In their performance Wojciech Grudziński and Maria Magdalena Kozłowska together with a group of collaborators open up a risky dialogue, taking advantage of the fact that the teacher is not present.

Now, what? Are you a student in need of a good lesson, or are you a teacher in search of a willing student? Will you obey this binary choice, or are you ready to refuse, non-conform, and deny it? This is where the game begins.

Polished wood, solidity, smoothness. 
Hardness you can hold on to. 

Imagine a ballet barre, a pragmatic yet sacred object prone to fetishization that grounds hierarchies. By centralizing touch and the prospect of support, it proposes an insight into the corporeal, intimate experiences of artists, both pupils and masters. 

It is a long wooden timeline embodying the lineage of dancing some-bodies. It is a kind of prosthesis, a fading support system, something that is supposed to annihilate itself. It can become a fetish: rigid and hard, phallic in shape, subjected to multiple touches of various hands. 

Its specific objecthood resonates with the quality of the student-teacher relationship: oscillating between trust and vulnerability, admiration and rancor. Visualizing the barre can support dancers deprived of its touch, but it can also become a kind of obsession with security that is not possible in real life. 

Sweat stains, imprints on the mirrors, dust bunnies in the corners; there are many material witnesses and traces present in a studio. As Sara Ahmed puts it, the speech act becomes an object, which gathers us around. Can NO gather us around and materialize itself in space? What is the choreography of refusal? How do you dance a disagreement? 

Note: TEACH ME NOT! is an edgy game. Students of course have a right to disagree anytime but then have to leave the party.

Production: Zodiak – Centre for New Dance, Wojciech Grudziński, Nowy Teatr, Adam Mickiewicz Institute
With the Support of: ICK Dans Amsterdam.

Co-organized by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of the international cultural program of the Polish Presidency of the Council of the European Union 2025. 
Co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, Republic of Poland.
Co-financed by The Capital City of Warsaw.