Where to Put the Blanket, cont.	3/7

Roots

Initially, the idea presented in the provisional title Coming Back to Roots appeared enigmatic to many of us. Łumiński's work made it clear, however, that the title alluded to a time when dance, music, and singing had been unified. Yet Łumiński aim was not to reconstruct primitive spectacles. As a modern artist, he was concerned to reach the most concise means of expression and representation, even as he presented the performance in the context of a secular ritual reflecting the image of modern people and representing universal and timeless behaviors and problems. Łumiński is interested in the perspective anthropologists have introduced to art; a situation in which a person is put on stage is a micromodel of a social construct. This is certainly rich terrain for choreographic research and the sourcing of movement material. Łumiński has been interested in anthropology on various levels since the beginning of his career, and his work in Philadelphia comes on the brink of starting his doctoral dissertation in anthropology at Indiana University.

Łumiński invited the dancers to search for the most restricted, strangled, or even lost means of expression in order to speak to the world around them and at the same time to provoke discussion about the significance of art in their lives. The intensive process involved far more than just executing movement ordained by the choreographer. The dancers worked on elementary acting tasks, notably improvising with text (articles from daily papers) and creating characters and their movements out of random sentences from a script. They also watched films such as All About Eve, Steel Magnolias, and Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown to study ensemble acting. They listened to Polish folk music and discussed theatre; met with Allen Kuharski and Sharon Friedler of Swarthmore College; completed out-of-studio tasks; and, in the last week of the rehearsal process, carried out exercises with breathing and voice, in particular "freeing" the voice while dancing, in which they were joined by the project's composer, Wojtek Blecharz. Even during the final stages of the production the choreographer offered new impulses and information, generating questions that made each of us seek answers.

Łumiński kept provoking the young dancers into their own spiritual and intellectual searches, stimulating them into action and reminding them that what is most important is not how they dance but why. The forty-minute performance that resulted could truly claim the dancers as its rightful coauthors. Just as Łumiński's movement contains and symbolizes his own thoughts about art, Where to Put the Blanket (the title's final incarnation comes from the headline of an article used during the work) emerged entirely from the five-week process. I can now clearly see the work as the reflection or metaphor of that process: a micromodel of society.