Weronika Pelczyńska

Weronika Pelczyńska is a dancer, choreographer and a creator of stage movement. It is thanks to her that Chekhov's and Dygat's characters swing, tap dance, roller skate, Anna Karenina dances the waltz, and the Dulskis seduce the audience with expressive jazz and poetic images as if from a dance theatre. Pelczyńska has bravely entered the dramatic stages of Warsaw, giving Polish theatre a whole new rhythm and pace. Some may still be out of breath.

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Weronika Pelczyńska, photo courtesy of the artist

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Born in 1985, Weronika Pelczyńska graduated from the renowned SEAD Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance and the Faculty of Production Engineering at Warsaw University of Technology. She was a scholarship holder of DanceWEB 2013 (ImPulzTanz, Vienna, Austria), Carte Blanche 2013 (Modul-Dance, Slovenia) and Grazyna Kulczyk's Alternative Dance Academy (2017 and 2019, Poznań). She gained international stage experience performing with the Bodhi Project from Salzburg, Cologne’s Mouvoir, the Kassel-based Johannes Wieland Company , Bonn’s Cocoon Dance and Random Scream from Brussels.

As Pelczyńska recalls in an interview with Culture.pl:

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However, I knew from the beginning that I wanted to work in Poland. Here there is great potential and room for improvement. We have many ambitious and talented dancers, and public demand for dance is growing.

As a dancer, she has tried many dance forms in Poland: she worked with the theatre Studio Buffo and Anna Piotrowska's Mufmi Dance Theatre, and won a gold medal at the European Championship in disco dance formations with the Volt troupe. For her performance Fire is Raging in Your Hair, choreographed by Anna Nowicka, she won the prestigious Berlin HAU Award. In 2009, she created the performance Prawa Półkula (Right hemisphere) with Marysia Stokłosa. Her first choreography for the play – Opowieści z Lasku Wiedeńskiego (Tales of the Vienna Woods), a graduation performance by students of the Warsaw Theatre Academy directed by Agnieszka Glińska – was created a year later, being the start of a regular and fruitful collaboration between the two artists. Other of their joint productions include Iwona, Księżniczka Burgunda (Ivona, Princess of Burgundy) (National Theatre, 2014) and Panny z Wilka (The Maids of Wilko) (Stary Teatr, 2019). Working with Agnieszka Glińska, as Pelczyńska notes, was one of the most important artistic encounters of her dance resume. Together they have produced more than 20 performances.

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'bi(g)gender', Weronika Pelczyńska, Magda Fejdasz, photo: Natalia Kontrakiewicz

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Among Pelczyńska's other collaborations with artists, it is worth mentioning her work with Poland’s Magda Szpecht, Grzegorz Laszuk, Robert Jarosz, Agnieszka Holland, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Michał Marczak and Barbara Sass. Prominent overseas artists include Matej Kejžar, Peter Pleyer, Stephanie Thiersch, Jozef Frucek and Linda Kapetanea, as well as with Rafeala Giovanola.

Pelczyńska teaches at the Aleksander Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Art and at SWPS University in Warsaw.

The Dulskis dance the twist

Favorite moment – the first reading. ‘Agnieszka [Glińska] has an incredible gift for gathering interesting stage personalities around her’, says Weronika. ‘Already during the first meeting with the script she is able to conjure up in words the world we are about to build together on the theatre stage. Then the first ideas and inspirations are born’.

The process of creating movement begins with improvisation. In the rehearsal room, the actor is accompanied by ‘someone from movement’, but he does not impose steps or figures, but helps to find and give the movement the right shape. It doesn't have to be a complicated dance sequence. To catch the viewer's attention, sometimes a subtle, natural gesture or way of moving is enough. As Pelczyńska says:

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Choreography has an imposed, defined, repetitive form and rhythm. This is how it differs from stage movement, which is a process of building a role together. Working with an actor is fascinating, also because it is unpredictable. It looks different every time. I look carefully at the actors, check whether the movements I have prepared for them fit them, whether they look good on stage and whether they express the character appropriately.

Wrist solo

In Pożegnania (Farewells) by Stanisław Dygat, the actors tap-danced and skated, and in Mewa (The Seagull), together with Dominika Kluźniak, she searched for movement derived from the movement of the wrists, which is as delicate as a wave or a bird's wing. As she said in an interview with Izabela Szymańska:

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I always try to look for ideas in actors, in their natural way of moving and gesticulating. Everyone has a different way of touching, smoking a cigarette, greeting friends, everyone is distinctive. I could invent steps for them, a movement language, but in my opinion it makes no sense. When viewers notice a movement taken from everyday life, an organic movement, they have a kind of flashback – they associate it with something, and it speaks to them more.

