25xXXI | 25 Years of Iconic Polish Performances: Make Yourself
'Make Yourself' exposed a paradoxical dimension at the heart of dance: a form long associated with resistance and liberation, yet equally capable of operating as a disciplinary tool, today readily enlisted in the marketing strategies of major brands and platforms.
‘Relax! Relax your body! Relax your mind!’. It is with these words that Marta Ziółek greets the audience assembling for Make Yourself. The choreographer immediately assumes a central position: half-reclining in a relaxed pose at the centre of the stage, her face obscured by a mask she holds before her, her voice filtered through autotune. One by one, following a slow walk around the space and a brief self-presentation to the audience, the other performers gather around her. This vivid image –dancers arranged like a team of superheroes or a slightly eccentric family portrait – recurs throughout the performance. As a cover of Gil Scott-Heron’s Angel Dust fills the room, and the hour-long performance begins with the presentation of successive protagonists in a choreographic drama.
Breaking away from the group, Paweł Sakowicz launches into a looped litany of 'high-definition' products, followed by a languid mindfulness session: Ziółek dialogues with her mask, repeating coaching slogans, while performers in the background move through yoga and Pilates poses. The scene is abruptly interrupted by the roar of an accelerating car, the lighting shifts to resemble headlights. In the next sequence, Maria Magdalena Kozłowska performs A Perfect Lie by The Engine Room, while Agnieszka Kryst dances ecstatically – yet under these lights, engine sounds and the marketing context, the moment evokes a car commercial association rather than erotic dance. Eventually, an 'assistant' (Komuna Warszawa's stage manager) interrupts Kryst's sensual performance, bringing a ringing smartphone (the microphone pack), and the stage lights up to full white.
The white cube of Make Yourself resembles the interior of a boutique – along one wall stands a clothing rack frequently used by the performers. The next scene takes the form of a brief performative lecture, combining text and choreography: Kryst outlines the principles of the consumer market against a backdrop of ballet and yoga. Her exposition leads back into Sakowicz's high-speed paean to acceleration, this time accompanied by the choreography from the full ensemble. This acceleration takes us to a nightclub, where for a long moment we observe the repetitive gestures of raving bodies. A ringtone mixed with Drake's Hotline Bling and another lighting shift moves us again – this time to a fitness studio. It is here, surrounded by exercising bodies, that telemarketer Wasiewicz appears to 'sell' Ramona Nagabczyńska, who is doing squats and bendslike a product on display.
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'Make Yourself', dir. Marta Ziółek, Komuna Warszawa, 2016, photo: Bartek Stawiarski
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In the following scenes, various choreographic arrangements intertwine with pop hits, creating the sensation of a live remix or compulsive channel-surfing: Sakowicz sings Christina Perri's Human a cappella while assuming ballet positions; the group dances to Justin Bieber's Where Are U Now or Kozłowska's rendition of Freed From Desire. Drawing on a wide spectrum of movement techniques – from yoga and ballet to fitness, hakken and krump – the choreography loops gestures to conjure a sense of build-up and capitalist acceleration. This logic also permeates the spoken text, studded with recurring, sloganised lines. Between sequences, often at the edge of the stage, Ziółek drifts in and out – at once part of and apart from the action – commenting, observing, setting directions. The performance ends with a long, ecstatic group choreography to the propulsive beat of Ninos Du Brasil. The artists invite the audience to join in before returning to their original ensemble formation, and Ziółek delivers her farewell monologue. Gradually, they disperse, returning us to the opening image.
Reviews from the year of the premiere confirm that Make Yourself served as an adequate diagnosis of Polish – or perhaps global – reality, enabling the urban middle class to view itself in a 'mirror, while walking along the road'. Interpretacje Festival in Katowice, was performed more than thirty times across Poland – including at the Polish Dance Platform and the Open'er Festival in 2017 – and toured internationally to Bucharest, Tel Aviv, and New York. It quickly proved one of the most effective attempts to make choreography and dance more attractive to the Polish audience. In this sense, it helped pave the way for the flourishing of dance and choreography in Polish art spaces over the following decade. Perhaps this was because, while engaging with artistic tools not easily domesticated (new choreography? performance art? contemporary dance?), the piece mobilised familiar elements: recognisable brands, group training, club rave culture, pop culture icons, yoga, and the consumer market? Or perhaps it was simply because, drawing on these well-known codes, the work was inherently seductive: visually provocative, humorous, and seriously unserious.
