On an autumn afternoon in 1960, Yves Klein, who was always fascinated in the sky, put on a suit, jumped from a roof and hang in mid-air. With his arms confidently outstretched and a look of elation on his face, he defied the laws of gravity and proved that he could fly. His leap, as he had stated six months before Gagarin’s historic escapade, denounced the moon race which he considered stupid. ‘A man in Space! The painter of space leaps into the void!’, he captioned the photograph of the leap and landed, for ever, in the history of the avant-garde (right next to his monochromatic paintings). The photographic ‘record’ was, of course, a photomontage, and the courageously leaping Klein was not awaited by a void, but by his unrestricted faith in the power of art and the necessity of questioning the obvious. That, and the outstretched arms of a circle of people with a safety net.

Symbolically initiated by Klein, the ‘practice of leaping into’, as an act of both protest and affirmation, has made its way into broadly defined contemporary culture, where it is also one of the constitutive elements of contemporary choreography. ‘It is not how I dance … It is that I dance,’ Deborah Hay proclaimed her political activism of dance in her book entitled (quite aptly) Using the Sky: a dance.

During the festival this year, we will indulge in more leaps

to express our frenetic faith in

the body

acting, ecstatic, vibrating experiencing, feeling, fragmented, the body-object and the body-process, the dreaming body, the becoming-body and the (self-)transforming body, which is fluid, material and fictional, kaleidoscopic, autonomous, social and political, radically stripped down and exposing, which is involved, multivocal, resonating, dialogic and dialectic, balancing on the edge of a jittery world in an act of survival

the body in (constant) movement

the dancing body

leaping bravely into the Unknown

and landing safely in a Community

We will leap, jump, hop, sway and pulsate, we will rock, bounce, levitate, fly and fall, and jump up all over again

until the Earth shakes.

And we will never stop.

Joanna Leśnierowska
curator