Nomadic Arts Festival began in 2014 in Poland. Below is a description of the festival context and a gallery of the 2014 festival 'between wheat and pine'

Photos in the above video are by Ewa Szymczyk from NAF14: between wheat and pine

View the gallery from the nomadic community 'between wheat and pine' here

Download the 2014 Festival Documentation here, with texts from artists and photos from the festival

Context:

Nomadic Arts Festival 2014: Between Wheat & Pine will take place 29th-31st Aug. in Charciabałda

Nomadic Arts Festival 2014 presents a unique and intimate festival of experimental performance, set in rural Poland ‘Between Wheat & Pine’. Three days exploring the theme of ‘Body and Earth’ through a diverse program of performances, music, workshops and walks.

Taking place at an “off-grid” rural farm, the festival sets up its community in close proximity with the natural environment, with an experimental program of performances, collective dinners, fires at night and sleeping under the opens sky.

The 2014 Festival ‘Between Wheat & Pine’ set out in creating an intimate proximity between ‘Body & Earth’

Further Nomadic Arts Festival, in collaboration with In Situ Foundation and Pracownia Zelazna will create a two day performance event in Poland (27th and 28th Aug.) More information to come. 

Background for Nomadic Arts Festival 2014: Between Wheat & Pine

The 2014 festival will take place at Marcin’s home, in Charciabałda, Poland, of which it has taken its name ‘Between Wheat & Pine’. The theme of the festival has take inspiration from its location and from the life philosophies of Marcin.

Marcin lives off-grid and with a strong relation to the natural environment, which surrounds his home. He focuses on a “simple” way of life, where he has stripped his house down to the bare minimum, only having a wooden stove and wooden furniture he has build himself, with wood from the forest surroundings his home. In generally Marcin lives quite “primitively” with water well and toilet outside, though this way of living brings him in closer proximity to the natural environment, both physically and spiritually. It is also from the surrounding woods and forests, of which Marcin takes inspiration to create most of his projects and explorations. The theme of this year’s festival is therefore taking inspiration from the physical working and the spiritual relationship between body, the natural environment and the earth.

Nomadic Arts Festival 2014: Between Wheat & Pine will take place in Warsaw and Charciabałda, Poland, exploring the theme of ‘Body & Earth’.

27th and 28th Aug. A Collaborative Performance event between In Situ Foundation, Pracownia Zelazna and Nomadic Arts Festival will take place in Warsaw. For more information about the event here

29th-31st Aug. Nomadic Arts Festival 2014: Between Wheat & Pine will take place in Charciabałda.

The program displayed here, is for the festival in Charciabałda. More artist to be announced.

Performance

WATER TABLE PERFORMANCE
By Brian Connolly

A durational performance/artwork, which reflects upon the importance of water for all life and how we overlook this at our peril. This is brought to action through the slow lifting and extension of a table (with various of objects upon it). Over time the table will rise higher and higher, making the structure more unstable and the movements more crucial.

More information about Brian Connolly here

RED POLE DANCE
By RED BIND (Gilivanka KEDZIOR & Barbara FRIEDMAN)

Two women, totally blinded by a black hood, are both connected to a pole by a long re ribbon attached to a collar around their necks. For nearly an hour, they rotate in passing each other, until the whole ribbon is wound around the pole.

This performance is inspired by the “Maypole Dance”, a form of folk dance from Western Europe still widely distributed nowadays. The origin of the Maypole Dance began in ancient Babylon during fertility rites. Its symbolism has been continually debated for centuries, although no set conclusion has ever been arrived at.

Here detached from its festive scope, it opens up to various readings:  by turns fateful dance, endless ritual procession, or metaphor of an animal convolution. The performative act takes there a penitential dimension. It experiences the limits of resistance of a body in a position of constriction and sensory deprivation, submitted to a repetitive action. Paradoxically, it also experiments the anesthetic effect of this same obsessive movement. It analyzes the relationship to the other one, the inability/difficulty in communicating of the enduring body and its subdivision through time.

More information about RED BIND here

BREAK IN THE ACTION
By Iza Szostak and Kuba Słomkowski

Long durational performance/ installation made up of/ inspired by the gifts of the forest.

This natural construction will be used in order to generate specific body movement and particular action to the accompaniment of music. During the stay in Charciabałda everyone is welcome to observe the process of building as well as the breaks in between – little performances.

