Kem School 2022: Summary
Kem School is an intersectional study programme devised to facilitate the development of personal practices alongside collective modes of working, through experiments and reflections on social choreography, performance and queer-feminist methodologies. Kem School 2022, based on the premise of a highly successful previous edition, took place between 26th of July and 15th of September 2022. This overview will provide some insight into what took place during those 8 weeks, although limited by the ephemeral and multilayered nature of the Kem School process which is hard to put into words.
This year we expanded the scope of the programme to include 2 complementary and mutually nourishing strands: How to Touch Movement? and Choreographies of Alliance. The first, focused on developing choreographic tools to situate artistic research and practice in forms of embodied knowledge, in relation to current socio-political conditions. The second, aimed to develop reparative strategies in a series of meetings and initiatives with artists and activist groups that draw on queer-feminist methodologies.
How to Touch Movement?
Mentoring
A significant part of the programme was centred around a mentoring process led by Alex Baczyński-Jenkins and Ania Nowak. Premised on the notions of critical and experimental pedagogies, mentoring functioned as the ongoing digestive system of the School. It mediated the collective articulation of knowledge and the connections emerging across all the different aspects of the school, as well as the interweaving of the participants' individual and collective practices.
Mentoring was a space for reflection, practised through introducing tools of shared mapping/ diagramming, feedback, discussions, choreographic score writing, exercises in collaboration and performative translations. The mediating process was intended as a way to accumulate knowledge, pool resources, bring attention to the proximity and movements between theory and practice and draw connections between the various elements of the programme as well as the participants' individual practices.
A tool mobilised to this end was the ‘papyrus’, a sprawling collaborative mind-map bridging different registers of knowledge: textual and visual, imagined and embodied, focused and diffused, auto-fictive and research-based. Communally pooling references together, the mindmap coalesced strands of the learning process and at the same time opened up to building the network outwards.
Experiences
One of the key strategies employed in the group-forming process was leadership in flux: the participants were invited to embody and share different roles, depending on the circumstances, emergent needs and intuitions. This process was open to the participants as well as the organisers in order to circumvent habitual systems of hierarchy in the shared learning process. One of the spaces facilitating this were experiences, which were conceptualised by each participant to share knowledge about their individual practice with the group. Some of the forms that this communal knowledge-sharing took were immersive performances, group readings, presentations, guided meditations, choreographed movements, sound baths and grounding practices. Registers of knowledge were in flux, mobilising the embodied, the lived, learned intuited and the imagined.
Workshops and Seminars
Another significant portion of Kem School’s How to Touch Movement? was taken up by workshops and seminars, interspersed throughout the programme and led by a diverse group of choreographers, artists, activists, theorists, archivers and more. The workshops varied in length and theme, spanning political, academic and performative contents, all facilitating the crossover and interconnection of various types of knowledge from diverse disciplines.
The guests of this year’s school were:
Tosia Leniarska
Geo Wyex
Karol Radziszewski
Anka Herbut
Szymon Adamczak
Lambda Warszawa
Nadia Markiewicz
Being Truant - Seminar with Tosia Leniarska
Truant thinking - a drifting, meandering cognitive process of escaping, being in relation to that from which one escapes. Tosia Leniarska’s seminar took Kem School participants on a walk around affect theory of public space, social choreography and play, the undercommons, diagrams and cybernetics. Among the issues raised were thought choreographed through diagrams and the praxis of being a truant child, in a constant process of mapping and renegotiating the space around it.
Geo Wyex - Why do we fuck with time? Performance workshop
When as performers can we fuck with time? How does the performance emerge from the space of non-performance? How do you move across the threshold of life and performance? Over the course of 3 days, these and other questions were raised, as we considered the performative in relation to temporality during a choreographic workshop led by Geo. Based on techniques of automatic writing and personal experiences, the participants worked out scores for group performances, aided by a theoretical framework consisting of Pope.L’s Hole Theory and texts by Every Ocean Hughes.
