Renata Piotrowska-Auffret
Renata Piotrowska-Auffret is a choreographer and the artist; in her works she uses tools of experimental dance, performative arts, dramaturgy and theatre.
Piotrowska-Auffret contemplates the contemporary world by deriving the inspirations from intimate experiences, real and fictional, embedded in a given social context. She is interested in the perversity of relations between the historical and contemporary body politics, between public and private, as well as between text and movement.
She was a priority artist in the frame of Aerowaves Twenty17 and Aerowaves Twenty19. She received scholarships from Adam Mickiewicz Institute, Art Stations Foundation and Ministry of Culture and National Heritage in Poland, program „Młoda Polska” (2010) and „Stypendium Ministra” (2013).
She created: Now (2007), Dancing with the Enemy (2007), UNKNOWN series (2008–2010), break ART OF THE WAR (2010), UNKNOWN.SEANCE (2011), videodance Inside (2011), The Forest_work in progress (2013), Death. Exercises and variations (2014), Common (2015-2016), The pure gold is seeping out of me (2017), Flatland of limp muscles (2019).
Since 2014 she started a series of private pieces – performances putting at stake female body politics, oscillating between private and public.
As she describes her works: „I am a female artist, I am a women, I am a mother – so the polarization of the body touches me directly. I always have a personal and autobiographical urgency to do the work.” As a result of working with politically involved themes, the private pieces have already been created.
Death. Exercises and variations (Aerowaves Twenty 2017) tells a story through movement and words of one female body. Of the body that deliberately and ironically exposes itself to a stage confrontation with death, and more precisely, with a figure of a skeleton and with a phenomenon of dance macabre.
The pure gold is seeping out of me (Aerowaves Twenty 2019) is composed of voices of many different women with different bodies. The politics of reproduction, including childbirth and motherhood that can be described as close and paradoxical relations between life and death, become in here a leading topic.
The pure gold… has been already presented in 2019 in the frame of European festivals: Spring Forward in Paris (France), Studio Dance Scene and Dance Art Center in Warsaw (Poland), Cloud Festival in Tirana (Albania), NORMA Festival in Ostrava (Czech Republic), Festival Culturescapes in Dornach and Museum Susch in Zernez (Switzerland); and in and in 2020/21 will be presented in, among others, Denmark (Bora Bora Dans & Visuelt Teater; Danshallerne), Germany (Staatstheater Mainz; Off Europa Festival), Czech Republic (Baazar Festival), Ireland (Dance Limerick), Romania (Like Festival), Georgia (Circe Platform) and Great Britain (Sadler’s Wells).
Flatland of limp muscles (2019) is the third piece from the series. Based on testimonies of contemporary women gathered by the artists, and the formula of the fairy tale and the witch, the production tells of strategies for abusing the female body, and deconstructs and transforms the power/violence narratives and mechanisms present in culture today.
Renata Piotrowska-Auffret is now planning to start working on another piece from the series titled Flourishing hell.
Piotrowska-Auffret graduated from master choreographic program ex.e.r.ce. in Montpellier and Theatre Academy in Białystok.
She is a member of choreographer’s platform from Warsaw – Center in Motion.
