CHOREOGRAPHER'S STATEMENT

"I am drawn to concepts relating to time, space and the human condition. By placing the human being under intense physical and psychological scrutiny I aim to challenge relationships between performer and viewer, inviting the viewer to intellectually participate in the work, developing a unique combination of clear physical abstraction and dramatic intention."

BIOGRAPHY

Anna Krzystek is a choreographer & performer based in Glasgow. Anna is also a core member of Helsinki based performance company OBLIVIA Performance Company After a year-long period of research and development, supported by Scottish Arts Council Choreographic Fellowsship Award, and numerous work in progress events FIGURE THIS has come into being and will premier in March 09. FIGURE THIS is the third in a series of solo performances based on the premise of waiting.

TRILOGY OF WORK

TEST, STILL and FIGURE THIS form a series of work based on the premise of waiting. Waiting, in all degrees of ambiguity, is experienced by everyone everyday. In these pieces the performer is referred to as the figure. Her presence is at once both immediate and distant as she is placed in relation to time, space, sound, object & filmed image. The carefully deliberated juxtapositions of the various elements forming these works create space for individual experiences to arise.

FORTHCOMING PERFORMANCES OF FIGURE THIS

British Dance Edition
Ikon Eastside Gallery, Birmingham, UK
6th February 2010

European Performance Art Festival, Warsaw, Poland
16-18 October 2009

“One could go on for a long time about the genius and wonderful
execution of Anna Krzystek’s dance performance- she was absolutely
superb!
This is a work that plays with our perceptions and perspectives of
performance as well as the concepts of transformation or resolution.
Playfully and perplexing we are engaged with ideas current in
contemporary field theory and as ancient as medieval alchemy.”
Robert Beaton

RECENT PERFORMANCES:
Les Halles, Brussels, Belgium
TEST 19th February 09
STILL 20th February09
FIGURE THIS (as work in progress) 21st February 09

New Territories @ Tramway, Glasgow, UK
FIGURE THIS premier 17th March 09
Trilogy of work: TEST, STILL, FIGURE THIS 18th March 09

FIGURE THIS  (2009)
Choreography & performance - Anna Krzystek
Original sound score - Tom Murray
Video installation - Tim Nunn, Daniela De Paulis and Anna Krzystek

FIGURE THIS aims to observe the figure more closely, unveiling newly found aspects of her presence.
The figure moves through a series of choreographic acts that sees her pushed to extremes. These acts are compulsive and enduring, they commence and end without warning leaving the figure suspended in periods of “not doing”. It is precisely in these gaps of “not doing’ that the figure is revealed and a sense of closeness can be felt.

The objects that surround the figure are remains from TEST and STILL, they quietly hold their own presence within the whole.

Commissioned by New Territories. Co-commissioned by Les Halles.
Additional funding & support from Scottish Arts Council Choreographic Fellowship Award, CCA, Dance Base, The Work Room, Dance House, Tramway, Oblivia and Balance.

STILL
Choreography & performance -Anna Krzystek
Original sound score - Tom Murray
Film installation – Lucy Cash

As TEST presents an ongoing prelude to something that may or may not happen STILL visits the next phase of anticipation.
STILL exists on a fine line between performance and installation. It explores the openness of an installation whilst still utilizing structural tensions and the clearly defined frontal perspective found in theatre and film; finding moments during which the performer is able to fall in and out of focus giving space and time for the spectator’s eye to freely engage with other collaborative aspects of the work.

"(STILL) certainly side-stepped the mainstream with persuasive conviction, producing work that rewarded necessary concentration by sending our thoughts and imaginings into energising freefall." The Herald

Commissioned by New Territories 2007. Additional funding & support from Scottish Arts Council, CCA, Tramway, Dance Base, Dance House and Balance.

Premier: New Territories, Tramway, Glasgow 2007
Tour dates include Paris, Roubaix, London, Alsager and Aberdeen.

TEST
Choreography and performance – Anna Krzystek
Original sound score – Tom Murray

TEST exists as a series of in between moments.
From the beginning we share the performer’s introspective, yet powerful, presence, which immediately forms tensions between herself and the space, herself and time and herself & the audience.
Within all its sparse quiescence TEST radiates physical exertion to a point where the audience, no longer just observers, become accomplices in this seemingly ongoing waiting game.
TEST eliminates all sense of predictability and acts as a test to exercise concentration.

TEST was made possible with funding & support from Scottish Arts Council and CCA.

