Kem School is an experimental education program that harnesses the potential of performance/choreography, queer-feminist methodologies and collectivity as vital tools of radical pedagogy. It emerged as a response to the absence of alternative educational initiatives in Poland, that centre the body as a carrier of socio-political knowledge. Our intersectional program is devised to facilitate the development of personal practices alongside collective modes of working.

Kem School 2023 saw the end of our 3 year cycle - How to Touch Movement? during which we reflected on social choreography and strategies of world-building. Over a period of 4 months, our group of 15 participants came together in order to collectively develop choreographic tools to situate their artistic research and practice in forms of embodied knowledge, in relation to current socio-political conditions.

The participants of this Kem School 2023 were:
★ Bartosz Jakubowski
★ Agata Jarosławiec
★ Ania Jeglorz
★ Ana Szopa
★ Dominika Głowala
★ Kasia Skoczylas
★ Kacper Szalecki
★ Buzia Gręda
★ Kinga Osowska
★ Daniela Weiss
★ Dawid Dzwonkowski
★ Jagoda Dobecka
★ Emma Szumlas
★ Ania Nowakowska
★ Jagoda Wójtowicz

During Kem School 2023, we adopted a new approach with regards to our timetable. Instead of meeting continuously for a given period of time, we established 4 blocks, of varying length, stretched over a 4 month period. The decision to arrange the timetable in this way was related to the need for greater accessibility to the program, which was indicated by previous Kem School participants via a feedback process.

During these blocks, Kem School participants would gather for intense, collaborative sessions and workshops. Throughout these meetings, we engaged participants with a diverse set of formats, ranging from bodily to discursive, collective to individual practices, and everything situated at their intersections.

Mentoring and Experiences

One of the key threads that bind the pedagogical process of Kem School, synthesising its diverse elements are Mentoring and Experiences. The former is constituted by the presence of a mentor, who guides participants through experimental pedagogical formats such as mapping, feedback, writing scores and discussion - it functions as a space of reflection and as an ongoing digestive system of the school. The latter emerges from participants’ presentations of their individual practices, drawing on their research and interests to design collective formats of sharing knowledge that can be experienced by the group. These took the form of guided meditations, collective dream simulations, soundwalks and immersive performances among others. Together, these two mutually nourishing strands facilitate collective articulations of knowledge and the generation of radical new configurations.

Mentoring with Alex Baczyński-Jenkins and Ania Nowak

The time participants spent with Alex Baczyński-Jenkins flanked the Kem School program, marking its commencement and closure. During the first block of our school, Alex introduced mind-mapping, scoring and choreography as tools of processing and embodying knowledge. Participants were tasked with brainstorming themes and ideas around queer-feminisms, alternative education and performance and then given the tools to transform those ideas into situation and movement. Alex placed particular emphasis on performance in public, as a liberational strategy of taking up space and reclaiming oppressive architectures, thus all the actions took place outside, embedded in the fabric of the city and its complexities

The facilitation process of the two middle blocks of Kem School, was taken over by Ania Nowak, whose attentiveness to discussion, circular gatherings and somatic loosenings of the body provided a space to pool resources acquired by participants through the different workshop formats they were engaged in and embody and situate that knowledge. By also employing strategies of games and short somato-discursive experiences, Ania Nowak helped the Kem School participants to work through the information they learned, connecting it to their individual practices and proliferating it into diverse registers.

The final block of Kem School saw Alex Baczyński-Jenkins return, to help the participants process and digest the whole experience of Kem School, guiding them through a process of synthesis and conclusion based on work with somatic scores and performance.

Experiences

Premised on the radical notion of leadership in flux, participants were invited to embody and share different roles, including the role of teacher/leader. This materialised in the spaces of experiences, during which participants would invite others to ‘experience’ their practice, ongoing research or realm of interest through an embodied, collective practice. Through a diverse set of formats, multiple registers of knowledge were engaged.

The participants’ experiences were varied and enticing. Ania Nowakowska showed us the the world-building potential of sounds in the surrounding audiosphere, Ania Jeglorz and Kasia Skoczylas invited us to reflect on the weirdness of touch, Kacper Szalecki proposed a practice of collective automatic drawing, Emma Szumlas encouraged a group memory simulation, Jagoda Dobecka led us through a karaoke session of mournful songs, Buzia Gręda took us on a speculative journey to the swamp, Kinga Osowska led us through a choreography of techno stimming and Bartosz Jakubowski drew a choreographic analogy between our anuses and our lips.

Somatic Pratice

At Kem School, we are convinced that theoretical and discursive knowledge comes hand in hand with bodily knowledge, and that the body as a vessel of the mind cannot be ignored in educational formats. Over the course of Kem School 2023, we invited different artists and somatic educators to engage our participants’ bodily realities, reminding them that they are bodies present in spaces. The formats employed by the movers we invited to engage Kem School participants included authentic movement, yoga, somatic centering, breathing exercises, massage and slow-dance. Somatic practices this year were facilitated by:

★ Jagna Nawrocka
★ Bożna Wydrowska
★ Katarzyna Szugajew

Workshops

A significant portion of the Kem School 2023 curriculum was taken up by workshops and seminars, facilitated by local and international choreographers, artists, activists, researchers, 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. Guests invited to deliver workshop and seminar formats at Kem School 2023 were:

★ Liz Rosenfeld (with Christa Holka’s generous guest contribution)
★ Maria F. Scaroni
★ Julia Celejewska & Magda Czech
★ Paweł Świerczak
★ Agnieszka Polska
★ Bożna Wydrowska
★ Ewa Tatar
★ Alicja Czyczel
★ Yulia Krivich

This Should Happen Here More Often
Workshop with Liz Rosenfeld

In a three-day workshop, the participants dived into a deep exploration of the history of cruising practices, its current reality and its future possibilities for non- cis queer bodies. Through light reading, visual deconstruction of cruising representations in performance, film and still photography, they looked at the socio-political construction of cruising, and deconstructed this historically cis- male dominated practice. This deconstruction was used as a point of entry into enduring somatic practices of sustained action, facilitated by Liz, which culminated in the production of choreographic material for short performative pieces that were performed in a nearby park, mobilising cruising as a productive methodology and metaphor of queer existence.

