Marta Ziółek is a choreographer and performer. Before she began her study of choreography at the School for New Dance Development (SNDO) in Amsterdam, she was a student of an inter-faculty humanities programme at the University of Warsaw.
She has taken part in workshops, projects and collaborations with such choreographers and theoreticians as Bojana Cvejić, DD Dorvillier, Deborah Hay, Maria La Ribot, Trajal Harrell, Benoit Lachambre, Ann Liv Young, Xavier Le Roy, or Meg Stuart.
Her latest choreography Body Eye or how to say (2013-2014) is a collaboration with Lisa Vereerthrugghen produced by the Het Veem Theater in Amsterdam. The piece draws on Ziółeks explorations of the work of American artist Carolee Schneemann, which go back to the Poles earlier piece, Ciało Oko [Body Eye], conceived as part of Komuna//Warszawas RE//MIX programme (2013).
Ziółeks latest works have been shown in the Netherlands, the USA, and Poland: in Warsaw (Komuna//Warszawas RE//MIX programme; New Dance Review) and Lublin (International Dance Theatres Festival).
In 2011 she received the prestigious Dance Web scholarship at ImpulsTanz Festival in Vienna, in 2012 she took part in Europe in Motion, a platform for young, emerging choreographers, while in 2013 she received a scholarship from the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts.
In her art, Marta Ziółek focuses on expanding the scope of choreographic practice. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, she examines boundaries between visual arts, performance, and choreography.
As a choreographer, she tests limitations in performance, investigating everything that condition freedom of action in choreography. She is interested in exposing, unmasking, and challenging the things that are forced upon, required of, and dictated to a choreographer as an inseparable element of his or her practice. She considers artistic dance to be, first and foremost, about the way dancing bodies influence one another and the environment around, as well as the manner how they are disciplined and exposed when in motion. She is interested in creating situations, kinetic events, dancing in an expanded field of image and sculpture. She approaches performance as a concrete way to reconfigure history and corporeity, to work with embodiment, its reproduction, and disembodiment (alienation). She considers choreography to be an experimental practice which triggers different forms of thinking in movement and thus must continuously redefine its limits.
Her new project Black on Black isinspired by a series of black paintings by Rodchenko and aims to elaborate on the idea of black choreography. The project is produced by the Het Veem Theater in association with the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and will be showcased in Amsterdam and Warsaw in 2015.
Currently, Ziółek is collaborating with Aleksandra Hirszfeld on an interdisciplinary project titled Monadologia [Mondadology] in Warsaw.
