
I Love Ballet
choreography: Ramona Nagabczyńska
Duration: 60 minutes
Tickets: 40 zł / 50 zł
Trigger warnings: smoke, loud music and stroboscope are used in the show
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I Love Ballet 07.11.2025, 19:00
- Buy ticket
I Love Ballet 08.11.2025, 19:00
The statement ‘I love ballet’ is quite anecdotal among dancers. This is a phrase that is often uttered by ballet students when they are asked why they chose to pursue a ballet education and feel the oppressive gaze of their ballet teacher on them.
Four dancers and independent dance artists, who graduated from ballet school but abandoned ballet for other dance forms, take a fresh look at ballet. They note what continues to attract them to the discipline, what rejects them, what traces they see of their ballet education in their current bodies and lives. After 20 years since their adventure with ballet ended, Aleksandra Borys, Karolina Kraczkowska, Ramona Nagabczyńska and Iza Szostak achieve the critical distance needed to notice the ‘text’ of ballet. And as it turns out, this “text” is very rich. Both the ballet librettos expressed explicitly and the narratives hidden behind the scenes can be analysed endlessly as ideological machines.
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Ramona Nagabczyńska about the show:
Agnieszka Berlińska: Have you missed ballet?
Ramona Nagabczyńska: Yes. When I no longer have to prove anything, for example to my ballet school teachers, and I no longer have to worry about whether I have a ballet body and the right bounce or whether I’m stretched enough, I can enjoy ballet. Have fun with it. In ballet school, the phrase ‘I love ballet’ is a tool to manipulate the psyche of children. So that even if they don’t love ballet at first, they can be convinced that they already do. Without this, they would not be able to dedicate themselves so much. A similar psychological dependency mechanism works as in a violent relationship: if you love me, you will endure, even if I beat and humiliate you. Without that, no one would be able to withstand that school pressure.
AB: So “I love ballet” is ironic.
RN: Both yes and no. I avoid being explicit because I’m not interested in dissolving traumas from school. I’m interested in different levels of looking at ballet: ideological, formal, bodily. The whole ballet system is imbued with patriarchy, it seeps into every crevice. At the very bottom, in the corps de ballet, all the ballerinas are supposed to look the same and move the same, not the way their bodies tell them to. The higher up the hierarchy, the fewer women there are and the top belongs to the men. There is a director, soloists and one prima ballerina, even though there are statistically many more women in ballet than men. It is a world constructed by men for men. About their fantasies. We read ballet librettos because there are interesting tropes in them. The woman in ballet is always a beautiful, ethereal and sort of otherworldly being. A female nymph, a female fairy, a female swan. A virgin. She is disembodied: she does not sweat, she does not smell, her corporeality is aesthetic. She floats above the ground on pointe in a world of pleasant fantasies. A woman-child, voiceless, totally passive. Even if she is a sexual object, her sexuality is never threatening or active. It is a passive sexuality, waiting for a man. This pattern of femininity is passed on to children in ballet schools and it has consequences in adulthood. We talk about this a lot in rehearsals. That we struggled to “belt it out”, to go for our own, to disagree with different behaviours and to be treated as partners by men.
AB: Feminist themes have been present in your work for some time.
RN: It’s a dangerous label. You have to be careful with feminism so that it doesn’t become a predetermined canon of behaviour and demands, because that’s usually when the conversation ends. I identify as a woman and take up topics that interest me. In that sense it’s feminist because it’s my voice. I had to step away from ballet, get involved in contemporary dance, art, university studies, so that now I can come back to ballet and look with a different eye. It is only from this perspective that I can draw out what I think is relevant and valuable in ballet for me, today. I want to bring out some of the backstage.
AB: What is the backstage in ballet?
RN: For example, there’s a big disconnect between the behaviour on stage and off stage. On stage, everything is supposed to be nice and smooth. It’s not allowed to show the fragility of the body or that it has limits. When you leave the stage, everything that is dirty and messy comes out. Also in a metaphorical sense – in the relationships between people who badmouth each other. The backstage is physical pain and very hard work, which cannot be seen. And from us it will be seen. It’s been twenty years since we’ve had ballet training, and on top of that we’re each in our forties. We don’t even have to intentionally deconstruct the technique, it happens naturally, there are just cracks. And I find these natural ruptures more interesting than conscious formal deconstruction.
Premiere
30 May 2025
Team
Choreography: Ramona Nagabczyńska
Dramaturgy: Agata Siniarska
Set design and Costumes: Dominika Olszowy
Costume cooperation: Joanna Kotowicz
Music: Daniel Szwed
Lights direction: Piotr Pieczyński
Performing: Aleksandra Borys, Karolina Kraczkowska, Ramona Nagabczyńska, Iza Szostak
Bios
Ramona Nagabczyńska is a dancer and choreographer. She received her artistic education at the Warsaw Ballet High School, the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Frankfurt and the London Contemporary Dance School in London, and her theoretical education at the SWPS University and the University of Warsaw. She works in Poland and abroad.
Her choreographic works include: ‘New (Dis)Order’ (2012) – selected for Aerowaves in 2014, ‘Re//accumulation’ (2012), ‘The Way Things Dinge’ (2014), ‘pURe’ (2015), ‘MORE’ (2017), “Networking” (2018/19), ‘Body Parts’ (2019) – also selected for Aerowaves, ‘Silenzio!’ (2021), ‘Le Jeu de Massacre’ (2021)- together with Barbara Kinga Majewska, “Blogo” (2022), ‘Anonymous Performers’ (2024) and ‘Hate Haus’ (2024) – together with the Hertz Haus collective.
