The Theatre Association „Gardzienice” – the Centre for Theatre Practices was founded as a theatre and performance group by Włodzimierz Staniewski in a small village Gardzienice near Lublin (Poland) in 1977. Since then, it has become one of the best known examples of experimental theatre, linking musicality, music, performance, and close relationship between the artists and the audience.
In the first period of its functioning, Gardzienice concentrated on the Middle Ages and folk tradition of Europe, i.e. in the "Evening spectacle" (1977) the group used Polish drama from Romanticism period, folk tales and songs, and Rabelais's book. Gardzienice’s most known performances include: “The Life of Archpriest Avvakum” (“Żywot Protopopa Awwakuma”, 1981) and “Metamorphoses, or The Golden Ass” (1997). Since the 1990s, the group concentrates on the Ancient Greek culture as a source of symbols and tropes in European collective imagination, as well as on using ethnographic and anthropological knowledge about different traditions, like the Carpathian region.