Four artists from the Army of the Individual – Benjamin Abras, Alice Joana Gonçalves, Lisbeth Gruwez and Radouan Mriziga – prepared workshops and dance performances for the Malta audience. Old Brewery New Dance celebrates the 15th anniversary of its existence, while the Polish Dance Theatre presents the story of its wanderings. For the first time artists invited by Malta Generator and the Idiom curator Nástio Mosquito will stand behind the decks at silent discos. Young people from the Peaceful toolbox initiative and the Stereo 48 group invite to dancing happenings. Get ready to dance!
The international dance program of the Army of the individual
The Brazilian artist Benjamin Abras invites to voice and dance training workshops The Voice of the Voice in the Voice – open for everyone, regardless of age and agility. Meetings with the artist will show how Afro-Brazillian dance traditions and techniques can liberate the body, and how the voice may create its presence publicly, politically and in relation to other bodies. You can still sign up!! The workshops will conclude with joint happenings in various parts of Poznań. Meet Benjamin Abras:
There will be two dance performances of artists from the Army of the individual at Zamek Culture Centre. Alice Joana Gonçalves is a dancer, choreographer and lawyer specialising in criminology. Her work is on the crossroads between two worlds: one of crime, and the other of body, instincts, emotions and impulses. The Foxes is a small-scale performance of two artists, which uncovers the fragility and opens up to the closeness with another body. Meet Alice Joana Gonçalves:
The performance of the Belgian dancer Lisbeth Gruwez, who cooperated with figures such as Jan Fabre, Needcompany, Jan Lauwers, Grace Ellen Barkey, or Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, will be presented in Poland for the first time. Together with Maarten Van Cauwenberghe she forms the Voetvolk duo. In It’s going to get worse and worse and worse, my friend dance is combined with footage of speeches by an ultra-conservative American evangelist, Jimm Swaggart. Meet Lisbeth Gruwez:
Radouan Mriziga is a dancer and choreographer from Marrakesh. He studied at the P.A.R.T.S school, established by Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker. In his performance 55 he endeavours to make his own physical presence into a kind of architectural form. There will be an opportunity to meet the artist at Dom Studencki Hanka. Meet Radouan Mriziga:
Dance is hard to see – Old Brewery New Dance on Malta
15 exciting years devoted to presenting, creating, and broadening the field of vision of modern choreography has passed. The special festival program Old Brewery New Dance has been prepared since the very beginning by Joanna Leśnierowska.
The program includes works of Polish choreographers such as You are safe, which takes on the problem of movement and moving in the modern world. According to the author, Agata Siniarska, one cannot escape the problems facing our planet, there is no returning to the beginning and the state of purity. In This is the real thing the centre of reference is the body. The dancer Anna Nowicka poses a question about what the body actually is, how we perceive it and to what extent we can consciously construct it. Masacre is the story of modern ballroom dancing, in which Paweł Sakowicz will show how dances of enslaved communities from the regions of Brazil, Haiti and Cuba have been codified and became popular entertainment for the upper-middle class.
Old Brewery New Dance also showcases international artists. The artist include Ivo Dimchev, who will propose a joint Selfie concert. Sofia Dias and Vítor Roriz invite to Out of any present – a cosmic journey between what is external, distant, and simultaneously vital. The performative installation Durational Rope and the work entitled Thisentanglement by the Brazilian duo Quarto is the first rendition of a 10-year research project called Rope. Long and incessant manipulating of a rope creates a language in which effort bordering on extreme exhaustion gradually changes our perception of the body and the object. Chiara Bersani in Gentle Unicorn tells the story of her own „usurpatory body, muscle and bone” which is 98 cm tall, and which she names after a mythological creature – the unicorn.
Polish Dance Theatre on Malta
Two anniversary plays, the latest play and a Portuguese story. The program of the Polish Dance Theatre is a journey through the history of the wandering stage.
The newest play of the Polish Dance Theatre is an epic tale of our times interpreted as an age-old story of exclusion. Will be see the Promised Promised Land or a reversed utopia? The play Fobos is a study of the fear of the individual and an attempt to understand what scares us and why. The play 45 is an anniversary premiere, the crowning piece of the theatre’s 45th artistic season. It takes the form of an interactive journey with the audience. It’s „wandering” structure is a reference to the story of the theatre, which has not had its own stage since its foundation. The fourth play, The Investigation, is a documentary, intergenerational story of the birth of the Polish Dance Theatre in 1973.
Tickets to the plays are available online at Going and Empik, as well as Centrum Informacji Kulturalnej.
Dancing toolbox and peaceful silent disco
We will fill the festival centre on Liberty Square with movement and music! During the day we will have breakdance workshops with the Palestinian group Stereo 48, and late at night: silent discos with the legendary NOS trio, DJs from Poznań and Portugal, as well as – for the first time – with artists invited by Malta Generator and the Idiom curator Nástio Mosquito.
Malta Generator invited high-school students to co-create the program. The Peaceful toolbox initiative will present projects created from the need of talking about things that are important to them. One of the initiatives is a dancing project Pre-peace, in which activists use the choreography they developed together during earlier meetings to restore the state between war and peace.
The nights will be a wild ride thanks to silent discos. On 21 and 28 June the festival club will host Portuguese DJs invited by Nástio Mosquito. On 22 June – we will have a collective silent disco organised by Malta Generator. Two channels in the headphones will be taken over by the Warsaw collective FLAUTA, their selection including: techno, house, electro, synthwave, postpunk. On the third channel we will have the vouging DJ from Future V – an international group from Berlin – who will transform silent disco into queernight! On that night, the fun will be accompanied by a worthy cause – the profits from the entry tickets (PLN 15 or more) will go to Kids Paradise. On 27th of June the decks will be taken over by Poznań artists – the Młoda Kultura collective, which is a part of the Peaceful toolbox and have also prepared an exhibition and a concert , as well as Dj Elvira and Bromance. To finish off, on 29 June, Malta’s favourite night shift: the NOS trio : Michał Nogaś, Agnieszka Obszańska, Agnieszka Szydłowska!