»My Sculptures Dance For Me« – Danuta Kwapiszewska
The figure of a woman in a long, voluminous skirt raises her arms gracefully above her head; her gaze turns to the sides. Kwapiszewska’s sculptural dance figure is made of plastic. A person encounter with the sculpture, which was part of the archive of the Chopin Museum in Warsaw, was Mastalerz’s starting point for her research, and inspiration to develop the choreography. Kwapiszewska made the dance figures as a reaction to her physical challenges when she was no longer able to work as a dancer and started sculpting. In a reaction to her health crises, which was simultaneously connected a crisis of her artistic practice, Kwapiszewska transformed her vulnerability. Autobiographical details of Mastalerz’s life intertwine with Kwapiszewska’s work and life: Both were born in Lodz and share Warsaw as the key location of their artistic practice and life. In both of their practices, too, the materiality of plastic expands to the history of art as material without history, and transcends time to the present.
The curator Marta Zaborowska (Chopin Museum in Warsaw) describes the materiality of the sculptures in detail: »The skeleton is made of steel wire braided with thin copper wire. The body is made of plastic, which was very popular in the 1970s. In the 1960s, it was embedded in a base, most likely made of plaster, covered with a layer of paint and locally with the material used to make the body.« In the 1970s, plastic became a common material in the arts, strongly associated with fragility and brittleness, which until today, challenges the objectives in the conservation of cultural objects. But how does the fragile material of plastic relate to the vulnerability of the body?
In the arts of the twentieth century, plastic is a »material without history.« It came into use during the time of the historical avant-gardes, and after World War II, plastic became an everyday material. In Mythologies (1957), Roland Barthes states: »Plastic is completely absorbed in its use; in extreme cases, objects would be invented for the sake of the pleasure of using plastic. The hierarchy of substances has been destroyed, replaced by a single one: the whole world can be plasticized.« As a material without history, plastic is consumed in its use. In its dissolution it becomes brittle, dissolves, and disappears. Kwapiszewska’s sculptures share the same fate: Their surface becomes brittle, producing cracks, visible in the sculptural object. The material’s vulnerability becomes visible in the slender arms, the bent curves.
Mould’s title references »cast« and the act of casting as a sculptural process. In Kwapiszewska’s history, sculpting becomes the escape, or rather a last resort after dancing. While her sculptures seem to simply »revive« a pose, a gesture, Mould points to the restorative dimension of dancing and sculpting in moments of rupture. In the chosen format of a loop, Mastalerz aims to produce an infinite continuity, to blur interruptions. In effect, the opposite happens. Any moments of rupture rush to the fore: sudden movements of dancers, changes in light. Similar to the cracks and brittleness of Kwapiszewska’s dance figures that became visible over time, Mould recalls moments of restoration and rehabilitation.
With no documentation left of the choreographies that Kwapiszewska had conceptualized, Mastalerz’s film succeeds in blending the female body’s fragile state and the plastic material history of everyday life, by trespassing on the Polish history of dance – as they appear on stage, softly lit choreographically drafted bodies, who move and become sculptures, who move and begin to dance: MOJE RZEŹBY TAŃCZĄ ZA MNIE, WYSTAWA PRAC (transl. My Sculptures Dance for Me)
