Where to Put the Blanket, cont.	2/7

Attempts

The key to an endeavor's guiding concept is often found in its title. The original name suggested by Łumiński for the Philadelphia project was Próba powrotu do korzeni (An Attempt to Return to Roots). This was originally translated into English as Coming Back to Roots, omitting the viatal word attempt. This is significant, because attempt connotes the essence of Łumiński's intended process. An attempt, like an artistic process, is an activity: a try, an endeavor, an experiment undertaken whose final result is far from guaranteed. Determining the destination of a journey is an exciting mystery to be solved and reached–it is the essence of embarking. As with a journey, the elements of unpredictability, surprise, preparation, readiness, sensitivity, and openness to the unexpected constitute a vital part of any artistic endeavor or attempt. This was the primary motif of our five weeks together.

When I asked Łumiński in the first days of the project about his goals for the project, he answered openly, "I don't know." I found this courageous: his willingness to risk working without a clearly outlined final "product" in mind, guided only by artistic assumptions. It was clear from the beginning that Łumiński regarded the performances as a pretext to carry out much more important and arduous work in the studio, where life continued in the same rhythm for nearly five weeks: a morning class for the community and the project's four female dancers, followed by an afternoon rehearsal. This schedule shows the priority of practices in Łumiński's theater: movement and dance carry the most vital emotions and meanings. It is within the microcosm of movement that a kind of narrative of Łumiński's world of theater is hidden, a story which is consequently transposed into larger theatrical units–sequences, images, situations, and scenes.

It is the movement technique, furthermore, created over ten years ago and gradually refined in the years since then, that contains the basic elements of what Łumiński finds interesting in art. In attempting to describe his difficult, often acrobatic style of dance on many occasions, I have called it "a dance of inconsequence" because it seems to be guided by no single prevailing rule of movement construction. A Łumiński dance is based on combinations of steps that seem impossible to execute, or that appear uncoordinated and performed as if motivated by competing simultaneous impulses that tear the dancer's body apart in a solitary internal struggle. A dancer's sudden change of direction or turning axis; breathtaking speed then a sudden falling off of energy; abrupt shifts from deep pli?s to jumps and pirouettes; intensely ecstatic arm swings, legwork, and head movements, which often simultaneously initiate dancing and disrupt balance; continuously established then broken symmetries of bodily arrangement–all these events make the dancers' next moves impossible to predict, as if little depended on their will or agency.

Łumiński's movement innovations are supported by research on kinetic abilities of the human body–the ways one can manipulate the body's weight, the role of the pelvis and the spine, the conscious search for and use of new centers of movement. This search includes investigating psycho-physical knowledge–how the body "floats" in space between the real outer world and the realm of the Other. The choreographer feels that this dual interior dialogue occurs in the sphere of the universal spiritual experience (a concept Łumiński explores in his Silesian Dance Theatre producitons).

The narrative incorporated in the movement appeared to me clearly as I listened to instructions Łumiński gave the dancers during the daily classes in the SHMD studio. He constantly returned to the notions of surprise ("surprise yourself while dancing") and suspension (as in a climax, the moment of waiting for something unexpected to happen, and not knowing how it would impel you).

On the first day Łumiński used the Greek term peripéteia (vicissitude), which corresponds to the ideas of surprise and suspension. In the poetics of drama peripéteia describes an event that suddenly changes the plot and characters' fates. Łumiński transposes it metaphorically to dance as a rule of movement, a principle of construction that entails a constant negation of previous movements, surprising the dancers as well as the audience. For Łumiński peripéteia becomes the main dramaturgical mechanism of dance, but also a metaphor for all actions in life.

Dance organized around the axis heel/coccyx/spine/top-of-head becomes, right in front of our eyes, a history of balance–and consequently a narrative emerges about its loss and our constant return to it. Thus, the dancer's body tells a universal story of continuous struggle that remains in the center of Łumiński's theatre: the fall and rise of an individual, sometimes solitary but more often in a group. While his form of dance requires a huge physical effort from the dancer, it above all demands a considerable intellectual effort–a persistent concentration and an absolute, immediate presence on the stage.

One of Łumiński's initial comments, made in the first week of the project (the most difficult time for the dancers, with its surfeit of new physical and intellectual information), was that their work together was "more about thinking than dancing." One of the dancers echoed this idea in her diary in a beautiful, vivid and inspiring motto that encapsulated one of the most fruitful revelations of the project: "my mind is moving!"

While essential as a basic means of expression, movement in Łumiński's theatre is not an aim in itself. It is, rather, a tool for expressing the ideas of the performance. The sequences of gestures and steps that make up a dance are like words that make a sentence. They contain messages whose meanings are dependant on a context, one created by dramatization, theatrical situations, stage design, words, and atmosphere. Interestingly, most of the group arrangements not directly connected with particular characters were developed during the first week and remained unchanged; further work on these arrangements was restricted only to dancers perfecting the material given them by the choreographer. The most intriguing work in the course of the project came as a result of dancers improvising to create the original movement for their characters. This process allowed the dancers to stay emotionally close to the material and to begin to identify with the characters they created.