Death is one thing that cannot be experienced. It is an irreversible event from which one doesn’t come back. With the person gone, the possibility of experience vanishes with it. To this philosophical statement, in her new performance, polish choreographer and performer Renata Piotrowska, with a humour and distance, opposes the experience of theatre, understood by the theorist Peggy Phelan as the place in which society “rehearses for loss, and especially for death.” Piotrowska’s solo “Death. Exercises and variations” embodies this rehearsal quite literally. As she attempts to stage the encounter with death, she goes through different scenarios making up a performative diptych that travels through centuries of (in)experience with death while she draws on its artistic, cultural and social representations. Based on the observations that the contemporary body aspires to defy dying more then ever, and that the omnipresence of death in the media is conversed by its evacuation from our everyday lives, she turns to some historical hallmarks associated with the issues of death and dying, such as dance macabre, ritualistic repetition, personification, violence, exhaustion, gore or eroticism. Choreographing it as an elusive partner through its many faces, Piotrowska is trying to track our understanding, or lack thereof of death today.

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