delighting
Performance by Daniel Kotowski

Zachęta – National Gallery of Art
free entry

Event interpreted into Polish Sign Language

In his new performance delighting, premiering at Pickle Bar, Daniel Kotowski deconstructs the seeming innocence of aesthetic delight so as to uncover the violence dripping from legitimised culture, as it softly romanticises and delegitimises ‘other’ – bodies, languages, worldings. Delight and violence are not a coincidental pairing, they deeply embedded into the ‘western’ culture through a colonial gaze that simultaneously disavows the vulnerability of the one watching. Kotowski acknowledges performance as a space of shared dis/comfort and vulnerability and refutes the margins constructed by the very stage – or rather – appropriates them, twists them, shifts them, (de)lighting what’s peripheral to them, exposing the seeming centers as facades.

text: Weronika Zalewska
performance: Daniel Kotowski
costume design: Paweł Włodarski
choreographic consultation: Alicja Czyczel
co-production: Festival Theaterformen

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