AR.50 RE/MIX // XXVI Goleniowskie Spotkania Teatralne BRAMAT
Bałdyga, Krukowska, Laszuk, Majewska, Marczak, Olkiewicz, Stokłosa, Szczawińska, Więcek, Żwirblis
We recall remixes of famous performances by Akademia Ruchu (“Academy of Movement”) from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, prepared in June 2024 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of AR in artistic pairs – AR performers collaborated with creators of younger generations. Five pairs – five remixes.
Janusz Bałdyga / Grzegorz Laszuk – “Autobus” (“The bus”) (1975)
Cezary Marczak / Dominik Więcek – “Inne tańce” (“Other dances”) (1982)
Krzysztof Żwirblis / Maria Stokłosa – “Życie codzienne po Wielkiej Rewolucji Francuskiej ” (“Everyday life after the Great French Revolution”) (1980)
Zbigniew Olkiewicz / Barbara Kinga Majewska – “Kartagina” (1986)
Jolanta Krukowska / Weronika Szczawińska – “Piosenka” (“The song”) (1995)
Before the show– from 6.30 pm – in our theatre’s hallway you’ll be able to watch archival recordings with fragments of oryginal performances by Akademia Ruchu.
Curatorial team responsible for the Remixes and the Anniversary programme: Zofia Dworakowska, Grzegorz Laszuk i Tomasz Plata.
Curator’s description
Several thousand performances on the streets of cities and towns – in Poland, Europe, and America. A dozen or so outstanding theater performances and appearances at the world’s largest festivals, including Documenta, Performa, and Santarcangelo. Continued activity in the social sphere, including the establishment of several independent cultural centers (Dziekanka, Dom Kultury Cora, Kino-Teatr-Tęcza). A significant influence on the formative period of the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. Books, writings, films, seminars. This and much more – this is the legacy of Akademia Ruchu, arguably the most important formation in Polish non-institutional theatre of the last half-century.
For 10 years, since the death of its founder and leader Wojciech Krukowski, the Academy has been operating in a state of dormancy. No new performances or projects are being created, but the members of the group are taking care of the archives and pursuing their own creative practices.
The AR.50 anniversary project is an attempt to confront the experiences of five Academy performers with those of younger generations of artists. The idea is unprecedented: no other Polish performing arts classic has ever attempted anything like this before.
AR.50 recalls history (the performances are accompanied by an exhibition of carefully selected documentary materials), pays tribute, but also sets the archive in motion, boldly testing its possibilities. Thus, Komuna Warszawa, linked to the Academy by long-standing friendships and cooperation, once again—as it did years ago in the RE//MIX project—tests the formula of a “living archive” of performing arts, an archive that evokes the past through action, reinterpretation, and re-performance.
Remixed performances:
“Autobus” (“The bus”), 1975
The performance was first presented in May 1975 in Warsaw’s Dziekanka. The decision to create a work devoid of action and using only images was a significant departure from accepted theatrical conventions. The performance showed a group of figures—bus passengers and the driver—frozen in prolonged immobility on an invisible platform. Their minimal expression resulted from physiological changes caused by immobility and exposure to strong spotlighting.
“Życie Codzienne po Wielkiej Rewolucji Francuskiej” (“Everyday life after the Great French Revolution”), 1980
The action of the performance consisted of a collection of everyday behaviors most typical of the image of Poland in the 1980s. These facts were transferred from real life into the interior of a symbolic white cube “stage,” with respect for objective truth, independent of emotional impressions. Everyday Life… is a collage of situations which, while remaining documents of their time, take on metaphorical and commentary meanings. The dynamics of the performance, in which the time measurements of the stage action often equate to the flow of real time, was also based on treating the visual and rhythmic structure of the action as an autonomous value.
“Inne tańce” (“Other dances”), 1982
“Other Dances” was created during martial law. AkademiaRuchu presented 16 short pieces called “dances,” each of which was a separate theatrical sign. The motifs of the dances were inspired by various, often contradictory, stereotypes of social behavior. This vision was determined by experience: both participation in social facts and their mythology. By choreographing everyday behaviors, the actor sought to highlight the various psychoses of social groups in Poland at the time. He came closest to his own individual truth when he stepped off the stage. The dances were accompanied by music from Polish new wave bands (Białe Wulkany, Brygada Kryzys).
