Iwona Olszowska. Fot. Jacek Niedzielski.
On Saturday, 30 January 2016 (7 pm), the Old Brewery New Dance and Art Stations Foundation will present the premiere of Anna Nowicka’s Stany Wyśnione (Dream States) at Studio Słodownia +3 (Stary Browar/Old Brewery, ul. Półwiejska 42). The piece features Burkhard Körner, Aleksandra Osowicz, and Weronika Pelczyńska, while the dramaturgy has been devised by Eleonora Zdebiak, who collaborates with Magdalena Ptasznik, among other artists.
As you focus your attention on the words you are reading, you are slowly beginning to relax. Your body is getting warmer, your limbs are getting heavier. You feel your feet resting on the floor, your arms resting on your legs, your torso resting on your pelvis, your head resting on your neck.
The weight of your whole, relaxed body is releasing into the ground. All what obstructs you, all what distracts you, all that bothers you is exiting your body and returning into the ground. With every word you are reading, you are traveling deeper. You go deeper, and deeper. And deeper. You are releasing into the elusive world of flittering images that emerge in front of your eyes. With your eyes open, you Begin to dream.
Stany Wyśnione (Dream States) offers an opportunity to use dreams and imagination in performance practice at many levels. The performers take the audience on a journey into the unconscious, going deeper and deeper into the world of senses and fantasy, charting a route through reality and dream, bringing the imagined into conscious choreographic procedures. The process of dreaming makes it possible to discover unexpected images that become the basis for movement and the core of the piece.
Conscious “opening” of dreams makes it possible to construct a multilayered show that brings together reality and fiction. The performers aptly navigate between the real and the imagined, the visible and the invisible, looking at their works and playing with the audience’s gaze.
The creative process is accomplished with the use of tools offered by The School of Images, such as visualisation or dream openingTM, which consist in multilayered work with the dream material: the text, narration, reoccurring patterns, and a question that is its central axis. The second fundamental tool used in the work is shifting perspectives, moving between three different roles or perspectives of looking: that of the performer, the witness, and the observer. Each of the three roles makes it possible to move closer to or further away from the experience, while providing a context for the viewer.
Dream States explore the intimacy of experience and what happens when it is made public. Each performer’s individual physical material will be presented in its “private”, “sensitive” form though dance.
At the same time, their personal dream experiences that fuel the movement will be amplified and exposed as media material separated from the person who dreamt them via a video camera, mobile projector, and loudspeakers (video recording and projecting during the performance). The audience will watch and experience bodies dancing on the stage, while having access to their film representations and listening to sounds that are reconstructed, relocated, and “liberated” from real-life bodies. Each viewer’s personal meeting with the performers will trigger questions about the reality of experience and the ease with which a glaze may be manipulated, a gesture’s meaning deconstructed and deformed, and emotions artificially evoked.
Anna Nowicka is a graduate of SEAD in Salzburg, Ernst-Busch/HZT in Berlin, and the psychology department of the University of Warsaw. Her artistic research focuses on the relation between a dreaming and a dancing body, especially the choreography of the imagined. As part of her practice, she explores multiple perspectives of looking and the possibilities offered by different viewpoints as regards discovering and revealing all potential images, seemingly unavailable to the eye. She considers choreographing as constantly investigating the relation and tension between the creative process and its outcome (understood also as a side-effect of these investigations).
Concept: Anna Nowicka
Creation: Anna Nowicka, Burkhard Körner, Aleksandra Osowicz, Weronika Pelczyńska
Dramaturgia: Eleonora Zdebiak
Music: Wojtek Urbański
Costumes: Kiss the future ? Tanja Padan
Visualities: Aleksandra Osowicz
In a dialogue with: Bonnie Buckner
Technical realization: Łukasz Kędzierski
Production: Art Stations Foundation by Grażyna Kulczyk
With the support of: VARP ? PA ? Visegrad Fund/L1 association (HU); Hayka design store, Centrum w Ruchu
Tickets at 20 zł (concessionary at 15 zł) are available at the Information Points of the Old Brewery and on ebilet.pl.
More information: www.artstationsfoundation5050.com
