If you have never been to a dance performance
If you have always wanted to try it
If you sometimes have a feeling that you don’t know what dance is about and whether it is at all edible
If you don’t quite clearly perceive the difference between dance and choreography
If you are a dance enthusiast, current and/or future, and want to deepen your knowledge
If you’ve seen choreographed performances before, and you want to take a closer look,
or you are afraid to come back to dance at all, because you feel that you don’t quite understand
or that you don’t understand anything about it.
Don’t worry, you are not alone.

Dance is hard to see was declared by its pioneer, Yvonne Rainer, as early as 1966, at the very climax of the dance revolution which is officially recognized as the beginning of contemporary choreography (and she made a conscious use of the fact that the English word ‘to see’ means both ‘to notice something’ and ‘to understand it’). This revolution was accompanied by the now well-known slogan of the democratization of dance, the direct expression of which was a radical expansion of the dance vocabulary to include activities known to us from everyday life, with running and walking at the forefront, which allowed choreographers to create an egalitarian space of a community of performers and viewers. In reality, however, it was more than that: it was about learning a new way of looking at, and seeing, dance and its organization – choreography – which as an ephemeral art escapes our perception. “I want my dance to be a superstar!” Rainer also confessed, which led her to a break with traditional narration, deprived dance of its causal binding, separated it from the person of its author, made dance an autonomous object and the body the main protagonist – the subject and object of choreography. By programmatically revealing the choreographic seams, concentrating on simple tasks, unveiling the rules governing the organization of movement, a frame was created that ennobled the body in motion and elevated it to the rank of an object worth looking at as any other work of art. And, most importantly, the viewer’s attention was redirected to the previously unnoticed but ubiquitous choreography of everyday life, making the surrounding reality (including social and political reality) an important point of reference shared by the performers and viewers.

In a series of meetings accompanying the premieres of the “Widening the Field” program, the curator Joanna Leśnierowska invited the audience to practice looking at dance together.

The opening meeting let to understand how it came about that not only running and walking is dance, but also every smallest conceivable gesture, and even the very thought of it, and – how contemporary choreography was born, for which the mind has become a muscle that can be exercised, and for which the material may be not only the human body in motion (or motionlessness), but also objects, words, images, and thoughts… and what strategies do contemporary artists apply to make choreography visible?

Second lecture followed the dance superhero – the BODY – object and subject of choreography. How contemporary dance artists deconstruct it – right before our eyes! – while questioning its bodily identity and autonomy? Together with works by prominent choreographers we looked at the body as a landscape in constant transformation, saw it as an object and as a process, and asked, among other things: do we have a body or rather are we a body?

Last meeting tackled the problem of originality (authenticity) and authorship of contemporary choreography. Starting from the simplest question about the copyright of everyday movement (for if walking is a dance, who is its “inventor”? Who created it? Who is its author?), through horizontal forms of collaboration and collective choreography-making, to the hot topic of cultural (and pop-cultural) borrowing and appropriation (appropriations). Parisian style and fashion catwalk step vouguing, Miley Cyrrus twerking at a concert, white hip-hoppers and b-boys, Israeli folk built on quotations or club dance floor and internet gifs brought straight to the stage. When does borrowing become inspiration, when does it become appropriation, and when does it become theft (if we can still talk about it at all)? And how do contemporary choreographers make borrowing a theme and a strategy?