On benefits of team improvisation
Best Polish choreographers train young Ukrainian artists
The Les Kurbas State Centre for Theatre Arts hosted the first series of workshops (the last one will take place on November 6): the leading Polish choreographers, directors, and playwrights invited young artists to attend weekly classes and trainings.
The fashion for art lesson, which started to spread in Europe about 20 years ago, finally reached Ukraine. Of course, in terms of the number of summer schools and trainings the Ukrainian culture space is quite far from the European milieu, but Ukrainian artistic youth starts to understand that the knowledge and skills acquired at the academic educational establishments may be way too scarce, especially when you take up modern art. What is the norm for the majority of young European artists (to improve one’s own professional skills, to go beyond the certain professor-teaching circle, to risk while searching and discovering new creative liaisons), has just begun for Ukrainian ones.
The Les Kurbas Studying Center is one of the first Ukrainian institutions that took course towards supporting various workshops and trainings, and has been keeping to it for 10 years. The previous attempts to establish an alternative school of acting skills still echoes there. One recalls with nostalgia the “indignation” with Hryhorii Hladii, Volodymyr Kuchynsky, and Borys Yukhananov’s work with young actors, which raised skepticism at the beginning.
The established tradition could fail to survive, unless our neighbors helped us. The institution involved in popularization of the Polish culture abroad (Adam Mickiewicz Institute and Warsaw Theater Institute) came up with an offer to hold in the Kurbas Center a series of workshops, where Polish artists would teach Ukrainian artistic youth. Clearly, the offer covered the dramatic art, but this time it deals with other spheres as well, such as choreography and dance theater, directing skills, and dramaturgy.
The directions have been chosen not without a reason, first of all, because these usual occupations for a theater are acquiring new qualities in the modern art practice. A choreographer is not the one who invents “dance backups” for drama action, he is rather a script writer who works in a tandem with a director, writes dialogues on the proposed topic or transforms completely a classical work, making it more modern.
This change of the parameters of the established artistic occupations is not accidental, rather provoked by one of the typical attributes of theater production: creating a theatrical product in the process of team or individual improvisation. Of course, such kind of work is typical of Ukraine as well, but no higher educational establishment on theater or art prepares a playwright that would be a director’s coauthor, while dancing theater, known to everyone, is constantly getting dissolved in the overall stream of contemporary dance.
The first series of art workshops, which has recently finished at the Kurbas Center, is a public showing of A Stroll performed by Polish artist Iwona Olszowska, in which she counted on Ukrainian dancers and choreographers. The latter are considered the most mobile and popular among their colleagues, it is proved simply by the vast number of shows and dancing projects.
At the same time, the noise effect of the show led to the trend, when from intellectual artistic activity most of contemporary choreographic streams move to mimicking production. For the artists who held two-week workshops at Les Kurbas Center, Leszek Bzdyl and Iwona Olszowska, such degradation of mass culture is the least desirable thing. That is why the first thing they proposed to do at the classes was to refuse from usual things, feel freedom of mind and body, unbend at maximum, free one’s muscles and body.
The first impetus to existence in such a dance is to understand yourself as a self-sufficient personality, who confirms himself or herself in the surrounding world, while inventing one’s own plastic way of expression, dancing language. Such philosophy of dance enables one to pave his or her way to self-knowledge, not superficial showing or self-demonstration, but, at the same time, it requires different plastic technical skills.
Performing the new combination of movements invented by Bzdyl and Olszowska, trying to think through dancing all the time, improvise, seek unknown things – those who had already possessed certain skills discovered new ways of existence in the space, when arms and legs
