FACTOR T


A Dancer In An Image - the Subject Study /Tancerz w obrazie – studium Przedmiotu/
Jadwiga Majewska, Teatr 3, 2009

The creation of Factor T by Dada von Bzdulow Theatre – choreographed by Katarzyna Chmielewska, Bethany Formica, Rafał Dziemidok, and directed by Leszek Bzdyl, was inspired by a philosophical essay of Stefan Themerson of the same title; however, the performance could as well have been created without it.
Themerson depicted human life as a constant, tragic conflict, namely - Factor T – between our urges and our aversion to the methods which make them satisfied; or so it said in the programme – what happens on stage can do without a theory. What desires can have a mature actor-dancer-choreographer who again appears on stage, a circus arena? What methods will he fight with in the dance ring to satisfy the desires? We’ll see… But not everyone, since only two rows of seats have been put in a square, limiting the space. Is it to deliver intimacy, closeness?
From the very moment we cross a threshold, a struggle starts, one forces another, there’s resistance, aversion, refusal. This duality will be seen throughout the performance, since the artists with the very arrangement of seats force us to choose a perspective, but allow to choose proximity (first or second row). Each actor is seated in a different row on one side of a square. In a moment the audience will sit in the very same seats; we’re equal, shoulder to shoulder, we gaze at an empty square floor and at one another. Neither too close, nor too far, we stay at an appropriate distance that is favourable to our understanding of the piece.
That’s what the artists will stick to. They won’t cross our private space, though at moments, it seems they will: that the force of gravity will push them against the audience, or that they take a seat on some spectator’s laps. The artists never lose control though, nor in the most violent scenes. They screech to a halt with their feet, but within fluid boundaries of respect for the audience. As if they were saying: we’ve created the most convenient conditions for an agreement, but should you not feel like it… don’t force it. “It'is up to the audience!" — as Cunningham would say.                         
The whole performance can be subdivided in two halves, but not exactly. Half theatre-like (bottom), half private (top) clothes in the first part become perfectly thought-out in the second: suspenders, worn-through leather shoes, garters, a buttoned collar as if old costumes (created by Hiroshi Iwasaki) – worn-out theatre splendour, sad remnants of style and elegance. A half without music, and a half with splendid, witty music by Mikołaj Trzaska. When two of them – Dziemidok and Chmielewska – put on their costumes, layer by layer, before the audience’s very eyes, the other two do the same, but behind the wings.(…)       
The Ten Commandments, delivered by Dziemidok in English, are not only a recitation of his role, but a foundation stone of the rules that people observe, so our common space between  always different “You”, and never the same “I”. Are those the rules of our life? And what are they for a post-dramatic theatre? There are no rules. At the end of this peculiar pandemonium, when emotions reach a climax, when we may barely know what else can be thought up, or shown, they all get undressed, and appear in underwear… and an exception again. Leszek Bzdyl doesn’t get undressed. So when naked Dziemidok desperately shouts: “Stop that, I can’t stand it anymore!” we happen to realize that there is no other mysterious “HIM”. And because before the lights went out, Leszek Bzdyl had worked the pedals, the obvious associations lead us towards him. HE, the director, holds all this commotion in the grip, and starts all this mindless, but perfectly working, perpetual motion machine of a theatre world; and he knows exactly when to bring it to an end. Because only HE can be himself here, be authentic and unique. He’s a Fair Judge, the Host of Eden, looking down on us, the audience and the artists; on us: clowns, showmen, strippers, peeping Toms; on us, the actors in this both funny and sad performance in which one is looking for a role, a character – and defines oneself against and towards, or confronts with, or is in favour of, or bears testimony to… - doomed for oneself in reciprocity.


Dance: Exceptional Commotion /Taniec: niepospolite poruszenie/
Patryk Czaplicki, Dziennik nr 98 - Kultura, 25 April 2008

“Factor T”, the latest performance by Dada von Bzdülöw Theatre, is one of the most interesting premieres of the passing theatre season.

