Mothers of Steel

This project is an investigation into the phenomenology of tears that touches upon many themes — memory, history, death, happiness, fragility, innocence, strength, futuristic ontologies, etc. It puts into questions the social and cultural mechanisms related to public and private display of emotions. Contrasting personal statements with iconic scenes of crying in Eastern European context, it examines how emotions are manifested in different situations, and why we (or we do not) express them publicly. Within narratives concerning our bio politics — cultural/national/emotional identities — the project approaches todays post-bodies/technological paradigms and it is an attempt to entangle the personal with the artificial. Further information

Mădălina Dan, maker and facilitator, studied at the Choreography high school in Bucharest and in the choreography department of the National University of Theatre and Film, where she also received her Masters in Play-Writing. She was a member of Oleg Danovski Ballet Company from 1998 to 2003. She was invited artist to the Herberger Institute, School of Dance (Arizona State University) in 2009 and in 2008 she received the danceWEB scholarship in Vienna. She studied at HZT in the MA program “Solo/Dance/Authorship” (2014–2016). Along the years, she has been an active member in the contemporary dance community in Romania, at the National Dance Centre in Bucharest, teaching and developing educational and social programs. In 2015, she received a CNDB award for her contribution brought to the development in contemporary art in Romania.
Works by Mădălina Dan have been shown at Springdance Festival (Utrecht), Tanzquartier Wien, Balkan Dance Platform (Novi Sad), eXplore Dance Festival (Bukarest), Temps d’Images (Cluj), SouthBank Center & Chisenhale Dance Space (London), Fabrik (Potsdam), Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), TanzFabrik (Berlin), Dance Theater Workshop (New York), Firkin Crane (Cork), Alta Theater (Prague) and others. Latest collaborations together with: Sergiu Matis, Agata Siniarska, Tahni Holt, Mihaela Dancs, Alexandra Pirici.

madalinadan.tumblr.com

Agata Siniarska makes works within formats of performances, events, practices, lectures, videos, TV programme and others. She is interested in knowledge, that explores various mediums, protocols, strategies of its own production and does not apply any hierarchy to itself. These are all the detours, twists, turns through knowing and confusion: from aliens, imaginative blobs, slime molds, sweat, scientific facts, air particles, discourses, affects, personal dramas, gossips, zeros, thoughts, inner speeds, transplants, women — all knowledge that seeks not to explain but to involve.
Agata is a founding member of female trouble — a collective revolving around identity, body, feminisms, pleasure, affirmation and love, as well as a co-founder of Pinpoint TV, an artistic research project in the format of an internet TV programme, set within intersecting art-scenes of Berlin.
Her present project is a research around dance as a soft act of killing.

cargocollective.com/agatasiniarska