Shaking the Habitual

Kem School is an experimental educational programme that harnesses the potential of performance, queer-feminist methodologies and collectivity as vital tools for radical pedagogy. It emerged as a response to the absence of alternative educational initiatives in Poland that centre the body as a carrier of socio-political knowledge.

In the workshop Kem School will approach speaking, moving, reading and writing as acts of embodiment and interdependence. They will work with notions of habit, attachment and accessibility to create timeand body-based scenarios for making our personal and political feelings approachable.

If society is broken and we are divided, how can improvisation become a tool for expanding our capacity for delight and discomfort? How is consensual social intimacy created? What does disobedience look and feel like today and tomorrow?

The US-American cultural theorist Lauren Berlant wrote “Cruel optimism is about how people will stay in relation to their object even if it destroys them because they can’t bear giving up the pleasure of knowing the world in a particular way.” What other knowledges of the world do we desire to develop today? How to bear this amount of pleasure and pain together?

In the workshop, choreographic, performative and self-help strategies will be used to work with and against the definitions and attention economies that rule our everyday. The workshop will be held in English.

It is open to everyone interested in working with the body-mind connection, with a special invitation to participants with queer, crip*, BIPOC, migrant experiences. No previous movement, writing or artistic experience is required.