hi,
i’m dorota michalak (she/her)
a polish choreographer, dancer, somatic educator, organizer - working internationally at the confluence of artistic creation and social engagement
based in berlin since 2016
my work spans creating vocal and dance performances, site-responsive interventions and transdisciplinary projects, as well as facilitating workshops and group-processes
in my choreographic, communal and pedagogic projects, i approach dance and music as an experiential biotechnology, a site of knowledge creation at the confluence of phantasy, physicality, and heritage - attending to memories of matter and perceptual fluidity
i practice “meshwork choreography” focusing on relational aspects of artistic work across institutional and bottom-up contexts, opening reflection about placemaking, commoning and organizing within more-than-human sociality
i host spaces of collective involvement, bringing together people of different backgrounds and generations around dance and music. in 2020, i co-instigated doom mood collective centering exchange between artists, researchers, elders, and communities from rural and urban areas, whose inherited embodied knowledges and practices are at risk of disappearing. since 2023, i have been member of otucha collective focusing on rural eastern european vocal culture and collective singing
my practice speaks to sensory and attention politics, ecology, touching technologies, body as a process – body as an archive, socio-somatic aspects of dancing and musicking, prefiguration in organizing and work culture...
I work with dance, voice, physical and chemical processes, musicality and archives 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 the vascularity of systems that connect personal histories with geo-politics, grounded in deep listening as political and physical involvement. Tangibility of voice, impersonal affect, cellular empathy, kinaesthetic engagement, tissular phantasies - these are my tools to enhance “czułość” /[ˈʧ̑uwɔɕʨ̑] in polish: receptivity with its technological connotations, sensitivity and tenderness/, unleash imagination, and sharpen attention, necessary to meticulously delve into the living archive - the processual body with its inherited knowledges, hybridity and prosthesis.
I draw from culture of rural Eastern Europe as a critical tool for rethinking the present. Following folk heritage, I work with dance as a cathartic, rebellious and relation-building practice, shifting attention towards its tactile, musical and energetic aspects. I’m interested in non-metric grooves, physics of voice and polyphonies, aesthetics of presence 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 a socio-political tool and a medicine. In this spirit, I use performing arts as a way of engaging the power, and sensitivity, of collective attunement.