Hanba!

In the year 1931 in the Cracovian quarter of Podgórze a new street band came into being. Far from ordinary, it was a group of defiant musicians who decided to use their song to denounce the corruption, violence and iniquity of interwar Poland, a reality far more complicated than one could imagine today.

The Rebellious Street Band Hańba! ['disgrace'] is a musical and literary fiction, designed to convince the audience that punk-rock was not born in the noisy seventies on the British Isles, but goes way back to the Second Polish Republic, a period marked by extraordinary cultural, artistic and economic growth, but also systematic destruction of democracy, the authoritarian rule of Sanation and its imperialist impulses. With the support of street instruments (banjo, drums, accordion, tuba) and a bunch of interwar poets (Tuwim, Brzechwa, Broniewski), four Cracovian performers impersonate imaginary characters and combine musical inspirations (punk, folk, klezmer) to tell their own tale about the most poetic period in the history of Poland.