Choreographer, educator, activist and dancer, working both individually and collectively. Czyczel is interested primarily in communal forms of artmaking and transplanting choreography beyond theatre stages, also to communities with less access to art.
While at university for film studies, Czyczel realised it was movement that she wanted to pursue. In 2013 she went to Paris on Erasmus exchange and had her first stimulating encounter with new choreography and contemporary dance: she saw works by Xavier Le Roy’s at Théâtre de la Cité Internationale, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker at Théâtre de la Ville and Jérôme Bel at Festival d’Automne. Upon returning to Poland, Czyczel studied Interfaculty Individual Studies in the Humanities at the University of Warsaw. Already back then she knew she wanted to become a professional artist.
In her search for choreography education, Czyczel came across Centrum w Ruchu, where she signed up for an experimental choreography course in 2015. As the artist herself said, taking up the course was a challenge – she had to transform from a theory-loving art researcher into a performer. Her interest in sport helped: since age 11, Czyczel swam on catamarans in a youth sailing club in Sopot so she was familiar with physical regime.
The course was taught by Marysia Stokłosa (the founder of Centrum w Ruchu), Magda Ptasznik and Renata Piotrowska-Auffret. In that period, Czyczel also went to Burdąg to participate in a workshop by the late Ria Higler, who for years was the artistic director of School for New Dance Development (SNDO) in Amsterdam:
Text
Looking back I clearly see that meeting Higler was a formative event. Ria used different somatic practices and created experimental, improvisation-based choreography, employing deep body work, work in nature, by night, in darkness… I remember that when I came back I had a somatic sense of great transformation.
Picture display
standardowy (864px desktop)
'Czucie', 2022, photo: Jakub Celej
Picture image
11_czucie_2022_fot._jakub_celej.jpg
Following Higler’s advice, Czyczel went on a month-long choreography course at SNDO. Once it finished, she returned to Warsaw, but felt like she needed to search for growth opportunities abroad. She was accepted into Centre Chorégraphique National (CCN) in Montpellier, where she studied choreography between 2017 and 2019. While there, Czyczel realised that she wanted to focus on researching movement and collaborating with others, consequently developing her skills in both choreography and dance. To this day, she considers her time at the French school to be an intense period of looking for her own artistic language, learning to cooperate in a group and to build mutual trust and understanding with other artists. Anne Kerzhero, then CCN’s Academic Director and the choreographer DD Dorvillier accompanied the young artist on her path. The most vital encounters, however, were with other students from all over the world, which made Czyczel aware of her own Middle European situation, often exoticisied in the West. Being in the centre paradoxically allowed for the emergence of connections between different peripheries – Czyczel met persons from Brasil, Portugal, South Korea, Hungary, Burkina Faso and Greece. As she recollects:
Text
For the first time in my life, I experienced such a wide variety of corporealities. I understood that the fact that people bring their cultures into the classroom is a huge resource, one that wasn’t really discussed directly. It was wonderful to experience such a broad spectrum, I didn’t have access to anything like it in Warsaw. I could learn the stories of people whose presence in Western Europe was often linked to a necessity to migrate.
The meetings had political dimension to them. Activisim had been present in Czyczel’s life earlier, too – while at University of Warsaw, she was part of the Uniwersytet Zaagażowany student movement. While working on performances, she was going to proabortion protest in Poland and yellow vests demonstrations in Paris. The pandemic era was spread between different cities and different forms of engagement, both artistic and activist.
Near the end of her choreography studies in France, Czyczel was invited to perform in a show by Vincent Dupont. She appeared in it for the next few years, until 2021. After a stay in Vienna for the danceWEB scholarship, Czyczel came to Poland to show her diploma piece, body, out loud (2019), at a festival organised by Agata Życzkowska and Paulina Święciańska in Masovian Culture Institute in Warsaw.
Picture display
standardowy (864px desktop)
Ciało, na głos, 2019, photo: Marc Coudrais
Picture image
1_cialo_na_glos_2019_fot._marc_coudrais.jpg
Didactics is vital to Czyczel’s practice. While studying at Montpellier, she went on a residency where Louise Vantalon was an artistic supervisor. Thanks to her, Czyczel realised that working with children is also art, simply directed to a different audience. She spent many hours in two elementary schools, where she did something she’d today call artistic research. After moving to Warsaw, Czyczel continued to work with children – as an artist-educator she collaborated with the Museum of Modern Art, co-creating the project Formy Podstawowe (2021-2025). This experience, alongside contributing to the project Dancing Families, helped Czyczel develop her didactic skills and later employ them while organising workshops, meetings, and communal activities.
