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• Tuesday May 23: 20:15 – 21:45 (reserve your ticket)
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People said: Bohemian crystals are not for maids.

So, we must become the crystal ourselves.

The diamonds, the pearls of choreography.

Today the dancers are your gifts,

not limited by curtain falling and rising.

The act of taking a bow usually takes place in a theater or, more broadly speaking, in performative situations. The bow is a boundary moment - it is still part of the game, you are still playing, you are on the edge. On the one hand, the bow provokes the spectators to thank the artists, and on the other, it can be understood as an action aimed at proving that one cares about receiving someone’s approval. The question remains: what happens at the moment of the bow? Whom does it really serve?

BOW A STUDY arrives from Wojciech Grudziński’s long-term research on the phenomenon of the bow and its choreographic and social dimensions. With a pinch of melancholy, a specific perspective on the tradition of ballet in Eastern and Central Europe is echoed, which mirrors the post-communist new order dominated by power, bravado and neoliberal economy. With his artistic team, Grudziński investigated a legacy of great bows from the history of dance, pointing to the liminal, suspicious, and undefined moments in performance. Through assembled choreography of curtains, dancers, intentional samples, invented and real memories, and exchanges of gifts, both audience and the site of theater are invited into a playful dialogue on hierarchy, vulnerability and gratitude. It is never fully clear who submits, who bows and who dominates and sets the direction of the game. As today, being in debt is desirable, the aim is never to have debts paid off, but to preserve a state of personal indebtedness.

The loop that shifts (Wojciech Grudziński, “Bow. A Study”)

by Teresa Fazan

A body that takes a bow finds itself in a vulnerable position: exposing the neck and the tip of the head, it offers itself to the audience. The performing body sweats for the public, opens up to the public, and is paid by the public. And then, as it bends in uncertainty, the vulnerable exposure is reiterated. The finishing nod is a condensation of the theatrical logic: it asserts the mutuality between performing and perceiving bodies. As a sign of respect and humility, it immediately evokes the hierarchical order between those seeking approval and those granting it. Thus, the moment of the nod is like a knot: layers of tradition and power relations accumulate in this simple gesture. Should such a knot, like the Gordian one, be cut open or is there a chance to reclaim and untie it? In his project, Wojciech Grudziński attempts to do just that: to deconstruct and queer this burdened theatrical gesture. But how can one body untie such a knot?

Traditionally, taking a bow marks the boundaries of the performance: as a liminal gesture, it belongs to the terrain of the spectacle and is already a post-show residual. But in Grudziński’s research, performance’s borders are canceled from the outset. What if taking a bow is not the ending of things, but the beginning? Or in the process of deconstruction, the boundaries of the performance get entirely fused with the process of making it? As a queer artist from Poland, Grudziński uses deconstruction as a tool of queer artistic practice. For him, queering the bow means exposing the power dynamics behind it and trying to repeat the gesture on different terms, with a slight shift in the logic so the reproduced movement is already something different. It also means employing means of choreography, a practice peripheral to the language-dominated world of the theater. As a process of accumulating and shifting meanings, choreography invades the theatrical space and asks: what if we look at this gesture as a bodily work, as a labor that is part of the politically burdened structure?

Grudziński consequently commits to the choreographic refusal to solidify problems in presupposed meanings. For his research, he asked fellow artists whether taking a bow could become a gesture of resistance. With different levels of conviction, everyone responded: no, at least not on stage. They proposed some out-of-stage situations such as protests or parties as examples of possible places of decoding, shifting the meaning of the gesture. The impossibility of reviving the bow inside the stage’s power relations became Grudziński’s point of departure. Such practice resonates with the logic of Halberstam’s queer art of failure: the goal is to tirelessly look for alternatives, while never denying the power of the dominant discourse and even if all attempts are doomed to fail. As in the logic of Rancière’s aesthetic regimes, where the receiver of the meaning becomes the creator, by using movement scores as one of the means of research, Grudziński opened his process to the meanings coming from the outside. During the process, he used the recorded answers to his question and embodied them with the authentic movement method. The public was invited to create new scores by writing down associations and thoughts that came up. Taking a bow was thus no longer (re)enacted but rather repeated which is to say, after Deleuze and Guatarri, renewed and deterritorialized. Grudziński’s research-based choreographic practice dissolves the rigidness of the theatrical gesture, exposing its political roots but also making it more ambiguous and open-ended, and possibly creating lines of flight where the revolution seems impossible. Whether these lines will lead us to an alternative finale remains yet to be seen.