Performance “AR.50 RE/MIX” | Poland
Creators: Komuna Warszawa Theatre, Akademia Ruchu
Curatorial team: Zofia Dworakowska, Grzegorz Laszuk, Tomasz Plata
Programme:
Janusz Bałdyga / Grzegorz Laszuk: “Bus” (1975)
Cezary Marczak / Dominik Więcek / Kacper Szklarski: “Other dances” (1982)
Krzysztof Żwirblis / Maria Stokłosa: “Everyday life after the Great French Revolution” (1980)
Zbigniew Olkiewicz / Barbara Kinga Majewska: “Cartagena” (1986)
Jolanta Krukowska / Weronika Szczawińska: “Song” (1995)
Premiere: June 15, 2024
Date: August 28, 2025 | Thursday
Time: 7 pm
Place: Stage, Art Factory in Łódź, 3 Tymienieckiego Street
Tickets: 40 PLN - early bird / 50 PLN - reduced / 70 PLN - regular
Ticket sales: kicket.com portal / online payment
Early bird tickets: on sale until July 13, 2025
Regular and reduced tickets: on sale from July 14, 2025
Duration: 90 minutes
Age Restrictions: none
Language: Polish
After the performance, around 8:30 pm, we invite the viewers to a meeting and discussion with the artists.
The discussion will take place in the Foyer of the Art Factory in Łódź.
The discussion will be led by Tomasz Domagała.
The discussion will be held in Polish.
DESCRIPTION OF THE PERFORMANCE
The performance “AR.50 RE/MIX” is a remix of famous Akademia Ruchu (Movement Academy) performances from the 70s, 80s and 90s, prepared in June 2024 to celebrate AR's 50th anniversary, performed in artistic pairs. AR performers collaborated with artists of younger generations - 5 pairs - 5 remixes.
Several thousand performances on the streets of cities and towns - in Poland, Europe and America. Several outstanding theatre performances and appearances at the world's largest festivals, including Documenta, Performa, and Santarcangelo. Continuously sustained activity in the social sphere, including several established centres of independent culture (Dziekanka, Dom Kultury Cora, Kino-Teatr-Tęcza). Significant influence on the formative period of the Ujazdowski Castle CCA. Books, magazines, films, seminars. This and much more. These are the achievements of Akademia Ruchu, perhaps the most important formation in Polish non-institutional theatre of the last half-century.
For the past 10 years, since the death of its founder and leader Wojciech Krukowski, the Academia Ruchu has been operating in a kind of dormant mode. No new performances or actions are produced, but the members of the group are engaged in looking after the archives as well as their own creative practices.
The “AR.50” jubilee project is an attempt to confront the experiences of the Academy's five performers with those of younger generations. The idea is unprecedented: perhaps no one else from the domestic classics of the performing arts has so far decided on similar action. “AR.50” recalls the history (the actions on stage are accompanied by an exhibition of carefully selected documentary materials), pays homage to, but also sets the archive in motion, boldly testing the possibilities it contains.
Thus, Komuna Warszawa, linked to the Academy by a long relationship of friendship and cooperation, once again - as it did years ago in the “RE//MIX” project - tests the formula of a “living archive” of the performing arts, an archive that evokes the past through action, reinterpretation, reperformance.
REMIXED PERFORMANCES
“Bus” | 1975
The performance was presented for the first time in May 1975 in Warsaw. 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 figural group - the passengers and the bus driver - frozen in prolonged stillness on an invisible platform. Their vestigial expression resulted from the physiological transformations caused by their immobility and exposure to strong headlamps.
“Everyday Life after the Great French Revolution” | 1980
The action of the performance was formed by a collection of everyday behaviours, most typical of the image of Poland in the 1980s. These facts were transferred from the reality of life into the interior of a symbolic white cube “stage”, with respect for the objective, and therefore independent of emotional, impression of truth. “Everyday Life…” is a collage of situations that, while remaining documents of their time, acquire metaphorical and commentary meanings. The dynamics of the performance, in which the temporal measures of the stage actions often equate with the flow of real time, was also based on treating the visual-rhythmic structure of the action as an autonomous value.
“Other Dances” | 1982
“Other Dances” were created during martial law. Akademia Ruchu presented 16 short pictures called “dances”, each of which was a separate theatrical sign. The motifs of the dances were inspired by different, often opposing, stereotypes of social behaviour. The vision was determined by experience: both participation in social facts - and their mythology. The actor who danced these everyday behaviours tried to point out the various psychoses of social groups in Poland at the time. They became closest to their own individual truth by stepping off the stage. The dances were accompanied by the music of Polish new wave bands (Białe Wulkany, Brygada Kryzys).
