Project: Grzegorz Laszuk.
komuna//warszawa is ending October with RE//MIX FINALE, a six-week-long festival concluding the fourth, and last, season of the RE//MIX series. More than 40 performance artists – theatre directors, actors, dancers, musicians and composers – are going to show works they dedicated to artists of various disciplines for the last time at komuna//warszawa. The programme includes five premieres, twelve showcases and repeated presentations of remixes created in previous seasons of the series. During the finale we will see works by Iwona Pasińska, komuna//warszawa, Monika Strzępka & Paweł Demirski, Weronika Szczawińska, Edyta Kozak, Magdalena Zielińska, Karol Radziszewski & Dorota Sajewska. Starring as guru artists who incessantly inspire their younger colleagues will be choreographer and ballet reformer Conrad Drzewiecki, iconic American performance group Living Theatre, scandalising Nobel award winner Dario Fo, Poland’s first popularly recognised theatre director Lidia Zamkow, dance rebel and philosopher Jérôme Bel and the legend of Polish theatre Jerzy Grotowski.
First off, on 26 and 27 October (7:30pm) comes the premiere of Iwona Pasińska’s work,Ostatnia niedziela. RE//MIX Conrad Drzewiecki [The Last Sunday: RE//MIX Conrad Drzewiecki] featuring Mikołaj Mikołajczyk.
The festival will end with the launch of a book edited by Dorota Sajewska and Tomasz Plata and published by the Theatre Institute in Warsaw, Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej and komuna//warszawa.
About Ostatnia niedziela. RE//MIX Conrad Drzewiecki:
Iwona Pasińska was brought up on the myth of Maestro Drzewiecki; she actually met him as principal dancer of the Polish Dance Theatre when he worked on Śmierć Izoldy(The Death of Isolde) andPieśń Roksany (The Song of Roksana). The confrontation of a myth and reality inspired her to reflect on Drzewicki’s real role on the Polish dance scene. Unequivocally adored and praised as the ideal of form and content, the maestro snared Polish dance in an aesthetic-conceptual trap which he himself could or would not escape. Setting up norms of making a performance, he also set up standards of its reception. The conventions, habitually accepted by audiences’, have made it impossible for Maestro Drzewicki and his successors to get Polish dance theatre out of the box. One might also ask what stands behind this accepted form.
During 1986 Ballet Meetings in Łódź Drzewiecki premiered his Ostatnia niedziela [The Last Sunday]. Booed and disapproved of, it was the master’s first flop. It was also a proof that experimenting with Drzewicki’s own constructions was more difficult for the artist than following the beaten track to glory.
More about the works:
Edyta Kozak “RE//MIX Jérôme Bel”
Initiated in 2010, the RE//MIX series features new productions referring back to classic pieces of theatre and dance, but also literature and film that, now a bit forgotten, once changed the awareness of people who are today dealing with “strange” theatre, namely theatre that is interdisciplinary, searching, verging on visual theatre, performance art, plastic arts and social actions. These pieces make up a specific cultural canon, shape testes and styles, define its own sources and inspirations, act as points of reference.
Remix is a term borrowed from music; it denotes a work made by processing a different work. It is not a simple interpretation, or a rendition of the original piece using new means of expression, or a new arrangement. When it contains fragments of the original, or samples, they are quotations only. Remix is a new work whose form or content refers back to an original piece, dialoguing with it or interpreting it anew.
Tomasz Plata, the RE//MIX series initiator, about the Finale:Four seasons, tens of premieres from the most exciting young artists representing different genres of performance art: theatre directors, dancers, composers and musicians…, the RE//MIX project has become a unique experience. Firstly, it triggered a discussion on a new, alternative, canon, or set of canonical achievements in the history of avant-garde theatre, contemporary theatre, performance art and related fields. Today we know that such an unorthodox canon may contain John Cage, The Wooster Group, Trisha Brown, and Akademia Ruchu, existing side by side. Secondly, RE//MIXes have added intensity to the discussion on documenting performances, being an excellent occasion to reconsider such elementary questions as, “may a performance be recorded and reused?”, and “if, yes, how and on what conditions?”. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, RE//MIXes have had a practical outcome: they allowed people to network and form a new community, and created a space where they could compare different creative strategies. We’ve achieved so much with such a simple idea – to get a few young artists to work on their favourite performances. It’s time to take stock of it all.