Just follow the sound of a bell…

More information about Iza and Kuba

Curated by Burdąg Foundation for Nomadic Arts Festival 2014

My father was an oak tree in Marivan! The army burned him! My mother was dried! and me…
By Wahshi Kuhi

Marivan is burning. A fear starring out between the leaves. Can a burning tree heal? Can I see you in the eyes again? What is forgotten in the heart of conflicts?

More information about Wahshi Kuhi

Would you go with me?
By Anna Haracz, Dana Chmielewska and Agata Gregorkiewicz

The body and the earth
Water and fire.
Still walking

go with you?
or stay with myself?
I know how to go
I don’t know how to stay
with you too

I’ve had enough of wandering
the troublesome spacetimes
commonality calls and fascinates
I’m staying here

More in formation about the artists here

Chasing the Rainbow
By The Living Collective (Beatrice Jarvis and Dana MacPherson)

This is not art, nor basic shelter, nor necessary; yet this is ultimate. Perhaps this is our own searching. Returning to a home in ourselves we have lost but perhaps never have known.

The goal of this performance installation is to uncover spaces of experiences and transformations of bodily states, which raise questions about physical and mental conditions. Constructing a simple dwelling place, a shelter to explore ideas of habitus guided by what it means to simply exist in a landscape. How far can performance and artistic occupation subvert or alter an experience / reality of the fabric of a site?

This work will embody a meeting of minds, hands and bodies in dialog with natural resources and exploration of what it means to find home, to seek shelter, to make nest, to hide, to protect oneself against the elements.

For more information about The Living Collective

From here Dotąd
By Ben Driscoll, Alfie Heffer and Stefan Andersson

A walk undertaken by Ben Driscoll and Alfie Heffer from London to Warsaw, joined by Stefan Andersson on the way. En route devising a performance, exploring improvisation, task based exercises and chance encounters. Our undetermined path is our context.

Across 1000 miles, of unexpected happenings, boots and blisters, people and places met. As we ask, how can we be present in the world? How can the world be present in us?

‘If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again, – if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.’

– Henry David Thoreau, Walking (1862)

For more information and updates from the walk, please visit walkingfromheretothere.wordpress.com
More information about artists

Untitled
By Karolina Kubik

Wound. Landscape units, related with observations and conquest, through the rhetorics of human body.

More information about Karolina Kubik

Personal nature image
By Marysia Stokłosa

Both nature and human being have the potential of silence and chaos. We can be calm and we change unpredictably. There is an inner-logic, a drive and a constant fluctuation. There is something very feminine about nature.

I am an urban human. I feel that on one hand I belong to the nature. But on the other hand, I am more like a visitor. This relation is not obvious for me. Just as the relation with my own body. I practice becoming an element of this natural environment. Being present, being active. Nature designs the most sophisticated theatre sets. I become a part of this picture. It influences me in a human way.

More information about Maria Stokłosa

Photograph by Monika Sobczak

Silver #3 (Madness and Empty Delirium)
By David Frankovich

“[…] sola, abbandonata in questo popoloso deserto […] Che far degg’io? Gioire, di voluttà ne’ vortici perir.”

– Francesco Maria Piave, La Traviata.

More information about the David Frankovich

Curated by P|A|S – Performance Arts Studies for Nomadic Arts Festival 2014

Breathe / Break: linear when you think of it / but not when you think back on it
By Mads Floor Andersen

‘Before then I had know only the desert and the caravan routes.
In the years that followed, my eyes returned to contemplate the
desert expanses and the caravan routes; but now I know this path
is only one of many that opened before me on that morning in Dorothea.’

-Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

More information about Mads Floor Andersen

‘Searching for the greener grass’
By Kimbal Quist Bumstead  

Two strangers meet, eyes facing forwards, backs facing back, contained within a capsule, along a tarmac blood vessel. The crack in the seat, the border between them, a hand brushes against a leg to move the jacket on the seat, a plastic bag and a sandwich wrapper. Where are you going? What are you doing? It doesn’t matter, we are both going the same way. The strangers share for a moment an intense personal relationship and then they go separate ways, they might never see each other again, they might think about each other, they might forget. ‘Searching for the greener grass’ is a performance about transitory relationships, a fleeting moment with a passer by, about places of waiting, of inertia, and of passing through. I am on a journey, from Berlin to Diyarbakir to meet a stranger to work on a project about notions of home. You are invited to meet me on this journey, one step of it, a detour into the woods, a soundscape of stories. See you on the bus.

More information about Kimbal Quist Bumstead

Workshops

THE EARTH’S EMBRACE (voluntary workshop)
By Supi

An ancient burial ritual and invitation to germination, placing yourself like a seed in the ground. Earth, our true mother, is the greatest nurturer and healer.

