Blue screen is a post-production technique that allows image manipulation. By using an even, blue background, the camera-recorded action can be transferred to completely different scenery. In his performance, Przemek Kamiński refers to the cultural history of the colour blue, approaching it through the prism of the ancient Greek term pharmakon, meaning medicine, poison, and something that must be sacrificed. The artist creates a series of vertical landscapes, in which a body irradiated by the colour moves between the visible and the imagined. The first and second plan, as well as viewers’ fantasies, blend into each other, while the identity is negotiated along and across the surface of the screen.

photos: Maciej Zakrzewski for Art Stations Foundation by Grażyna Kulczyk

Pharmakon (it radiates)

In May 1961, American choreographer Simone Forti presented Five Dance Constructions and Some Other Things. An audience gathered in Yoko Ono’s famous loft on Chambers Street, New York, witnessed a kind of movement installation in which dance exists in a space above conventional stage-audience division, the way object exists in an art gallery space.
Przemek Kamiński appropriates Forti’s idea, recycles and reinterprets the original choreographic material. He creates his own “dance constructions”, focusing on the materiality of action, rather than potential narrative associations. Performer and simple objects occupy the same space and engage in similar kinds of movements: waving, sliding, rolling, squeezing, crushing, dropping, hanging.

photos: Grzegorz Karkoszka

Some Other Things

Emotionally overloaded forms circulate online and offline sculpting the surface of our bodies and identities. In ﻿So Emotional two performers hidden behind white theatrical masks inhabit images of ecstasy and despair, anger and fear to explore historical and contemporary forms of emotions and the emotionality of the form itself. While shadowing each other, they browse through artworks, memes, gifs, scenes from film and music videos. They hack them, pile them up and set them in motion to consider the body’s ability to act, resist and transform individually and collectively.

If the body is a battleground and affect is a new frontier of political struggle, how can we prepare for it? And how can we cultivate micro resistance trapped in a never-ending chain of repetition and appropriation?

photos: Katarzyna Szugajew

So Emotional

THEREAFTER is a pseudo-documentary film that captures two protagonists dwelling in the imaginary landscape. It is speculation about a place that exists in a parallel universe, in a distant future, long after contemporary society has collapsed. While wandering, roaming and manoeuvring therein, they experience a series of phantasmic encounters. They gradually discover features of the landscape and commit to a place where green is greener than ever before.

THEREAFTER

Blue (ribbon dance) is a monochromatic choreography - a choreography reduced to, produced by and related to one colour. Blue becomes here a primary quality of an embodied experience as well as a strategy for contemplation and poetic reflection - a reverie of love, grief and loss. The performer moves against a dense soundtrack, which comprises reflections on the history of the colour as well as a personal narrative, letting the blue movement leak out from within his body.

"Why blue? People ask me this question often. We don’t get to choose what or whom we love, I want to say. We just don’t get to choose."
Maggie Nelson "Bluets"

Photos: Marta Ankiersztejn for Institute of Music and Dance

Blue (ribbon dance)

Sunrise Sunset departs from the scattered archival materials revolving around the life and work of American dancer and choreographer Fred Herko. A forgotten member of Judson Dance Theater and an amphetamine-driven frequenter of Andy Warhol’s Factory, he famously ended his life with a flamboyant grand jete out the window of an apartment in Greenwich Village, New York.

Performed by Martin Hansen and Przemek Kamiński, Sunrise Sunset revisits Herko’s forgotten and incomplete archive and body of work that sat between the theatrical and the quotidian, between the balletic and the unfinished. Yet, it always carried the excessive, the campy and the neo-romantic at its core.

Sunrise Sunset draws a speculative horizon on which different materials, references and accounts by his peers like Andy Warhol, Jill Johnston, Elaine Summers, Diane di Prima and Herko himself are brought to life, extended and reimagined. Together they form an impressionistic portrait that revisits Herko’s queer utopian spirit of the unfinished, the too-late and the not-yet-there, all between sunrise and sunset – a stretch of radiant glow.

Photos: Dorothea Tuch

Sunrise Sunset

Soft Spot is a science fiction drama performance series choreographed by Przemek Kamiński. The show, released in May 2018, stars Przemek Kamiński, Suvi Kemppainen, Julia Plawgo and Alistair Watts. Set in the fictional city of Berlin, Germany, in the late 2010s, it portrays four strangers whose lives become connected due to a strange dream.

The first season focuses on the group’s search for the legendary soft spot, amongst supernatural events happening around the city. It consists of five episodes - “What we saw in the dream”, “Full Moon”, “The Cave/Time Warp”, “I Knew You Where Waiting” and “To the Mountain/Nucleus” - that can be presented separately or in any order. Each of them reveals a different part of a choreographic mystery.

Photos: Jakub Świetlik

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Pshemek Kaminski

Pharmakon (it radiates)

Some Other Things

So Emotional

THEREAFTER

Blue (ribbon dance)

Sunrise Sunset

Soft Spot

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