In Moralność Pani Dulskiej (The Morality of Mrs. Dulska), presented at the Współczesny Theatre, from steps, small gestures, marching, talking, the characters in the play seamlessly transition into dance – the one marked in the drama by Gabriela Zapolska – the cake-walk, twist, waltz, and the one through which, as Weronika says, the theatrical illustration and the relationships between the characters gain additional meaning. ‘We look for it between sentences, in the atmosphere, not in syllables. Dance sometimes allows you to say more than words’, explains the choreographer. Thus, the characters enliven bourgeois dances from the previous era with jazz improvisations and energetic, rock and roll-like tangles.

Weronika's idea was praised by theatre critics, who called her choreography – in this award-winning Warsaw production – thrilling, fast, attractive and clever. And at the same time light and pleasing to the eye. Marek Krajewski reviewed:

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The show is dynamic not only because of the fast pace of the action, but also because of the almost surreal scenes – interludes in which the characters momentarily drop their masks. This is a very interesting idea of the director. Through this simple device, Agnieszka Glińska showed not only the duality of human nature, but also diversified the performance, additionally unexpectedly relieving the tension in order to build it anew in the next scene.

On theatrical posters, Weronika Pelczyńska's name appeared alongside Agnieszka Glińska’s on the occasion of another play, Amazonia, a production staged at the Wola Theatre, and at the Studio Theatre on Sąd Ostateczny (The Final Judgment) by pre-war Austrian writer Odon van Horvath. She also worked on Anna Karenina, directed by Paweł Szkotak at the capital's Studio Theatre. She said:

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During rehearsals, the idea of movement evoking associations with the dance macabre emerged. I worked with the actor Marcin Januszkiewicz using the method of improvisation, writing down the best moments, which the actor then recreated on stage every night.

As if in a dancing trance

Weronika Pelczyńska also has to her credit a film collaboration with Polish cinema legend Barbara Sass-Zdort. In the film Pieśni Miłosne (Love Songs) inspired by the famous story of the revolt of the Bethany nuns from Kazimierz Dolny, she prepared two scenes of possession; a kind of dance in a trance. As the artist recalled:

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I collaborated with about 20 young actresses, with whom together I created a kind of sound choir. We were looking for the source of trance-like movement precisely in the sound, the voice. It was from it that more and more intense movement was born. We explored the limits of religious trance during one of our rehearsals in the space of a church on Warsaw's Savior Square. It was an extraordinary experience.

As a dancer, Weronika realises herself, among other things, in the association of independent artists and choreographers established in Warsaw, Centrum (w) Ruchu, which is a space for performing arts in Warsaw, created on the initiative of the Burdąg Foundation and located in the premises of the Wawer Cultural Center.

On the theatrical stage, Pelczyńska could also be seen in the play Fale (Waves), directed by Agnieszka Błońska in the Ochota Theatre in Warsaw. In 2011, Komuna Warsaw hosted the premiere of her solo performance Yvonne, Yvonne – a remix of the work of American choreographer Yvonne Rainer. In it, the dancer circles the empty stage several times in a steady run, then crosses the space, changes direction, after several minutes she enriches her trot with a set of exercises, and when she stops and tries to catch her balance, she smoothly moves to a series of exercises taken straight out of a ballet training room. The movement becomes more and more intense.

She is also active on dance stages in Germany, especially Bonn and Cologne. She can be seen in performances of Replay Swan, choreographed by Rafael Giovanola-Endrass of the Cocoon Dance Company, and Under Green Ground, choreographed by Stephanie Thiersch of the Mouvoir group.

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I can't quite define the trend that interests me. I am constantly looking for new forms and inspiration. Important to me is the method of working with the dancer and actor, working on the body. I am not a conceptual or critical artist. I believe that a choreographer should be comprehensively educated so that he or she can draw inspiration from different catalogues of forms and movement. Someday I will construct a performance that will have a reducer mechanism

– jokes Weronika.

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Rzeźbiary by Weronika Pelczyńska and Magda Fejdasz, photo: Marek Zimakiewicz

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As of 2019, together with Magda Fejdasz and Monika Szpunar, she is co-founding the choreographic initiative Sisterhood Practice, bringing together female choreographers, theatre makers and academics. The initiative embodies the concept of sisterhood and is based on the principles of dialogue and collaboration. In an interview with Marcelina Obarska, Pelczyńska said:

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On the level of choreography, we explore sisterhood exactly as a kind of great degree of independence in something we cultivate together. We’re interested in collective work that doesn’t cause a loss of singularity. The more individual we are, the more common our goal is.

One of the choreographies produced as part of the initiative was The Sculptresses, a performance created at the invitation of the National Museum in Warsaw as an event accompanying the exhibition Corsets Off: Camille Claudel and Polish Women Sculptors of the 19th Century. Pelczyńska and Magda Fejdasz introduced the audience to Polish female sculptors not mentioned in the exhibition's title: Tola Certowicz, Antonina Rożniatowska, Jadwiga Milewska, Felicja Modrzejewska and others. In dance, they gave life to the sculptures, set them in motion.

Other initiatives of Sisterhood Practices were the performances Still Standing (2023) and The Sphere (2022).

choreography

contemporary dance