Poznań: Old Brewery New Dance at Malta Festival 2017

This year?s edition of the Old Brewery New Dance review, presented as part of the Malta Festival, will take place on 16-24 June 2017. The event has been prepared by Joanna Leśnierowska (curator) and Mateusz Szymanówka (co-author). Apart from presentations by Hadar Ahuvia, Mădălina Dan & Agata Siniarska, Hanna Kanecka & Aleksandra Bożek-Muszyńska, the review will include accompanying events, organised in several thematic panels, such as the Yanka Rudzka Project: Gestures and Traces (a symposium preceded by the Polish premiere of the Yanka Rudzka Project: Leavening, co-produced by Polish and Brazilian artists); open sessions of the Polish instalment of Nobody?s Business, and initiative devoted to local and international exchange of practices and methods in performing arts; Think Tank Choreograficzny, a research project examining the practices, methods, and tools developed at the juncture of Polish and international contemporary dance scenes?for the duration of five days, the project will leave online space and colonise the Old Brewery, acting as a temporary research institute. The focus will be not so much on the presentations as on projects aimed at knowledge production and exchange through dance, and at discussing the situation of this art field in Poland. The review will conclude with two ?walk+talk? meetings led by the duos of Maria Stokłosa/Frédéric Gies and Alice Chauchat/Anna Nowicka. ?walk + walk? is a series of performance lectures initiated in 2008 by the Austrian choreographer and dancer Philipp Gehmacher. As part of the cycle, choreographers are invited to create solos in which they simultaneously speak and move. Topics range from artists? concepts, through their individual understanding of the body-in-motion, and the history of their practice.

From curators:

?Matsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the world and a weed which grows in human-devastated pine forests of North America and Asia. Thanks to its ability to nourish trees, matsutake allows forests to last despite extreme conditions. In Japan, on the other hand, it is a delicacy, reaching astronomical prices, and collected by precarians ? peasants, immigrants, outcasts of society and fugitives. With all of its contradictions, the case of matsutake, a mushroom with a talent for inhabiting ruined places, becomes a parable of survival, described in The Mushroom at the End of the World. The first sentence of this fascinating book by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, an anthropology professor, is a fundamental question: What do you do when your world starts to fall apart? How to live in the (capitalist, but not only) ruins which we created? Thinkers and scholars agree: the only thing that guarantees survival is symbiosis, cooperation within a(n) (eco)system, not so much a choice and a pleasant exercise, but a complicated necessity ? collaborative survival.

The art of survival, defined in such a peculiar way, has for years been practiced by the artists of contemporary choreography.

It would be difficult to find another discipline which would, literally and metaphorically, inhabit so many difficult, neglected areas; which would experience so many deficiencies; which would be so mistrustful towards all sorts of abuse, celebrate the horizontality of its own structures based on a generous exchange of experiences, collective generation of knowledge, dialogue and (self-)reflection, developing many models of cooperation, full of understanding for diversity and respect for Otherness.

Chorography (with collectivity at its roots), the art of ?mushroom pickers,? the art for special tasks, can offer us today alternative scenarios for ?being together? in the world which obviously went mad.

During this year?s Old Brewery New Dance at Malta, we will meet in practice and practice the meeting ? of curators, artists and audiences ? convinced that the manifold, co-operating, co-responsible, thinking collectively
We, the People
or rather
We.
is still possible.
Not only in the field of contemporary choreography.?

Programme curator: Joanna Leśnierowska

Co-author of this year?s edition: Mateusz Szymanówka

PROGRAMME

16-17 June, 7 pm: The Yanka Rudzka Project: Leavening

17 & 18 June, 12 pm ? 4 pm: Symposium Yanka Rudzka. Gestures and Traces.

18 June, 7 pm: Everything you have is yours?

19 June, 7 pm: Mădălina Dan & Agata Siniarska Mothers of Steel

20 June, 2 pm & 5 pm: Hanna Kanecka & Aleksandra Bożek-Muszyńska Around

Think Tank Choreograficzny

20-24 June / Art Stations Gallery

20-23 June

10 am ? 3 pm: Nobody?s Bussiness doing Nobody?s Dance