Christa Holka was invited by Liz Rosenfeld to give a presentation as part of their workshop at Kem School 2023, during which participants were introduced to Christa’s extensive photographic practice of documenting queer nightlife and performance in the USA and London.

Workshop with Maria F. Scaroni

Departing from her own practice of the influencer dance, Maria F. Scaroni led the Kem School participants through a 4-day process that harnessed love, grief and tribute as affects carrying performative and healing potentialities. By introducing practices concerning consent developed by queer organisations in San Francisco, exercises in anarchitecture and “fake healing” Maria encouraged us to establish connections between body and affect, and situate the two within the context of surrounding space and social architecture.

The intense process culminated with the development of a body of language and a language of bodies, that was re-staged during an open rehearsal in TR Warszawa. During a 45-minute time period, performers spread all throughout the theatre, fragmenting viewers’ attention, and gave love to the space, wrote on the walls, playfully collaborated to test out new configurations of movement and being together and read out fragments of Bell Hooks’ works. You had to be there!

Well-being Workshop with Julia Celejewska & Magda Czech

This workshop emerged as a collaboration between a Kem School alumna and a member of our core Kem School team, who both connected in their interest in well-being. They invited Kem School 2023 participants to collectively reflect on overburdening and burnout in artistic practice. During the workshop, which apart from discourse contained somatic elements, Julia and Magda guided us through the process of looking at our fatigue and the factors that reinforce it. Together we searched for answers to the questions: what are the individual costs of artistic activity and what are the social consequences? How can we turn to the body as a possible means to support and nurture ourselves in moments of overburden?

Authentic Relating Workshop with Paweł Świerczak

Authentic Relating is the practice of developing body awareness in order to establish an authentic relationship with yourself and with another person. It is also a set of concrete and useful tools to use in any communication situation. In the first part of our workshop with Paweł, we learned the basics of AR in practice. In the second, we focused on tools that can support creative, collective work: we explored relationality (in opposition to reactivity) in discomfort, learned about the methods of embodied feedback and ways to transform conflicts. The workshop concluded by us looking at and harnessing the potential of using AR as a dramaturgical tool.

Workshop with Bożna Wydrowska

Taking voice and movement as an entry point, our Kem School alumna Bozna Wydrowska offered Kem School students a perspective on the body as a source of fluid and shifting meanings. Drawing from the ballroom tradition, she introduced such categories as "face" and "face performance" which provided a channel through which to explore the emancipatory and political dimensions of the face and voice. In order to practise movement as a space of body positivity, where one can experiment with the diversity of one's own identity, the artist invited participants to simply explore the idea of ‘being’, by starting from the pleasure of being in / having a body. Queering the face and voice as spaces of identification was a way to play with what seems most obvious, and what too easily defines us in social life.

Seminar with Ewka Tatar

The Kem School 2023 program saw a semi-formal talk with Ewka Tara, who came to our space to share stories from her experience as an activist working on the ground and in the legal domain of the Polish-Belarussian border. She recounted the human rights abuses that she witnessed there and discussed strategies of anti-racist activism and border abolitionism with the Kem School participants.

Workshop with Alicja Czyczel

The workshop with choreographer, performer and somatic activist Alicja Czyczel was devised as a means to provide our Kem School students with a soft landing strong foothold in the realm of movement and performing. Alicja aimed to foster an interest in experiential anatomy and the study of movement, for those who want to take care of their bodies in an attentive, creative and sensitive way. During the class she taught us how to learn and experience individually, in pairs and in a group - working with movement, imagination, (self)touch and voice. The workshop combined elements of choreographic work and somatic education with rest and recuperation, contained within a broader reflection on gender, body and identity politics.

Seminar with Yulia Krivich

More and more discussions are emerging on whether postcolonial and decolonial theories can be applied to the context of "Eastern Europe," or whether new theories should emerge to describe the complexity of this region. This is precisely the interest of Yulia Krivich, who proposed a discussion with Kem School participants that began with an analysis of artistic and cultural examples that contain colonial residue and then evolved into an exploration of the potential of postcolonial and decolonial approaches in the context of "Eastern Europe". The seminar was concluded by the generation of a dictionary of decoloniality, which contained terms linked to emancipatory artistic and activist practices that can be directly applied.

Neverending Story
Workshop with Agnieszka Polska

We were delighted to host Agnieszka Polska at this year’s Kem School, who prepared a workshop titled Neverending Story (a reference to the book of the same title). During the workshop, the participants worked on strategies of emotional communication between artists and their publics in enticing forms of storytelling while discussing the relation between body and affect, unfathomable emotions and ways of discovering the theme that threads through one’s practice. The workshop was based on screenwriting techniques informed by knowledge of affective infrastructures.

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 and intellectual resources. We would particularly like to thank the team of Centrum Jasna 10, Świetlica Krytyki Politycznej which hosted and supported our programme, Goethe Institute which was a partner of the project and TR Warszawa which generously hosted us in their space. Kem School was made possible co-funding from the City of Warsaw, in the framework of the program “JASNA 10: Społeczna Inicjatywa Kultury”

Thank you <3

Kem School 2023: Summary