The Second Body

Ola Maciejewska works mainly in dance, choreography, and installations. Her work focuses on the frictions between materiality and ephemerality, movement and the conditions of its appearance. In the light of these notions, she produces a critical reading of the history of dance. Working on the convergences between dance and the visual arts, her series of works based on the serpentine dances invented by Loïe Fuller engage the viewer in a reflection on metamorphosis, synaesthesia, and the hybrid nature of embodiment.

For this new work, she has taken Daisy Hildyard’s essay The Second Body as a starting point to question human disruption of the climate and ecology. Here, human beings have two bodies – one tangible, made of flesh and bone, the other more diffuse, involved in a network of exchanges with other entities. Based on this ambivalence, she explores the dissolution of the boundaries between subject and object, animate and inanimate, and observes the inter- and co-dependent relationship between matter and the body as choreography. Maciejewska stages a body and an ice object: a complex organism made up of muscles, bones, and veins – 80% liquid – on the one hand; a solid body made entirely of solidified water on the other. Neither a duo nor a solo, The Second Body invites us to look at the permeability of these bodies of water in constant metamorphosis. The work is a manifesto on dependence, exteriority, and relativity, and affirms the immediate beauty of a lived experience.