WOODS WON’T VAPORIZE

A choreographic research on European Wilderness initiated with a visit to the Carpathian Mountains (Kôprová and Tichá Valley in Slovakia). It has been developed in collaboration with Alica Minar within the #TakeHeart residency in Hellerau over the summer and autumn of 2022.

Working with the notion of wilderness touches on several aspects simultaneously: the question of power relations between humans and land, the practice of letting go of control in favor of building collaborations, zooming into biological processes enabling alliances between living and dead matter, and shifting attention from static objects to dynamic fluxes and interdependencies. It became a mixture of dance, cooking and carpentry. Within the process, we collected multiple stories about woods and wilderness focusing on relationality and biological processes, we worked with dance scores and storytelling as practices of intimately imbricating body and environment and celebrating energy flows. We focused on glucose as the primary substance that all living beings exchange and wood from the perspective of craftsmanship. The research became a space for reflecting on work organization and collaboration. Making joint decisions as a relational process allowed us to generate a third quality beyond our individual agendas and capabilities.

Concept, research & performance:
Alica Minar, Dorota Michalak

with the generous contribution of Erik Baláž and  Matthias Nuss


SUPPORTED BY:

︎ Fonds Darstellende Künste aus Mitteln der Beauftragten der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien im Rahmen von NEUSTART KULTUR, #TakeHeart Residenzförderung

︎ HELLERAU - Europäisches Zentrum der Künste


PERFORMED AT:

HELLERAU - Dresden (DE), October 2022