Monika Błaszczak

Monika Błaszczak is a Polish dancer and choreographer. She has presented her work at Tate Modern, Victoria and Albert Museum, The Place, Laban Theatre, V.O Curations, South London Gallery, and Polish Dance Theatre, amongst others. She graduated with distinction from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London, UK, and the State Ballet School in Poznań, Poland. Monika Błaszczak's studies in the Performance Studies Department are enabled by the Young Poland Scholarship from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage in Poland, Fundusz TALENTY, the Department of Culture in Gorzów Wielkopolski, Poland, and the abundantly generous support of friends and family.

Title of Project:

The Inverted Portal: An Aesthetic Theory For Dancers

Project Description:

What is dance, and what could it still become? “The Inverted Portal: An Aesthetic Theory for Dancers” is born out of a curiosity towards freeing up potentialities in dance, and freeing up our potentialities through dance. According to traditional aesthetic theories, an aesthetic experience requires a perceiving subject to be separated from a perceived object by an aesthetic distance. For dance, this requirement has meant that dance only becomes aestheticized and “ascends” to the level of an artwork when witnessed by an audience. I am interested in formulating an alternative model for an aesthetic experience in which a dancer's body acts simultaneously as a perceiving and perceived agent of an aesthetic experience. This allows a dancer to simultaneously produce and receive their artwork, without requiring an audience. This is achieved through a figure of an Inverted Portal—a portal that leads to itself, producing its self-transformations.

By abandoning the prerequisite for an aesthetic distance in constructing an aesthetic experience and by shifting the focus from the audience to the dancer's experience of their dancing, dance can be rethought as an art of affectability rather than an art of movement, as it is historically defined. In this way of understanding dance, all bodies are dancers, participating in the dance of intra-active cosmic intimacy. The methodology weaves between choreography, aesthetics, agential realism, auto-ethnography, science fiction, and hauntology. The research draws on the works of André Lepecki, Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, Karen Barad, David Lloyd, Immanuel Kant, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari.

Project Inspiration:

One sunny afternoon, I was dancing in the forest that my family lived next to. I was suddenly taken by a powerful sensation of immense beauty. It was a late summer: still warm, but the leaves began to emanate golden. Wet moss oozed the smell of a humid, deep woodiness. Everything was gentle: the air, the light, the body of the Earth. Suddenly, I realized I was not alone: in the distance, a deer stared into my eyes for an extended moment, and then gracefully walked away. Upon returning my gaze to where I saw the deer, I unexpectedly discovered another figure: a beautiful, mysterious woman stood inexplicably straight and faced me directly, with her arms stretched by her torso draped in a bright, shiny dress. She was not human. She whispered to me: listen to the wind. This was her guidance on how to become a dancer.

Areas of Academic Interest/Research:

Dance, choreography, hauntology, aesthetics, love