Body Stories
2019
Performance
Body Stories is a performance that was created during a residency at Ponderosa, an art center and community located in the German countryside.
During the residency I took part in a series of contact improvisation dance classes, which turned my body into lead and made me cry a lot. To calm down, I took myself on long walks along the Oder, the river marking the border between Germany and Poland. Being in the open, surrounded by nature and away from people helped me to get back a sense of myself, of my body, of my movements.
In this performance I am practicing my own kind of contact improvisation, replacing people with trees, ruins and birds. My gestures turn into a conversation with my surroundings, a tree shaped like a question mark punctuating my sentences. The elements I chose to "contact improvise" with, or to converse with, function as a kind of mirror, offering their physicality to give me back my own.
The performance took place with no audience and was filmed by myself. You can watch the video here:
https://vimeo.com/332618300