Ultimately, Make Yourself scrutinised the regimes governing attractive bodies while presenting them to the audience in the full glare of stage lights, enabling spectators to witness live the fantasies of a capitalist dream. It revealed the contradiction inherent in dance: a form long associated with resistance and liberation, yet equally capable of operating as a disciplinary tool, today readily enlisted in the marketing strategies of major brands and platforms. It is no coincidence that many artists on the Polish dance scene, in order to fund arthouse productions, choreograph advertisements for soaps, fries, and menstrual cups. Or, perhaps, there is no irony in this at all, and Ziółek herself understands this best; as she noted in an interview, Make Yourself was in fact inspired by a particular brand's commercial.
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'Make Yourself', dir. Marta Ziółek, Komuna Warszawa, 2016, photo: Bartek Stawiarski
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It is therefore unsurprising that the performers appear like products showcased in an advert break – or a scroll – each with distinct features. The protagonists of the choreographic drama are clusters of traits, stars not of a Netflix series but of an Instagram feed – and these, as we know, are immortal and infinitely malleable. They undergo transformations while remaining banal and elusive, ready for infinite projection and able to inhabit ever-new consumer niches. This is the triumph – or, for melancholic critics such as Mark Fisher, the defeat – of market-driven (un)freedom: everything loops endlessly, subject to superficial transformations born of the cannibalisation of past trends.
A decade on, the performers have undeniably 'made themselves': each member of the team has built an independent career, from the creative staff (dramaturg Anka Herbut, visual artist Dominika Olszowy, musicians Lubomir Grzelak and Krzysztof Bagiński) to the performers (alongside those already mentioned, Katarzyna Sikora also appears). Yet one senses that with Make Yourself and other choreographies of that period, these artists carved out space for more than just themselves. Like Ziółek's other projects, the piece sought to democratise dance – bringing techniques from streets and clubs onto Warsaw's stages and into art galleries, drawing liberally from pop culture and the aesthetics of glamorous kitsch.
The low mingles with the high, and fascination with strangeness becomes critical exaggeration. Is Make Yourself an hommage of self-making or perhaps a critical satire of the hollow regimes of the self? Likely both. Ziółek’s own artistic practice points toward this duality. To this day, she interrogates authenticity, the construction of stage personae, and the power of the mask – both as veil and incarnation that allows one to touch the deepest layers of the self, explore the darkness of the unconscious, and test the limits of one’s imaginations, fears, and desires. Simultaneously it allows to playfully navigate the ambiguous terrain between embodiment and performance, and the elusive truth of identity. The continuity of the choreographer’s interests is best evidenced by the mask which appears in various forms in almost all of her projects: literally as a mask (Make Yourself, 2016; So Emotional, 2017; Larva, 2021), as an iPhone on a selfie stick or even the selfie itself (IT, 2015), as a queer balaclava (Officer, This Is Just Dancing, 2021), or as the clown’s heavy makeup (Free Bodies, 2023).
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'Make Yourself', dir. Marta Ziółek, Komuna Warszawa, 2016, photo: Bartek Stawiarski
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The past decade has not undermined the central thesis of Make Yourself: the capitalist regime of identity as product. As then, so now – nothing new under the sun; we are more likely to witness the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Only now, the aftertaste is more bitter: we are more aware of the ecological and social costs of unrestrained consumption, while the aesthetics of AI-generated imagery chills some viewers to the bone. Ziółek grasps fully that the body and its movement form a paradoxical terrain where strategies of appropriation meet strategies of resistance, of control and liberation.
Written by Teresa Fazan
Komuna Warszawa
'Make Yourself'
Concept, choreography & costumes by Marta Ziółek
Screenplay by Anka Herbut
Music by Lutto Lento
Set design & video by Dominika Olszowy
Video by Krzysztof Bagiński
Lighting design by Karolina Gębska
Premiere: 20th May 2016