Death: Exercises and variations

Death is an experience that cannot be told. It is a boundary which, once crossed, cannot be gone back over. The one who experiences death passes away forever. Renata Piotrowska-Auffret confronts the experience of death and the experience of theatre with distance and humour. She takes up Peggy Phelan’s notion of theatre being a place in which society learns to “rehearse for loss, and especially for death”. Indeed, the choreographer tries to stage the encounter with death itself, collecting various scenarios that form a performative diptych, traveling through centuries of (not) experiencing death and tapping into artistic, cultural and social representations. She concludes that the contemporary body, more so than ever, negates its mortality, while the overabundance of dying in the media actually serves to expunge death from daily life. The artist turns to historical phenomena and phantasms such as medieval danse macabre iconography, rituals, personifications of Death, “gore” aesthetics, or the petite mort of eroticism. Time and again she stages the encounter with death, drawing it into the choreography like an ephemeral partner.

The show has been selected by the Aerowaves Partners' to be our Twenty17 Artists.

Concept, choreography, performance: Renata Piotrowska-Auffret
Dramaturgy: Bojana Bauer
Lighting: Ewa Garniec

Production: Fundacja Burdąg
Partners: Centrum w Ruchu, Wawerskie Centrum Kultury, Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej – Sala Laboratorium, Centre national de la danse in Paris, La Briqueterie – CDC du Val-de-Marne, Teatr Soho in Warsaw, ST Spot Yokohama, Art Stations Foundation by Grażyna Kulczyk in Poznań

Duration: 45 min.
Tickets: 35/25/20 PLN

photo: Marta Ankiersztejn

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