Threesome

In Threesome, I share the dance space with spectral figures from the past as I grapple with their legacy. In this exercise in phantasmagoric choreography, I go cruising through the biographies of the legendary dancers Stanisław Szymański, Wojciech Wiesiołłowski, and Gerard Wilk. Brought up in post-war, communist Poland, two of them eventually emigrated, while one chose to stay in his native country. How have their bodies been remembered? How did these bodies come to recognize their sensibility and express it on stage? How can these marginalized lives be reclaimed and embodied today? How do we construct an untamed, monstrous, illogical bodily archive of queer history without losing any of their uniqueness? Threesome seeks to dispel the myths and rediscover their individual experience in a world that we were not part of. It is a hazy posthumous ballet, a repressed legacy, a reenactment, an act of somatic plunder and transformation. Threesome: Do not let these biographies be appropriated, much less consumed by the history of ballet and by politics. Do not let national sentiment lay claim to the oberek. Surrender to the other, so as to disappear and to exist more fully. "Most of them are human in form, but they often have a grotesque oddity that they try to keep hidden. Some use their lovely faces to keep you from noticing that, when seen from the back, their heads are hollow. Others use their long hair to hide the fact that they have animals' feet. Some keep their hands in fast, perpetual motion to prevent you from seeing that their fingers are joined together. They are able to provoke both admiration and horror. They are thought to lament over and revel in their differences." — Peter Stoneley, A Queer History of the Ballet

WOJCIECH GRUDZIŃSKI is a choreographer and dancer. He graduated from the Roman Turczynowicz Ballet School in Warsaw and the contemporary dance department at CODARTS – Rotterdam Dance Academy in the Netherlands. In 2023, he obtained a master’s degree from DAS Graduate School – Academy of Theatre and Dance at the University of Amsterdam. In 2024, he was an artist-in-residence at Cité internationale des arts x CN D in Paris, where he worked on the development of the project THREESOME. In 2025, he received the Polityka Passport Award in the Stage category. Wojciech Grudziński is an associated artist with Frascati Producties in Amsterdam. He has been awarded scholarships from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (2017, 2021), the City of Warsaw (2021), as well as Dutch programs such as Schuurman Schimmel–van Outeren Stichting (2012/2013) and Stichting Bekker-la Bastide-Fonds (2013). In 2018, he won a competition for a study visit at Movement Research at Judson Church in New York, organised in cooperation with the GPS/Global Practice Sharing Program, Art Stations Foundation, and the Institute of Music and Dance. Grudziński has collaborated with, among others, Dries Verhoeven (The NarcoSexuals, SPRING Performing Arts Festival), Igor Cardellini and Tomas Gonzalez (2100, Palazzo Trevisan degli Ulivi, Venice), Marta Ziółek (Seans z Pamelą, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw), Ula Sickle (Ujazdowski Castle – Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw), Ben J. Riepe (CREATURE, Goethe-Institut, Kraków), Katarzyna Kalwat (Purification, Łaźnia Nowa Theatre, Kraków), and Hana Umeda (Sada Yakko, Komuna//Warszawa). Wojciech develops his own choreographic projects. In 2016–2017, he created the solo works SLAVE4YOU and PAX. In 2018, as a resident of Art Stations Foundation (Solo Projekt Plus), he produced POPULUXE, which was selected for the Polish Dance Platform 2019. In 2019, he premiered RODOS (produced by Komuna Warszawa), which was featured in Polityka magazine’s TOP10 ranking. In 2021, he presented DANCE MOM, a performance developed in collaboration with his mother, Ewa Grudzińska. In recent years, he has presented BOW: A STUDY (2023, premiered at Santarcangelo Festival), THREESOME (2024, co-produced by Belluard Bollwerk and Nowy Teatr), and TEACH ME NOT! (2025, co-produced by Zodiak – Centre for New Dance, Nowy Teatr, and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute).