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Ten years after graduating from Codarts University for the Arts in Rotterdam, Wojciech Grudziński invited his former professor to join a new project that would interrogate the dynamics of their past student–teacher relationship. The teacher refused, and in doing so prompted a deeper reflection on the bittersweet memories of dance education.

TEACH ME NOT! is a choreography of trust and dependence, of admiration and quiet resentment – a dialogue that emerges only through the absence of the master.

Polished wood. Solid. Smooth. Strong enough to hold on to. Imagine a ballet barre: an object both pragmatic and sacred, easily fetishised, silently reinforcing hierarchies. Touching it inspires intimate, physical sensations – of both pupils and masters. The barre becomes a wooden axis of time, carrying the lineage of dancing bodies. It can be a prosthesis, a vanishing support system. Or a fetish – rigid, hard, phallic in shape, marked by the touch of countless hands.

Sweat stains. Fingerprints on mirrors. Dust gathering in the corners. The dance studio is swollen with silent traces of cohorts who have inscribed themselves onto every surface. Within this charged space, is a relationship structure without a teacher simply a duet of the mutually submissive? Without hierarchy, is saying “no” even possible? What might a choreography of refusal look like?

Be warned… TEACH ME NOT! is not a game. Students always have the right to refuse – though refusal never comes without consequences.

REVIEWS︎

In Teach Me Not! it is not only bodies, objects, and sounds that are choreographed, but also—often opposing—qualities: the softness of buttocks and the hardness of a wooden phallus they rub against; masculinity and femininity; submission and authority; horizontality and verticality; the energy of play and the energy of transgression. The instability of meaning and character of individual elements within this choreography, the flickering iconography it invokes, as well as its ambivalence, are among the greatest strengths of this work.

ZUZANNA BERENDT for teatralny.pl
published on 17.09.2025