Czyczel bases her artistic practice on close collaboration of equals. One example is her co-operation with the stage designer, costume designer and performer Marta Szypulska. The duo invited the dancer Dana Chmielewska and composer Aleksandra Gryka to work together on LAGMA.
Produced during the pandemic, the show was presented at the Polish Dance Platform in Łódź in 2024, and later at the performative opening of the Museum of Modern Art new building in Warsaw. As Czyczel stressed, the project was unique in terms of the process:
Text
It was an insanely creative time, we gave ourselves total freedom. We worked without making any compromises; it all flowed out of us, our artistic languages, our fascinations. I’m really happy that it this piece is fully OURS – we divide the authorship between four artists-performers, all present onstage. Unfortunately, collaborative projects like these are a rarity in Poland: low budgets and the constant pressure for novelty are more conducive to working solo and fast.
Czyczel is interested in a process-focused, improvisation-based practice, work with object and imagination. Even though traditional theatre rarely provides these conditions, the artist still finds her place there. She collaborated with the director Weronika Szczawińska on The Hearing Trumpet, which is no accident – Szczawińska is interested in choreography and her work blends the line between dramatic theatre and performance. In 2025, the two worked together again, this time on Mother Joan of Angels for the theatre series (Teatr Telewizji) of Polish Television. Other theatre works by Czyczel as choreographer include Antigone in Molenbeek (directed by Anna Smolar, 2024), Sailor (directed by Wojtek Rodak, 2020) and Scenografia Głosów (EN: Voice Scenography, directed by Daniel Kotowski, 2024).
Picture display
standardowy (864px desktop)
'Trąbka do słuchania', 2024, directed by Weronika Szczawińska, photo: Natalia Kabanow
Picture image
4_trabka_do_sluchania_2024_rez._weronika_szczawinska_fot._natalia_kabanow.jpeg
During the pandemic, Czyczel inaugurated the group project Przestrzeń Wspólna (Common Space). As the artist said, this support network became vital to her practice, thanks to the sense of belonging and dialogue it facilitated. Przestrzeń Wspólna became a platform for all professionals working in choreography: critics, researchers, performers, producers (also those based outside the centre of the art world). The project was mostly active in 2020-2022, but the relationships and practices it fostered moved beyond that timeframe.
Czyczel is generally interested in projects aimed at creating community, fostering exchange and searching for a new role and formula for art in the face of climate crisis. One example is the network Nature of Us (2022-2025) organised by artists from Middle and Eastern Europe thanks to the International Visegrad Fund. As an educator, mentor, facilitator and co-ordinator, Czyczel was also part of Wielka Księga Scorów (The Score Book, 5th edition of Program Wzmocnienia Środowisk Twórczych / Programme for Artistic Community Strength), the 4th edition of Kem School (2024), the project Co-thinking (2024) and Ruchome Teksty Performatywnie (Mobile Texts Performatively).
Czyczel received the Grażyna Kulczyk scholarship and plans to use it to record a sound album. Sound has long fascinated the artist, stemming from her interest in folk culture, especially traditional singing. While still at school, she recorded different sounds and created sound landscapes. Together with Aleksandra Gryka, Czyczel created the album Toń (released by the label Szara Reneta, 2021) – the record was comprised of sounds documented by the Liwiec river. Czyczel improvised using her voice and sounds from the environment (thunder, crickets, combine harvester, water sounds recorded with hydrophones). The album was accompanied by site-specific concerts, which so far were given at the Biennale in Gwangju, South Korea, the Opatowicka Island in Wrocław, Poland, by the Wilga river during Kolonie dla Dorosłych, and Moczydło Park in Warsaw. Similar to the artist’s other projects, this one also has a research dimension to it – it can be shown in different places:
Text
Projects like this one help me enrich my language and introduce new realms to my work that wouldn’t necessarily be available to me in performative arts or theatre. Working across disciplines allows me to ask myself many interesting questions about the nature of my practice and what it is that I want to do as an artist.
