An esteemed choreographer, dancer, founder and director of the Baltic Dance Theatre, Izadora Weiss is a graduate of the Warsaw Ballet School and the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music, as well as a double recipient of the scholarship of the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. She debuted in 1996 on the stage of the Grand Theatre in Poznań, with a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She is also responsible for the choreography for over twenty opera performances presented on major stages in Poland and abroad, including the United States, France, Ireland, Germany, Luxemburg, the Netherlands and Finland.
A breakthrough in her career came with the ballet choreography for Krzysztof Penderecki’s Violin Concerto No. 1, following which she was invited by none other than Jiří Kylián to join the prestigious Nederlands Dans Theatre, where she had the opportunity to polish her skills under such masters as Ohad Naharin and Saburo Teshigawara. The artist admits:
I haven’t been lucky, or maybe unlucky, enough to dance with the greatest choreographers. Those who have danced with Mats Ek, Jiří Kylián, or William Forsythe cannot escape their choreographic styles – their bodies have soaked them up. I had to invent my own language for expressing emotions. If I were to describe my style, I would refer to it as an attempt to visualize the spirit of music by means of a human body. I don’t even mean the specific notes or the rhythm, but just the spirit. I believe that people seek beauty and that’s what I want to give them.
Weiss emphasizes the importance of music in her works: Bach, Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, Leszek Możdżer, Lisa Gerrard, and, naturally, Nigel Kennedy. She first met this British violinist when preparing The Four Seasons for the 2000 Malta Theatre Festival in Poznań. At that time, Kennedy was already a world-renowned musician – his album with reinterpretations of Vivaldi’s compositions sold more than two million copies internationally, earning him a Guinness Record for the world’s best-selling classical music album.
Dancing Shakespeare