the desires and doubts associated with activism. What happens when you need to fight the same battles over and over again?

In “She was a friend of someone else,” Gosia Wdowik documents the struggle for abortion rights in Poland: A group of activists is planning a high-profile protest against the stigmatisation and criminalisation of abortion. The idea is for women to show solidarity and speak out publicly about their abortions without fear or shame.

As a collective political act, this then influenced legislation at best. It could have been an activist success story. But it became a story with too many beginnings and not enough endings – and an exhausted narrator. Is quitting an option? How can resistance and change emerge from a state of exhaustion?Gosia Wdowik herself lies mute and motionless on the floor. Her countless engagements have left her burnt out.

The work enquires about the correlation between activism and burnout, which manifests itself, among other things, in the fear that rights once acquired are not secured forever and threaten to disappear again in moments of retreat and rest. A subtle choreography opens up an emotional space around the experience of an exhausted woman who stayed in bed one day instead of protesting - only to eventually return to community life.