Rooms by the Sea: Exercises in Listening

Five characters set off far away, beyond the horizon, through landscapes filled with micro-sounds and gestures. The outer and inner worlds, constantly intermingling, offer an experience of states of alienation and distance – including from one another – that elude words, yet are deeply felt through the body.

Will our shared longing for the Unknown allow us to be together again, in a different way?

fot. Klaudyna Schubert

Joanna Leśnierowska is a dance dramaturg, critic, curator and performer. Since 2003, alongside her curatorial work in choreography, she has been developing an independent practice as a visual dramaturg, choreographer, and composer of light and space – both in her own works and in collaboration with other Polish and international artists.

Between 2003 and 2009, she co-founded and performed with the Towarzystwo Gimnastyczne dance company. She made her debut as a choreographer in 2011 with the performance Reconstruction. In 2013, together with Janusz Orlik, she co-created the solo work Insight (winner of the Best Choreography award at Polish Dance Platform 2014), which was presented across Europe, as well as in Brazil, Palestine and Israel.

Leśnierowska’s longstanding interest in the visual arts – in particular, the possibility of translating the creative strategies of new painting and (post)photography into performance – initiated a period of research that culminated in …(rooms by the sea): Exercises in Looking (2014) and BLUR (2017). Her discovery of traces of the Polish choreographer Yanka Rudzka in Brazil led to the creation of the Polish-Brazilian performance LEAVENING (2016), as well as Polyphony (2018), developed in dialogue with Armenian, Brazilian, Georgian and Polish artists.