Gift of the Soul

The show prepared as a gift for dance lovers by the Polish Dance Theatre to celebrate its 30th anniversary is a unusual and unique event, although it continues the way of thinking created by Conrad Drzewiecki and developed by Ewa Wycichowska. On the one hand it is another multi-dimensional proposition born of the imagination of its creators and offering new dance gestures, new gesture compilations, new ideas, and new thoughts expressed with the language of men and women speaking through dance. However, the longer I watched the dance and followed the plot I came to realise that the show is an answer of the authors and dancers to the following questions: what is their art? where are the sources of their passion for it? why is that passion so unconditional, sometimes destructive, if they are all aware that dance is ephemeral and theses formulated with the dance language are so transitory?

“... and I’m dancing” has two formal and contentual determinants. The show is set in a casting session, but it concerns love. The session turns out to be more than a selection of dancers, or maybe even of repertoire. It comes to be a selection of the fate and destiny.

Similarly, love is not only a feeling that brings two people together, in a nearly everlasting dimension. Such structure of the show allowed Wycichowska to intelligently introduce five quotations from previous shows, including “The Spring Feast”, “Transss...” and “+- finity”.

This time, Wycichowska’s dancers do not only dance (including Przemysła Grządziela’s stilt dance, brilliant as ever), but they also speak, or sometimes even shout. They are in good moods, but – in accordance with the laws of casting sessions – some of them also happen to die in the ballet waste bin.

Piano and acting improvisations by Leszek Możdżer turn out to be an outstanding asset of the musical dimension of the show (music by Jacek Wierzchowski + quotations). The improvisations underline the authenticity and colours of the atmosphere. And the theatre, the dancing thirty-year-old, continues to show a great deal of vigour and an unpredictable stockpile of artistic ideas.

Andrzej Chylewski, "Głos Wielkopolski", June 27, 2003.