I Love Ballet

The statement “I love ballet” is even anecdotal among dancers. This is a phrase that often falls from the mouths of ballet school students when they are asked why they chose ballet education, and feel the oppressive gaze of their ballet teacher on them. Four dancers and independent dance artists who graduated from ballet school but abandoned ballet for other dance forms take a fresh look at their first performative craft. They note what continues to attract them to the discipline, what rejects them, what traces they see of their ballet education in their current bodies and lives. After 20 years since their adventure with ballet ended, Aleksandra Borys, Karolina Kraczkowska, Ramona Nagabczynska and Iza Szostak achieve the critical distance needed to see the “text” of ballet. And as it turns out, this “text” is very rich. Both the ballet librettos expressed explicitely and the narratives hidden behind the scenes can be analyzed endlessly as ideological machines.

Ramona Nagabczynska is a dancer and choreographer. She received her artistic education at the Ogólnokształcąca Szkoła Baletowa in Warsaw, the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Frankfurt and the London Contemporary Dance School in London, while she received her theoretical education at SWPS University and Warsaw University. She works in Poland and abroad. Her choreographic works include: “New (Dis)Order” (2012) - selected for Aerowaves in 2014, “Re//accumulation” (2012), “The Way Things Dinge” (2014), “pURe” (2015), “MORE” (2017), ‘Networking’ (2018/19), “Body Parts” (2019) - also selected for Aerowaves, “Silenzio!” (2021), “Le Jeu de Massacre” (2021)- together with Barbara Kinga Majewska, ‘Bliss’ (2022), “Anonymous Performers” (2024) and “Hate Haus” (2024)- together with the Hertz Haus collective. From 2015 to 2019 she was an artist of the international performing arts network apap Network. In 2021 she won an award for directing the performance “Silenzio!” at the Divine Comedy Festival. She is one of the co-founders of the collective Center in Motion.