(2022)

A choreographic and body-based field research initiated within Kinship Residency in Studio ALTA, Prague, developed in collaboration between Xenia Koghilaki, Dorota Michalak, and Julek Kreutzer.

WHAT CAN BE LEARNED FROM THE GARDEN ABOUT COLLECTIVENESS, TIME, AND IDEOLOGY?

Three choreographers attempt to "conspire with” the local gardens embedded in the infrastructure of the city. Through the notion of nakedness, we search for a sense of belonging to what goes beyond being and acting human.

We consider a garden a protected space of co-existence and encounter between humans, plants, insects, vegetal and mineral agents as well as different kinds of particles like chemicals, dust, or noises. Using the notion of nakedness as our basic choreographic tool we want to explore how the conspiracy between all those agents can be reinforced. In the notion of nakedness, we search for the potential to approach what is “underneath”. With this as a starting point, we develop choreographic strategies to explore contradictory dipoles like permeability and resistance, camouflage and exposure as well as the possibility of hijacking concrete (architectural or imaginary) structures. On another note, we explicitly turn to the garden as a site that depends on human intervention. We are interested in observing the staging of human relationships* with what grows and lives. Following this understanding, the garden reveals for us an implicit writing of ideology, power relations, time and society in which it is shaped.

The overall project is approached through the collective mode of working centered on a non-hierarchical exchange, based on sharing choreographic tasks, field observations, speculations and principles of sustainability.

*quote from Edenic Apocalypse to Gardens against Eden by Natasha Myers



CR
ED
ITS

Concept, research & performance:
Xenia Koghilaki, Dorota Michalak, Julek Kreutzer


SUPPORTED BY:

︎ Studio ALTA

︎ Goethe Institut


PERFORMED AT:

Studio ALTA - Prague (CZ), August 2022

︎ ︎ ︎dorotmich@gmail.com