I Love Ballet

The statement ‘I love ballet’ is practically a cliché among dancers. This phrase is often uttered by ballet school students when asked why they chose a ballet education, feeling the oppressive gaze of their teacher.

Four dancers and independent dance artists, who graduated from ballet school but abandoned ballet for other dance forms, take a fresh look at their original performance discipline. They note what continues to attract them to the form, what repels them, and what traces they see of their ballet education in their current bodies and lives. Twenty years after ending their adventures with ballet, Aleksandra Borys, Karolina Kraczkowska, Ramona Nagabczynska and Iza Szostak have gained the critical distance needed to read ballet as a text. And as it turns out, this text is very rich. Both the explicitly expressed ballet librettos and the narratives hidden behind the scenes can be endlessly analysed as ideological machines.

Ramona Nagabczyńska is a dancer and choreographer. She received her artistic education at the Roman Turczynowicz Ballet School in Warsaw, the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts, and the London Contemporary Dance School, while she received her theoretical education at SWPS University and the University of Warsaw. She works in Poland and abroad.

Her choreographic works include: New (Dis)Order (2012), selected for Aerowaves in 2014; Re//accumulation (2012); The Way Things Dinge (2014); pURe (2015); MORE (2017); Networking (2018/19); Body Parts (2019), also selected for Aerowaves; Silenzio! (2021); Le Jeu de Massacre (2021), together with Barbara Kinga Majewska; Bliss (2022); Anonymous Performers (2024); and Hate Haus (2024), together with the Hertz Haus collective.

From 2015 to 2019, she was an artist in the international apap_advancing performing arts project network. In 2021, she won an award for directing the performance Silenzio! at the Boska Komedia International Theatre Festival.

She is one of the co-founders of the Centrum w Ruchu collective.