On the Saturday night, after due preparation and ceremony, you will spend the night communing with the earth; either entombed beneath her surface, or above ground holding sacred space around the central fire.

At dawn, the buried ones will be resurrected from their ‘benevolent death’ and reborn into the new day.

The Willingness to Rest

In my tiredness
And willingness to rest
I slipped so far down
I felt the earth embraced me
And knew me once again.

– David Whyte

Feedback from a previous workshop:

‘Profoundly transformational and cathartic.  I was reborn, I think, and it took me quite a while to even be able to speak after emerging from the burial mound.  Can’t say enough about the integrity of Sue, and the loving environment that she created.’

More information about Supi here

ANATOMY OF CONSCIOUSNESS (two part workshop)
By Anna Haracz

The workshop is based on the awakening of consciousness and kinetic principles of anatomy of the human body by working with images and ideas. It aims to establish flow throughout the body, which allows complete fluidity, speed and power of movement without generating unnecessary tension. The basic principle of this operation is the feeling of pleasure and relaxation , which protects against overproduction and physical injuries. It is a way to cope smooth and effective with difficult or already injured parts of the body.

Workshop includes tools inspired by her participation in the Gaga Intensive Summer Course in Batsheva Dance Company (Gaga – Ohad Naharin’s movement language ) and her own tools based on yoga (asanas and pranayama). We’ll work on certain aspects of this new and unique language of dance and tools of yoga. Improvisational nature of the activities will create space for everyone to explore their own body.

More information about Anna Haracz here

Curated by Body Space for Nomadic Arts Festival 2014

We all know it, but we forgot it (Capillary – Root Hairs Junction)
By Ewa Szymczyk

Support by knowledge of Celtic Tree Astrology, and the knowledge about Healing Energies of Trees. We going to search for a peaceful flow, self expression, releases held in trauma. Consciousness, connection, relief, being into being.

More information about Ewa Szymczyk

Observing the Here & Now
By Pawel Konior

I don’t want to give a workshop…
Workshop is for those who like to do shopping and work
I don’t like to work and a specially shopping.
Window shopping is something else – you observe.
And I would like to invite you to do the same – observe!
Observe what is inside you and around you.
We will try to get inspiration from the nature and moreover
we will try to inspire nature. We will try to get one with…
When you become…one…,you feel it in the gut and
in the heart that you are part of something beyond ourselves,
that there is meaning to each move, step, and breath you do.

More information about Pawel Konior

Exhibition

Scores for a Widening Field
By Minou Tsambika Polleros

‘At the heart of today’s ecological crisis lies a terrible failure to understand the essence of our relationship with the natural world’  – Shelley Sacks

This little showcase explores body practice in the heat of shifting systems and new forming world orders. It investigates how body practice can sit within active agendas dealing with the current state of the world. Minou works in natural environments as one way of initiating an alive connection with the wider ecology and locale, emancipating a sense of belonging, creatively moving, composing and participating in the world that we live in.

Minou invites the viewer into a landscape in which human being and environment inform each other creating more than poetic imagery but the attempt to call on the work with our whole physical and intellectual selves as sentient beings in a sentient world.

More information about Minou Tsambika Polleros

The Nomadic Community 2014: Partners, Curators and other support

PAS | Performance Art Studies

"There is not one way of doing performance art, but many."

PAS │ Performance Art Studies is an independent educational program that is offering intensive studies to young artists, art students and other interested people in Performance Art since 2008. The aim of these studies is to provide the participants a comprehensive form of teaching on Performance Art, everywhere in the world and always in cooperation with Performance Art festivals, art academies, museums and galleries.

PAS │ Performance Art Studies offers three main sections in education for Performance Art: The PAStudies, the PASproject and the PASyouth program. All these sections are divided into specific sections, for example: PAStudies (compact) or PASproject (advanced), to be able to adjust a certain program to the different working fields where PAS is involved. This flexibility allows to research in areas where performative strategies can support other fields of art and art education and influence other areas of life. This enables us to find the best method for different occasions.

- BBB Johannes Deimling, artistic director of PAS | Performance Art Studies

 The link to the PAS website: http://pas.bbbjohannesdeimling.de

Burdąg Foundation is a non-profit organization which supports research, production and educational projects in contemporary/experimental dance, performance and interdisciplinary arts. We create space for meeting, artistic exchange and sharing ideas. Burdąg Space for Performing Arts is also a place for workshops, research and rehearsals in a unique region of Masurian Lakes / Poland. It is an ideal destination for those seeking focus on work and rest away from their everyday life. In 2013 together with 9 young choreographers the Burdag Foundation created a new space for dance in Warsaw - Centrum w Ruchu.