From 2015 to 2019 she was an artist of the international performing arts network apap Network. In 2021 she won the prize for directing the performance ‘Silenzio!’ at the Divine Comedy Festival.
She is one of the co-founders of the collective Centrum w Ruchu.
Agata Siniarska works with augmented choreography. She situates her practice between how we think about the world and how we move in it. Her current research explores the idea of the Anthropocene museum, multi-species archives in times of war and extinction, and the different alliances between human and non-human bodies. In addition to performance and choreography, Agata works as a dramaturgist in the performing arts and recently started her journey through the underground music scene, playing in a band szum (as TATARI together with the noise-punk band rat milk).
She lives in Berlin with her dog Foka. She is a big fan of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. In 2025, she was a bronze medallist at the European championships in Lisbon.
Aleksandra Borys works with choreography in the art and science movement, incorporating science, cosmology and ecology into artistic research. She has been creating choreographic works for over a decade, experimenting with their somatic and immersive form. Her work has been produced by Nature of Us, Foksal Gallery in Warsaw, Nowy Teatr in Warsaw, BlakDance in Brisbane, pelna.lia haraki and NiMAC in Nicosia, Zachęta in Warsaw, Komuna Warszawa Theatre and Art Stations Foundation in Poznań.
She founded and runs the independent choreographic newspaper “Ruchome Teksty”. She is a member of the Warsaw collective Centrum w Ruchu. Nominated for the Prix Jardin d’Europe 2011, winner of the Aerowaves List 2012 and the Polish Dance Platform 2012.
Scholarship holder of, among others. KPO 2024 scholarship programme, the programme of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage, the programme of the National Institute of Music and Dance, a study visit to Movement Research – Judson Church in New York, the Grażyna Kulczyk Research Scholarship, the Młoda Polska ministerial programme, the SPAZIO programme, DanceWeb2011, the ImPACK programme, and the Tour de Choreografes d’Europe programme.
From 2021 to 2022, she developed her artistic research within the a.pass – artistic research on performance and scenography programme in Brussels. Since 2016, she has a Master of Art and Science degree from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London; she also holds a BA in contemporary dance from CODARTS, University of the Arts, Rotterdam; and graduated from the National Ballet School in Łódź.
Karolina Kraczkowska –dancer, performer, choreographer, graduate of the Institute of Applied Linguistics at the University of Warsaw and the Dance in Performance programme at the Laban Center in London. A member of the Polish Dance Theatre from 2004 to 2007, she has worked as a freelancer on productions by Jasmin Vardimon, Fin Walker, Michael Keegan-Dolan, Kirstine Kyhl Andersen, Christoph Winkler, Riccardo Buscarini, Leila Mcmillan, Janina Rajakangas, Uli Sickle, Marten Spangberg and Tino Sehgal. Currently she is associated with the Warsaw circle of experimental choreographers, directors and playwrights, including Paweł Sakowicz (‘Massacre’ and “Drama”), Ramona Nagabczyńska (‘Silenzio!’, ‘Anonymous performers’) Anna Smolar, Anka Herbut, Marta Malikowska and Agata Siniarska, Renata Piotrowska, Magda Ptasznik. She was awarded a scholarship by the Danceweb programme in 2016, mentored by Tino Sehgal and Louise Hojer. Simultaneously, she develops her interests in the area of choreography by realising original solo works. Among others, at the Chez Bushwick residency in New York in 2016, as part of the performance programme at Zachęta (SPA, 2017, Malachowski Square, 2018), Solo Projekt Plus 2018 at Stary Browar and as part of a cultural grant from the city of Lublin (2019 show of work in process at Wawerski Cultural Centre). In these works, she deepens her movement and choreographic practice, exploring the possibilities of body transformation, of changing one’s own identity, based on the perception of the body as a metaphor, an instrument, a tool, an embodiment of the subject animating it, communicating inner thought, feelings and affects. A body perceived as productive and creative, seen not as a fixed unchanging entity, but as a series of processes of continuous becoming, constitution, integration, multiplication, striving to increase its potentiality.
Iza Szostak is a choreographer and performer whose artistic path leads through classical dance, explorations of new materialism to experiments with VR technology. Educated at the Warsaw Ballet School and Codarts – Rotterdam Dance Academy, she started out in classical dance before moving into the fields of contemporary dance, performance and conceptual art.
At the centre of her work has always remained the body – not only as a tool of expression, but as a medium through which to explore relationships with the environment, objects or technology. Her fascination with new materialism led her to explore choreography as a relational practice in which movement not only expresses but also creates reality. This path has led to performances such as RE//MIX – Merce Cunningham (premiered at the Komuna Warszawa Theatre), Europa. Investigation, National Affairs, Skaj is the Limit or Coparic Ballet, in which the body becomes part of a larger structure – sometimes an investigative system, sometimes a machine and sometimes a memory archive.
Since 2020, Iza has been immersing herself in the world of augmented realities, exploring how technology is changing our perception of the body and presence. She creates VR projects such as Future Presence (WRO Biennale) and Score (TRAFO), in which choreography moves into digital space, opening up new possibilities for the experience of movement.
She lives in Warsaw, is mum to Rozalka and Ignasio, co-founding the Centrum w Ruchu collective and developing further projects at the intersection of dance, visual arts and new technologies, often in collaboration with audiovisual artist (and private husband) Kuba Słomkowski.
Co-financing
Co-financed by the funds of Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.

The event is co-financed by the City of Warsaw as part of the project Komuna Warszawa – Social Institution of Culture.

Cooperation
We would like to thank BLOCH for supporting the performance.
