East European Performing Arts Platform (EEPAP) supports the
development of contemporary performing arts (dance and theatre)
in 18 countries of Central and Eastern Europe.

KROKI: International Festival of Contemporary Dance (Kraków, Poland)

MP

From the organisers:

This year’s edition under the motto Body Is (Not) Enough will show two faces of contemporary dance art. We will present artists and ensembles which know how to fantastically use the newsy, interactive technologies and those who focus on the body and its potential. olśniewają with new dance techniques. For the first time there will be two Polish premieres on the programme, including MGA’s Digital Garden 2016 produced by  the technical staff of the MGA and our friends – the  dancers. AnothEr premiere is Tomasz Bazan’s most recent project Solar Plexus, inspired by Lem’s novel  Solaris.  Interactive performances will also include a Hungarian zaskakujący poetic  performance The Miracles of the Night by The Symptoms group and the choreographer Reki Szabo.

Three great stars from abroad are also on the programme: the renowned and well-known for years Johannes Wieland with his production Darwintodarwin and Ann van den Broek z with the best Dutch dance performance of the year 2015 -The Black Piece, as well the youngest star,  Sharon Eyal, an Israeli choreographer …  with L-E-V ensemble to present their performance OCD LoveNesting, a performance by the Kraków Dance Theatre, MAŁE KRoki workshops for the youngest participants, NIEZWYKŁE KRoki workshops for persons with disabilities, meetings with artists and screening of dance performances will also be on the festival programme.

Katarzyna Bester is the Curator.

KRoki is a true feast for dance and theatre aficionados, a surprise for enthusiasts of interactive happenings in the space, showing technology in art and the beauty and perfection of human body.

We invite you to the Małopolska Garden of Arts  which will turn into a Garden of Dance for the fourth time!

Iwona Kempa, Festival Director; Artistic Director, MOS

From the curator:

The body – the micro- and macro-space of dance. Here, everything starts from the body and finishes with the body. Whether muscular or sick, full of energy or motionless, freed or shaped, when on stage, it is an autonomous empire, the last resort beyond which there seems to be no more dance.

However, dance is sometimes a journey not to the inside of the body but to the outside of it. This happens when not the inner physical processes become the object of artistic reflection but transgressing them, going beyond the body into the interdisciplinary and multimedia space of new opportunities. 

 

What do artists search for in this space? Both those who “betray” their limiting bodies for the benefit of cooperation with a machine, and those who crave for a human element in their digital, cold worlds? What is hidden behind this deficiency, this need of complementation?

In art, the desire to broaden physical abilities of man has always been present. As in ballet, which could be called an analogue technique of transgression or in bio art, in which transgression assumes directly understood invasion of technical gadgets into one’s own body. In many ways, contemporary dance also creates its own, exclusively bodily techniques constituting a response to transhumanist attempts.

But can the body express anything? Is it a material that is metamorphic enough, plastic enough to express every thought of the mind? Thanks to the presence of digital tools, the dancer reaches qualities which are physically inaccessible. Accompanied by intelligent technologies, the dancer formulates a new sort of attractive and sometimes very creative partnership. To many people, however, the presence of multimedia gadgets on stage is a simplification and a threat to the physical presence that is fundamental to dance, whereas the apparent symbiosis in fact means man’s defeat.

The objective of the fourth edition of the International Contemporary Dance Festival “KRoki” is to confront those two creative concepts, two standpoints, two different practices present in contemporary dance, one of which searches new techniques in the body and the other produces “new technologies” in collaboration with digital media. What does dance win and what does it lose in each case? Does the closer and closer fusion of man and machine, which is present in our postmodern world, translate into their coexistence on stage or is it rather a fight for dominance? Who will survive? What will be the result of this collision? We will soon know.

curator Katarzyna Bester

Other: 

Festival programme and admission prices on the event website.
 

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