fot. Pat Mic dla teatru Komuna Warszawa
CALL ME JAY is a pas de trois for two dancers and a LED light machine.
It is a dance piece among cables and old-school lamps.
It is a duet that that turns into a group piece.
It is a piece in which different modes of control are being tested.
It is a game in which it is not clear who is under who’s influence.
It is a choreography in which an object becomes a robot, becomes a partner, becomes a mover, becomes a light, becomes a lover, becomes an inspiration source.
It is a dance piece in which stories without words are being told and poetic images are emerging from basic, technical materials.
It is a piece that invites the audience to fantasise about coexistences and unusual human-technology entanglements.
CALL ME JAY is a piece that brings together a dancer, a light operator (who in fact is a dancer as well) and a moving light (a remotely control LED lamp / a robot). The three interact with each other. The first is using her own, human dancing skills, the second remotely (via the board) controls the movement of the light. The third follows the orders. Or at least that’s what it looks like.
This peculiar “ballet” plays with various modes of interconnectivity, dependency and control (visible ones, remote, direct, hidden…) between humans and non humans, displaying different ways of being and doing together : ordering, asking, supporting, negotiating, imitating, amplifying…
Dance emerges from this equation. In this game, the performers (including the moving light) play with different choreographic strategies. They copy, follow, manipulate, improvise, try to control one another imagining multiple constellations. They follow their senses to understand the materiality of things. They touch and listen to transform and be transformed. They allow fragility and friction to exist. They compose with their own bodies, but as well with the cables and some other traditional old-fashion lamps that are surrounding them on stage and that will disappear from the theatre landscapes in a close future.
The comparison of one to another (organic vs mechanic, active vs passive, subject vs object) is constantly present, and the focus is put on what emerges in between the different bodies.
CALL ME JAY aims in creating a space for reflection about different human/technology entanglements. It invites the audience to imagine new possible forms of community: what a collaboration with a non-human could be?
CREDITS:
Project initiated by Agata Maszkiewicz
Researched together with Agnieszka Ryszkiewicz, Emma Tricard
Performance: Agata Maszkiewicz, Emma Tricard
Choreography: Agata Maszkiewicz with collaborators
Dramaturgy: Agnieszka Ryszkiewicz, Vincent Tirmarche
Music: Antoine Tirmarche
Costume: Marta Szypulska
Light design : Séverine Rième
Production: L’Association Chorégraphique
Coproduction: La Manufacture CDCN (Centre de Développement Chorégraphique National) Nouvelle – Aquitaine, Bordeaux / La Rochelle; SPRING Performing Arts Festival (The Netherlands), InSzPer (Performing Arts Institute Warsaw); APAP – FEMINIST FUTURES, a project co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, KOMUNA WARSZAWA;
Residence & support: À la Motte – St Saturnin du Bois; Residenz Schauspiel Leipzig (In the frame of Braking the spell program), BUDA Kortrijk / Tanzfabrik Berlin / Centrale Fies (in the frame of APAP – FEMINIST FUTURES program); L’Avant Scene Cognac; Festival le Grand HUIT à Honolulu, Nantes; L’Espace Franquin Angoulême; Culture Moves Europe, a project funded by the European Union and the Goethe-Institut;
This work was produced with the financial assistance of the European Union. The views expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Union.
Subsidies : DRAC Nouvelle Aquitaine (Ministry of culture / France), Departament of Charente;
PREMIERE:
7,8,9 march 2025 KOMUNA WARSZAWA
23,24 & 25 Mai 2025 SPRING Performing Arts Festival, Utrecht
ARTISTC TEAM:
Agata Maszkiewicz (PL/FR) is a polish choreographer and a performer. She lives in Charente, France and works generally in Europe.
She graduated Institute of Dance Arts in Linz in Austria (2009) and was a participant of the ex.er.ce program in CCN in Montpellier (2007). Before moving to France she was living and working in Vienna. She collaborated, among others with a collective Superamas, Ivana Muller, Alix Eynaudi, Anne Juren ,Paola Caspao, Weronika Szczawinska and Agnieszka Jakimiak.
In her choreographic work she uses bodies, objects, things, texts, images. She likes to create hybrid stage forms, to link different topics, often very distant from each other, and to propose bizarre mixtures. She often uses humor as a tool to make the strangest or “unorthodox” proposition accessible to the onlookers. She always searches for a specific context to create movement.
She loves to dance. And she is busy making dance interesting to look at.
Dancer, choreographer and talker, Emma Tricard is currently based in Marseille. After having trained with Maguy Marin, she graduated from HZT-Berlin and the Master Exerce at ICI-CCN in Montpellier. Since 2015, she has been developing a choreographic research based on the observation and distortion between “saying” and “doing”. Thrown into an adventurous quest, she invents dances of conjugation, thinks her work in the future tense and plays with the causal relationships between things, thoughts, movements and phenomena of nature. Emma Tricard makes dance pieces in theaters, collaborative performances, audio walks, and develops a research-creation with Joanne Clavel, researcher at CNRS in Environmental Humanities. In 2022, she premiers ‘Le Débordement / Die Ausschreitung, at Le Manège de Reims, a french-german choreographic piece of science-fiction made in collaboration with Cécile Bally.
