Laguna

Why make horror stories when fear is all around? Why be scared of something that you know doesn’t exist? What do you actually enjoy when you watch how fictional worlds disintegrate right before your eyes? And how does this relate to your own sense of fear? “Laguna” grows from our fascination with body horror as a genre that is a mirror for our collective fears related to physicality. It exploits our weakness to images that are both attractive and repulsive, causing our hearts to beat faster and our skin to tingle around the neck. In “Laguna”, the onstage spa, bodies are uncomfortable, wounds emerge as if out of nowhere, deckchairs are like torture devices and mud, which heals in other spas, kills like a bad omen at the cinema. A total eclipse of the Sun lasts long enough to shake the laws of more than gravity and motor skills. The disintegration is in the plot, the basic horror story conflict between order and chaos. And you can also experience first-hand the relationship between the tension onstage and in your muscles. You can also find out what brings relief when we meet to be scared together, just for a while.

Paweł Sakowicz - choreographer and dancer. He is particularly interested in the history of dance and issues of cultural appropriation in choreography. Paweł’s works include: ”Jumpcore” (Zachęta - National Gallery of Art), “Masakra” (Nowy Teatr in Warsaw), “Amando” (National Museum in Warsaw), “Imperial” (Komuna Warszawa Theatre), “Fatamorgana” (Studio Hrdinu in Prague), “Boa” (National Stary Theatre in Kraków) and ”Laguna” (TR Warszawa). He has shown his work at, among others, three editions of the Polish Dance Platform, the Divine Comedy Festival, Santarcangelo Festival, Zürcher Theater Spektakel, Sirenos Festival, Warsaw Gallery Weekend, La Biennale de danse du Val-de-Marne, Susch Museum, Tramway Glasgow, NYU Skirball and Bohemian National Hall in New York. He regularly collaborates with Anka Herbut, Anna Smolar and Łukasz Twarkowski. Anka Herbut is a dramaturg working at the intersection of choreography, dance and theater. She is a writer, researcher, curator and mother. A close collaborator of Paweł Sakowicz and Łukasz Twarkowski. Her texts have been staged at the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre in Vilnius, Dailes Theatre in Riga, National Stary Theatre in Kraków, Nowy Theatre, Studio Theatre, TR Warszawa and Komuna/Warszawa in Warsaw, among others. Her writing blends critical practice, theoretical reflection and social engagement. She is particularly interested in feminist world-building strategies, experiments with the poetics and performativity of language, social choreographies. For several years, she has been developing Resistance Movements and Antibodies, projects that explore choreographic strategies of resistance and the embodiment of new models of coexistence. She is a member of the international feminist collective systering and part of the programming team at TR Warszawa theater in Warsaw, Poland. Milena Liebe - she is a visual artist dealing with post-internet esthetic and a costume designer working in the fields of choreography, theatre, and movies. Her works were exhibited in Zachęta National Gallery of Art. Jacqueline Sobiszewski is a visual artist, working with light, video, film and photography. Light designer working in the fields of dance and choreography, theatre and movies. Born and raised in the Netherlands. Studied at the Cinematography Department of the State Higher School of Film, Television and Theater in Łódź. Combining various techniques, always looking for a new visual language in various fields of art, cooperating with directors, musicians, choreographers and individually. Her work has been shown in NYC,Los Angeles, Sydney, London, Paris, Vienna, Madrid, Lisbon, Sao Paulo. She lives and works in Warsaw, Poland. Justyna Stasiowska is a lesbian Silesian artist and theorist working through sound and based in Berlin. With an M.A in Drama and Theatre Studies from Krakow’s Jagiellonian University, she has also researched in the field of sound studies and published in various theatre journals and books, including the contemporary music journal “Glissando”, which she has also edited, and the academic sound studies blog “SoundingOut!blog”. Working in the field of sonic narration, she focuses on notions of dramaturgy and design in different disciplines, and Stasiowska has worked for choreographers, theatre directors, architects, designers and video artists at theatres, design festivals, performance spaces across Europe. She has performed live at Sanatorium of Sound (PL), Phonon (CZ), Canti Spazializzati (PL), Control Room (PL) and created sound art pieces that have been presented at MSN and Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw. Iza Tarasewicz - born in 1981 in Białystok, Poland. Her sculptural installations take the form of modular, flexible, mobile, and reconfigurable display systems that combine a raw and modest functionalism with formal logics found in the natural world, scientific experimentation, and graphs and diagrams — figures of thought and charts of relation that systematize knowledge and data and abstractly describe the interaction of phenomena. The artist gets inspiration for her work from the atomism of classical Greek philosophy and from the reality-explanations of 20th-century quantum physics and chaos-theory. Her statues and object-assemblages that may be combined into installations are generated into systems filled with energy, formed from hardly identifiable organic and inorganic materials. She lives and works in Kolonia Koplany, Poland.