In a tragic clinch
In their manifesto “Dadaists” from Gdańsk note that audience should not eat their performances as they are uneatable; that they confess the faith of incidents and escape from the excess of seriousness; that they make theatre for our sickness, sloth and determination; for our feeling of embarrassment, beautiful intellect or constant lack of thoughts.
“Factor T” drives a wedge between those arty statements, and brings pleasure of communing with art that is perverse and unpretentious. We feel aversion to killing, but have to kill to survive. We don’t want to beget a child, but we have to satisfy sexual desires. Here lies an eternal conflict, and a point of departure for this performance. The feedback between aversion and desire underlying “Factor T”, was described by Stefan Themerson. His writings’ recognition by Leszek Bzdyl and the crew had served as a trampoline for a “post-drama” dance, making the audience feel all at sea. The piece treats of the schizophrenic condition of actors who crave for “performing”, and yet, try to free from the fetters. What is true and false remains questionable, and honesty and hypocrisy are just substitute words - Dada von Bzdülöw trifles with the ideals of inspirational art; but, unfortunately, under a close scrutiny of the audience, in the face of a defeat in producing “true” meanings, the show must go on. Retreat is impossible. The actors’ neurosis must be found enjoyable, and should disavow a tragically-comical status of an actor struggling with a role that in turns upsets or tickles his or her ego. All that remains is to confuse the trails.

Knives for VIPs
The first part of the performance is a contact-improvisation. Four dancers -   Katarzyna Chmielewska, Bethany Formica (USA), Leszek Bzdyl and Rafał Dziemidok – by grappling with their own physicality, form a kind of unstable gravitational relation. The obligation to satisfy ‘physically – bodily’ perturbations, as well as the obligation to break the order, become a test of their endurance. And it’s not that some “nice dancing” matters here. Individual short pieces appear to be the elements of some private fun that happened to be staged in public. There’s plenty of lightness, self-ridicule and zest. What may bother is the intensity with which the dancers are staring at the audience, as if expecting us to enter this relation of “action – reaction”. A disaster is looming large.
The performance by Dada von Bzdülöw is an offence – an offence against trivial pictures and cheap emotions. That’s an off and it’s biting, just splendid; although, some defenders of dancing-on-points correctness, or some enemies of worn-out post-modernism could say that the piece is overripe. Yet, that cannot change the fact that “Factor T” is one of the most ambitious hybrids that break a stereotype of contemporary dance, being taken for some suspicious art, made only for the initiated and “fanatical”. 


April Greek, The Brooklyn Rail, November 2008
Tragicomic Throwdown: Dada von Bzdülöw’s “Factor T”.

