BATAILLE: DAWN OF NEW DAYS
Sławek Krawczyński, Anna Godowska

Can a journey to the impossible really happen? Six dancers in the poignant world of Georges Bataille, a French writer, philosopher and critic of contemporary culture, one of the few thinkers of the past century who had the courage to ask uncompromising and unconditional questions about the sense and form of human existence.

Bataille challenges us, and takes us to a place where “all turbulent emotions merge into one”. His paradoxical philosophy points towards dance with a silent gesture. As we dance, we discover terror and new spaces concealed within its depth. As we dance, we jump into emptiness and discover laughter. As we dance, we plunge into the dark riddle of erotism until we come across “the world of the festive, of kings and gods”. Dance becomes a test of sovereignty by expressing, both materially and intangibly, the uniquely dramatic nature of Bataille’s thoughts and his key question: Can we become anew?

The project is based on the following writings by Georges Bataille: Inner Experience, The Tears of Eros, The Accursed Share and Erotism. These became the subject of a multidirectional study in which we used our method of working with dreams and the unconscious developed since 2005 under the project Taniec śniącego ciała (Dance of the Dreaming Body). The method is a creative synthesis of techniques inspired by Carl Gustav Jung’s analytical psychology and Arnold Mindell’s process oriented psychology, as well as our own improvisation and meditation techniques which we have been developing for many years research work.