As a performer, she works with the Cie L’Unanime, Sergiu Matis, Alain Michard, Lea Moro, DD Dorvillier, Anna Aristarkhova among others, and accompany the work of Betty Tchomanga as outside eye and assistant to the creation.
Séverine Rième is a performer, choreographer, light designer and poet. After studying literature, she started as a dancer-performer in 1998, then went on to choreograph and direct from 2004 to the present day.
In 2008, she completed a training course in light design and technique, thus extending her choreographic reflection with a physical and organic approach to stage lighting.
Her creative work lies at the crossroads of several practices, combining the body in movement, oral and vocal practices, and the creation of plastic and visual devices. Her research explores the porosity between inert and living, plasticity and erasure, identity and multiplicity.
She is currently working on a number of stage, film and poetry projects.
Her first poetry book, Nos soifs, was published in February 2024 by Les Carnets du dessert de lune in the Lune de poche collection. Her writing is becoming an increasingly important part of her research and creative work.
Antoine Tirmarche, composer of musical score for Call me Jay., he studied Jazz in the Institut Régional d’Expression Musicale of Bordeaux. He then took classes of orchestral and electroacoustic composition in the Conservatoire Gabriel Fauré of Angoulême and graduated in electroacoustic composition in 2023. He works with silence, rhythm, systems and structures and proposes mainly electroacoustic compositions for the stage work of Maszkiewicz.
Less interested in the nature of the sounds than in the gap between them and how sounds interact with each other, his music pieces are often a mixture of recording and synthesis, barely audible and unbearably loud, anxious unrest and soothing calm. He likes to enter into dialogue with a moving body, the stage design or the light and always look for unconventional ways of interaction.
Marta Szypulska lives between Poznań-Warsaw-Lublin, works everywhere. Tailor, costume and stage designer, a graduate of the University of Arts in Poznan at the Faculty of Interior Design and Stage Design with a specialisation in Fashion Design. She directs her artistic activities towards designing unique clothes for street people, unconventional individualists and conscious fashion consumers. She draws inspiration from futuristic visions and the natural world. She is currently pursuing a career in theatrical costume design, personal tailoring and creating custom forms for performance. She has worked in many theatres in Poland, with Weronika Szczawińska collaborating on such works as: “No More War”, ‘Talking about Trees’, ‘Simply’, ‘Urban Birdwatcher’, ‘The Club’, ‘Abandonment Time’, ‘Mushrooms’, ‘Listening Trumpet’. She collaborated with Wiktor Rubin on costumes for the films “Chaplin”, “Curse of the Kennedy Family”, “Citizen Kane”, “Ant Hill”. Together with Wojtek Rodak, she realized the performances: “Sailor”, ‘Tom in the Countryside’, ‘Colorful Dreams’. With Jasmina Metwaly for the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. She has realized performances for Now Poliż, Gosia Wdowik, Hana Umeda and such choreographers as Alicja Czyczel, Marta Ziółek, Wojtek Grudziński and Magda Jędra.
Since 2000 Vincent Tirmarche is a member of the SUPERAMAS collective, where he has created numerous films, installations and performances. SUPERAMAS shows, often “unclassifiable”, combine critical reflection on the contemporary socio-political environment with formal research into theatrical and/or mediatized representation, in the tradition of Guy Debord’s La société du spectacle.
As an artist Vincent Tirmarche is interested in the relation between reality and fiction. His works often propose a blur between the two. His close collaboration with Agata Maszkiewicz is a long-lasting companionship based on artistic respect and mutual agreement on the goal of any artwork: to move the spectators and put at test their believes and their trust in what they consider to be right and true. Therefore, art can become a mean to reflect and criticize our current society. Maszkiewicz and Tirmarche’s work is less occupied with aesthetic accomplishments than with a sharp and accurate critical point of view.
Busy with in situ performances, performative pedagogy, artistic mediation and choreographic games, Agnieszka Ryszkiewicz works in series blurring borders between different art forms and twisting formats of traditional pieces.
After graduating in contemporary dance from IDA (Linz, Austria) she got a master’s degree from Paris 8-St Denis University in philosophy and aesthetics of dance and eventually terminated a two-year choreographic program – ESSAIS – at the National Center for Contemporary Dance in Angers, France (CNDC direction Emmanuelle Huynh).
Since then, she continues to work in a variety of contexts exploring the social dimensions of the human bodies, its iconographies and memories. The encounters with other bodies lead her to produce stage pieces, performances, happenings and performative situations including amateurs. Projects take place both in artistic and non-artistic spaces (galleries, prisons, schools, internet, private houses).
agata maszkiewicz 