In 2023, the curator Katarzyna Słoboda invited Czyczel to create a sound installation for the Narracje festival (Gdańsk, Poland). The artist produced a form of somatic narration, typical of her work. In the years 2017-2024 she performed a solo by the visual artist Joanna Piotrowska at the art fair in Basel, Warsaw Gallery Weekend and at the Kunsthalle im Lipsisbau in Dresden. In 2022, at the group exhibition The Discomfort of Evening curated by Magdalena Komornicka, Czyczel presented her solo performance titled Czucie (EN: Feeling). Alongside the dancer and educator Natalia Oniśk, the artist also performed Golden Gate, a choreography by Ania Nowak, at the exhibition Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Ania Nowak and Guests at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. As part of the collective squir, Czyczel co-created the performance Show Her Clearance, inspired by the archive of Akademia Ruchu, a Polish art group founded in the 1970s. The performance was presented in public space as part of the opening programme of the exhibition The Impermanent. Four Takes on the Collection at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Czyczel’s romance with visual arts circles also resulted in her joining the curatorial collective behind Liquid Tongues, the project shown in the Polish Pavillion at the 61. International Art Exhibition in Venice in 2026.
Picture display
standardowy (864px desktop)
Exhibition 'Pocałunek nie zabija. Ania Nowak i gościnie', 2024, photo: Pat Mic
Picture image
10_wystawa_pocalunek_nie_zabija._ania_nowak_i_goscinie_2024_fot._pat_mic.jpg
Despite all the fruitful collaboration and success, Czyczel is much more interested in working outside museums and theatres:
Text
I’d like to be in an artistic and energetic exchange with communities whose access to art is not as easy: in smaller cities, in the countryside, at refugee community centres, as these audiences are potentially more diverse in terms of class and age. It is important to me to reach people whose access to culture is limited because I believe everyone has a right to have access to art on their own terms, regardless of their education or background.
One example of an accessible piece by Czyczel is the site-specific performance Ślad Ślimaka (EN: Snail Trail) which premiered at the 5th edition of the Kraków Dance Festival. It was accompanied by the presentation of a video Czyczel created in collaboration with the multimedia artist Ewelina Węgiel and participants of workshops held in Kraków. The topic of diversity also appears in the artist’s projects in collaboration with persons with disabilities. In 2022, Karolina Dziełak-Żakowska invited Czyczel and Tatiana Cholewa to conduct the workshop Dance and Disability. Recently, Czyczel also collaborated with Katarzyna Żeglicka, creating the choreography Warstwy (Layers) which premiered in Cricoteka, Kraków in October 2025.
Czyczel considers herself an activist – although not necessarily an artivist because, as she says, the creative and activist paths run parallel. The artist self-advocates, discussing the working conditions on different occasions. In her art, she tackles themes that are personally important to her: ecology, ecosomatics, affect and interspecies communication. Politics is also an important sphere: as the artist notes, some bodies do not have the luxury of being ‘apolitical’:
Text
Let’s consider the work of Ana Mendieta: a naked young woman of Cuban origin who creates ephemeral installations in the ground. There is nothing more political. It is still the case that some people – women, people of colour, trans persons – by their mere presence in public space pose multiple questions about the world we co-create, and the rules it is governed by. Who is present in the space and who is absent? What kind of bodies can we see? What does it tell us about the society we live in and the political moment we are in?
In this sense, every piece by the artist is political – feminist, queer, ecological or just socially aware. For the artist, choreography as such is intersectional, as it always positions itself at the junction of different disciplines and practices.
Czyczel also participated in the project Liquid Tongues by Daniel Kotowski and Bogna Burska, which was selected to represent Poland at the 2026 Venice Biennale. The central part of the piece is a musical piece inspired by whale songs, intonated by Choir in Motion, a group made up of both hearing and Deaf performers. Liquid Tongues ventures beyond human means of communication to search for other-than-human communication methods. In concord with Kotowski’s entire practice, the language of the Deaf isn’t treated as an ersatz of the hearing language, but
in accordance with the idea of Deaf Gain, deafness is understood as [...] a separate culture and identity that grants new perspectives and forms of expression. A significant portion of the video and audio material was recorded in water – an environment where Deaf people can freely use sign language while the hearing emit distorted sounds. The barrier between air and water becomes a space of experimentation; a mirror where different languages, bodies, and modes of feeling meet.
The choreography Czyczel prepared is inspired by underwater life and the movements of fish schools, whose movements blend the border between singular organisms and the complex system they create.