“Kartagina”, 1982
The performance was an attempt to express the idea of a society that continues to exist despite the crisis of its structures. The motif adopted at the starting point of work on the form of the performance is “critical condition.” This refers both to the model situation of a social group and its consciousness. In Kartagina, the visual sign of crisis is created by a geometric plane dividing the space of action and changing its position in subsequent sequences. This sign is a barrier limiting the natural development of the activity of the group and individuals, but also inspiring this activity and determining its transformations. This creates a suggestion of the infinity of cycles, impulses, and actions in the name of maintaining an active attitude. But can the very fact of renewable, one-way activity remain the only optimistic argument?
“Piosenka” (“The song”), 1995
The stage was crossed diagonally by a red wall filling the entire space. The structure of the performance corresponded to the structure of the song. The individual “verses” were dialogue scenes involving a different pair of actors each time, taking actions resulting from their previous meeting in search of a common theme for their work, a common inspiration –
which required both a convergence of aesthetic concepts and a shared interpretation of different individual life experiences, as well as a shared experience of working in the theater. The recurring “refrain” of the action is the motif of a procession, which appears from time to time, in which the actors are also dressed in white wedding dresses and bend over a white pram, from which the wind blows, moving their robes, hair, and a white flag raised above the group. Excerpts from Marcin Świetlicki’s poem, beginning with the words: “This revolution, these terrible events…” were played from a tape recorder. The theme of the dialogues touching on autobiographical threads of the actors’ actions is primarily repeated attempts at self-identification in the context of political and social changes and the experiences of theater work. The action of the performance is accompanied by the recurring theme of Laurie Anderson’s song Coming Together, with music by Frederick Rzewski.
Premiere
15 June 2024
Team
Janusz Bałdyga / Grzegorz Laszuk – “Autobus” (1975)
Cezary Marczak / Dominik Więcek – “Inne tańce” (1982)
Krzysztof Żwirblis / Maria Stokłosa – “Życie codzienne po Wielkiej Rewolucji Francuskiej ” (1980)
Zbigniew Olkiewicz / Barbara Kinga Majewska – “Kartagina” (1986)
Jolanta Krukowska / Weronika Szczawińska – “Piosenka” (1995)
Curatorial team: Zofia Dworakowska, Grzegorz Laszuk, Tomasz Plata.
Bios
Jolanta Krukowska
Actress, performer, co-founder of Akademia Ruchu. She was a student of Halina Hulanicka, who studied under Isadora Duncan, among others. In the early 1970s, she performed at the Stodoła Pantomime Theater. In parallel with AR projects, since the mid-1980s, she has been creating her own works on the borderline between theater and performance. She has presented them in Poland and at international festivals. For many years, she has been conducting creative workshops on body awareness and movement training for actors.
Weronika Szczawińska
Director, playwright, cultural studies scholar, and performer. In her work, she combines a personal perspective with important social issues. She obtained her doctorate at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She has collaborated with, among others, the National Old Theater in Krakow, the Powszechny Theater in Warsaw, TR Warszawa, and the Wrocław Contemporary Theater. She has also collaborated several times with Komuna Warszawa. For her productions of Nigdy więcej wojny (No More War), Rozmowa o drzewach (A Conversation About Trees), and Po prostu (Simply), staged as part of the Institute of Arts, she received the Polityka Passport Award in 2019.
Janusz Bałdyga
Professor at the University of Arts in Poznań, where he runs the Performance Art Studio at the Faculty of Sculpture. He has been with the Academy of Movement since 1979. He works with performance art and has developed an original style of artistic expression in which he consistently reduces language and means of articulation. In his works, a sense of space and its conditions, as well as the dynamics brought about by human presence, are of great importance. The artist’s body becomes a structural element, a tool for describing space and a testimony to the struggle with matter.
Grzegorz Laszuk
Director, graphic designer, performer, activist, co-founder of Komuna Warszawa. Author of over 50 plays and theatrical performances that are politically engaged or deal with political engagement. Initiator and participant in many collective activities, including the Radio Kapitał internet project.
Krzysztof Żwirblis
Actor-performer, visual artist, curator, and art critic. Working with Akademia Ruchu since 1976. In the 1990s, he ran the AR Gallery at Kino.Teatr.Tęcza, and from 2007 to 2012, the Studio Gallery. In addition to exhibitions, he organizes multi-day social and artistic events and workshops on urban performance art.
Maria Stokłosa
Choreographer, dancer, performer. In her work, she combines choreography with dance improvisation. She is involved in many activities promoting the development of experimental choreography – as an initiator of educational projects and a teacher, as well as the president of the Burdąg Foundation and a member of Centrum w Ruchu.
