CHOREA Theatre is a thriving, uncountable and unpredictable group of artists, performers, musicians, dancers, actors, practitioners, theatre and drama theorists. We create interdisciplinary artistic, educational and social projects: concerts, workshops and performances. We employ innovative, original work methods, going beyond the cultural mainstream. We direct our work, projects, actions and activities to: adults, youth and children, those who are regular theatre-goers, those with limited access to art, and those looking for alternative cultural initiatives. We put emphasis on team-building, joint cooperation, partnership, group dynamics, interrelations, discovering creative potentials, and the awareness of body, voice and musicality in our work.
CHOREA Theatre was founded on February 10, 2004, in Lublin, as a result of collaboration between two groups of performers. First group, "The Ancient Orchestra", led by Tomasz Rodowicz and Maciej Rychły, was developing musical and rhythmical work. Second group, "Dances of the Labyrinth", led by Dorota Porowska and Elżbieta Rojek, was experimenting on movement and dance. Since 2004, before they found their residence in Lodz in 2007, they have been working in several locations. The company was first based in Naleczow, Srebrna Gora and Warsaw, they cooperated with Earthfall Dance Theatre in Cardiff (Wales). Since 2007 they established a permanent base in the city of Lodz, co-founding with Lodz Art Centre a cultural institution named Fabryka Sztuki (Art Factory) and they own an amazing industrial theatre spaces (for rehearsals, performances and workshops) situated in the 19th Century factories.
Since the beginning of its existence, CHOREA Theatre collaborates with many groups and artists from Poland and around the world. The theatre has produced dozens of performances and concerts. CHOREA works with many individual, experienced and renowned artists, as well as with amateurs, students, volunteers, people full of curiosity about the world, seekers, and active individuals. Under the theatre's umbrella operate the CHOREA Theatre Choir, the Intergenerational Theatre Group led by Janusz Adam Biedrzycki, and Children's Theatre Groups led by Joanna Filarska. The group regularly conducts a series of theatre and music workshops in Poland and around the world.
Since 2010, CHOREA has been organising the International Retroperspektywy Theatre Festival, and in 2015 and 2017 they also held two nationwide editions of the Perspektywy Festival. In 2015, the theatre released the album "Lulabajki" with music for both children and adults. In 2016, in collaboration with the Leon Schiller Polish National Film, Television and Theatre School in Łódź and the National Institute of Music and Dance in Warsaw, CHOREA created the handbook "Actors physical training. From individual to group actions". In 2020, CHOREA Theatre held the online premiere of the album "Gilgamesz", featuring music by Tomasz Krzyżanowski. In 2023, CHOREA recorded the album "Livet", a contemporary suite for the Earth, composed and arranged by Piotr Klimek, inspired by traditional songs from Bulgaria, Ukraine, Poland, and Norway.
Over the years, the group has developed its own training technique, which involves working with the body, voice, and rhythm, as well as working with a partner and in a group. A key aspect of CHOREA’s method is teamwork - the ability to collaborate in a laboratory-like setting - while ensuring that the group's interest does not overshadow an individual's uniqueness. The aim of the method is to explore the substance of movement, sound, and word, combined into an integral whole, by breaking away from traditional ways of illustrating their mutual relationships. Awakening the entire body and intense training create a stage presence that reconnects all these elements.
