CUTE & AWKWARD
2025 | FRASCATI PRODUCTION
CUTE & AWKWARD performance emerges from the shadows. In it, “awkwardness” is not a failure, but vulnerability. “Cuteness” becomes a camouflage – a way to survive. Suspended between memory and fiction, the show moves freely between queer meeting spaces and the pop culture fantasy of somnambulism. The creators draw on cultural icons: Warsaw’s first gay cruising bar – “Phantom,” and the hypnotic, melancholic sound of Annie Lennox’s “No More I Love You’s.” Dance becomes an attempt to maintain the eternal creative immaturity of identity, which seeks answers to such questions as: How to reproduce the movement without appropriating it? How to stay connected without holding on by force? How to disappear and remain present at the same time?
In this solo act performed by two persons, the dancefloor becomes a magnetic drift zone. Bodies respond to invisible impulses, and movements develop slowly – as if recovered from someone else’s memory: tentative, shaky, yet precise in their delicacy. Performers dance together; while one of them is influenced by external forces, the other responds to them instinctively. Choreography becomes a flow of energy – a form of promenade on the polonaise, a return to the Polish national dance, and a gesture of being moved rather than moving. Invoking queer spaces becomes a form of symbolic resistance – a way of being close, moving through relationship rather than control.
CUTE & AWKWARD is a sister project to Wojciech Grudzinski’s earlier performance THREESOME. After working with biographies of three legendary ballet dancers (Stanislaw Szymanski, Wojciech Wiesiołłowski, and Gerard Wilk), the new piece takes up similar themes of body regime and gender, but explores them from a new perspective, through different bodies and points of view. It is a sensitive exploration of the state of being a phantom and the experience of sleepwalking.
︎︎︎ BEHIND THE SCENS (NEWS)
︎︎︎ CONCEPT, CHOREOGRAPHY, PERFORMANCE: Wojciech Grudziński
︎︎︎ ARTISTIC COLLABORATION, PERFORMANCE: Lucas Lagomarsino
︎︎︎ ARTISTIC COLLABORATION: Igor Cardellini
︎︎︎ TEXT: Maria Magdalena Kozłowska
︎︎︎ FINAL DIRECTION: Miguel Angel Melgares
︎︎︎ MUSIC: Wojtek Blecharz
︎︎︎ LIGHT DESIGN: Jacqueline Sobiszewski
︎︎︎ VIDEO: Rafał Dominik
︎︎︎ FRASCATI PRODUCTION
︎︎︎ Co-produced by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute
︎︎︎ Co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage
PICTURES: Peteris Viksna / Amsterdam 2025
︎︎︎ ARTISTIC COLLABORATION, PERFORMANCE: Lucas Lagomarsino
︎︎︎ ARTISTIC COLLABORATION: Igor Cardellini
︎︎︎ TEXT: Maria Magdalena Kozłowska
︎︎︎ FINAL DIRECTION: Miguel Angel Melgares
︎︎︎ MUSIC: Wojtek Blecharz
︎︎︎ LIGHT DESIGN: Jacqueline Sobiszewski
︎︎︎ VIDEO: Rafał Dominik
︎︎︎ FRASCATI PRODUCTION
︎︎︎ Co-produced by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute
︎︎︎ Co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage
PICTURES: Peteris Viksna / Amsterdam 2025