Polish Dance Theatre

Ballet double bill

THE HAT

Choreography, set design, lighting design, sound, text: Jo Strømgren
Costumes: Bregje van Balen
Assistant choreographer: Rebecca Hoback

ROMEOS & JULIAS UNPLAGUED. TRAUMSTADT

Conception and choreography: Yoshiko Waki
Assistant choreographer: Rene Haustein
Dramaturgy: Rolf Baumgart
Set and costume design: Nanako Oizumi
Lights: Przemysław Gapczyński, Nanako Oizumi, Dariusz Szych

Guest performance by the Polish Dance Theatre (Poznań) marking the company's 50 years.

The Hat

Like sepia-toned 'old-fashioned' photographs bathed in warm shades of brown, the afterimages of past experiences that became jumbled in memory and its subjective chronology, the choreographic images conjured up by Jo Strømgren from a magic hat remind us that memories, though fleeting and existing immaterially, do not lose their reality.

Echoes and mirages of events, shuffled by the passing of time, snippets of what has passed, a nostalgic look back and from afar – The Hat draws the audience into a seance of memory which allows one to penetrate the hidden meanings of the things that have been and not fully conscious.

The hazy images with slightly blurred contours show phantasms of performances, human interactions, coming together and coming apart, departures and returns, speaking in several languages and more than a dozen languages used by the bodies of the dancers of the Polish Dance Theater.

What else can be taken out of the hat? What other series of events can this (un)ordinary object trigger?

Romeos & Julias unplagued. Traumstadt

The Polish Dance Theater and the bodytalk collective juxtapose ecstatic and liberating dance with the suffocating reality of the pandemic. By multiplying the titular couple, they simultaneously tell several love stories with the same tragic finale. They use a multi-sensory palette of means to draw an analogy between the scourge of the coronavirus and the epidemics of the Renaissance times. The mix of live music, human voices of different intensity, carnivalesque costumes and youthfully vibrant movement creates an expressive space for the most universal of human experiences: love and death. The titular Traumstadt is both a city of dreams and a city of traumas where the eternal need for closeness collides with mandated social distancing that condemns people to loneliness and physical isolation.