Who was Yanka Rudzka\u2014a dancer and choreographer born in \u0141\u00f3d\u017a who left Poland after the war, became one of the pioneers of modern dance in Brazil, and has all but disappeared from Polish history? \u201cThe Yanka Rudzka Project: Maturation\u201d does not attempt to reconstruct her biography or create yet another portrait of a great artist. Instead, through dance, photography, and film, it explores what is elusive in her story: absences, omissions, severed genealogies, and an identity that exists across different places, languages, and cultures. <\/p>\n\n
Yanka Rudzka (1916\u20132008) was one of the most fascinating figures in 20th-century avant-garde dance. In prewar \u0141\u00f3d\u017a, she helped shape the rapidly developing expressionist dance scene, which for many Jewish female artists became a tool for emancipation\u2014a way to build agency and transcend traditional social roles. After the war, Rudzka left Poland and never returned. In Salvador, Brazil, she made her mark as a charismatic artist and educator, as well as the founder of Brazil\u2019s first university dance department. <\/p>\n\n
In 2013, Joanna Le\u015bnierowska began to rediscover her story, devoting more than a dozen years of research and artistic exploration to Rudzka. \u201cMaturation\u201d is the latest chapter in this process\u2014an international co-production created jointly by artists from Poland, Brazil, and Germany. A special place in the project is held by Lia Robatto, one of Rudzka\u2019s most important students and a living custodian of the memory of her work in Brazil, as well as Neemias Santana, a dancer and choreographer from Salvador whose practice draws, among other things, on Afro-Brazilian traditions. <\/p>\n\n
Dance, photography, film, archival materials, sound, and space come together to create a multi-voiced narrative\u2014not so much about \u201cwho Yanka Rudzka really was\u201d as about memory, migration, and the possibility of reclaiming histories that never coalesce into a single, self-contained narrative.<\/p>\n\n
The performance is accompanied by an installation that will remain on view even outside of showtimes.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cYanka Rudzka\u2019s Project: Maturation\u201d is a premiere production of the 2026 \u0141\u00f3d\u017a of Many Cultures Festival.<\/p>\n\n
Joanna Le\u015bnierowska <\/strong>\u2014 visual playwright, choreographer, curator, and spatial composer\u2014works at the intersection of choreography and the visual arts. Since 2016, she has been developing a research-based art project dedicated to the legacy of Yanka Rudzka. Previous installments of the project included Zaczyn <\/em>(2016) and Wielog\u0142os<\/em> (2018). <\/p>\n\n Lia Robatto <\/strong>\u2014 a Brazilian choreographer, director, and dance educator, and one of Yanka Rudzka\u2019s most prominent students. In the 1950s, she worked with Rudzka as a soloist. She has choreographed and directed approximately 40 productions. <\/p>\n\n Neemias Santana <\/strong>\u2013 A choreographer, dancer, and performer based in Salvador, in the Brazilian state of Bahia. He graduated with a degree in dance from the Federal University of Bahia. His practice evolves through a dialogue with Afro-Brazilian dance traditions, contemporary choreography, and somatic practices. <\/p>\n\n Anna Zieli\u0144ska<\/strong> \u2013 A visual artist who works in conceptual photography, spatial representation, and the material traces of emotions. A graduate of the photography program at the Academy of Fine Arts in Pozna\u0144. <\/p>\n\n Also participating in the project are filmmaker, dancer, and choreographer Jo\u00e3o Rafael Neto; editor and theater artist Daniel Utrez; architect Iwona Kalenik, who designs within the framework of the ethics of care; costume designers Peter Pleyer and Michiel Keuper; and sound designer Katarzyna Sitarz.<\/p>\n\n The performance is intended for audiences aged 13 and older. We invite both those interested in contemporary dance and the visual arts, as well as those fascinated by stories of migration, memory, and multicultural identities. You don\u2019t need to be familiar with Yanka Rudzka\u2019s biography beforehand\u2014\u201cDojrzenie\u201d can serve as your first encounter with this extraordinary figure, but also as an invitation to reflect on how we reclaim the stories of people whose fates defy national and geographical boundaries. <\/p>\n\n Yanka Rudzka\u2019s story sounds almost like a tale tailor-made for the \u0141\u00f3d\u017a of Many Cultures Festival. A native of \u0141\u00f3d\u017a and a Jewish woman, a representative of the prewar avant-garde, a migrant who, after the war, cut herself off from part of her own past, and at the same time one of the people who helped shape modern dance in Brazil. Her biography cannot be confined to a single national narrative. Spanning the distance between \u0141\u00f3d\u017a and Salvador, Europe and South America, the experience of the Holocaust and her postwar artistic work, it reminds us that culture is always born in motion\u2014through encounters, migrations, borrowings, and mutual influences. <\/p>\n\n \u201cMaturation,\u201d however, does not attempt to appropriate this ambiguous biography or fill in all the gaps left by Rudzka. Absence itself becomes part of the story. As Joanna Le\u015bnierowska wrote, the creators are interested in Rudzka as a figure \u201cin-between\u201d\u2014not anchored in a single place or time, but woven from many genealogies, languages, places, and bodily memories. <\/p>\n\n This is precisely why the project resonates so strongly with the Festival\u2019s vision: multiculturalism here is not a catalog of fixed identities placed side by side. It is a process, a movement, and a relationship in which identities can be incomplete, hybrid, and fluid. Yanka Rudzka\u2019s return to \u0141\u00f3d\u017a through the bodies, images, and memories of contemporary artists from several countries simultaneously raises a question about the city itself: which stories do we remember, which have we lost, and can we recover them without pretending that we can tell them in their entirety? <\/p>\n\n The performance and installation will be presented on the first floor of the Marek Edelman Dialogue Center in \u0141\u00f3d\u017a. The Dialogue Center building is accessible to people with mobility impairments. It has wide, non-automatic entrance doors, an accessible restroom, and an elevator. In front of the building, there is a large parking lot with designated spaces for people with disabilities. Assistance dogs and guide dogs are welcome both inside the building and in the auditorium. The building is equipped with the ToTuPoint audio navigation system. The entrance to the parking lot is on Wojska Polskiego Street. Nearby bus and tram stops include: Wojska Polskiego\/Centrum Dialogu and Wojska Polskiego\/Sporna. <\/p>\n\n This performance is intended for people ages 13 and older. Teatro Vila Velha, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, HELLERAU \u2013 European Center for the Arts in Dresden, and the Brazilian Embassy in Warsaw. As part of their preparations for the project, Joanna Le\u015bnierowska and Anna Zieli\u0144ska completed creative residencies in Brazil through the Adam Mickiewicz Institute\u2019s \u201cReSide<\/strong>\u201d program. <\/p>\n\n YRP: Maturity; photo by JR Neto, press materials <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" PREMIERE! A project resulting from more than a dozen years of research into the biography of \u0141\u00f3d\u017a-born dancer and choreographer Yanka Rudzka. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":4939,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false},"categories":[16,29],"class_list":["post-5056","event","type-event","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sztuka-en","category-dance"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFor Whom?<\/h2>\n\n
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