POLSKA / Agata Maszkiewicz (POL) & FRACTURED / Andrea Miltner (GB, CZ)

POLSKA / Agata Maszkiewicz (POL)

The eve of the grand opening of the European football championship in Poland and the Summer Olympics in London is the best time to present the provocative POLSKA! This enaging performer masterfully handles issues like national pride, the struggle for victory and obsession with perfection like a football player plays with his ball - now black, now white, now black again...that then deflates. The Olympic uniform is an instrument of the cult of the body and must be worn with head held high - otherwise the heads of those around will be hung in embarrassment.

This daring performance, a combination of dance, video, music and performance art, takes the big risks – it doesn’t present dance in the conventional sense, but plays with what dance should or not be according to each audience member‘s own expectations. It relativizes and bends the expressive language of physical theatre.

Identity, gender, embarrassment as an artistic construct – these are the main themes of this performance, in which through physical, gut reactions of sympathy or embarrassment the audience members can literally put on the dancer’s skin. Maszkiewicz experiments with the audience’s feelings, expectations, and projections of their own attitudes. She puts ideas we take for granted, such as national pride, victory, perfectionism or success, into a new context.

At its core, POLSKA fights for the right to fail. Sometimes it’s mischievous, sometimes it’s gentle humour she uses, as she takes us into a giant stadium where the many lanes and tracks are the various paths we can take in defining success for ourselves.

Agata Maszkiewicz
Born in Poland, lives and works in Austria and France. She graduated Institute of Dance Arts at the Anton Bruckner Privatuniversitaet in Linz, Austria and continued her education in a Choreographic Center in Montpellier as a participant of ex.er.ce program. She works, among others, with a collective Superamas (You dream, BIG3 happy/end, Casino), Ivana Muller (60 minutes of opportunism) and creates her own work (installation 'snowflakes' in 2008, solo 'POLSKA' in 2009, performance 'Don Kiewicz & Sancho Waniec” in 2011). She collaborated with Anne Juren, Marian Baillot and Alix Eynaudi on the piece 'Komposition' (2008). In 2008, together with Alix Eynaudi, she created a video-performance 'The Visitants' and later on, in 2009 a piece 'Long long short long short'.

Vincent Tirmarche
Born in 1965, lives in Paris. Between 1986 and 1989 he studied Cinema and Literature (Master and DEA) at the university Jussieu PARIS 7, and in 2002, Digital Arts (DEA) at l'Ecole Supérieur de l'Image, Angoulème, France.
Video and Film maker, musician, & performer, he worked and collaborated in France on many theatrical projects since 1988. Since 2000, he is member of the French/Austrian/Belgium collective SUPERAMAS.

POLSKA is followed by:

FRACTURED / Andrea Miltnerová (Cz/GB)

The body in high resolution

Andrea Miltnerová's long term ethnochoreologic research gives the performance ‛Fractured’ the semblance of an adventurous experiment: this experienced choreographer has succeeded in simulating evolution in real time. In this theatre laboratory, in the confined space of a single illuminated square, Kafka's nightmarish metamorphosis transforms itself into various life forms to the fragmented sounds of a Bach concerto.

During the course of the performance the animality of a spider, a grasshopper or a frog begins to take on human substance ... and the dancer reveals her face. The sorrowfully cogent predetermination of every biological mass - development and replication, pulsation, expiration, movement - is the sole comprehensible means of communication with the non human world. In front of our eyes we see a person, an animal, a surreal creation, an extraterrestrial being - the fruits of our imagination or the projection of ourselves? - the instinct driven movements of the dancer break down the barriers of any identity.

The technically precise choreography is based on the expressiveness of detail, on the strength of the image in which time flows at a slower tempo. Precisely timed micromovements unveil the fascinating world of muscles and sinews beneath the skin, attacking the boundaries of physical possibility, provoking the beauty of physicality. With a minimum of creative tools and maximum means of expression it stimulates the audience's imagination.


‛Fractured’ has been successfully presented at the European Festival of Contemporary Dance in Bytom and Cracow, Poland, at euro scene Leipzig, Germany and has been invited to the Unidram festival in Potsdam, Germany and to the Korzo Theatre in The Hague, Holland.

Reviews of the performance:

...with her brilliant solo ‛Fractured’ she (Miltnerová) is man tested to the extreme and an insect located in a room. Sound, light, movement, interpretation, create a surreal study of a highly real, disturbed being...
(Volkmar Draeger; Neues Deutschland, Berlin; tanznetz, Munich)

Her well-toned shoulders and back become landscapes, her body fluid, abstract sculpture, which constantly reveals new anatomical pictures... The whole is pure body theatre...
(Torben Ibs; Leipziger Volkszeitung)

The discovery of the festival director Ann-Elisabeth Wolff is Andrea Miltnerová from Prague. She mutates from a body in baroque costume to an insect...
(tanz Zeitschrift für Ballett, Tanz und Performance Berlin)

Andrea Miltnerová
British dancer and choreographer of Czech origin, who lives in Prague. For the past few years she has been specialising in baroque dance and its creative fusion with other techniques, above all contemporary dance. She was born and trained in London and came to Prague to dance with the Ballet of the National Theatre. She has also danced in various musicals and currently collaborates as a performer with various Czech and foreign creators.
Her deep interest in the baroque led her to collaborate on the reconstruction of baroque operas and to create her own performances for example: ‛The Baroque Body Revealed’, ‛Pentimento’ and ‛Vertical Horizontal’. She has worked as a director, choreographer and dancer with the early music ensembles Collegium Marianum and Collegium 1704. She is currently working with French choreographer Francoise Denieau, performing in her productions throughout France, including Paris (Opéra Comique) and Versailles (Opéra Royale), in Luxembourg and in Switzerland (Lausanne).

The performance is part of the New Web project 2012.