25xXXI. 25 Years of Iconic Polish Performances: Mt 9:7
Rafał Urbacki’s autobiographical solo was among the first critical choreographies in Poland. Fifteen years after its premiere, it remains one of the most mature and radical.
A muffled music-box tune. In the darkness, only the outline of a male figure is visible, repeating the same sparse sequence of gestures. The dancing body is seated. Gradually, the darkness thins, and the faint movements performed to that quiet, mechanical melody grow clearer. The choreography consists of simple gestures illustrating children’s religious songs: the sign of the cross, a halo traced above the head, hands forming a heart, a dove in flight. This sequence of Christian symbols is disrupted by a pair of devil’s horns, shaped with the performer’s fingers and accompanied by a wry, almost tender smile.
In the opening scene of Mt 9:7, Rafał Urbacki sits in a wheelchair. The space around him is empty save for a few props: a microphone on a stand, a Bible, a small statue of Mary. Later, he adds a wind-up music card and a rosary. These objects announce the themes that structure his half-hour autobiographical solo. Mt 9:7, the Silesian artist’s professional stage debut, is a performative meditation on language, disability, and the Catholic Church. More precisely, Urbacki saw the Church as constructing and maintaining false, stereotype-ridden narratives about 'others' – their bodies and minds – narratives that profoundly shape their standing in the 'social' space. The performance both challenges the dominant ways disability is spoken about – complementing them with jarring, dissonant elements, just as in its opening choreography – and reveals the ableism hidden beneath Christian rhetoric of mercy and inclusion.
The point of departure for this critique was Urbacki’s decision to stop using the wheelchair he had relied on for over a decade due to myopathy and progressive muscle atrophy. Though, in keeping with the verse from the Gospel of Matthew that lends the work its title, he indeed 'rose and went', this was no miracle – despite the attempts of some to frame him within this paradigm. It was the result of rigorous physical work, and of a technique of walking he developed himself, drawing on Body-Mind Centering and contact improvisation.
Urbacki's Poznań solo formed the first part of a three-performance identity-driven project created between 2010 and 2012, alongside W Przechlapanem (In Screwedville), Stypa (The Wake), and the darkroom-based Kto podskoczy jest pedałem, hej! (Whoever Jumps Is a Faggot, Hey! [sic!]). The cycle revolved around the performer’s non-normative 'I'–as an ex-Catholic, a gay man, and a person with 'alternative motorics'. He introduced this last term to replace 'disability', reframing bodily difference in positive, non-deficit terms.
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'Mt 9,7', dir. Rafał Urbacki, Art Station Foundation, Poznań, 2010, photo: Jakub Wittchen
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'I'm a disabled person, so I suffer. I absolutely suffer. And my suffering is here so you can be enriched by it. So, you can perform good deeds', he announces at one point with trademark bite, pointing to a pervasive collective narrative that casts disability as personal tragedy. This discourse frames alternative motorics as failure and deficiency, suggesting that those 'afflicted' are unhappy and in need of assistance. Urbacki not only dismantles this patronising, objectifying image, but also exposes the mechanisms behind the 'altruism' of the able-bodied majority. According to the artist, these acts primarily serve the emotional comfort of the helper, stemming from the 'patronizing compassion'. As Cher’s 'Strong Enough' blares during his climactic dance solo, he declares he has no use for such pity. Listing forms of everyday 'help', such as doing groceries or accompanying him on a trip to a sanatorium – he asks the audience whether anyone will 'fill him with grace'. Sex with a disabled person, he explains, citing a clergyman he once knew, can count as 'an act of mercy' – even extramarital sex. For the performer, however, this 'truly good deed' would be a sin. Searching from the stage for a 'righteous husband' with whom he might 'go to the dressing room', he effectively comes out.
