Queerness, Oppression of the Body, Non-Humans: The Latest in Polish Choreography

rapeflower_003_web_fotpatmic-qypg9i4wsukcp9ijnj9ugi1ng3f3ixcnoaqwufd4tk.jpg, small, Photo of Hana Umeda's performance "Rapeflower", photo: Pat Mic

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What are Poland’s most daring choreographers thinking about right now? The answers might surprise you. And they might fit into a small glossary – like the one below.

As part of the cultural programme of the Polish Presidency of the Council of the European Union, audiences in Western European countries will get to see works by seven Polish artists specialising in new choreography and performance. And most likely, it will not be their first encounter: these are creators who live, work and teach abroad on a daily basis. However, if someone is still waiting for the pleasure of getting to know their practice, we have come up with a few key words that will give them an idea about what they are exploring right now.

Wojciech Grudziński: queerness

Wojciech Grudziński, photo: press materials

In 2025, Grudziński became the first winner of the new Stage category at Poland’s most important cultural awards, the Paszporty Polityki. It replaced the previous category of Theatre in recognition of other practices in the field of performing arts, primarily contemporary dance and new choreography, sometimes wrongly identified simply with theatre. In Grudziński’s diverse work, he emphasises sense of humour and the queer perspective, qualities present in both subject matter and aesthetics.

For example, he invited his mother, Ewa Grudzińska, to perform with him in Dance Mom (2021), creating a communal relationship between her and the show’s professional artists. Together with his co-producers, the artist declared that he wanted to ‘recreate the relationship between mother and child in other relationships: patchwork families, queer homes and tribal groups.’ Meanwhile, ‘paradise-like, colourful, hot, frivolous, vivacious and delightful,’ was how critic Kacper Ziemba described Grudziński’s 2019 show RODOS [a Polish acronym for allotment gardens], in which the choreographer combined the microcosm of allotments with the sensuality of cruising. In Threesome/Trzy (2024), he dealt with the biographies of three great Polish dancers (Gerard Wilk, Wojciech Wiesiołłowski and Stanisław Szymański), performing an original queering of the history of dance. It was a ‘choreographic spiritualistic séance,’ according to critic Teresa Fazan.

During the Polish Presidency in 2025, audiences in Helsinki had the opportunity to see Teach Me Not!, a performance created with vocalist, performer, director and composer Maria Magdalena Kozłowska. Their collaboration resulted in a project exploring the non-obvious tensions in the master-disciple relationship and the potential play created within it.

Alex Baczyński-Jenkins: fluidity

Thumbnail — Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, 'Until a Thousand Roses Bloom (with Warsaw in the Background)', Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw 1-22.06.2018, photo: Spyros Rennt

The co-founder of the queer-feminist collective KEM admitted in a conversation with Karolina Plinta that he is interested in ‘queer entanglements’, and that included ambiguous, shifting identities. This sense of fluidity can also be seen in the emotional tone of his works: in his characteristic focus on the process, there is room for free ‘journeys’ of affect, with delicate shifts between tension, uncertainty, suspense and a sense of relaxation, harmony or enchantment. This quality is evident both in the performers and in the audience.

Fluidity was certainly on offer during Until a Thousand Roses Bloom (with Warsaw in the Background), a 2018 performance that unfolded gradually in a garden arranged over two floors of the Foksal Gallery Foundation, developing like a slow whirl of desire (Baczyński-Jenkins, like Grudziński, was inspired here by the practice of cruising). In turn, in Untitled (Holding Horizon) (2020), the artist based the group choreography on meditatively repetitive sequences, which would sometimes lose their rhythm due to various disturbances, only to regain it later.

His two works during the Polish Presidency of the EU Council – Malign Junction (Goodbye, Berlin) and Unending Love, or Love Dies, on Repeat Like it’s Endless – further explore the flow of feelings and desire, as well as themes of loss, transformation and (in)finity. The language he uses to describe his practice itself seems to flitter between meanings, looping and resisting simple interpretation.

Anna Nowak: language

A scene from the performance "Future Tongues", choreography: Ania Nowak, photo: press

Language, in turn, may be a keyword when it comes to Anna Nowak’s work. The artist herself defines language as an ‘organ and choreographic material’ when it comes to her practice. She is also interested in crossing binaries and exploring the body in states of crisis or exclusion.

In her 2023 performance for the exhibition Kissing Doesn’t Kill, Nowak employed her characteristic use of repetition. Aleksander Kmak wrote in Szum magazine that the artist was seeking ‘non-canonical, non-hierarchical languages’ through the piece. The repetition and chanting of words also appeared in Inflammations (2019), where pulsating language accompanied representations of a fragile, unstable body. Meanwhile, the 2019 video installation Lip Service is a portrait of non-verbal communication between the artist and her then-partner, the hard-of-hearing performer Athena Lange, for whom German sign language is her primary language.

The cultural programme of the Polish Presidency also included Nowak’s Future Tongues, a choreographic speculation on how communication might evolve in the future. Writing in Didaskalia, researcher and curator Katarzyna Słoboda observed that communication is envisioned here as becoming indistinguishable from ‘an intimate and direct relationship based on corporeality and movement, empathy and mindfulness’.

