Ola Maciejewska born in Poland and based in France, is a dancer, artist and choreographer. Her work is anchored on frictions between materiality and ephemerality, movement and its conditions of appearance. In light of these questions, she produced critical reading of the history of dance. Through working on convergences between dance and visual art, her series of works focalised on serpentine dances invented by Loie Fuller engage the viewer in reflection on metamorphosis, synesthesia, and the hybrid nature of embodiment. Her work have been presented all over Europe, in the US and in Asia. In 2022, Maciejewska received a fellowship from Watermill Center founded by Robert Wilson, as well as became an artist associated with the project ‘Campement artistique pour littoral’, in the frame of the program Mondes Nouveaux by Ministère de la Culture. The same year FIGURY (przestrzenne) – premiere in 2022 at CNDC Angers – received Gallery Award from Nadežda Petrović Gallery in Čačak / Serbia, which will lead to a solo exhibition in 2025. She is currently working on a new production for 2025 for 5 performers (supported by Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels).
In her latest work, Ola Maciejewska takes Daisy Hildyard’s The Second Body (2017), as a starting point to approach the forms of relation that produce our existence—deeply involved and sensitive to what surrounds us—and to question the human alteration of climate and ecology. In Hildyard’s text, humans have two bodies: a tangible one made of flesh and blood, and another more amorphous one involved in a network of exchanges with other ecosystems. Intrigued by this simultaneous presence, Ola Maciejewska explores the dissolution of the boundaries between object and subject, animate and inanimate, to the point where we can observe the choreographic process in which matter and bodies interrelate and become codependent.
On stage, a body and a block of ice: one, a complex organism made of muscles, bones and veins, 80% of which is liquid, the other made of frozen tap water. Neither a duet nor a solo, The Second Body invites us to witness the permeability of these two bodies of water in constant metamorphosis. It is a question about the body’s relation to its environment and the possibilities of incorporating that environment into the body through a repertoire of sense and movement that articulates duration and resistance. It’s a manifesto on dependence, scales, radical exteriority and limits, affirming the immediacy and beauty of felt experience.
In this regard, Isabel de Naverán’s words about FIGURY (przestrzenne), a piece by Ola Maciejewska preceding and closely linked to The Second Body, resonate: “The interest in sculpture in this piece has to do not only with the artistic discipline, but with the question of commitment that a body acquires with its immediate environment: spatial, architectural, institutional, affective, physical, sensitive. Maciejewska insists on the idea that all the elements of the space in which this piece unfolds ‘become verbs’ that participate in the action and modify its state.”
Conception, direction et choreography: Ola Maciejewska / Interpretation: Leah Marojević / Dance construction (ice form): Alix Boillot / Light: Rima Ben Brahim / Sound / dramartutgy collaboration : Gilles Amalvi / Molds & prototypes: Mathieu Peyroulet Ghilini / Coproduction: Ménagerie de verre (Paris / FR) Watermill Center (New York / U.S.A) ICI – CCN Montpellier Occitanie (Montpellier / FR) C.A.M.P (Presqu’île de Gâvres / FR) / With the support of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels and with the Financial Support of Spectacle vivant en Bretagne.
The company is supported by Ministère de la Culture – Drac Bretagne Thanks to CN D for lending studio Originally developed and performed by Ola Maciejewska in the frame of Figury (przestrzenne), module: film. The title of the piece The Second Body given after the book by Daisy Hildyard (Fiztcarraldo Editions). This work is dedicated to Simone Forti.
As part of Festival Sâlmon, Isabel de Naverán will hold a conversation with Ola Maciejewska about her practice, which will pick up on and extend the long-standing correspondence they have maintained since de Naverán curated Maciejewska’s Loïe Fuller: Research in Madrid and Bilbao in 2018, and after the recent presentation of FIGURY (przestrzenne) at Estudio V. En el hueco acontece, a program curated by Isabel de Naverán (Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2023).
