NEWS

One of the guests of the 27^th Flora Theatre Festival will be the renowned Polish choreographer Maciej Kuźmiński, who will exclusively lead a dance workshop and present two productions within the festival’s WOLNOŚĆ line, which sensitively respond to the Russian aggression in Ukraine…

photo by Karl Heinz-Mierke / Aleksander Joachimiak

A graduate of Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London, Maciej Kuźmiński (1985) is one of the most acclaimed Polish choreographers of today. He draws on his own movement method called Dynamic Phrasing, which he will also exclusively present at the dance workshop at the 27^th Flora.
For Kuźmiński, the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine is one of the most influential events of his life. Since its outbreak in February 2022, he has created five productions that relate to this tragic event in different ways.

Every Minute Motherland is a dance piece created by Maciej Kuźmiński using documentary methods in response to the Russian aggression in Ukraine and the subsequent refugee crisis.
The collaboration of Kuźmiński with Ukrainian dancers who have fled to Poland to escape the war has produced an extraordinarily powerful choreography that finds expression for “the unspeakable” through the shared language of dance.
In contrast to the constant daily viewing of images of war on television and social media, where war plays out in numbing repetition, Every Minute Motherland directs our attention towards the intimate testimonies of the individual bodies of the dancers, whose traumatic experiences are gradually released in movement and time during the performance, becoming an existential experience of us all.

Such trauma is also borne by dancer Daria Koval, whose personal story has been transformed by the choreographer, based on their joint research, into an evocative solo that resonates strongly with international audiences and has won prizes at festivals across Europe (Solo Dance Contest Gdańsk, Solocoreografico Frankfurt am Main). Resistance Movement is a riveting personal account of the destructiveness of war and the incredible will to resist it.

The programme block WOLNOŚĆ is organized with significant financial support of the Czech-Polish Forum and the Polish Institute in Prague.

The Polish line of this year’s Flora is complemented by two more titles with a Polish imprint. The opera Ad Matrem, based on the works of the most famous Polish composer of the 20^th century, Henryk Górecki, was created for Moravské divadlo Olomouc by the directorial tandem Petr Erbes – Boris Jedinák.

The production Juices metaphorically reveals the taboo working conditions of Eastern European immigrant women in Germany. German-Polish playwright Ewe Benbenek drew inspiration from her family’s experience when writing the play. The drama about transgenerational burdens was staged at the Nationaltheater Mannheim by Kamila Polívková, for whom it was her directorial debut on a German stage.