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, reflecting on 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 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 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 monstrous 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/. Returning to folk heritage while processing inherited shame, 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, storytelling, hands-on work, voice practice 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. 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 playing with somatic and mental habits, both as part of dance training and as a research tool in artistic and social contexts:
BECOMING-BODY & WORKING WITH THE OBVIOUS - using improvisation across media
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
“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.)”