hi,
i’m dorota michalak (she/her)
choreographer, dancer, somatic educator, organizer - working internationally at the confluence of artistic creation and social engagement
from konin, central poland, based in berlin, eastern germany since 2016
my work spans choreography, performance, transdisciplinary (field)research, and facilitation - engaging embodied knowledge, sensory politics, and more-than-human ecologies
across choreographic, communal and pedagogic projects, i host spaces of collective involvement -approaching dance and music as a shared energetic process foregrounding embodied musicality, corporeality of resonance, and somatic awareness
my work is an experiential biotechnology at the confluence of phantasy, physicality, and heritage - attending to memories of matter and perceptual fluidity to question and transcend bound and homogenic ideas and forms
my practice evolves through transcultural dialogue, between institutional and bottom-up contexts, and between different sites of knowledge-production, growing from the idea of relational meshwork - reflecting on relational aspects of artistic work, placemaking, commoning and organizing within more-than-human sociality
in 2020, i co-instigated doom mood collective bringing together artists from rural and urban areas, different backgrounds and generations, centering exchange around dance and music practices at risk of disappearing. since 2023, i have been member of otucha collective focusing on phenomena of human voice, rural eastern european vocal culture and collective singing
my practice speaks to sensory and attention politics, ecology, touching visions, body as a process – body as an archive, socio-somatic aspects of dancing and musicking, prefiguration in organizing and work culture...
MESHWORKING IN PLANTHROPO-SCENE
MY APPROACH
I’ve been exploring embodied communication and transmedia poetics since childhood. It all began with an attempt to start a girl band with an elementary school friend, spending hours gazing at the stars and the clay soil, engaging in lengthy sessions of existential reflection on a swing, and organizing mediations between friends.
Twenty years later.
Drawing on the notion of animacy as relational becoming, I work on the margins of late-capitalist society, developing what I call meshwork choreography. It reflects my innate need to find connections and resonances between everything, including seemingly distant matters such as cellular communication, party cultures, and old songs.
Meshwork choreography refuses the separation of artistic work from its relationscapes: organizational culture, socio-political context, perceptual sensitivity, infrastructure and the ethics of collaboration within the more-than-human sociality. It is a simultaneously social and artistic process in which the conditions of making are not background but constitutive of the work itself.
As I shift attention from product to process of co-creation and reception, acknowledging the soft power of co-inciding and co-creating atmosphere (invisible, intersubjective efforts, emotional intelligence and soft skills), my work encompasses mutually inspiring activities: CHOREOGRAPHIC (FIELD) RESEARCH + CREATION, TEACHING + FACILITATING, ORGANIZING + CURATING.
Addressing attention and sensory politics, my projects explore how focus can be redirected inward, toward embodied knowledges, and outward, toward shared intimacy, ambience, and synergy. I experiment with formats that facilitate deep dives into tissular fantasies, strengthening a sense of reciprocity and relation both with one's own body and with a (more-than-human) community, exposed from molecular perspective.
I dance to attune to what is already here, strangely unfamiliar, on micro scales, in the openings and cracks, in unsettling resonances, in multitudes and depths. I focus on culture as biology and the vascularity of systems that connect personal histories with geo-politics, grounded in deep listening as physical❤️🔥, ethical and political involvement. Tangibility of voice, impersonal affect, cellular empathy, kinaesthetic engagement, embodied musicality, tissular fantasies – I use these 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 - taking seriously a well-known disco-polo lyrics: “Ciało do ciała, usta do ust i nigdy więcej nie smuć się już”/Body to body, lips to lips and don’t be sad ever again/. Drawing from folk heritage, I work with dance as a cathartic, rebellious and relation-building practice, shifting attention towards its tactile, musical and energetic aspects. Practices of dancing and musicking, their various aesthetic qualities and induced pleasures, are forms of collective knowledge and ways of sensing into reality. In this spirit, I use performing arts as a way of engaging the power, and sensitivity, of collective attunement.
I see my work as alternative social reproduction, generating space for collective involvement, unexpected encounters, embodied knowledges, and glocal solidarities - navigating across institutional and bottom-up contexts and insisting on dialogue between diverse knowledge-holding entities.
MICROBIOLOGY OF RELATEDNESS
ABOUT PRACTICE & TEACHING
As a workshop facilitator, I use a mixture of score-based improvisation, somatic storytelling, hands-on work, voice practice, as well as physical 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.
Touching visions and haptic speculations enhance fluency and frivolity in reading physical reality. Receiving, responding, reacting. Particles, waves, flows, energy circuits. To be in touch, to be moved, to be a vessel. Delegating agency to the peripheries, decentralizing, attending to details, embracing nuances, welcoming the unknown.
Since 2018, I’ve been facilitating various workshop formats:
BECOMING-BODY & WORKING WITH THE OBVIOUS - using improvisation across media and embodiment to find creative potential of glitches in cultural patterns of perception, relationality and movement
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 party to feel into molecular processes underlying the experience of bonding and synergy.
“What we do need to do is make strange the disenchantment and scepticism we have inherited from those whose power was secured in part through sciences designed to invalidate all other ways of knowing the world.”
“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).”
“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 the Polish countryside, echoes of times when people considered that <<even the stone was not a mute, passive, impersonal thing>> persisted into the 20th century - as in the saying: “when stones grew, they were soft.”
prefigurative practice addresses the “basic” phantasies that solidify “institutional objects that are never questioned (roles, aims, modalities, economies, temporalities, etc.)”