Hold onto...

'Hold onto' is a project by Monika Szpunar, consisting of two parts that share a common idea: the desire to bring the audience closer to dance and choreography, to create opportunities for encounter and the attempt to capture the ephemeral. The first part, ‘Hold onto dance’, invites elderly people into 6 creative laboratories that culminate in a performance.Through the practice of original choreographic tools, participants shift from passive spectators into active performers. The project highlights the agility of seniors and the embodied experience and memory they carry, as well as brings people closer to contemporary choreography. The second part, ‘Hold onto the wind’, is a (non)solo dance piece that gives the audience the possibility for an immersive experience. It draws inspiration from the phenomenon of the wind and moves between memory and the here and now; between what has been passed on to us and what we want to pass on - while attempting to tame the experience of (in)coherence.

MONIKA SZPUNAR - dancer, performer and choreographer working interdisciplinarily and across borders, mainly in Poland, the Czech Republic and France. She is a graduate of ACTS/Ecole de Danse Contemporaine in Paris and The Place, London Contemporary Dance School. In 2016, she spent six months in Brazil, where she collaborated with local artists and studied at Unicamp in Campinas. As a dancer, she has collaborated with artists such as Weronika Pelczyńska, Magda Fejdasz, Joanna Leśnierowska, Johana Pocková and Sabina Bočková (POCKETART), Viktor Černický and the French company Compagnie INTERSCRIBO / Tatiana Julien. Monika also works as a curator and producer at the Krakow Choreographic Center. She co-creates the choreographic initiative sisterhood practices, within which the performances “Still Standing” and “ The Sculptresses”(Aerowaves 2024) were created. Monika develops original projects that bring choreography into dialogue with other disciplines and engage different social groups.