so beautiful


"So beautiful" – the second solo performance by Chmielewska (this time being the performer) is certainly of a different nature. After the first act of life affirmation happening in the broad stage lights, it converts into rather smooth and gentle movement danced in the dimmed parts of stage. The dancer, with barely visible swings of tempo, significantly reverses the initial interpretation of her actions. Affirmation is substituted for doubt and melancholy, and yet, it takes a short while before she reverts to the previous subject matter again. This time, by using pantomime, she avoids clear and explicit interpretation. Impersonating Charlie Chaplin with his classic walk and manners, she turns an ironic eye on her prior evaluation, and by taking everything in brackets. she refuses to answer if "life is so beautiful."
Marcin Maćkiewicz, www.poznan.dlastudenta.pl, 30 Aug 2006

Katarzyna Chmielewska in the performance "So beautiful" comes on stage in an almost transparent, salmon-pink dress which, from the very beginning of the performance, is being put in the spotlight. For a while, the dancer keeps on falling and tumbling on stage like a plastic doll; she’s luring and tempting, and at moments, repelling with her infantile way of being. She falls on her knees like a puppy, then suddenly, she gets up, and in a provocative way bends towards the audience. Her rhythmical moves, and the way she keeps her arms constrained as if something were holding her from behind, leave no doubt as to what she is giving up to and experiencing. Does she enjoy it? Her facial expression says yes – Is she lying? – I ask myself. And at this moment, the dancer takes off her high-heels – the symbol of sexuality and enslavement. Only now do we see that all that she’s been doing until now was a grotesque. Has she placed herself into that particular pattern on her own? If yes – then has she done it consciously?
Marta Kazimierska, Gazeta Wyborcza – Poznan, 22.08.2006

In “so beautiful”, the dancer (Katarzyna Chmielewska) delves into the stereotypes associated with a contemporary canon of beauty. Performing in high-heeled shoes and a pink dress, she’s humorously pretending  to be an awkward dancer at times, asking  thus contradictory questions: is “beautiful” what we see as beautiful, or is “beautiful” what beautiful is, and are the roots of beauty external or internal?
Anna Malcer, Dziennik Bałtycki, 28 Nov 2001

Katarzyna Chmielewska in her latest choreography tries to touch a category of beauty, and what we understand through it. She takes a look at beauty, but also mass-beauty that is tinselled, false, and producing certain aesthetic surcharge that we’re all experiencing. Using the stereotypes concerning beauty, she attempts to smuggle the truth about it. She wants to show beauty as an individual category. Do we carry beauty inside ourselves, or does it come from the outside? How does it come that something that is beautiful for some, is unattractive for the others? And one more question: Can life be beautiful?
“so beautiful” links femininity, lyricism and pure beauty. It’s a comeback to a human-being and his emotions. “so beautiful” by Katarzyna Chmielewska is the 25th jubilee premiere of Dada Theatre.
Krzysztof Gorski, Wyborcza, Gdansk 28 Nov 2001