Cezary Marczak
Actor and landscape architect. Working with Akademia Ruchu since 1973. At the same time, since the 1980s, he has been implementing his own performative projects and plant installations as part of artistic projects.
Dominik Więcek
Dancer, choreographer, performer, fashion photographer, and stylist. His work is characterized by lightness of form, balancing on the intersection of arts and theatrical genres, and playing with his own image. In December 2023, he staged the award-winning performance Glory Game at Komuna Warszawa.
Zbigniew Olkiewicz
Actor, director, performer. Working with Akademia Ruchu since 1974. Since the 1980s, he has been simultaneously implementing his own projects in Poland, Spain, Argentina, and France, among others.
Barbara Kinga Majewska
A classically trained musician specializing in contemporary vocal music, composer, and author of sound installations. She explores the agency of the human voice in an intermedia context (live performances, sound installations, text). Going beyond what is audible, her practice focuses on the non-musical contexts of singing that reinforce the voice throughout the Western musical tradition. In her work, she aims at inherited fantasies about the act of singing and balances on the border where the voice itself becomes a song.
Reviews and Publications
The coverage of the AR.50 celebrations was one of the topics of the fourth episode of the “Pasta Kulturalna” program produced by the History Meeting House. Excerpts from rehearsals and interviews with artists can be viewed HERE.
Dariusz Kosiński, “Akademia Ruchu: what made it unique” (“Akademia Ruchu: what made it unique”), Tygodnik Powszechny 2024, no. 26:
“Akademia Ruchu was an artistic group that consistently worked to suspend and remove restrictions, and thus to expand the scope of freedom within the specific hybrid entity that was the Polish People’s Republic. Even after 1989, its work was aimed (as we can see today, extremely accurately) at the enthusiastically accepted domination of glittering consumerism and the terror of economics as the supposedly only sphere of “hard” reality.
The members of the group consistently opposed these trends, just as they had previously opposed the destruction of the social fabric and the restriction of freedom by the system of ideological control. However, while the Polish People’s Republic collapsed to some extent as a result of processes recognized and reinforced by artists, capitalist Poland, which put an end to the existence of the Akademia Ruchu, continues to grow stronger.
This makes it necessary to seek ways to infect subsequent generations with the Academy’s working methods and creative goals. Not only because of the deep roots of the norms of the system that governs us in our practices, gestures, and figures, but also because of its entry into a new phase—a state accepted and desired by those subject to its rigors. In the face of the growing obsession with “security above all else,” analyses and interventions arising from the spirit and practices of the Akademia seem to be very effective ways not so much of protest as of creating shelters for independent thinking. For we are not exempt from seeking tools that allow us to maintain a minimum of agency and awareness of what we are participating in.
Read the whole text HERE
Dominik Gac, “Wybudzanie” (“Awakening”), ‘Raptularz’ No. 64 “Na offie” (“Offstage”):
“An empty stage. Cezary Marczak sits on a chair with his back to the audience. Dominik Więcek stands in front of him. He smiles. Białe Wulkany plays in the speakers. I still can’t make out the words except for the two that make up the song title: Wojna piła. Marczak hands the younger performer a coat. Więcek, suppressing his laughter, performs variations on one of the scenes from Other Dances, in which the actors exchanged clothes. He takes off and puts on the coat. He loops the movement. He changes the tempo. It’s not a show, but you can see that he’s excellent. I get the feeling that he’s having fun, that he’s joyful. At the end, when the music stops, Marczak says amusedly, “Wojna, kiła, pomidory?” (War, syphilis, tomatoes?) and immediately explains, quoting the lyrics of the song: “Wojna piła z mojej głowy!” (War drank from my head!). What is blurred and vague today is concretized in an absurd joke. And yet war is drinking from our heads – who knows, perhaps even more greedily than in the early 1980s, when Białe Wulkany recorded their song and Akademia Ruchu prepared Other Dances? Or am I exaggerating? After all, we are not under martial law today. Rockets are falling on apartment blocks in Kiev and Lviv. However, there are no tanks on the streets of Polish cities, and the cities that Putin is razing to the ground are far away, with mountains, fields, forests, and “only” those pits full of corpses between us. Comparisons and updates are difficult and risky, yet they remain an inherent feature of remixing.
Read the whole text HERE
Co-financing
The event is co-financed by the City of Warsaw as part of the Komuna Warszawa – Społeczna Instytucja Kultury (Warsaw Commune – Social Cultural Institution) project.
