ORGANIZING & COLLECTIVES
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, PARTISAN SOCIAL REPRODUCTION, PREFIGURATION IN ORGANIZING AND WORK CULTURE.
I draw from 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).
During my dance training, there was a very coincidental moment that gave very clear orientation to my practice. It was at the workshop based on traditional Korean dances led by Jee-Ae Lim in 2019 at HZT. We worked with meridians and elements. I danced attending to the wood element that provided me with ground-breaking insights into movement-abilities and relatedness. From that moment, I started to comparatively study plant life and communication across different disciplines. Plants directed my attention towards life as immersion, dissolving rigid boundaries between organisms and their surroundings, mixing the cellular and cosmic, material and energetic. Learning with plants is a labour of giving in to the sensations and pleasures, tangible conditions of ours, diving into the affects, animacy, vibrancy and mysteries of material world. It offers a prism to rearticulate human-environmental relations and tools to practice biocentric, environmental modes of awareness, relatedness and collectivity.
I work with movement, voice, stories 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.
MICROBIOLOGY OF
RELATEDNESS
As a workshop facilitator, I use a mixture of storytelling, score-based improvisations, hands-on practices, voice work and (micro)biological knowledge to access innate bodily virtuosity in dancing, supporting the state of being carried by movement and the access to playfulness in articulation of it.
Skin, membranes and surfaces are approached as interfaces – the places where merging and interdependence happen. Touching visions and haptic speculations enhance fluency and frivolity in reading physical reality (properties, melodies, densities, dynamics and qualities): waves, vibrations, energy circuits, metabolism, fluids and circulations. To be in touch, to be moved, to be a vessel. Delegating agency to the peripheries, decentralizing, attending to details, embracing nuances, facing the unknown.
It can be applied both in a dance training and as a research tool in artistic and social contexts.
Since 2018, I’ve facilitated various workshop formats playing with somatic and mental habits, using phantasising as an embodied, collective practice creating new physicalities, relations and meanings:
BECOMING-BODY & WORKING WITH THE OBVIOUS - using improvisation across somatic and semantic spheres
BECOMING-PLANT DANCE SESSIONS – mixing different branches of knowledge: philosophy, craft and dance to attend to more-than-human sociality
PHYTO-SOMATIC DANCE PARTY - combining visceral meticulousness of somatic microbiology with social intimacy of a (folk) party
MESHWORKING IN PLANTHROPOSCENE
I work with placemaking, commoning, and organizing across various projects connecting art with social engagement. My practice reflects on work culture from an animist and phyto-somatic perspective. I’m interested in dance and choreography as forms of alternative social reproduction, enhancing glocal solidarities and operating across both institutional and bottom-up contexts.
I use MESHWORK as a metaphor that invites an animist vision into organizing and work culture. It resonates with perspectives such as place-thought, which Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe scholar Vanessa Watts describes as “a theoretical understanding of the world via a physical embodiment.”
“Place-Thought is based upon the premise that land is alive and thinking and that humans and non-humans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts.”
In her curatorial text for the “Fiddlesticks” exhibition, Katarzyna Różniak-Szabelska notes (quoting Kacper Pobłocki) that in the Polish countryside, echoes of times when people believed that “even the stone was not regarded as a mute, passive, impersonal thing” persisted into the 20th century - as in the saying: “when stones grew, they were soft.”
Within my practice, following the meshwork metaphor and listening to plants supports the creation of new imaginaries and the unlearning of “disciplined” models of work. This aligns with what Valeria Graziano calls prefigurative practice - addressing the “basic” phantasies that solidify “institutional objects that are never questioned (roles, aims, modalities, economies, temporalities, etc.)”
Such a practice sensitizes to the value of co-inciding, invisible efforts and soft skills of co-creating atmosphere, the flow, health and efficiency of collective metabolism. It invites to consider artistic work within its broader ecology, attentive to its political, situational, material, relational, and affective dimensions, while questioning capitalist schemes of production. It acknowledges infrastructure, systemic entanglements, and sensorium as integral to the process.
This approach calls for respecting and recognizing embodied, situated knowledges, and for insisting on dialogue between diverse knowledge-holding entities. It is a work of hosting and generating spaces for encounters and exchanges - becoming sensitive and critical together through creative communal involvement.
“To co-incide suggests how different things happen at the same moment, a happening that bring things near to other things, whereby the nearness shapes the shape of each thing”.
additional references:
SenseLab - Laboratory for Thought in Motion // action turn and expanded understanding of a field(work) // folk perspectives on authorship and schemes of artistic production // an invitation of Natasha Myers to vegetalize our sensorium and collaborate with plants // invitation of Valeria Graziano to think about artistic practices as elements of partisan social reproduction, rooted in a pre-figurative approach transplanted from the social justice movements to cultural/artistic sector // reflections about Meshwork Choreography by Daisuke Muto, who uses the idea of meshwork after Tim Ingold looking at different strategies of (intercultural) collaboration in the field of choreography // shift from network & inclusion to decolonial politics of matter discussed i.a. by Dimitris Papadopoulos:
“This decolonial politics of matter attempts to restore justice step by step through everyday practice (…). In politics of matter, justice becomes ingrained in the materiality of being: in the soil, in the water, in our bodily tissues, limbs, organs, cells, genes, and molecules. Decolonizing settler land is one thing; decolonizing matter is another (even if they are tightly connected).”