Set in Theresienstadt and serving as a kind of companion piece to his sociological study of the camp, "The Journey" inhabits the inner experience of participants at every level of that grotesque experiment, from victim to bystander to Nazi.
"The Third Part of the Night" (1971), which opens BAMcinématek's retrospective, develops a metaphor for Poland's World War II occupation out of his father's grotesque wartime experience: being forced to nourish typhoid-infected lice with his own blood in the service of developing a vaccine for the Germans.
A duet between Mr. Wampach and the dancer Tamar Sheref, "Sacre" is billed as a "grotesque and eerie" experience that pushes the performers (especially their lung capacity) to extremes.
The ironic gaze eventually penetrates to a vision of the grotesque quality of experience, marked by the discontinuity of word and deed and the total lack of coherence between appearance and reality.
"We actively engage and we are no longer passively scrolling that grotesque feeling we experience is our brain being disturbed by what unsettles us from the norm," Dromsjel says.
His actors, melding word to flesh, make us believe in their characters' impossibly lyrical, grotesque or otherworldly experiences in the fairy-filled woods at night, as well as in their daylight selves in the ordered world of the court.
He experiences grotesque hallucinations, apparently as a result of post-traumatic stress disorder, and faces more direct threats to his life.
Experiencing grotesque consumer culture in person and then complaining about it is much better, because at the end of the day, you get to pee everywhere before being banned from it forever.
Most worthwhile accounts of the Shoah - and not all are worthwhile, however grotesque and terrifying the experiences that underpin them - emerged years later, a dam-burst of emotion and narrative.
