Wojciech Grudziński, Maria Magdalena Kozłowska: TEACH ME NOT!

In their performance Wojciech Grudziński and Maria Magdalena Kozłowska together with a group of collaborators open up a risky dialogue, taking advantage of the fact that the teacher is not present.

Now, what? Are you a student in need of a good lesson, or are you a teacher in search of a willing student? Will you obey this binary choice, or are you ready to refuse, non-conform, and deny it? This is where the game begins.

Polished wood, solidity, smoothness. 
Hardness you can hold on to. 

Imagine a ballet barre, a pragmatic yet sacred object prone to fetishization that grounds hierarchies. By centralizing touch and the prospect of support, it proposes an insight into the corporeal, intimate experiences of artists, both pupils and masters. 

It is a long wooden timeline embodying the lineage of dancing some-bodies. It is a kind of prosthesis, a fading support system, something that is supposed to annihilate itself. It can become a fetish: rigid and hard, phallic in shape, subjected to multiple touches of various hands. 

Its specific objecthood resonates with the quality of the student-teacher relationship: oscillating between trust and vulnerability, admiration and rancor. Visualizing the barre can support dancers deprived of its touch, but it can also become a kind of obsession with security that is not possible in real life. 

Sweat stains, imprints on the mirrors, dust bunnies in the corners; there are many material witnesses and traces present in a studio. As Sara Ahmed puts it, the speech act becomes an object, which gathers us around. Can NO gather us around and materialize itself in space? What is the choreography of refusal? How do you dance a disagreement? 

Note: TEACH ME NOT! is an edgy game. Students of course have a right to disagree anytime but then have to leave the party.

Bios

Wojciech Grudziński (1991) is a Polish artist, choreographer and dancer based in Amsterdam. His work investigates topics such as the power dynamics that exist (both implicitly and explicitly) within theatre and dance. Wojciech studied dance at a Ballet School in Warsaw and CODARTS in Rotterdam, and obtained his master’s from DAS Theatre in Amsterdam (2021-2023). Explorations of inclusivity, queerness and the embracing of diversity lie at the heart of Wojciech Grudziński’s work. He works without boundaries, shame or coyness on the basis of a created freedom of choreography and performance. His work is an ode to dance and choreography heritage, within which Wojciech strives to create an inviting scope for play and to celebrate a range of different perspectives on the way we see our bodies. Since 2024, he has been an associate artist at the Frascati Producties Amsterdam. In the same year, Wojciech received support from the Centre National de la Danse x Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris to carry out research on the legacy of three Polish dancers from the communist era.

Maria Magdalena Kozlowska is a singer, writer and theatre maker born in Zielona Góra, Poland. She graduated from the College of Inter-Area Individual Studies In the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Warsaw and from the DAS Theatre in Amsterdam. Her performances and videos portrait singing women and sonic utopias. She often works with classical musicians and opera singers, looking into the performance of music, as well as affective labour of singing voice. She also researches the entanglement of voice and landscape, building temporary stages in nature and public spaces. Her work has been exhibited by art and theatre institutions, such as Holland Festival, O. Festival, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Santarcangelo Festival, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Belluard Bollwerk Festival, Gessneralle Zürich, European Cultural Foundation and Venice Biennale of Art. She is currently associated with Frascati Producties in Amsterdam.