“Cartagena” | 1982
The performance was an attempt to express the idea of a society that persists despite the crisis of its structures. The motif adopted as the starting point for working on the form of the performance is the “critical state”. This refers both to the model situation of a social group and its consciousness. In Carthage, the visual sign of the crisis is formed by a geometric plane, dividing the space of the action and changing its position in its successive sequences. This sign is a barrier that limits the natural development of the group's and individuals' activity, but also inspires this activity and determines its transformation. It creates the suggestion of an infinity of cycles, entrainments and actions, in the name of maintaining an active attitude. But, can the mere fact of renewed, unidirectional activity remain the only optimising argument?
“Song” | 1995
The playing field was diagonally crossed by a red wall, filling the entire action space. The structure of the performance corresponded to that of a song. The individual “stanzas” were dialogue scenes involving, each time, a different pair of actors, taking action arising from their previous meeting, in search of a common motive for their work, a common inspiration - which required both a rapprochement of aesthetic concepts and a common interpretation of different individual experiences, life experiences, and a common experience of working in theatre. A recurring “refrain” of the action was the motif of a procession that appeared from time to time, with the actors also dressed in white wedding dresses and leaning over a white pram from which the wind blew, moving the robes, hair and a white flag raised above the group. Excerpts of a poem by Marcin Świetlicki, beginning with the words: “This revolution, these terrible events…” were played from a tape recorder. The motif of the actors' dialogic actions, touching upon autobiographical motifs, is primarily a repeated attempt at self-identification in relation to the context of political and social changes and the experience of theatre work. The action of the performance is accompanied by the regularly recurring motif of the song “Coming Together” performed by Laurie Anderson with music by Frederick Rzewski.
INFORMATION ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Janusz Bałdyga - professor at the University of Arts in Poznań, where he runs the Performance Art Studio at the Department of Sculpture. Member of Akademia Ruchu since 1979. He is involved in performance-type activities and has developed an original character of artistic statements in which he consistently reduces the language and means of articulation. In his works, the 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 constructional element, a tool for describing space and a testimony to the struggle with matter.
Grzegorz Laszuk - director, graphic artist, performer, activist, co-founder of Komuna Warszawa. Author of over 50 theatrical performances and actions that are politically engaged or talk about political engagement. Originator and participant of many collective actions, including the Internet project Radio Kapitał.
Cezary Marczak - actor and landscape architect. Member of Akademia Ruchu since 1973. At the same time, since the 1980s, he has been carrying out original performance projects and plant installations as part of art projects.
Dominik Więcek - dancer, choreographer, performer, fashion photographer and stylist. His work is characterised by lightness of form, balancing on the intersection of arts and theatrical genres and playing with his own image. He created the award-winning performance “Glory Game” at Komuna Warszawa.
Krzysztof Żwilibris - actor-performer, visual artist, curator and art critic. Member of Akademia Ruchu since 1976. He ran the AR Gallery at Kino.Teatr.Tęcza in the 1990s and the Studio Gallery from 2007 to 2012. In addition to exhibitions, he carries out multi-day social-artistic actions and urban performance workshops.
Maria Stokłosa - choreographer, dancer, performer. In her works she combines choreography with the practice of dance improvisation. She is involved in many activities for 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.
Zbigniew Olkiewicz - actor, director, performer. Member of Akademia Ruchu since 1974. Since the 1980s, he has been simultaneously realising his own projects, in Poland, Spain, Argentina and France, among other countries.
Barbara Kinga Majewska - classically trained musician specialising in contemporary vocal music, composer and author of sound installations. She explores the causality of the human voice from an intermedial perspective (live performance, sound installation, text). Moving beyond the audible, her practice focuses on the extra-musical contexts of singing that enhance the voice throughout the canon of the Western musical tradition. Her work takes aim at inherited fantasies of the act of singing and balances on the edge where the voice itself becomes the song.
Jolanta Krukowska - actress, performer, co-founder of Akademia Ruchu. She was a pupil of Halina Hulanicka, who studied with Izadora Duncan, among others. In the early 1970s, she performed at the “Stodoła” Pantomime Theatre. Parallel to her AR projects, she has been making her own works from the borderline of theatre and performance since the mid 1980s. She has presented them in Poland and at international festivals. For many years she has led creative workshops on body awareness and movement training for the actors.
Weronika Szczawińska - director, playwright, cultural studies scholar and performer. In her works, she combines a personal perspective with important social themes. She defended her doctoral thesis at the Art Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She has collaborated with the National Old Theatre in Kraków, the Powszechny Theatre in Warsaw, TR Warsaw, and the Współczesny Theatre in Wrocław, and several times with Komuna Warszawa, among others. She was awarded the 2019 Polityka Passport for her productions of “No More War” and “Talking about Trees” and “Simply” staged as part of the Institute of Arts.
