The Chosen Victim's Dance. Artur Zmijewski interviews Katarzyna Kozyra
Artur Zmijewski: Who are your actors?
Katarzyna Kozyra: Karolina has put me in touch with some old people who used to be dancers at the National Theatre. There is a 94 year old woman in Skolimów who seems to be knowledgeable and active, then there is also grandma Ursula. Everyone will appear in the nude but in disguise. The grandpas are going to have huge, hairy pussies, and the grandmas will sprout fresh silicon dicks.
AZ: They are going to be part of the animated film you're making...
KK: They'll reproduce the movements of the dancers from the ballet "The Rite of Spring", choreographed by Nijinsky. Diagilew, the Russian impresario, along with Stravinsky and Roerich wrote a ballet about Orthodox myths. Roerich was the scenographer, Stravinsky wrote the music and Nijinsky did the choreography, drawing, among others, on Slavonic totems like the World Seer, with four faces looking at the four corners of the earth. This is probably where the weird dance arrangements come from. Nijinsky began with the choreography of the last part of the ballet — The Chosen Victim's Dance and then made other characters perform the same arrangement. This is why all the dancers perform movements from this last dance at some point. The movements of the actors are organised in "mystical" circles and squares. When they move along the edges of a square it means that they are in the labyrinth of death. When they move around a circle they're in the grasp of life. Snake-like movements indicate uncertainty and divination. Everything has some kind of meaning. I begin with The Chosen Victim's Dance because it is the purest and because the rest of the dancers also perform fragments from it. The task of the chosen victim in Nijinsky's ballet was to dance herself to death and to awaken the earth to life. I saw Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer's film which recreated the original choreography of the "Rites of Spring".
AZ: Why do you only work with decrepit old people"
KK: Nijinsky's choreography made it impossible to disguise the dancers' effort. He made the dancers' every move as difficult as possible. The ballet dancers had to be sharply trained if they were going to manage. There is one incredible sequence where a woman jumps in the air and has to carry out the same movement three times before landing. She stretches her body and head as far as possible to the left and her arm as far as possible to the right. Nijinsky's dancers lost their centre of gravity but still managed to carry out complicated movements whilst in the air — defying the laws of gravity and the body's limitations. When you watch it you don't see how difficult it is. Old people wouldn't be able to dance this, it would be impossible for them. But lying down, they can manage somehow, even imitating the complicated leaps into the air. Thanks to animation, even grandma Ursula is able to do this. Besides, their old bodies have something despairing about them — and the fact that they are doing something which is beyond them is terrifying.
AZ: You want to achieve the illusion of the body's movement in an empty, white space.
KK: The editing together of a sequence of movements, frame after frame, creates interesting effects. I noticed that in this choreography the dancers' movements are all on one plane. This is why there is no problem with them lying down. I just have to watch out that it is not too obvious that they are really lying down. Ewa thinks that if you lay them out and film them very precisely, frame after frame, you can create the impression that they are dancing, suspended in emptiness. Ewa helps me. She used to work in an animation studio. She was the one who put all the movements on paper, because I didn't have a clue how to sketch these framed movements. It was a great weight off my mind because I really didn't realise that there was so much work involved in animation. Two seconds of film is a whole day's work. But at least I'll achieve the effect I want. Not just an approximation — the same movements that there were in Nijinsky.
AZ: How far do you want to go with the project, how many seconds of film do you want to have?
KK: Thirty for the moment. It depends how many people I'm going to animate. I would really like to recreate the whole ballet with these human puppets. Nijinsky's spectacle only lasted half an hour. But for me, it's a year's work. Also, it would involve loads of characters, more than forty. So I think I probably won't do the whole thing.
AZ: So much effort, an uncertain result, but you're still going to do it?
KK: I just feel that right now this is the most important thing in life.
AZ: Why do you make people do the impossible? Why do you animate them?
KK: It is a way of imposing my will on them. We usually associate the body with a person, who has a will. My film shows the body deprived of its will. My old people are passive bodies, puppets, which I mould. I do what I want, they don't put up any resistance, I use their bodies and collapse the conviction that man is a self-determining being who decides for himself. When all is said and done, this someone is directed. This is just a body, a body deprived of its will — but it moves all the same. It is a kind of Totentanz!