Karol Radziszewski: Queer Archives Institute
Queer Archives Institute is a project founded by Karol Radziszewski dedicated to research, collection, digitalisation, presentation, exhibition, analysis and artistic interpretation of queer archives and memory, with a special focus on Central and Eastern Europe. The Queer Archives Insitute, along with its DIY magazines, brochures, guides, films and photographs documenting LGBTQ+ history, temporarily materialised in the Kem School time-space, as we discussed the alternate temporality of queer topology, the body as an archive and the act of self-staging as a queer performative tool.
Choreomania and choreographies of protest - Seminar with Anka Herbut
The seminar with Anka Herbut offered a wide theoretical overview of strategies of resistance in relation to dance and social choreographies, spanning anti-government protests in Chile and Hong Kong to pieces of contemporary dance and theatre. We considered theories of revolution and social organisation, to discuss the wider theme of human agency and collective responsibility. Anka also directed our analytical lens towards the kingdom of plants and the weeds within it, as a radical model of survival and occupying space. Another key issue of the seminar was how the body itself can be a site of protest, as it relates and organises itself in relation to others.
Queering Feedback - workshop with Szymon Adamczak
The 3-day workshop with Szymon Adamczak introduced the participants to methods of giving performative feedback to each other, which proved vital in the collective process of developing performance work. The process introduced by Szymon is multifaceted and adjustable, to adapt to the needs of the person receiving feedback. Using this framework, Kem School students were able to embody and practise theory, treating each other’s work and viewpoints as vantage points for research.
Crip Theory with Nadia Markiewicz
Nadia Markiewicz, a Kem School alumna, came back this year to share her research on disability studies, freak shows and crip theory. Nadia gave an exhausting overview of the history of the fight for disability rights as well as precious insight into the aesthetics of cripple punks and the concept of passing in relation to people living with disabilities.
Morning Practices
Apart from workshops and discursive seminars, this year’s programme employed the format of Morning Practices at the beginning of each day. These were devised as hour-long somatic practices that helped centre participants within their bodies, situate bodily knowledge and prepare each body/mind for the challenges of the day ahead. These included practices of expanded choreography, free/authentic movement, massage, slow-dance, kundalini yoga and vogue runway workshops. The guests we invited to conduct morning practice sessions this year were:
Alicja Czyczel
Ramona Nagabczyńska
Katarzyna Szugajew
Bożna Wydrowska
Choreographies of Alliance
The second strand of the Kem School 2022 programme was concerned with forging alliances amongst locally-working artist/activist groups, that draw from queer-feminist methodologies in their practice to actively support marginalised communities and work against oppressive, patriarchal, racist, heteronormative and ableist systems of power. We understand the term ‘choreography’ not only as a relation to dance, but also as a way of manifesting relations between body materialities, society and the environment, hence the term Choreographies of Alliance. The groups that we engaged held workshops for the Kem School participants, which were followed by an event open to the public that was translated into Polish Sign Language.
Queer poetry and zine workshop with Queers to the Front
Girls* (Queers) to the Front is a Warsaw-based collective that publishes zines with queer art and poetry and hosts parties centering women and queer artists. G*TTF held a zine workshop focused on queer pleasure, during which our participants created their own DIY zines from scrap materials, that reflected on the relationship between pleasure and capitalism and the place of pleasure in public debate, among others.
The public event co-hosted by us constituted a gathering around queer poetry and prose, at the intersection of independent publishing and private diary notes. A public reading of queer works served as a starting point to later collectively discuss the visibility of queer pleasure and eroticism in public.
Choreographic workshop and lecture with Teatr 21
Our second encounter was with Teatr 21, a theatre group whose actors consist only of people with trisomy 21 or on the autistic spectrum. Since 2005 they have produced a series of theatrical performances shown in public theatres, organised conferences and workshops and released publications all aiming at integrating artists with disabilities into the fields of art, culture and society and initiating debate about disability as a cultural construct. We welcomed a choreographer and actor from Teatr 21 in Kem School, where they took us through choreographic methods that are inclusive to diverse needs and tackle ableist assumptions in choreographic work. The workshop and ensuing conversations proved vital to shifting perspectives on civil inattention (how we avert our gaze from things we perceive as undesirable to the person that has them) and the way bodies are perceived through a normative gaze.
