Cute&Awkward

Awkwardness is vulnerability, not incompetence. Charm is camouflage and a way to survive. Twisted between memory and fiction, CUTE & AWKWARD revolves around queer hangouts and the pop culture dream of sleepwalking.

Two people, a scene and magnetic forces. Bodies respond to invisible stimuli, and movements are born slowly, as if they belonged to someone else's memories — uncertain, unbalanced, yet precise. The choreography in CUTE & AWKWARD maintains the rhythm of the march in polonaise, is a return to Polish national dance. It's more the act of being moved than moving as such.

The show refers to Warsaw's first gay cruise bar in post-communist Poland — Phantom — and to the echo of desire and loss in Annie Lennox's “No More 'I Love You's'”. The performers dance together, embodying the absent, and at the same time make a political gesture. Bodies are moved by external forces, and the dreamer responds to them instinctively. The evocation of queer social spaces here is a form of symbolic resistance, a way of closeness, of moving through relationship rather than control.

CUTE & AWKWARD is the sister project of Wojciech Grudziński's earlier performance — THREESOME. After working with biographies of three legendary dancers (Stanisław Szymański, Wojciech Wiesiołowski and Gerard Wilk), CUTE & AWKWARD touches on similar issues, but seen through different bodies and perspectives. It's a tender look at the specter and sleepiness.