HI,
I’M DOROTA
I’M A DANCER, CHOREOGRAPHER AND EDUCATOR WHOSE WORK SPANS CREATING VOCAL//DANCE PERFORMANCES AND SITE-RESPONSIVE INTERVENTIONS, COLLECTIVE SINGING, FACILITATING WORKSHOPS AND GROUP-PROCESSES, AND ORGANIZING.
MY METHODS ARE GROUNDED IN BETWEEN DANCE//IMPROVISATION, CHOREOGRAPHIC THINKING, SOMATICS, VOICE WORK, FOLK CULTURE, FIELDWORK, INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION AND COMPARATIVE STUDIES.
IN MY PRACTICE, I CALL UPON WHAT IS VISCERAL AND ELEMENTAL.
I APPROACH DANCE AS A BIOTECHNOLOGY, A SITE OF KNOWLEDGE CREATION AT THE CONFLUENCE OF PHANTASY AND PHYSICALITY, EMBODIMENT AND IMAGINATION, HERITAGE AND SPECULATION. THROUGH DANCE AND CHOREOGRAPHY, I DO THE WORK OF RE-ORIENTING AND RE-ORGANIZING, ATTENDING TO MEMORIES OF MATTER AND PERCEPTUAL FLUIDITY – WITH ATTENTION TO DETAILS AND CZUŁOŚĆ [ˈʧ̑uwɔɕʨ̑] (in polish: receptivity with its technological connotations, sensitivity and tenderness).
MY PRACTICE SPEAKS TO ANIMISM, SENSORY AND ATTENTION POLITICS, ECOLOGY, TOUCHING TECHNOLOGIES, BODY AS A PROCESS – BODY AS AN ARCHIVE, RURAL CULTURE, SOCIO-SOMATIC ASPECTS OF DANCING AND MUSICKING, PREFIGURATION IN ORGANIZING AND WORK CULTURE...
My work is grounded in ecosomatic, improvisational practices that foreground bodily//physical intelligence. Starting from dance, I flirt with and trespass different branches of knowledge, theories and practices, temporarily tasting or fully digesting their languages and perspectives (my dearest influencers will pop up in various texts describing my projects and in my Instagram stories).
I work with movement, voice, language and musicality as tools for transgression, breaking through what is stagnant in the body and in society, attuning to what is already there, strangely familiar, on micro scales, in the openings and cracks, in unsettling resonances, in multitudes. I focus on culture as biology and vascularity of systems that connect personal histories with geo-politics. Grounded in deep listening as political and physical involvement, I address entanglements of personal fears and dreams with systemic injustice and exploitation. Tangibility of voice, impersonal affect, cellular empathy, kinaesthetic engagement, tissular phantasies – these are my tools to enhance “czułość”, unleash imagination, and sharpen attention, necessary to meticulously delve into the living archive - the processual body with its inherited histories, hybridity and prosthesis.
I draw from traditions of rural Eastern Europe as a critical tool for rethinking the present. Following folk heritage, I work with dance as cathartic, rebellious and relation-building practice, shifting attention towards its tactile, musical and energetic aspects. I’m interested in non-metric grooves, polyphonies, and circular dramaturgies as forms of collective knowledge and ways of sensing into reality. Practice of dancing and musicking, its various aesthetic qualities and induced pleasures, is socio-political tool and a medicine. In this spirit, I use performing arts as a way of engaging the power, and fragility, of collective attunement.
Choreography is a poetic, political and somatic work, an art of juxtaposing, layering, sensing, distorting, augmenting, dismantling, sharpening, refocusing, attuning, creating new temporalities, repeating, pausing, insisting, attending to the details, paradoxes and coincidental proximities, and giving agency to gut feelings.