Art stations fundation - by Grażyna Kulczyk

Oops is a dance performance enacted as a continuous ‘dialogue’ between the dancer (Anita Wach) and the stage, which keeps questioning the meaning of the performer’s and its own existence. The stage takes on the role of a ‘dramatis personae’, addressing the audience and the dancer by way of a projected text: “I’m having trouble with the lights. I know I should turn them on any moment now. But I am afraid that this could be a mistake.”

Even though the stage speaks from a position of a timeless consciousness, a transcendence, “critical reason”; even though it is perfectly aware of the historical loop of mistakes in which it gets caught up over and over again together with the artists, produces, audience, economy, the state, science, religion – it is completely powerless, condemned to the physical presence of the performer. The dancer, trapped in her own physical presence and at the same time a captive of its context, can only defend her own meaning through her body. Both set a limit to each other and both are forced to admit to each other how every time anew they manage to betray each other. Mistake is the only meaningful reason for their existence.

Oops addresses the mechanism of the mistake, which acts as a noose from which there is no escape. For there is never just one mistake. It is always followed by an endless series of mistakes, until the need for change becomes too great. You change your dress style, or eating habits, your partner, job, name, address, bank, director, marriage, president, government, constitution, system … Life becomes an endless process of correcting mistakes, revolving around the repetition of one and the same mistake – to correct the mistake. History gradually loses its meaning. “Enlightened reason” got stuck at the court of King Louis XIV, cynically condemning every attempt to reach a solution to failure. It has become the captive of the mistake.

Jacek Kopciński, literary historian, dramaturg, theater critic and editor of the Polish monthly magazine Teatr, proclaimed Oops for the best dance performance in the season 2011-2012.