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SKIN WARSAW

skin-warsaw

SKIN WARSAW

SKIN Warsaw was realized in collaboration with Re: visions Festival and Impact Foundation at the Palace of Culture Warsaw, Poland on 03.-04.12.10.

Tools Ws took place for 7 full days (40h). We shared the space each night with an audience of 80 people. The 18 artists that joined the project came from Germany, Italy, Australia and Mexico.

Concept and realization
Eckhard Müller + Daniela Schwartz.

Dancers
Aleksandra Piechnik, Iza Szostak, Jadi Carboni, Julian Marcelo Elizari Romeo, Katarzyna Kizior, Leszek Stanek, Małgorzata Pianowska, Mirela Gołębniak, Paulina Święcańska, Szymon Osiński, Tomasz Wygoda, Volke Eschmann, Weronika Pelczyńska

Musicians
Daniel Radtke, Kuba Dykiert, Kuba Słomkowski.

Video
Keith Lim, Omar Soriano Lopez.

Tools Workshop Photos

SKIN Performance I by Soriano López

SKIN Performance III by Soriano López

Artist’s testimonials

“SKIN is happening and it is amazing that it is functioning that the audience is joining. Or “why do so many artists and event manager think the audience does not want to join?” Ecki and Dani found a very good way to bring all of us in contact with each other. Thank you!
I think it is the most beautiful thing to invite the audience to join in the dance to discover their artistic scenes.
I felt it is a question of my own wish how much I want to get in contact with those strangers. If I decide to trust in what am I doing and be with a clear positive intention the stranger trust me and starts dancing as well.”

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“Space, time, eye contact. A meeting with your self through the exploration of the present moment.
Anything can happen, I agree if is authentically in the present. Stay awake in the game to let go of judgments: a very little action can change the whole picture! Watcher, mover, action, reaction, leader, follower: the roles and the rules…and we go deep inside to our bones, organs and then along our skin, where everything has an order, a functionality, where our history is told, revealed and where we can truly exist. Thank you again for this wonderful experience!!!”

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“Priceless event it was for me. During the week of our rehearsals I recognized I was so much open and I could not stop it ! I was driving in Bus or Metro and I was looking into peoples eyes. I was non stop thinking about composition. I was trying to fill up every Gap in space and movement. Welcoming people getting into the Metro and saying goodbye when they had to leave. But it’s hard to keep this state of mind cause people are mostly closed. That’s why if You wanna keep it Must practice and work on Yourself all the time ! ;))”

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Complicity and Complication in the SKIN experience
by Omar Soriano López – Musician and Communicologist

Will there be any power that give us the capacity
 to see ourselves as others see us? Robert Burns

SKIN is an interdisciplinary project involving dancers, musicians and video artists in an improvisational performance which seeks the interaction of the audience, provoking different and multiple codes and tactics for communicating through the body, music, and camera. I particularly worked this time with the camera. Provoking as a result an active participation in the public, in which they see themselves almost inevitably immersed and involved in the process of the creation of what is happening from the beginning to the end, resulting in an experience where their imagination, ordinary state of consciousness and body expression are amplified, uninhibited and free flowing and in conjunction.

Starting from 27 of november to 2 of december, first there was a workshop, and finally having the performances the 3 y 4 at the Palace of Culture and Science, as a part of the program of Re:visions (Rewijze Warsawa), an annual artistic festival in which participate creators from different disciplines like music, video art, contemporary dance, and performance.

This first workshop functioned as a previous immersion for the integration of the performers, for knowing each other, but also to learn about the many possibilities of relationship and action that each has, it was a space-time where, in an intensive and exhaustive way, took place several exercises, games, self-explorations, improvisations, discussions, reflections, and the last but not less important, a really nice fellowship.

I must say this process involved a large effort that implied, face and fight with your own routines, prejudices, habits, stereotypes, cliches; the planner mind that analyzes, which foresees, that think about the risks, which is more in the future and the past than at present.

On the other hand, one itself must accept and recognize as spectator, to learn first and foremost to be a spectator and then to create as an artist. The starting point must be the others, to learn to listen and watch, being these the main rules of the game for the creation, so the individual work will not work if its not through always being aware of what is happening around me, to what the others are doing, and also perceiving and thinking how that affects me, how can I relate to it, what does it provokes me, and then react to it, and create a situation of complicity. Perhaps, one find itself mostly reacting rather than performing, or maybe we are co-performing, or co-reacting. But usually we think it’s the other way around, as the logical order intend to be.

Before the action, before making a decision and do something there must be a complicity between me and what’s happening and with the others, directly or indirectly. No action have really great consequences if its not by being an accomplice. That is, not searching and thinking how I am implicated in what its happening, but how I am complicated here and now with my surroundings and with the others. I think that this is not about to find oneself on the things one do. Its not like saying: let me first I found my center, doing my trench, been well protected, and only then I’ll be ready to make contact with the outside. Probably not. Maybe so, without looking for oneself previously, without the need for a re-cognition, paradoxically, in that way one is more intricate with what happens, and with the others.

Complicate, from latin complicare, to fold together (com, together; plicare, to fold, wave, knit) Mix, join [different things together]. Confound, muddle, tangle, con-fuse. To fold or twist together; to combine intricately; to make complex; to combine or associate so as to make intricate or difficult. to expose involvement in a convoluted matter.

When a subject implicate in the action it recognizes individually beforehand in the totality of what, actually, it is the unknown, a complete stranger for it. Somehow it’s like, before entering into relation with the world, I knew I keep a link with it just because somehow it has to do with me, it may be a representation of me. The other is like me, the other has my face. The terrible familiarity.

Recognizing in the other, in the outside. Where am I? How am I implicated here and now? Is there something about me in what it’s occurring now, in what the other is doing? This can become a true absolute solipsism, autism, a tautology. It’s like looking for a mirror all the time.

Rather, try to look and see the unknown in yourself, the unknown is not only outside, it’s already inside. And this is how then I could find complicity, communion, but in the strangeness. Of what we are accomplices? What do we have in common? Answer: that we do not know each other. We’re two strangers, even I am a stranger for myself. I realize that maybe things are always really far between them, even when they are caressing each other. Farness is the foundation of every relationship, of every communication, an irrevocable distance between people, and maybe that’s the reason why we seek, and seek always a familiar face. This is an ethics of farness, of strangeness, of mystery, of the unknowable.

If there should be a starting point would be to assert in any new encounter, in every new experience that I have only assured that I know nothing, as Socrates once said. Maybe this could be the only thing that is implicated indeed, what it is already there: the not-knowing, the question. But not a certainty, the sense of security that gives me the belief of founding oneself.
And finally, once I found myself complicated in what’s happening, knowing the complicity one keeps with the other, one is immediately committed to action. There is no turning back, one inevitably becomes responsible of the performance, as it actions are already involved and affect it directly or indirectly.

And that includes the spectator. Being an spectator is not something passive, just watching comfortably what happen, waiting for the performer to do something outstanding for me. Expectation is an action, one is constantly in action and that has consequences. It’s not about thinking what I am, to be something, it’s about doing. Rather I think if i’m spectating or performing, but considering how this action it’s affecting the whole thing? What to do with what I do? And how to do it? How am I doing as a spectator or as a performer?

So if it manages to make a state of trust and dialogue between the audience and the performers it’s because the spectator realizes that the performer is not doing things as if he already knew what to do, as if he had the idea of how the audience should react, instead, it’s because the performer recognizes itself as someone who does not know what will happen. So if an spectator accepts what the performer offers, perhaps it’s because it made the invitation to venture into the unknown.

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