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
Choreography and Performance Przemek Kamiński
Ribbon Dance Score Frédéric Gies
Texts Derek Jarman, Maggie Nelson
Sound HAUT
Voice Martin Hansen
Special Thanks to Julia Plawgo, Aleksandr Prowaliński and Mateusz Szymanówka
2019 Studio Theatre, Warsaw
2019 PQ Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space, Prague
2018 Zeitzeug Festival, Bochum
2018 DOCK11, Berlin
2017 Kunsthalle Zurich, Zurich
2017 Pomada Festival, Komuna/Warszawa, Warsaw
In his work, the colour blue is put into motion with the help of associations, contexts, and experiences borrowed from other artists. Blue (ribbon dance) thus becomes an archive of collective queer experience and a physical manifestation of shared cultural knowledge. […] Kamiński begins his solo with the words ‘It’s very nice to be here. Actually, it’s very nice to be anywhere at all,’ from the very outset negating the distinction between physical and virtual presence and setting the stage for imaginary times and spaces. […] In the show’s closing sequence, Kamiński performs a dance with a ribbon (based on a routine by Frédéric Gies), a practice culturally connoted with women. The movements are thus queerified, avoiding easy categorization and landing in between what is male and female. Whereas typically it is the body that produces the dance, here the dance creates the body, projecting its non-normative image, wedging it between the binary categories and forbidding it to settle squarely in either.
- Anka Herbut A Few Queer Choreographies and a Horizon Imbued with Potentiality, Polish Theatre Journal
Photos Marta Ankiersztejn © Instytut Muzyki i Tańca