Speechless

The work of Alek­san­dra Nowakows­ka with Piotr Korzeni­ak and of the duo PODPORA/KOHYT com­bines research in the area of per­for­mance art, a focus on move­ment and lis­ten­ing, and a search for non-obvi­ous sounds.

Speech­less by Alek­san­dra Nowakows­ka and Piotr Korzeni­ak is a dance solo for body and loop­er. As Jean-Luc Nan­cy writes, the body is the place where lan­guage forms; in lan­guage, some­thing abstract and elu­sive — such as thought — takes on shape and phys­i­cal­i­ty. Lan­guage and speech are part of the body in the sense that they stim­u­late neu­rons, organs, sens­es. Lan­guage and speech are bound up with “rhythm, sound, into­na­tion, breath, and also rep­re­sen­ta­tions of that body” (J‑L. Nan­cy, Cor­pus). This con­cept is the inspi­ra­tion for the solo per­for­mance “Speech­less”. How can one show the body so as to avoid des­ig­nat­ing it or assign­ing it mean­ing? Can some­thing as per­son­al and emo­tion­al as the human voice be shown “as such” — that is, allowed to tell its own sto­ry, rather than used to tell a story?

Bor­der­ing Silence by the duo PODPORA/KOHYT for gui­tar, elec­tron­ics, pre­pared cel­lo and gramo­phone records is an action based on dia­logue — of sounds with silence, of instruments/objects with the bod­ies of the per­form­ers; the con­cert draws on the tra­di­tion of free impro­vi­sa­tion, where, in real time, music is co-cre­at­ed by human and non-human bod­ies — in the ener­gy of con­ver­sa­tion, often on the bor­der of silence.

Pro­gramme:

Alek­san­dra Nowakows­ka, Piotr Korzeni­ak Speech­less PODPORA/KOHYT Bor­der­ing Silence

Per­form­ers:

Alek­san­dra Nowakows­ka dance, sounds Piotr Korzeni­ak elec­tron­ics Katarzy­na Pod­po­ra cel­lo, gramo­phone records, objects of var­i­ous ori­gins Max Kohyt gui­tar, electronics

Pro­duc­tion:

pro­gramme con­cept, text: Alek­san­dra Nowakows­ka, Katarzy­na Podpora

visu­al iden­ti­ty: Karol Tomo­ki Yamazaki

sound engi­neer­ing: Kos­ma Standera pro­duc­tion: Lil­ian­na Krych

Przestrzeń Muzy­ki Współczes­nej Hash­tag Lab is co-financed by the Cap­i­tal City of Warsaw.

More about the artists:

Alek­san­dra Nowakows­ka: dancer, grad­u­ate of the Dance The­atre Fac­ul­ty at AST in Kraków, cur­rent­ly a sec­ond-year stu­dent of Social Arts at IKP UW. She has cre­at­ed act­ing and dance roles, co-cre­at­ed and chore­o­graphed doc­u­men­tary the­atre per­for­mances, as well as ethno­graph­ic projects in the Żywiec and Łemko regions. Beyond the son­ic lay­er of dance she is inter­est­ed in the theme of place and body mem­o­ry — the process of cre­at­ing one’s own paths and giv­ing them mean­ing, move­ment in pub­lic space, and psy­cho­geog­ra­phy. She has cre­at­ed per­for­mances at Teatr KTO, Teatr Barakah in Kraków, Teatr Mały in Tychy, and at OPT Gardzienice res­i­den­cies, Przestrze­nie Sztu­ki in Katow­ice and Lublin, and as a ped­a­gogue, includ­ing with the Krakows­ki Teatr Tańca.

Piotr Korzeni­ak: Musi­cian, com­pos­er and stage tech­ni­cian. Since 2018 he has col­lab­o­rat­ed as com­pos­er and sound artist with Teatr Barakah. Since the start of his career he has realised over 200 the­atri­cal pro­duc­tions and con­certs. Co-author of the music for the per­for­mances “Inni Ludzie”, “Biegu­ni” and “Mat­ka Joan­na od Aniołów” direct­ed by Maciej Gor­czyńs­ki; com­pos­er and sound design­er of the per­for­mance “Mis­ery” direct­ed by Ana Nowicka.

PODPORA/KOHYT: a duo with a dou­ble per­son­al­i­ty, formed “on the bor­der of two worlds”: the world of tra­di­tion­al­ly under­stood, per­formed, com­posed music (Max Kohyt — impro­vis­ing musi­cian, com­pos­er of con­tem­po­rary and the­atri­cal music); and the world of visu­al art — sculp­ture, inter­me­dia, where sound, like lan­guage, can trans­form space (Katarzy­na Pod­po­ra — inde­pen­dent cre­ator active in the field of visu­al and sound art, Doc­tor of Arts, trans­la­tor, focused on lis­ten­ing to spaces and objects, and on the phe­nom­e­non of nota­tion). They com­pose and impro­vise in dia­logue — with each oth­er and with the sur­round­ing space — tak­ing care that their music does not dom­i­nate the sound­scape of the place. They use unusu­al, worn-out, pre­pared instru­ments, togeth­er with objects (whose biogra­phies mat­ter); there are also lay­ers of elec­tron­ics — syn­the­siz­ers, theremin, tape record­ings — manip­u­lat­ed on a reel-to-reel tape recorder as well as played from sim­ple cas­settes on ana­logue devices. Every sound is dif­fer­ent and every sound mat­ters. In 2020, the stu­dio album Nights Are Num­bered was released on Bocian Records.

Tickets

30 PLN