In Situ Foundation was set up in December 2004 in Podkowa Lesna, nearby Warsaw. The founders are the contemporary artists, Bozenna Biskupska (painting, sculpture, performance) and Zygmunt Rytka (photography, installation). The name In Situ means in place (Latin) and it defines the philosophy of the foundation. "In situ" can be subjected to various semantic interpretations: operating in a place which regardless of "its place" is an art space. The main goal and focus of the Foundation is to promote contemporary art in Poland and abroad as well as developing awareness of different cultural initiatives. We are non government organization supported by donations – public and private , sponsorship and our statutory activity. We cooperate with curators, critics, and artists-curators who find a challenge in the contemporary forms of art production as well as the new trends in culture. We welcome any individual contributing to the activation of the critical reflection of contemporary art.

Currently the Foundation focuses its work in a town of Sokolovsko at the Polish-Czech border, where the International Laboratory for Culture is set up.

Our main goal in Sokolovsko, at this stage, is the renovation of the mid-nineteenth century neo-gothic styled sanatory building, that will hold the Laboratory.

So far Sokolovsko holds two major festivals:

Contexts - International Sokolovsko Festival of Ephemeral Art

- a festival of contemporary art, focusing on ephemeral, performance and avant-garde art. Every year the Festival brings contemporary artists from different countries together, giving additional insight on the work of selected avant-garde artists of this genre,

and Sokolovsko Festival - Hommage a Kieślowski
- a film festival refering to the work and artistic heritage of Krzysztof Kieślowski, presenting contemporary cinematography from Poland and abroad

www.insitu.pl
www.thecontexts.pl

"Periodyk Akademicki" (eng. "Journal of Academy") - is an art magazine which is creating by young artists,
students and budding curators. We want to talk about art, observed by eyes of young generations.

More information here

 

Raczej Gallery is an independent Gallery founded in 2011 in Poznan, Poland. From the beginning we’re focused on the promotion of the performance art. We mainly present the actions of young artists as well as renowned performers. Significant for us is to show the diversity of  ephemeral arts. We present the actions that results from the experiences of the visual arts, theater, dance, music etc.  For more than three years  Raczej Gallery presented more that fifty artists and organized a lot of events consisted of performances, presentations, workshops, curatorial projects, and concerts by artists from Poland, Czech, Ukraine, Belarus, Finland, Great Britain, Germany, Russia, China, Taiwan, USA and other countries. Raczej Gallery was engaged in other cultural events  and collaborations such as Month of Performance Art in Berlin, the Festival Navinki in Minsk, Belarus or Maltafestival in Poznan.  The Gallery is run by its founders: Łukasz Trusewicz and Agnieszka Szablikowska.

BODY SPACE to miejsce spotkań osób zainteresowanych eksploracją możliwości ruchu ludzkiego ciała w tańcu.

More information here

 

A regularly updated and supplemented web site devoted to the art of dance in Poland, in its broadest definition.

The main part of the web site is the databases: dance people (artists, managers, curators, critics), institutions (dance ensembles, festivals, non-government organizations), bibliographies (a list of Polish-language publications on dance), education (schools, courses), plays (a database of Polish dance performances), and texts (reprints from the relevant press and web sites, and articles specially commissioned for the site).

The site has a shortened English language version (the main databases, current events, and a calendar of events).

The work (job offers for professional dancers) and announcement (workshop proposals for all those interested in developing their dance skills) bookmarks are an integral part of the site, as are the calendar of events and current events sections, which contain information on dance events in Poland.

The Nomadic Village is a 2-week settlement set up on a vacant lot close to an existing village. The nomadic artists’ mobile homes/ateliers form the structure of the Village around On The Road Productions’ (ORP) Steyr-Ikarus bus, which acts as its townhall.

In this autonomous enviroment participants can freely experiment with new ways of working; it stimulates creativity and exchange, and attracts local people to observe and participate in the process. At the end of the Village there is a public exhibition/show that invites a wider audience to appreciate the works produced during the Village.

The project is the brainchild of Captain Klaus, lead Artist and founder, from ORP/Austria.

Give & Get is a natural and human-friendly workshop festival focusing on diversity, educational and entertaining, and community and all in all inspiring project.We are traveling festival in different locations each year in Latvia. One of Give & Get goals is to awake a sense in people that everyone has the opportunity to create and implement all around him, through sharing, creativity and positivity.