In a frame of a LANDSCAPE year (2019) in Komuna Warszawa.

Imagine your landscape.

Is your landscape natural or not at all? Are you there? Or are you looking at it? Experiencing or describing it? Or perhaps you think of it in a different way altogether?

The curatorial idiom for the year 2019 is Landscape. The word brings many associations: with humanities, social sciences, arts, but also with natural sciences. The objective of selecting this idiom is to inspire artists in the broadly conceived performative arts to create multidisciplinary works that transcend genres, works based on non-obvious collaborations and associations. The idea of the landscape is broadly conceived so as to avoid imposing an outlook on the artists but to suggest some possible points of departure. The word landscape and its idea may refer to an objective reality (or perception), but also to its representation. Hence the work on a “landscape” performance assumes creative negotiation between experience and representation (and reflection on strategies of representation). Landscape is something perceived, thus working on it entails reflection on contemporary regimes of visibility and invisibility. We also pose the question of “naturalness” of landscape, joining in the important discourse of the age of Anthropocene. The idea of landscape also refers to the theoretical current that conceives of theatre (or more broadly, performing arts) as a kind of landscape art. We are inspired by visual arts, which have long ago taken up the issue of landscape. The objective of the year-long curatorship is to create works that will present audiences with a map of contemporary landscapes, realised in different paradigms and with a variety of media and aesthetics.

This year’s residents are Agata Maszkiewicz and Rafał Urbacki, distinguished dance artists, both perform and create choreographies. Their works focus on the motif of the body as landscape. The artists invited represent differing artistic techniques and their actions will revolve around bodies of differing motor skills, normative and alternative. Alongside the mapping the body on the basis of Maszkiewicz’s unique artistic style, Urbacki will develop reflection on the sick body – he is one of the few Polish performing artists to explore the narratives and debates surrounding the corporality of the terminally ill. The presentation of the works of both artists may prove to be a landmark artistic event: as Agata Maszkiewicz lives and works in France, her works are long overdue a confrontation with the Polish audience, while the works of Rafał Urbacki have long been absent from Warsaw.(…)”

SUCH A LANDSCAPE

“Such a landscape” is a site-specific work incorporating movement, sound, projection and light. It is a subtle invitation to reformulate relation between participants of the performative event in which the distinction between an active artist and a passive audience and their surrounding is being joifully blurred.

Idea, execution: Agata Maszkiewicz, Vincent Tirmarche, Christophe Demarthe
text: Vincent Tirmarche, Agata Maszkiewicz
music: Christophe Demarthe
costumes: Natalia Mleczak

Premiere:

9–11 May 2019

Further dates:

3 September 2019, KOMUNA WARSZAWA, Warsaw, Poland

24 October 2020, OFF europa festival, Leipzig/Drezden/Chemnitz, Germany

Off Europa: human landscapes