Analyzing several decades of development of choreography, we identified two areas of practice that seem to be most relevant to the group exercise of Utopia – a shared vision of a better world and its realization. These areas will serve us for specific physical inquiries. The first is the field of somatic practices, which in our digital, disembodied times reconnect us to physical experience and restore our awareness of our own bodies and emotions, and offer respectful interaction with Others. The second area is the rich field of improvisation understood as a laboratory for equal participation, non-hierarchical coexistence and co-creation. Improvisation is also a territory of courageous experimentation that develops the necessary skills to respond to a constantly changing environment and an expanded multisensory perception that enables a constructive response to change. In this way, improvisation becomes a metaphorical model of our existence in a world where the only thing we can be sure of is change. Improvisation skills can be a direct means of strengthening and equipping us with tools – a particular existential toolbox – to effectively and independently manage change (crisis).

The title of the event – Grand re Union – recalls the legendary improvisation collective Grand Union created by choreographers-pioneers of post modern dance in New York in 1969. Referring to its horizontal structure, it emphasizes the necessity of meeting and uniting in common thinking and acting. In this way, the title of the event also refers directly to the heritage of practices and reflections that are the subject of the project. In the face of the pandemic, Grand re Union has become a year-long online program – an international and intergenerational gathering – a symbolic gesture of passing the baton – of transferring the mission of consciously developing this art form to a new generation of artist-activists.

To democratize and decentralize the programming process, and as an expression of belief in the power of collaborative thinking, the program and dramaturgy were initially developed by an international, multigenerational curatorial team consisting of: Joanna Leśnierowska (Poznań) – curator of ASF’s performance program, initiator of the project concept; Julie Phelps (San Francisco) – artistic and managing director of CounterPulse, choreographer and dance activist; Peter Pleyer (Berlin) – choreographer, improviser and pedagogue-mentor (also many Polish artists); Marta Keil (Warsaw) – curator and researcher of performance art, editor of several publications on the subject and its politics; Rivca Rubin (Manchester) – choreographer, team coach and artistic mentor, coordinator and consultant of the Upwording method based on non-violent communication. Later on, every month, it welcomed different guest curators – members of the Grand re Union community.

Originally planned as a ten-day meeting in Poznan, the project was transformed into a platform for collecting, archiving and creating knowledge and experience from our disciplines. Supported by curators, an international and intergenerational group of practitioners, thinkers, philosophers, writers and researchers created an online magazine, whose consecutive issues were published starting from September 2020 on a monthly basis on the project website www.grandreunion.net. The publication of materials was accompanied by live online meetings – workshops/lectures/discussion panels – every third Saturday of the month. This form of the project enabled the documentation, development and dissemination of knowledge created in the field of dance and movement, and at the same time the broadening of choreographic (and other) reflection. Grand re Union became an attempt to outline a new framework for thinking about choreography (and to expand the existing ones), which would allow us to build alliances with other areas of art and to reach out to completely unobvious collaborators and conspirators.

Grand re Union
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