Kem School 2025 + Ania Nowak, Eve Stainton, softchaos + OPEN CALL
Open Programme 2 - 5.09
We’re moving forward with Kem School 2025! This year we’ve departed from working with one group throughout the year and made our whole programme available to the public. As part of our September programme we’re hosting a series of experimental formats, exploring the themes we find most urgent during this edition of Kem School - choreographies of protest, public space and anti-fascist art practices. Bringing us together to think about these will be: Ania Nowak, softchaos & Eve Stainton.
“Freaky Belladonnas: Permission, Risk and Movement in Electronic Music” by softchaos
How is the ecosystem of experimentation within the arts classed, racialised and gendered? What is the relationship between experimentation and queerness? How has the culture of electronic music excluded the politicised motion of the radical black tradition which generated it? Who is allowed to be experimental?
In its exploration of radical educational methodologies, Kem School seeks to foster experimental forms of knowledge production and dissemination. Exploring what new ideas, relationalities and frameworks can emerge when we re-arrange the elementary forms and gestures of communication - this is how we understand an experimental practice. As part of Kem School 2025, we have invited softchaos - musician and scholar, to share a new iteration of their ongoing research project in the form of a performative lecture. In doing so, they will draw on this idea of experimentality while simultaneously complexifying and situating it within a black critique of modernity.
Part sonic experimentation, part academic cross-section, Freaky Belladonnas is situated between considerations of the aesthetics of the black radical tradition and the affective politics of sound. Through a nuanced, personal approach to the material history of musical experimentation, softchaos reasserts the need to find new choreographies of experiencing bodies. This performative lecture marks a conscious engagement with and re-arrangement of the academic lecture format, mirroring the radical shifts applied by black artists to the cultural canon.
Place: ul. Jasna 10/3
Date & Time: 3.09, 19:00 - 20:30
Language: English, with simultaneous translation to Polish
Event link
OPEN CALL for “Atmospheres of Suspense” - workshop and performance by Eve Stainton
As part of the second block of Kem School 2025, Eve Stainton will lead a workshop exploring movement and choreography as methods to research and construct atmospheres of suspense within the body and between people.
Departing from the concept of identities of threat - understood as positions constructed and maintained in society and designated to people and things considered to be ‘dangerous’ or ‘other’, alongside considerations of how those images infiltrate bodies and ways of moving - Eve and the workshop participants will explore ways to make visible and transform states of suspense.
The workshop will also draw on research conducted around Impact Driver - Eve Stainton’s recent project which is inspired by gestures and rhythms of manual labor as a way of building movement and relationality.
Workshop participants will be invited to work with scores exploring interlocking bodies, rolling together, decceleration, stretched out time and bodies unyielding to postures of authority.
This workshop is intended for queer-identifying people, open to working with the body, intimacy and movement. The 3-day workshop will end with an open performance in public space, choreographed with Eve Stainton.
Dates:
Tuesday, 2.09, 16:00 - 18:00 Afternoon meeting and introductory talk with Eve
Wednesday, 3.09 , 10:00 - 17:00 workshop
Thursday, 4.09 , 10:00 - 17:00 workshop
Friday, 5.09 , 14:00 - 18:00 + public performance at 21:00
Language of instruction: English
Place: Jasna 10, Świetlica Krytyki Politycznej
Capacity: 16 attendants
How to apply: https://forms.gle/WjXM2c9oAcc4MpPz7
In case of any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us at school@kemwarsaw.com
Eve Stainton is an artist and choreographer born in Manchester and living in London, UK. They create multi-disciplinary performances that involve movement practices, welded steel/live welding, digital collage, and other invisible forces like drama and suspense. Their research is rooted in community, interested in how differently marginalised people experience and come into relationship with power structures and societal conventions. Often working with codes or tropes of gender, class and threat, their work stages clunky physical negotiations and reveals 'behind the scenes' mechanisms of working together to show a kind of reality that isn’t seamless.
Kem School is co-financed by the City of Warsaw
Kem School 2025 is supported by the British Council under the UK/Poland Season 2025
Goethe Institut is a partner of the project