“Yanka Rudzka’s Project: Maturation” | dance performance | installation

What?

Who was Yanka Rudzka—a dancer and choreographer born in Łódź who left Poland after the war, became one of the pioneers of modern dance in Brazil, and has all but disappeared from Polish history? “The Yanka Rudzka Project: Maturation” 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.

Yanka Rudzka (1916–2008) was one of the most fascinating figures in 20th-century avant-garde dance. In prewar Łódź, she helped shape the rapidly developing expressionist dance scene, which for many Jewish female artists became a tool for emancipation—a 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’s first university dance department.

In 2013, Joanna Leśnierowska began to rediscover her story, devoting more than a dozen years of research and artistic exploration to Rudzka. “Maturation” is the latest chapter in this process—an 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’s 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.

Dance, photography, film, archival materials, sound, and space come together to create a multi-voiced narrative—not so much about “who Yanka Rudzka really was” as about memory, migration, and the possibility of reclaiming histories that never coalesce into a single, self-contained narrative.

The performance is accompanied by an installation that will remain on view even outside of showtimes.

“Yanka Rudzka’s Project: Maturation” is a premiere production of the 2026 Łódź of Many Cultures Festival.

Who?

• Concept and Direction: Joanna Leśnierowska
• In dialogue with: Anna Zielińska, Neemias Santana, and Lia Robatto
• Choreography: Joanna Leśnierowska, Neemias Santana
• Dance / performance: Neemias Santana
• Photography installation: Anna Zielińska
• Video: João Rafael Neto
• Music: Katarzyna Sitarz
• Spatial Architecture: Iwona Kalenik
• Costumes: Peter Pleyer, Michiel Keuper
• Curator of the performance program for the Łódź Many Cultures Festival: Agata Siwiak

Joanna Leśnierowska — visual playwright, choreographer, curator, and spatial composer—works 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 (2016) and Wielogłos (2018).

Lia Robatto — a Brazilian choreographer, director, and dance educator, and one of Yanka Rudzka’s most prominent students. In the 1950s, she worked with Rudzka as a soloist. She has choreographed and directed approximately 40 productions.

Neemias Santana – 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.

Anna Zielińska – 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 Poznań.

Also participating in the project are filmmaker, dancer, and choreographer João 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.

For Whom?

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’t need to be familiar with Yanka Rudzka’s biography beforehand—“Dojrzenie” 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.

Why is it worth it?

Yanka Rudzka’s story sounds almost like a tale tailor-made for the Łódź of Many Cultures Festival. A native of Łódź 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 Łódź 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—through encounters, migrations, borrowings, and mutual influences.

“Maturation,” 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 Leśnierowska wrote, the creators are interested in Rudzka as a figure “in-between”—not anchored in a single place or time, but woven from many genealogies, languages, places, and bodily memories.

This is precisely why the project resonates so strongly with the Festival’s 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’s return to Łódź 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?

Availability

The performance and installation will be presented on the first floor of the Marek Edelman Dialogue Center in Łódź. 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.

This performance is intended for people ages 13 and older.

Partners:

Teatro Vila Velha, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, HELLERAU – European Center for the Arts in Dresden, and the Brazilian Embassy in Warsaw. As part of their preparations for the project, Joanna Leśnierowska and Anna Zielińska completed creative residencies in Brazil through the Adam Mickiewicz Institute’s “ReSide” program.

Photos

YRP: Maturity; photo by JR Neto, press materials