Marysia Stokłosa is a graduate of the prestigious European academies, the School for New Dance Development (SNDO) in Amsterdam, where she studied choreography and the London Contemporary Dance School at The Place where she received a diploma in contemporary dance. She also took dance classes at the Warsaw Ballet School. She is currently associated with Centrum Ruchu (Centre of Movement – a community of Warsaw–based choreographers) and in Burdąg Foundation in the Mazury region of Poland
A Few Steps Away From Lutosławski from
Culture.pl on
Vimeo.
In an interview with Anna Królica published in a book Generation solo Marysia Stokłosa says:
In the Netherlands, I surprisingly discovered that the dance can be a great pleasure instead of being a long and bumpy road to perfection. This is still a very present source of dance for me – pleasure. It enabled me to create a completely different relationship with this profession. I am so glad that this is no longer a struggle for perfection for me. What I find in dance these days is a purely physical pleasure but also a place where I can process my emotions and difficult experiences from my life. I think that if I hadn't found this out, I wouldn’t be a dancer any more (…). When your body becomes loose, you can do amazing things. Fears and limits disappear, you can dance effortlessly, be more creative and you can sing loudly even if you can’t sing at all.
Marysia Stokłosa is considered to be an original and important artist in the field of contemporary dance.
When you look at Stokłosa dancing, you get the impression that the move goes first through her head and when it reaches the underlying physical basis it starts travelling back and forth through her body. She managed to merge a movement of the body with a moving idea. – said Jadwiga Majewska in dwutygodnik.com.
She has few important plays in her portfolio: Intercontinental, Prawa Półkula (Right Hemisphere), Vacuum, Fall in D and Let’s Dance Chopin which she created on commission for the National Institute of Fryderyk Chopin for Expo 2010 in Shanghai. She is also an author of audio–visual works in cooperation with Julia Staniszewska (such as X Apartments in Warsaw and Mannheim)
Stokłosa is contemporary and old school at the same time - she is individual, not matching, not from the Polish climate. She focuses only on the person in the space, on the object, on pure action, on searching for the truth – as she often says. She does not use trendy media, nor does she excite with current flashy news. Yet, her works are like x-rays, dangerous but sometime indispensable for a present day reality diagnosis. She can by regarded as emotionally indifferent or even as having an almost laboratory coldness. This is why her choreographies are so different from other Polish productions, which tend to be very emotional and sentimental. In Stokłosa’s works there are no spectacular dramas, shocking turning points, heart-rending emotions. Instead there is a persistent and sometimes painful adding through subtraction in the process of reaching the abstract truth about ourselves – as a cultural community above distinctions, and about each of us – as a separate cultural individual – said Majewska.
She performed Glory and And Pulled Out Their Hair in Berlin, New York, Brussels, Barcelona, Buenos Aires and Copenhagen. She also performed in This Universe (choreography by Maija Reeta Raumanni), Project Zero Point (choreography Sara Shelton Mann) Die Zauberflote (ch. Min Tanaka); B.O.B. The Final Cut (ch. Dick Wong); sex me not (ch. Aitana Cordero) and others.
Maria Stokłosa regularly takes part in improvised performances of dance and music. She has performed with Makiko Ito, Małgorzata Haduch, Maria Mavtidou, Michał Górczyński, Wieland Moller and Konrad Szymański, amongst others. In 2008 – 2011 she co-created Kolektyw Melba. She organizes New Dance Reviews in Warsaw and invites many dancers and choreographers looking for a place to realize their artistic ideas to the Burdąg Arts Residency. In the summer of 2013 a group of five young creators worked there on a dance interpretation of Witold Lutosławski’s music.
Source: Centrum w Ruchu, dwutygodnik.com, Pokolenie solo, taniecpolska.pl, Edited. AL, marzec 2014, Translated by W.O. March 2014.