Storm – Paweł Sakowicz | #dance

In the inaugural performance at the newly opened Pavilion of Dance and Other Performing Arts, Paweł Sakowicz concentrates on the distinct meanings of hip movements. Drawing inspiration from 2D animation techniques, the artist draws on his experience of ballroom dancing and subjects the qualities inherent in this part of the body, such as expressiveness and sensuality, to choreographic reflection.

To seduce, without looking

Paweł Sakowicz most often reaches for a specific idiom as a dramaturgical tool, whether physical (such as the jump in Jumpcore or the pantomime gesture in Amando) or abstract (the motif of a vortex in the sound installation Vortex, desire in the performance Boa, the relationship between man and landscape in Fatamorgana). This is no different in the performance Storm, in which the artist chose the mechanics of hip movements, connoting, among other things, temptation and desire, as his creative material. This focus on a specific motif and subjecting it to a specific close reading has a particular effect on the viewer's attention, who, in the course of the performance, concentrates on recognising successive references to the main motif, its transformations and possibilities. The viewer's attention begins to wander, become distracted, drift away and return, as if tempted by new associations.

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However, Sakowicz himself relinquishes the seductive power of his gaze: he consistently avoids eye contact with the audience, not even raising his eyes for a moment. When the performer stands with his back to the audience surrounding the stage on four sides, one might get the impression that his movement – the careful dynamisation of his hips, the rest of his body drawing power from them – should be combined with an enticing, lingering gaze, so strong is the association that this model of bodily expression evokes with a specific way of sight. However, this is only a cognitive automatism: the audience is not attracted by the eyes, and the artist consistently fixes his gaze on the floor, several dozen centimetres in front of him, as if wanting to maintain a certain intimacy with his own movement.

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From the ‘Storm’ performance by Paweł Sakowicz at the Pavilion of Dance in Warsaw, photo: Filip Preis

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Sakowicz starts out with subtle hip movements in the corner of the stage and these evolve into increasingly bold exposures, only to slow down again, loop and finally accelerate and intensify. This dynamic is suggested by the title itself, which, as the artist told me, refers to the embodied accumulation of energy that fades as the lights on stage go out. It is important that this interpretation also points to the trajectories of desire – also based on a gradual build-up of tension and its sudden reduction.

What happens when the storm ends?

The piece was created in the process of developing choreographic material later presented at the Sapieha Palace in Vilnius during the opening of the group exhibition Breaking the Joints (4th April–31st December 2025). Curated by the duo Post Brothers/Edgaras Gerasimovičius, the exhibition focused on the representation and specificity of the body in animation. The title ‘breaking joints’, a 2D animation technique that involves designing the movement of characters in order to achieve a more elastic, fluid and natural effect, became an important inspiration for Sakowicz in his conceptual work on Storm.

It was the function of one of the largest joints in the human body – the hip joint – which is responsible for maintaining balance in space and enabling circulation (the hip joint is spherical), that became his choreographic research material. In Storm, we see this in the movements in which – as one might suppose – the artist sought to simultaneously break the fluidity, emphasis and grace of constant circulation. It can be associated with writhing, at times ‘angular’, and the performer's movement (I remember that this was especially true in the initial phase of the performance) emphasises that something sharp can easily be revealed in the rotation of the hips, for example through the dynamic transfer of body weight.

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From the ‘Storm’ performance by Paweł Sakowicz at the Pavilion of Dance in Warsaw, photo: Filip Preis

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As the artist admitted in an interview with Denis Maksimov, hips are one of his favourite parts of the body. This is interesting insofar as it is difficult to resist the impression that associations with hip movements have something playful and colloquial about them. When I think about the theme of the performance, sexist phrases immediately come to mind, such as the slogan: ‘hips good for childbearing’ or the crude ‘shake your hips’, or Shakira's song Hips Don't Lie, a hit from the early 2000s. However, the choreography in Storm allows us to forget these gender-conditioned clichés for a moment, transporting the viewer into a realm of anxiety, anticipation and loneliness played out in the sensual memory of the performer. The sequence of movement – initially vertical – moves towards the plane, brought down by Sakowicz, who hesitates between two axes and two qualities: stability and swaying.

In the last part of the performance, the artist returns to verticality, accompanied by intense, loud music by Agnė Matulevičiūtė. The choreography then brings to mind the figure of a lonely dancer in a club trying to dance out his inner self, paying no attention to anything or anyone around him. The light (designed by Julius Kuršys) also corresponds to the storm in the title at this moment: cool, spotlit, subject to rapid changes. This is followed by a discharge, a crisis, understood, however, differently than in the colloquial sense, which would see it as a negative turn of events – for Sakowicz, it is rather about the unfolding of events. This is followed by a release, a crisis, understood, however, differently than in the colloquial sense, which would see it as a negative turn of events – for Sakowicz, it is more about a turning point, a change, a distinction.

So, what happens when the storm is over? Storm does not give answers, doesn’t open this question up for discussion, but rather closes in on itself. The decision not to make eye contact – this seemingly minor gesture – organises the dramaturgy of the performance, co-created with Anka Herbut, as inward-looking, guided by personal memories of something that haunts the imagination and is expressed physically. An important feature here is also Sakowicz's experience of perfecting his hip work while practising ballroom dancing. This context juxtaposes the history of disciplining one's own body with the spontaneity and freedom encoded in the circular movement of the pelvis, or the radical rest associated with a deep, relaxed squat. This is not the first time the artist has referred to his many years of training as a competitive ballroom dancer: he has done so before in Masakra (Massacre, Nowy Teatr in Warsaw, 2019) and Imperial (Komuna Warszawa, 2023), in which he problematised the cultural contexts of Latin dances and the waltz, respectively.

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From the ‘Storm’ performance by Paweł Sakowicz at the Pavilion of Dance in Warsaw, photo: Filip Preis

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The mirror phase

The relationship between rigidity and explosiveness, stability and energy of change is also revealed in the costume designed by Elena Marija Veleckaitė: light-coloured jeans and a sweatshirt with a print of a human skeleton, under which the artist wears a T-shirt depicting muscles and tendons. Denim, as a workwear fabric, seems to resist fluidity and set its limits. When Sakowicz takes off his sweatshirt – does he shed his skeleton and the regime of posture associated with it? – he only appears to undress, emphasising the conventional and conventionalised nature of exposed physicality as one of the tools of the performance. The t-shirt with a drawing of the muscular system hidden under the skin brings to mind a plastinate, an object prepared for scientific or educational purposes. Except that in Storm, the body is not a passive object of observation, as in an anatomical theatre, but becomes a subject of movement and reflection on itself. In the aforementioned interview, the artist said that while working on the performance, contrary to his usual practice, he spent a lot of time rehearsing in front of a mirror. Insight into one's own reflection, symbolic separation from the outside world, and looking at oneself in one's own image are clearly visible in the poetics of Storm. Although there is no physical mirror on stage, its function seems to be present in the performance.

_STORM_{by Paweł Sakowicz – Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Pavilion of Dance and Other Performing Arts in Warsaw; with support from the Polish Institute in Vilnius and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute within the framework of the cultural programme of the Polish Presidency of the EU Council 2025; choreography and performance: Paweł Sakowicz, music: Agnė Matulevičiūtė, lighting: Julius Kuršys, costume design: Elena Marija Veleckaitė, dramaturgical support: Anka Herbut. Premiere: 30th January 2026 at the Pavilion of Dance and Other Performing Arts in Warsaw.}

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