9. Gdański Festiwal Tańca

While I am in Poland, I take advantage of the places and events I can go. One of them is the Gdańsk Dance Festival which today starts its 9th edition.

Yesterday evening I could enjoy two premieres: A co gdyby and Świadomość nieswiadomości.

As you can see the titles may not​ seem very understandable in English… so I will write you here a little synopsis of each (extracted from the festival catalogue) and add some photos I took, so you can have a better idea.

A co gdyby

We could say that the translation is “What if…”, in this case applied to the fairy tales world. Magdalena Laudańska, Kalina Poranzińska, Sebastian Piotrowicz and Maciej Kosteczka use dance (and theatre) toshow to the kidswhat would it happen if the fairy tales characters escape or change their destiny: a wolf with pain in the back? A witch that doesn’t want to eat children anymore?

(c) Eva Campos Suárez

I have to say, that even if I couldn’t understand a word, I enjoyed it like a kid and I caught part of the story. Their performance made me travel to the fantasy world which I dreamed of when I was a child. I think all adults of the theatre enjoyed it as well.

I think this piece can have a lot of future among the children festivals and theatres, because not only the dancers make us laugh but also give us a nice and positive message.

Świadomość nieswiadomości

The translation of the name of this piece is a bit difficult, we could say that it’s “Consciousness unconscious”. Albert Ciastek brought us on stage the consciousness itselfthrough the physical theatre and five dancers in collaboration.Thanks to the help of the choreographer Anna Piotrowska and the live music played by Dominik Strycharski, the piecemoved us to an abstract world of concepts, contradictions and relations.

(c) Eva Campos Suárez

From my humble and non-professional point of view, this piece has potential but still needs more work. The rhythms were well structured, so I didn’t feel it was very long considering that it lasted almost an hour. Unfortunately, a lot of people went out of the hall because the music was too loud. Probably the intention was to push the performers and make us (the public) feel in another place rather than a chair in a room.