The workshops will take place on Saturday, 18 April, from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. at the Orzeł Cultural Integration Centre. The programme includes circle, spinning and group dances. Admission is free, but the number of places is limited! Registration is available at the BOK-MCC Tourist and Cultural Information Point, tel. 75 645 32 90.
Jacek Hałas on the idea behind the workshops: “Human beings are social creatures and seek contact with others—but for this to happen, we must use a language that is understandable to the community. I do not mean literary language here, but the rhythm, steps, dance figures or the words of a song. This ‘bodily’ language, developed over generations, in a simple and pleasant way—by entertaining and teaching—allowed people, through direct participation, to acquire knowledge whose absence today we have to compensate for by visiting a psychotherapist. By cutting ourselves off from traditional ‘tools’, we have deprived ourselves of several ‘channels of access’ to knowledge about ourselves. In the past, as a member of a small community, a person took part in successive stages of ‘initiation’ from childhood. It also seems that the much smaller number of stimuli than today translated into their quality and significance for those receiving them. By learning, practising and finally observing participants in games, social dances and workshops, I came to the conclusion that various forms of spatial organisation—procession, pair, trio and group—played important roles in learning social behaviour. The most archaic forms—processions—concerned an individual’s participation in a group, the individual as a creative component of the community. These are structures in which everyone performs the same step, figure or variation, but only their shared performance gives meaning to the whole and turns it into a dance. Partner dances—whose Polish specificity and distinctive feature is spinning, related to the oldest ritual forms, the dances of dervishes and Hasidim, or the healing action of taran telli—allowed people to recognise and master emotions related to gender, sex and bodily closeness. It was a whole range of sensations that could be identified, experienced and brought under control in a safe situation. In the past, dance games and activities in threes, fours and groups formed the basis of children’s play, teaching, in the most natural way, the processes of integration and rejection as well as functioning in a group. The Stranger (The Little Fox Goes Around the Road), Us and Them (The Quail), or practising openness in a group (The Farmer in the Valley).”
BOK-MCC information