The public dimensions of our collaboration with Teatr 21 took the form of an open lecture, during which Justyna Lipko-Konieczna spoke about the category of the norm and how it has been constructed and enforced throughout history in various manifestations such as statistics, art-making, sociology and medical science.
Westsplaining lecture and gallery tour with Yulia Krivich and SDK Słonecznik
Yulia Krivich, a prominent decolonial activist and photographer gave the participants of Kem School 2022 a lecture about the western gaze on ‘eastern europe’ during which issues such as the manifestation of colonial narratives in language or patronising explanations of situations given by people not involved or affected by them were raised. Together with Yulia, we reflected on different forms that colonialism takes and has taken in the past and thought about effective strategies of decolonisation, particularly in the context of Russia’s genocidal war in Ukraine. Yulia also took us on a tour of galleries in Warsaw currently showing art by Ukrainian artists, which was particularly relevant as a decolonial strategy of giving space for the voices of those being oppressed to sound out.
Documenting the Kem School process
During this edition of Kem School, we made an attempt at archiving the creative and collaborative process in the form of soundscapes, while reflecting on the issues of documenting movement and what queer-feminist sound could be. Sounds produced by bodies and then detached from them, became a guide through an audio archive of thoughts, movements, ideas and interactions. Sound itself, as an ephemeral medium proved to be an ideal facilitator of Kem School’s transient process. The archiving process was done in cooperation with Akademia Radiowa, an initiative branching off from Radio Kapitał - a communal radio centring independent young creators. Tosia Ulatowska and Diana Krawiec from Akademia Radiowa visited Kem School to give lectures on soundscapes, field recordings and experimental music, to open participants up to the ways in which sound archives can be approached. Our collaboration ended with 10 separate soundscapes that will be aired in the form of podcasts on Radio Kapitał.
Extracurricular Activities
Sharing the Kem School Format in Białystok
The participants and organisers of this year’s Kem School were invited to share their process of collaborative world making, production of knowledge through exchange and embodied practice with a wider audience at the Arsenał Gallery in Białystok, Poland. This was part of the programme of the “De-schooling!” exhibition, showcasing non-traditional modes of education throughout Central and Eastern Europe. We conducted a 1,5hr workshop, consisting of a short round of speed dating, a somatic, grounding practice and a collective reading of Audre Lorde’s text on the power of the erotic. It was Kem School’s first venture outward, sharing its ideas of open source learning and collective choreographic formats as alternatives to traditional pedagogy.
Kem School Open Evening
The Kem School 2022 process was commemorated with an open evening during which we opened up the collective and creative process which we were immersed in for 8 weeks, to the wider public. The evening consisted of a short workshop, during which the Kem School participants conducted movement-based, bodily practices which grew from their collective experience in the school and later facilitated a group reading of Kate Morales’ ‘So You Want to Queer Your Pedagogy?’. Bodily practices are always closely intertwined with other forms of knowledge production in the group’s activity. The latter part of the evening took the form of a collective listening session of the aforementioned soundscapes, produced in collaboration with Akademia Radiowa. Between soundscapes, participants were able to share their personal experiences related to the Kem School process documented in opaque, audio form.
Kem School could not have happened without the generous support of institutions and organisations who collaborated with Kem in sharing their resources: not only supporting us with their space and funding but also in terms of community building, intellectual resources and activist know-how. We would particularly like to thank the team of Centrum Jasna 10, Świetlica Krytyki Politycznej which was an integral part of the initiative, hosting us for 4 weeks of the programme and helping facilitate many processes and Foksal Gallery Foundation, who generously let us reside in their space for the other 4 weeks of our programme.