During last years CHOREA Theatre presented their performances, concerts and intensive workshop sessions all over the world. In 2009 CHOREA performed on International Meeting on Ancient Drama Festival in Delphi, (Greece). In 2010 we cooperated with Rosanna Gamson Worldwide Theatre in Los Angeles (USA). In 2011 we presented our work in Escena Contemporanea Festival in Madrid (Spain) and in Mayerhold Theatre Centre in Moscow (Russia). In 2012 we visited Stage Centre in Tel Aviv (Israel). In 2011, 2012 and 2013 we performed on Bharat Rang Mahotsav - the biggest international Theatre Festival in India. In 2014 and 2015 we showed our performances in Art Carnuntum Verein für Kunst Geschichte Theater Kultur Festival in Art Carnuntum (Austria). In 2015 we presented our work in Luxembourg (Luxembourg) and in Chisnau (Moldova). In 2015 and 2016 we performed in Tbilisi International Festival of Theatre (Georgia). In 2017 we performed in Berlin (Germany), Stockholm (Sweden) and in St.Petersburg (Russia). In 2018 we visited Baerum Kulturhus and sandvika Teater in Oslo (Norway), we leaded an intensive workshop session, in terms of "Polish Theatre Days” during II International Theatre Festival TheATRIUM 2018 in Drama Theatre in Klaipeda (Lithuania), performed in Danube Bend Theatre in Vac (Hungary) in terms of V4 Festival and Theatre Meeting 2018, and performed on Festivalul International de Teatru Pentru Publicul Tanar in Iasi (Romania). In 2019 we visited NUKU Theatre in Tallin (Estonia), where we performed on Visual Theatre Festival NuQ Treff, and again performed in Danube Bend Theatre in Vac (Hungary) in terms of V4 Festival and Theatre Meeting 2019. In 2020 we leaded intensive workshop session in Akademija za umjetnost i kulturu, in Osijek (Croatia), and leaded a big international online project 'Ukraine - Poland: The borderland of theatre cultures' in Lviv and Kiev (Ukraine). In 2021 we leaded intensive workshop sessions at the Akademija za umjetnost i kulturu / The Academy of Arts and Culture in Osijek and at the Academy of Dramatic Art / Academy of Fine Arts / Academy of Music in Zagreb (Croatia). We also leaded big international project 'Schulz-Grotowski: przekraczanie granic', in terms of which we leaded workshops and performed in Lviv (Ukraine).
"Chorea is a category borrowed from the history of ancient Greek theatre. It defines how three elements of expression – word, music and movement – function when practiced by a single actor and a group of actors. The ancient theatre experience marked the beginning of our quest; now we are trying to avoid a fixation on it, and we are looking for other sources of inspiration. We do not attempt to make reconstructions, enclaves, or reproduce the aesthetic context which would allow for the fullest recreation of remote and contemporary traditions, but we reach for the source, a motive, a piece, and try to hit with it, bounce it off the factory walls, off a piece of metal sheet or crumbling bricks and concrete floor, in order to see and hear something within ourselves.
For us, chorea is a kind of a model, which we try to partly recreate and, in a way, overcome, thus building a new chorea. This is a search for our own way and place in this chaotic running up and down the bridge between the very remote and the very contemporary. Between the question: who should we be? and the question: who were the geniuses who were exiled and burned at the stakes for us, or ended up in mental hospitals? Then, Euripides, Aristophanes, Artaud, Kantor, Herbert or Grotowski ask us the same questions.
New chorea consists in the fact that, while respecting the principle of organic unity of singing, words and movement, we try to create a new quality in the theatre, by involving in our work contemporary literature, music and extreme movement which derives from dance techniques and experiments of radical trends in contemporary theatre, based on the sharp, dirty and violent movement that always involves lowering the centre of gravity and acting in very stretched scales of meaning in space. At the same time, there must be enough room for sound, rhythm and voice, spoken word and song. We use not only melody and singing, but all the organic sounds which people carry in themselves and are able to emit. We use both full texts and their fragments, sometimes even reduced to syllables and single sounds. The body in music and the body in motion creates a special intensity of actor’s presence – it authenticates the message.
New chorea is an attempt to find other means of communication, more demanding towards contemporary actors and spectators, because it touches upon the key problem of our culture – and thus also art and theatre – namely, self-identification, the ability to define who you are and where you are. It basically boils down to countless attempts to determine in many ways the basis for building your own identity and maintaining individual sensitivity in the face of apparent multiculturalism, virtualization of the real world, a new, revolutionary change in the way of communication, data collection and processing. In the face of the creation, for the first time in history, of the global awareness and global memory of the human species.
Thanks to theatre, people don’t need to seek identity through the wall of the screen, through zero-one valuation, but can hear directly from another human the statement in which the same question will be rephrased in many ways: who are we, how do we operate, what for and for whom? Why are we the only species that slaughters itself, longing in the depths of the heart for the presence and love of god?
Tomasz Rodowicz
Artistic Director of CHOREA Theatre
