Renata Piotrowska-Auffret among 20 priority artists of the 2017 AEROWAVES network

Aerowaves is a European Network of dance specialists which supports young choreographers, enabling them to present their performances at international stages. Every year, the members of Aerowaves convene to select the most interesting choreographic submissions by young dance artists appointed as ?priority companies?. Having counted the votes cast in the final round of this year?s session, the jury selected the group of the 2017 Aerowaves priority artists. The list of 20 companies and artists selected from among the candidates includes authors from 15 European countries, including some of the most promising choreographers. This year?s selection once more attests to the diversity of genres, themes and cultures encountered among the young artists from across Europe, testifying to the vitality and continuous development of European contemporary dance scene.

One of the selected artists is Renata Piotrowska-Auffret and her piece Death. Exercises and variations, realised in collaboration with the dramaturgue Bojana Bauer. We are happy to congratulate both artists on their success!

About the piece:

Death is one thing that cannot be experienced. It is an irreversible event from which one doesn?t come back. With the person gone, the possibility of experience vanishes with it. Renata Piotrowska?s latest piece confronts this experience with theatre, in Line with Peggy Phelan, to whom theatre is the place in which society ?rehearses for loss, and especially for death.?

Piotrowska?s solo approaches this rehearsal with engagement, distance and humour. She goes through different scenarios making up a performative diptych that travels through centuries of (in)experience with death while she draws on its artistic, cultural and social representations.

Based on the observations that the contemporary body aspires to defy dying more then ever, and that the omnipresence of death in the media is conversed by its evacuation from our everyday lives, she turns to some historical hallmarks associated with the issues of death and dying, such as dance macabre, ritualistic repetition, personification, violence, exhaustion, gore or eroticism. Choreographing it as an elusive partner through its many faces, Piotrowska tries to track our understanding (or lack thereof) of death today.

Concept, choreography, performance: Renata Piotrowska-Auffret

dramaturgy: Bojana Bauer

lighting: Ewa Garniec

production: Burdąg Foundation

partners: Centre in Motion, Wawerskie Centrum Kultury, Centre for Contemporary Art ? Sala Laboratorium, Centre Naitonal de la Danse in Paris, La Briqueterie ? CDC du Val-de-Marne, Teatr Soho.

premiere: 28 November 2014, Theatre Institute, Warsaw.

Special thanks to Simon Auffret, Anna Goładanowska, Małgosia Ignatowska and Marysia Stokłosa.

Renata Piotrowska-Auffret ? choreographer and performer, graduate of the Aleksander Zelwerowicz Theatre Academy in Warsaw / Faculty of Puppet Theatre in Białystok, and the Faculty of Choreography at the I.C.I. ? Centre Chorégraphique National de Montpellier/Languedoc-Roussillon in Montpellier, France (MFA, exerce ?research and performance?). In her work, Piotrowska-Auffret juxtaposes affective choreography with conceptual thinking. She is interested in the actions which confront the duality of the mind and body, experience and image, concept and practice, humour and seriousness, the individual and the communal. In contemplating contemporary world she draws inspiration from her own experience and theoretical texts in humanities. She is intrigued by contemporary politics of bodies, which she analyses through the lens of politics and representations of historical bodies and bodies from foreign cultures.

In 2007-2011, she taught regular classes in improvisation and contact improvisation in Warsaw, as well as workshops for adults in Poland and abroad. She also held contemporary dance classes for young people in 2009-2011. She collaborated with Grzegorz Kowalski?s video workshop at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (Faculty of Sculpture), where she taught improvisation and body awareness. An author of the educational dance programme Mam ochotę na taniec (I?m in a mood for dance) at the Ochota Theatre in Warsaw, in which she combined theory and practice, Piotrowska-Auffret currently holds classes for young people at the Ochota Theatre and Contemporary Dance Lab. She is also the co-creator and a pedagogue of the Year-Long Course in Experimental Choreography organised by the Burdąg Foundation.

Renata Piotrowska-Auffret among 20 priority artists of the 2017 AEROWAVES network

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