9th Maat Festival "National Body" has just started! Throughout 2017, together with the invited artists, we will be watching them work in the studio to see the results at the end of the year in a shared space for presentation.
MAAT FESTIVAL is the first residency festival in Poland which provides dancers with laboratory working conditions: final works created in a strictly defined space for presentation are observed and analysed.
The 9th edition of the residency platform explores the relationships between the body of the performer/dancer and all that we can classify as "national" in the broadest sense to define the artist's status. We do not resort to the classics but examine the fact of creating contexts in a specific mental place of thinking, its boundaries being defined by our language. The artist's national body is a tissue/matrix that combines both the local and the things that cannot be captured in the digital "post" era. Will the "national collection" be shaped in the future from the shattered prisms of various fields and links related to our global community without the myth-creating heroic ethos? Let's give away our bodies to our national artists! Let’s meet!
The first artist-in-residence of the MAAT FESTIVAL "NATIONAL BODY" is Anita Wach. From 4-14 April 2017 she worked in the studio on the concept of a project tentatively called "peer to peer." The project was inspired by a book 'Parasite' written by French philosopher Michel Serres. The Performer, spectator (host, parasite): “I perceive the performer as a host of the carrier, giver and the one who is fed–a parasite. The performer takes on these roles smoothly, in an alternating fashion, just like the viewer who–a mere recipient of the results–gives away its most valuable possession–conscious attention. The viewer and the performer alike are hosts, each parasitizing on this risky relationship, trying to remain independent in a situation of physical proximity. A camouflage and costumes are important, too–the performer is like a 'black box' with a record of events; like a birthday cake with surprise; a prestidigitator’s box; a Matryoshka doll placed inside another; a thing in a thing; an organism composed of thousands of other organisms; a fertilizer for feasting when everything is consumed and digested."
ANITA WACH is a dancer, choreographer, performer and teacher of contemporary dance. A long-time dancer with Jacek Łumiński’s Silesian Dance Theatre (1996-2003). At the beginning of 2004, she joined the Warsaw Bretoncaffe Theater company, where she took part in the following projects: "SLAM.IN", "SLAM.OUT" (2004) and "The Dance of a Dreaming Body" (2006), "Dancing to Sarah Kane" (2007), "A Lizard Manifesto,” "I Agaue" (2010), "Topinambur" (2008), "Dion.Is.Us." She was awarded the Pro Helvetia Scholarship as well as the scholarships from the Mobile Academy (2006) and the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (2011). An artist-in-residence with the Zollwerein Choreographic Centre in Essen (participant in an Ewa Jaros project “Yi-Ya”). She was involved in two Polish-Israeli projects: improvised "Blind date" and interdisciplinary (video and dance) co-organized by the Artstations Foundation (2008). Wach is the author of solo projects: "Inch 1.5" (realized under the residency program "Solo project" in Poznan, 2006) performance "V`" which premiered in Warsaw, an improvised solo show "on/off" performed at Maat Festival and "Mute" realized under the Maat Festival residency program in 2013. A co-author of the following spectacles: "Weast.com" which premiered during the Warsaw Night of Dance (in collaboration with Ewa Jaros, 2008) and “w/ restless” (in cooperation with Magda Tuk, Marcin Cecko, Paweł Smagała, co-produced by the Body-Mind Foundation and Open Latitude, 2012). She collaborates with the international collective Via Negativa in Ljubljana, where she performed two solo shows "Oops" (co-produced by the Modul Dance and the Art Stations Foundation, 2012) and "100 Toasts" (co-produced by Maat Festival, 2015), and co-created "Casablanca Therapy" (2010), "Shame" (2011), "Just the beginning" (2012) and "So on and so forth." In 2016 she became a choreographic supervisor of a spectacle "The Nineth" (produced by Via Negativa in co-production with JaJaJaNeNeNe). She started the Collective Patent Quartet, with whom she produced under a performance "gloria!" She is a co-founder of the artistic duo TukaWach (2013).
MAAT FESTIVAL 'NATIONAL BODY' concept and idea, curator of the programme: TOMASZ BAZAN / produced by: JOANNA KOLSTRUNG and ARKADIUSZ SŁAWEK / in cooperation with: KAROL RĘBISZ, TOMASZ FABIAŃSKI, MACIEJ RUKASZ / funded by the Centre of Culture in Lublin and the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage
