choreographic research with Katarzyna Paluch
In the quest for success we sought a safe place, orientation, a messianic form. Our flesh, our memories and our minds have become figures shaped by the vectors of the necessary. By trying to get together as characters with redefined emotions, we inhabit and create this unsafe place called success, in which individual struggles are incomprehensibly interconnected in transformative cycles of failure and re-creation. (Propaganda text. Not a successful story.)
The project Forward failure is an ongoing research which uses staged performance to examine the dualism of egoism and collaboration in an environment of constant catastrophe.
The first part of the research took place in Portugal (Casa Varela, Pombal) and in Poland (ŻAK, Gdańsk) in July 2022.
In 2023, we started working on a workshop format that uses the improvisational practices that we used to develop ‘forward failure’. We named the partnering practice ‘improbable lifts’ because, even though the partners are not (traditionally) cooperative and their intentions don’t overlap, there is still an outcome of this dysfunctional duo: Moments in which success is redefined, and the skewed result of a failing collaboration develops a poetic power.
Improbable lifts is a partnering practice that involves two or more bodies becoming one absurd unity. We seek to explore how physical tension builds the relationship and space between us. What possibilities and desires do the connected bodies allude to? What support and space can we find in this uneasy structure? How do we navigate the balance between ourselves and the other? What different strategies are there, and which difficulties do we encounter?