Alex Baczyński-Jenkins: Until a thousand roses bloom (with Warsaw in the background)

Until a thousand roses bloom (with Warsaw in the background) engages with the potential of desire, eroticism, sensuality, and touch. A choreography composed of gestures of erotic charge that might recall situations between friends, lovers, strangers. Bodies assemble in relations that never settle, always becoming, imbued with a sense of queer futurity.

The work includes a billowing, suspended red fabric, a prop for burlesque performances, bringing to the foreground sensuality and reflecting on the ephemerality of queer gestures.

The repetition of Urzula Sipińska’s 1971 titular ballad – Until a thousand roses bloom – folding onto itself in loops, saturates the space with a nostalgia not for the past but for what remains possible.

“Flowers grow always and everywhere, there where they will thrive.”

Cruising is taken as a mode of close attention to the modulations and gestures of longing, through repetition and temporal suspension. What is being cruised here is desire and eroticism itself.

Until a thousand roses bloom (with Warsaw in the background) forms part of a new edition of Fogo Fátuo entirely dedicated to the work of Alex Baczyński-Jenkins.

The programme is presented by Galeria Municipal do Porto in partnership with Teatro Municipal do Porto.

Choreography: Alex Baczyński-Jenkins | In collaboration with and performed by: Aaa Biczysko, Billy Morgan, Ewa Dziarnowska, Filipka Rutkowska, Jose Funnel, Rafał Pierzyński, Katarzyna Szugajew | Set design: Alex Baczyński-Jenkins in collaboration with Małgorzata Nawrocka | Live sound: Krzysztof Baginski | Sound research: Filip Lech, DUNNO Recordings | Originally commissioned and produced by Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw, 2018 | A production by: ABJ Studio| Studio director: Andrea Rodrigo | Studio manager: Laura Cecilia Nicolás | Tour manager and Set design assistant: Anna Posch

Previous presentations include: Foksal Gallery Foundation, Varsóvia / Warsaw (2018) | Kunsthalle Basel, Suíça / Switzerland, as part of Alex Baczyński-Jenkins’ solo exhibition Such Feeling (2019).

Photographs by Mariana Silva