Art stations fundation - by Grażyna Kulczyk

phot.Jakub Wittchen

This book has emerged in response to the strong need for reflecting on contemporary choreography in its current contexts and modus operandi. Over the contributions below, it follows this desire to explore the potentials of choreography as a way to think, to act and to perceive reality around us. At the same time, the book is the third and concluding volume of this series dedicated to different aspects of movement making: in its literal and metaphorical sense, and in all varieties of ways we can see and therefore understand choreography in the present day.

This book is made by practitioners. Together, we have aimed to challenge the way we think of what we do as well as how we go about doing it. We want to reflect how we gather, build relations and situate our thoughts and actions in response to the ever-changing reality (social and political) around us. Thus, we hoped to create a space for variety of views, voices and practices enabling both authors and readers to delve into their own reflection and look for possible and impossible inter-connections.

The book has been brought together in the context of multiple crises. The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic only highlighted its complexity, making it clear for us that there’s no way back to some normal, as that “normal” hadn’t been working anyway. What’s at stake here is the social and political order, the pressing need to reclaim agency, to extend the right to choose the way we gather, restore relations and structure our societies anew. 

phot.Jakub Wittchen

At the same time, this book  collects traces: traces of artistic practices and gestures, traces of personal experience, of past or/and current relations, of encounters—all accompanied by long-term (self)reflection of artists. Through this, we want to have a look at where choreographic practices are situated. What do we see when we carefully observe their various contexts? What shapes them? How do we take a stance with our artistic choices? What constellation of desires and urgencies are we operating within? How are collaborative bonds created, and with whom? What’s the landscape of their relations with humans and more-than-humans and what does that all mean?

Together, we believe choreographic practices provide alternative ways of being in the world with each other and being in relations with nature; of caring for each other and with each other. As the only way out is through, we want to co-map the way. That belief has also inspired the transnational, intergenerational project of Grand re Union,  instigated by the two of us with Julie Phelps, Peter Pleyer and Rivca Rubin. Grand re Union was originally designed as a ten-day, in-person gathering, the climax to end of sixteen years of the work of Art Stations Foundation in the bountiful field of choreographic development and discourse in Poland. Eventually, as we explained in the project statement, it was re-designed into a year-long online program bringing together a broad group of practitioners, thinkers, writers, and scholars who generated a monthly virtual publication, with associated live meetings online aiming to document, cultivate and transmit relevant knowledge and practices honed in dance, movement and choreographic reflection and creation. We were showing up in order to be changed and, by extension, to change the world. Together .

The present book, conceived as a final project of the Art Stations Foundation, as well, and formed in parallel to the Grand re Union project, resonates at large with its ideas, and invites you for a collective, ongoing reimagining of the multiplicity of choreographic (and not just) worlds we’d wish to live in. 

phot.Jakub Wittchen

Together, we believe choreographic practices provide alternative ways of being in the world with each other and being in relations with nature; of caring for each other and with each other. As the only way out is through, we want to co-map the way. That belief has also inspired the transnational, intergenerational project of Grand re Union, instigated by the two of us with Julie Phelps, Peter Pleyer and Rivca Rubin. Grand re Union was originally designed as a ten-day, in-person gathering, the climax to end of sixteen years of the work of Art Stations Foundation in the bountiful field of choreographic development and discourse in Poland. Eventually, as we explained in the project statement, it was re-designed into a year-long online program bringing together a broad group of practitioners, thinkers, writers, and scholars who generated a monthly virtual publication, with associated live meetings online aiming to document, cultivate and transmit relevant knowledge and practices honed in dance, movement and choreographic reflection and creation. We were showing up in order to be changed and, by extension, to change the world. Together.

The present book, conceived as a final project of the Art Stations Foundation, as well, and formed in parallel to the Grand re Union project, resonates at large with its ideas, and invites you for a collective, ongoing reimagining of the multiplicity of choreographic (and not just) worlds we’d wish to live in.

Buy the book online >> Fundacja Bęc Zmiana <<