In Mt 9:7, Urbacki illuminates the multi-layered nature of his discursive and social exclusion. His queerness fits neither the narratives of the faithful nor the narrative of the disabled. The ethics of care arising from the 'suffering' narrative surrounding alternative motorics denies 'other' bodies and minds full agency in public space. The Church itself, despite its official declarations, remains closed to their presence. The most striking example of such exclusion comes at the end of Urbacki's solo, when he recounts his First Holy Communion. As he speaks, he burns his foot with a lighter and stitches a rosary to it – a stark body-art gesture. The Silesian artist received the body of Christ last among his peers, limping painfully down the church aisle before the scrutinising eyes of the congregation. He was accompanied by a feeling of profound loneliness.
Mt 9:7 engages religion on a formal level as well. Urbacki adopts liturgical greetings ('Brothers and sisters', 'Praise be to Jesus Christ'), reads aloud the Gospel passage on the healing of the paralytic – after asking the audience to stand – and appropriates syntactic structure characteristic of Biblical style and liturgical language (repetitions, anaphoric lists beginning with conjunctions). He also invites the audience to a collective prayer through song and movement. Furthermore, his confessional stage address evokes the aesthetics of Christian testimony. The Silesian artist's performance, unlike Artur Żmijewski's Mass (presented a year later and frequently juxtaposed with Mt 9:7), does not reconstruct an entire service; instead, it plays with select ritual elements. The piece adopts the tone of a lecture performance – seasoned with stand-up humour – a form introduced to the Polish stage only months earlier by Wojtek Ziemilski's Small Narration, itself concerned with questions of identity.
Created in November 2010 within the Solo Project of Stary Browar Nowy Taniec, – the first institutional initiative in Poland devoted to contemporary choreography – Mt 9:7 contains little dance in the traditional sense: aside from the simple illustrative movements accompanying the religious songs, just over four minutes. At a time when socially and politically engaged choreography was nearly absent in Poland, this scarcity of 'dance proper' was met with disapproval within parts of the dance community. But Urbacki was far more interested in what art does and what it serves than in whether it meets formal and aesthetic genre expectations. Defining his artistic identity, he would often describe himself not as a choreographer or dancer but as a 'social debater' or a mover: someone who uses the body and its context to set processes in motion and 'get things done'.
'I would really like for this solo, this event, to change the world', he says in the piece's final line, moments after declaring he will be 'the first disabled gay saint'. At the time, still profoundly believing in the transformative power of art, Urbacki made the empowerment of the 'Other' in the public space his central aim – for Poznań's Mt 9:7 and for the entire 2010–2012 cycle. 'I want life to be easier for me', he explained in the post-show talk following Stypa (The Wake), 'which is why I concentrate in my projects on these overlapping discourses, these narratives of exclusion: sexuality, paralysis, death…' Social change, he believed, begins with a change in language. And so in Mt 9:7, he dismantles the prevailing disability narrative and advances his own – free of flattening euphemisms, harmful stereotypes, and sweeping generalisations.
Rafał Urbacki's autobiographical solo was among the first critical choreographies in Poland. Fifteen years after its premiere, it remains one of the most mature and radical. In many respects Mt 9:7 – a pioneering performance – was ahead of its time. In November 2010, when the Silesian mover presented it at Poznań's Stary Browar, the professional dance and theatre field in Poland was almost entirely inaccessible to artists with alternative motorics, whose work was treated as amateur or conflated with rehabilitation. Polish humanities had yet to seriously engage with disability studies – already well-developed in Western academia – which encouraged perceiving disability as a socio-cultural construct, deeply shaped by language rather than a, hitherto, dominant medical diagnosis. In Mt 9:7, this perspective intertwines with the then-nascent queer theory in Poland. By bringing 'other' bodies and their lived experiences into the performing arts, Urbacki helped initiate the slow, ongoing process of democratising the field – blurring the boundaries between the artistic activities of the 'abled' and 'disabled'.
Stary Browar Nowy Taniec, Poznań
Mt 9:7
Concept and choreography by Rafał Urbacki
Premiere: 28th November 2010