KONTAMINÁCIE: COLLABORATIVE SHARING

Duration: 75 min. 

 

Part 1

Mayfield Brooks: WHALE FALL MEDITATION: DECOMPOSITION AS LIBERATION

 

Whale Fall asks, what can decay teach us? How can whale death choreograph human life? What does decomposition do and how does it liberate us? A “whale fall” describes the process of a whale’s decomposition after it dies and falls to the ocean floor, where it provides vital nutrients for deep-sea creatures. This process asks, “Who am I feeding?” The guided mediation is an embodied journey into the heart of death and nothingness as liberatory practice.

 

 

Part 2

Katarzyna Pastuszak: MYCELIAL COMMUNICATION 

 

This is an offering of a movement practice I call “mycelial choreography” inspired by the communication network and decomposing systemically imposed borders. 

Can the mushrooms show us new ways to communicate and coexist? 

 

 

Part 3 

Mayfield Brooks & Katarzyna Pastuszak: DECOMPOSITION AND RHIZOMATIC NETWORKS AS MODELS OF INTERSPECIES KNOWLEDGE 

Practice and discussion.

 

 

Mayfield Brooks improvises while black and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of  the Lenape people, also known as New York City. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing. brooks is the 2021 recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a 2021 Bessie/New York Dance and Performance Award nominee for their experimental dance film, Whale Fall and a 2022 Danspace Project Platform artist. They were a 2022-3 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, the 2024 Alma Hawkins Visiting Chair at UCLA with the World Arts and Cultures/Dance program, and currently a Creative Time Research and Development Fellow.

Photo: Robbie Sweeny

 

Katarzyna Pastuszak is dancer/performer, choreographer and artistic director of Amareya Theatre & Guests, assistant professor in the Department of Performing Arts (Institute of English and American – University of Gdańsk), member of Between.Between (UG) Research Group, also associated with the Centre for Environmental and Minority Policy Studies (Sapporo, Japan). In her artistic endeavours, she mainly moves in the field of choreography and physical theatre. She combines movement explorations with current trends in humanist thought (posthumanism, ecofeminism). Projects realised in this field are: Dance Ecologies (from 2024), Spore Fantasy (sf) (with Nat Chylinska, 2024), Braiding Time, Memory and Water (directed by Sue Schroeder, 2024), LoopCurrent (directed by Maya Ciarrocchi, 2024), Instabilités naturelles (created with Sonnets Trois Fois and Nat Chylinska – PL, 2023), Mapping Bodies, Landscapes, Relations (2023), Re:fungia – fungi score (2022). In 2024 she completed the EarthBody Institute’s Certified Ecotherapy Course (USA). She is the winner of an individual 4th degree Rector's Award of the University of Gdańsk and numerous artistic scholarships awarded by the City of Gdańsk, the Marshal of the Pomeranian Voivodeship and the Minister of Culture and National Heritage. In 2024, she realised an extensive artistic and research scholarship project Dance Ecologies as part of the National Reconstruction Plan (KPO) programme for culture. Her works have been presented in Japan, Greenland, Norway, Turkey, Israel, Germany, France and numerous festivals in Poland. 

Photo: Nat Chylinska