Hana Umeda: body art

Photo of Hana Umeda's performance 'Rapeflower', photo: Pat Mic

As the daughter of a Polish mother and a Japanese father, she has integrated her roots by learning, and then later teaching, the classical Japanese dance form of jiutamai. In 2020, she was the first non-Japanese woman to be accepted into the family dance school of Hanasaki-ryu, which the creator herself describes as ‘a symbolic adoption’. Umeda is convinced that classical Japanese dance profoundly transforms the body, challenging everyday choreographic habits and the limitations of culturally conditioned movement.

Her 2018 directorial debut HanaUmeda/SadaYakko drew on the life of geisha and dancer Sada Yakko, an inspiration for many artists from the Young Poland movement, and whom Umeda described in an interview for Culture.pl as her ‘distant, symbolic relative’. The subject of corporeality (this time in the context of the metaphorical loss of power by ‘entrusting it to God’) also appeared in the 2023 performance Faithless, in which the performer reflected on losing her faith and leaving the Church.

In Rapeflower, shown during Poland’s EU Presidency, Umeda combines an autobiographical narrative about a rape experience with a parallel story about shaping her body through the discipline of Japanese dance. Currently, the term ‘rape survivor’ even appears in the artist’s bio on her website, together with her professional roles as a choreographer, director and performer.

Ramona Nagabczyńska: against oppression

'Silenzio', choerography: Ramona Nagabczyńska, photo: Maurycy Stankiewicz / Nowy Teatr

The artist frequently examines the topic of corporeality within the context of cultural (often violent) norms, primarily those imposed on women. ‘We are living in the time of a neoliberal regime, where every movement and every word is subordinated to it,’ she said in an interview for Szum magazine, highlighting how deeply embedded these norms are.

In Body Parts (2019), Nagabczyńska explored the issue of oppression through the context of the face as a kind of ‘interface’. She questioned the sources of the obsession with ensuring facial expressions remain neutral in contemporary dance, a norm she observed throughout her career. The 2022 performance Bliss was a form of choreographic variation on the theme of childbirth and the physiological potential of the female body. The play-pretend of ‘giving birth’ to subsequent objects (including plastic toys) could be interpreted as a critical commentary on the objectification of women and their treatment as reproductive machines. ‘Can submission to certain types of violence have a healing character?’ she asked in her 2024 work Performers Anonymous, a reflection on the very condition of being on stage.

During the cultural programme of the Polish Presidency, her performance Silenzio! (originally shown in 2021) tackles the subject of opera’s oppression of women and their bodies. It is a feminist work that critically, and humorously, portrays women’s entanglement in various social expectations.

Agata Siniarska: more-than-human

A scene from the 'Null&Void' performance, choreography: Agata Siniarska, photo: © Dajana Lothert

Bacteria and other non-human entities as performers? Agata Siniarska has repeatedly emphasised their presence on stage, describing her practice as ‘extended choreography’ – one that encompasses not only humans and stage presence, but also ecosystems, relationships and nature. This expansive view of choreography is tied to ethics – humans, together with their strong ‘I’, should be able to give way to other entities, relinquishing their dominance even when it comes to art.

Her 2018 work You Are Safe was described as a choreography of ‘the interdependence of the movement of human bodies, foreign bodies, thoughts, trillions of bacteria, viruses, global warming, political imaginations and theories’. In the solo performance The Soft Act of Killing, she explored ‘50,000 dead cells and 10 billion bacteria’, while in the co-created performance Second Nature, an important theme was the connections between plants and violence.

In null&void, a performance presented as part of the EU Council Presidency, the artist turned her focus to the usually overlooked, more-than-human victims of armed conflicts. Human-induced horror also brutally affects the earth, plants, animals and the harmonious systems they create. In this way, the artist symbolically gives voice to beings usually deemed less important. ‘These are quiet voices that remain unheard and are not taken into account,’ she said in an interview for Culture.pl.

Agata Maszkiewicz: (co-)relations

A scene from the "Call Me Jay" performance, choreography: Agata Maszkiewicz, photo: Pat Mic/Komuna Warszawa

Agata Maszkiewicz is similarly interested in various relationships – between human and non-human beings, including objects and technology – and eagerly investigates them on stage. This interest was evident in Still Life (2017) – a collage-like work focused on the relationships between humans, objects and the natural environment. In the performance Such a Landscape (2019), she demonstrated that the interior of a cultural institution – with its platforms, creaking floor, columns, lamps and an audience scattered around the room – could also be perceived as a landscape. This theme was also important in her outdoor performance Zero to Infinity (2022), where the natural scenery interacted with both existing and artificial lighting, leaving audiences questioning where a human’s place is in the universe.

The cultural programme of the Poland’s EU Council Presidency included Call Me Jay, a work written for two performers and an LED lamp that poetically conveys the tangled relationship between humans and technology – much like the cables visible on stage.

Sources: Aleksander Kmak, "Languages of distinct intimacies. „Kissing doesn't kill” by Ania Nowak at the Museum of Modern Art", SZUM Magazine; Katarzyna Słoboda, "Choreography of intimacy", Didaskalia. Gazeta teatralna; Kacper Ziemba, "Look Around", Teatralia.com; Karolina Plinta, "Choreography of the face and the digusting body. An interview with Ramona Nagabczyńska", SZUM Magazine; Teresa Fazan, "In the company of ghosts", Dwutygodnik.com.

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