Premier: CCA, Glasgow 2005
Tour dates include Vilnius, Bytom, NRLA, Aberdeen and Edinburgh

REVIEWS AND ESSAYS

TRILOGY, Anna Krzystek, Tramway, Glasgow, 18/03/09

Mary Brennan, The Herald

Star rating: ****

Hands on hips, Anna Krzystek stands centre stage and gazes,
unblinkingly, ahead of her. She holds the space - the dark oblong of
Tramway 4 - and us in the sheer force-field of her sustained
stillness. When she moves, that magnetic pull shifts gear but never
loses concentration: a long balance, fixed on one leg, seems to stop
time while sequences of rapid, repetitive steps - done over and over
with a determined precision - generate an aura of profound meditation
coupled with a flow of fierce, kinetic energy that is, at its core,
purely cosmic.

No-one in Scotland, or the UK for that matter, originates work like
the trilogy Krzystek presented on Wednesday night. Three solos - Test
(2005), Still (2007) and Figure This (2008) - each lasting 45 minutes,
asserted not only Krzystek's mental and physical stamina, but her
capacity for the kind of intellectual processes that few
choreographers are equipped to explore.

She cites the premise of waiting' as the starting point that connects
all three solos. She begins with her own presence, clad always in a
simple black tunic, then engages stillness and motion in various
conjunctions with sound scores (devised throughout by Tom Murray) or
videos that spool on floor-level monitors.

As movements and pace, sound and visual images alter, Krzystek's
choreography delves into fascinating aspects of time and space -
glimpsing her on screen even as she performs on stage brilliantly
catches notions of now and then/here and there'.

The new solo, the physically demanding and meticulously detailed
Figure This, has a humorous sound score punctuated with ecstatic
applause.

Krzystek's trilogy certainly merits our bravos - as does the New
Territories' decision to commission and support this exceptional,
radical talent.

ANNA KRZYSTEK - TEST, STILL AND FIGURE THIS

The complete trilogy was performed at Tramway on Wednesday 18 March 2009 as part of New Territories.

One could go on for a long time about the genius and wonderful execution of Anna Krzystek’s dance performance: she was absolutely superb! But, there was much more happening in Tramway 4 than a bunch of us watching Anna dance. This is a work that brings audience and performer into the same shared force-field to meet with real-live intelligence in the setting of the theatre. This dance trilogy plays with our perceptions and perspectives of performance as well as concepts of transformation or resolution. Playfully and perplexingly we are engaged in ideas current in contemporary field theory and as ancient as medieval alchemy.

I entered Tramway 4, somewhat expecting just to be in an audience to view an ‘ontologically separate and distinct’ performance across a notion of a proscenium arch and on a staged set. Before sitting down, I noticed that the performance had already started; the figure was already on stage. I began to feel that my getting seated, before this still stage-presence, was part of the night’s show. There was also a sense of looking into momentary presences in the more remote and contained spaces seen in the videos images on the television picture tubes.

In the audience, sitting up front, on the edge just to stage left, I watched the back of grey wizard-haired Tom Murray. He sat focussed over a sound table array of knobs, switches and laptop images silently and continually adjusting, turning, reaching out, looking outwards into the happening onstage and then back again to push, pull, twist and turn to the adjusters. The stage was as a vessel or test-tube containing the matter to be transformed and Tom, the Conductor responding to the process of change before him.

A teenager of the 60’s, I felt as if I were witness to an experiential happening about 20th century TV tube technology. Then, I was aware that as an audience, we were experiencing what it might be like to be in inside a TV or radio cathode tube – a modern day alchemical retort, noisily buzzing with a century of canned figures of musical harmony and discord, moving and still-life, news and entertainment, the trace of an actual smile and the repeated recording of an applause. Anna’s strong embodied presence responded to all of these. We were, in effect, experiencing being in the same experimental container with the figure, undergoing a bewildering bombardment of sound, no sound, movement, no movement, motion forwards and backwards, repetition and chaos. Tramway 4 had become a giant test-tube and both audience and performance, the matter inside it being changed by the noise of life.

In the end, after three-in-a-row dance pieces, the figure, not only had endured but stood as a transformed presence looking back at us, luminous and golden in the blackness of the stage; and we, the audience, revitalised by the process.

Robert Beaton

TEST-The Wait, Anna Krzystek, CCA, Glasgow, 21st March 2004'

Philip Stanier, Live Art Magazine

This was something special. A white gallery studio with a table, a chair and a radio tuned to static. One performer dressed in black walks in the space looking at the audience and the room around her, mostly scanning and occasionally looking at something or someone....

'A Chiasma of Changes' - stillness and vast landscapes in Anna Krzysteks choreography

An essay by Annika Tudeer
SUMMARY

Stillness that is yet movement is the foremost quality pervading the solo TEST - The Wait, where Anna Krzystek is perfecting the art of juxtaposing stillness and continuous movement. Anna is working through intricate movement sequences with subtle qualities of change that we could say have become a trademark of her choreography