11 solo dances
“11 Solo Dances”: Triptych – a blurb by Magdalena Dubrowska translated by Soren Gauger
Dance. War. Suicide. The tragic fates of three people interwoven through blood ties, love, and alienation.
She is Pola Nireńska, the famous Polish dancer and choreographer of Jewish descent.
He is Jan Karski, a soldier, diplomat, and courier for the Underground State, who tried to alert the world to the Holocaust of the Jews during World War Two, to no avail.
“I never danced so much as during the war,” Pola recalled.
“The work was less thrilling than a carpenter’s. It was almost utterly devoid of feats of bravery,” Jan wrote of his work for the conspiracy.
They were married in 1965, in Washington, where Pola ran a dance school, but after some time Jan forbade her from pursuing her passion. It was where she was to be a wife. And where, after years of struggling with depression and several suicide attempts, in 1992 she leapt from the eleventh-story window of a high-rise.
But there is a third character in this painful triptych: Jan Karski’s elder brother, Marian Kozielewski, soldier of Piłsudski’s Legions, a prisoner of Auschwitz, who also ended up in Washington, having drifted about after the war. Consumed by melancholy and pining for his home country, in 1964 he threw himself from a window of the Corcoran art gallery, where he worked as a watchman.
In the triptych composed of 11 Solo Dances, M. K. Gallery Walks, and M. K.—An Oral History Archive, director Katarzyna Wińska plucks out fragments of these three stories like bits of ancient vases. They cannot be pieced back into a whole, but the surviving shards are what is most valuable.
Thus, we have an attempt to reconstruct Pola Nireńska’s choreographies by contemporary dancer Justyna Białowąs, or in fact, her interpretation based on free associations, as no record of these eleven dances has survived, except for their titles, and a virtual stroll through the streets of Washington to Corcoran gallery, where Kozielewski worked. Finally, we have three letters that Marian sent to Wińska’s father, read in part by actress Agnieszka Żulewska. In one of these letters, sent two weeks before his death, Kozielewski wrote:
“They say that I have grown odd. No doubt. But they do not perceive that, at my age, it is not enough to eat well, get drunk well, and the devil take the rest.”
Magdalena Dubrowska