Life is full of conflicts. Most of us take this for granted. Some of us, like Stefan Themerson, write essays about it. And others, like Dada von Bzdülöw, make dances about essays about it. The fifteen-year-old dance company from Gdansk, Poland began work on Factor T., a “theatrical interpretation” of Themerson’s 1956 essay of the same title, in 2006. The Polish and British author’s dissertation describes the central human conflict as our benevolent and loving leanings running into violent actions when our “gastronomic (and sexual?) urges cannot be fulfilled without the killing of members of [our] own kind, or members of other, related species.” He tells us that this is not a dramatic conflict—rather it is an unavoidable, and therefore tragic, conflict. He names it Factor T.
Dada von Bzdülöw shows us a few incarnations of this Factor T. nested in their show, which received its New York premiere early last month at Danspace Project. Starting October 3rd’s eighty-minute performance, Rafał Dziemidok took to the floor wearing just slacks and suspenders. He was followed from different corners of the room by company founders Leszek Bzdyl and Katarzyna Chmielewska and Philadelphia-based dancer Bethany Formica, all in simple pants and t-shirts. They spent twenty minutes walking, pushing, shoving, and falling into each other just in front of, and sometimes nearly into, the audience, who were seated in-the-round. They split into pairs and carried each other haphazardly (even at times the very tall and big Dziemidok in the arms of the lean Chmielewska), they wrestled and rolled to intermittent silence and ambient music, and at the end of the scene launched into a few minutes of synchronous leaps and falls.
Without curtains to draw or a backstage to easily slip into, the company relied on light and music changes to flow one phase of the dance into the next. After the first such mood transition, Bzdyl hung a linen bag holding bricks of ice from a rope on a pulley on one side of the stage, and Dziemidok dressed himself methodically in a three-piece suit on another. As the ice melted and dripped on the floor, Dziemidok took advantage of the break from intense physicality to talk to the audience about philosophy, etymology, and human nature, briefly touching on religion to mention, humorously and touchingly, that “Jesus was way cool. Everyone wanted to hang out with Jesus.” A vignette followed in which the dancers, having dressed themselves in view of the audience in 1920s fashions, revisited their earlier relationship patterns of sparring and bandying. Chmielewska hit Bzdyl in the face and sent him rolling backward; she pushed him around with her heeled boot. 
Before the final scene, other smaller segments broke up the longer sketches and the dancers’ fierce, dense interactions. Paper airplanes flew from the rafters; the dancers handed everyone seated in one row a long knife to hold; they sat in the few empty seats around the stage and chatted with the crowd. But in the end, the company cohered again and dominated the floor as they previously had one another: Formica ran in circles, laughing, with two big red medicine balls held against her chest like inflated breasts while Bzdyl madly pedaled a stationary bicycle with a generator headlamp in a far-off corner and yelled like a madman. There was a sweeping tornado of movement, clothes flying, lights flashing, libretto, gymnastics. Then everything went dark.
Factor T. displays unavoidable conflict in many mirrors. Conflict between and among people, between fun and fear, chaos and coincidence. Fun but not lighthearted, it succeeds in showing the story of our constant, dynamic, futile but festive struggle to reconcile


Merilyn Jackson, The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 7th, 2008

Factor T. The Gdansk dance company Dada von Bzdülöw presents its second Live Arts Festival show inspired by a Polish writer. Last year it was Witold Gombrowicz; this year, the dancers make witty observations on another prankster author little-known here - Stefan Themerson, who first published the pataphysical works of Alfred Jarry in English under a press with a Latinized name for the Jabberwock. It helps to hear jabberwocky and Jarry clanging in your head to see where this show is going.
The wickedly playful intent of the piece kicked in with laborious lifts, and with company founder and dancer extraordinaire Leszek Bzdyl smiling. For the last year, Philly dancer Bethany Formica worked with the group for her role as a jaded ingénue in multiple, gorgeous costume changes. (Hiroshi Iwasaki designed the 1930s period costumes and Mikołaj Trzaska the jazzy music.) Katarzyna Chmielewska, also a founding Dada member, danced with reckless elegance in her schoolmarm-prim garb.
Mumpitz is German vernacular for "profound nonsense," and Rafał Dziemidok solemnly brings things to that level. A big guy prancing bare-chested in suspended pinstripe pants, he ends the piece baring his all, a perfect Live Arts/Fringe experience - if you know where it's coming from. 


Ali King, Live Arts Festival Blog, Sept 9, 2008

Dada von Bzdülöw Theatre's Factor T is an exhausting portrayal of wanting what one can’t have, inspired by the writings of Polish novelist, philosopher, and poet Stefan Themerson. Performed in an empty black box on the third floor of Christ Church Neighborhood House, the audience includes four half-hidden dancers—two men, two women. With no apparent cue, they leave their seats, and begin.
The work starts with a curiously dazed conversation, both between the dancers’ bodies and with the audience. Dreamy and detached, the dancers survey each other and their surroundings. Brief glances and fixed, intentional stares between dancer and observer riddle the piece, heightening tension and intimacy.
At times, just inches from the quartet’s poised bodies, the audience’s array of reactions seem to eventually fuel two dynamic pas de deux. One pair expresses sensual concern, with slow, assisted movements, while the other is a beautifully choreographed fight.
What starts free and unbuttoned gets dressed (literally) to a chaotic montage, with period costumes and striking characters. A flirty flapper, bewildered citizen, prophetic gentleman, and disciplinary mistress take the stage in the second half of the work, absorbed in their own identity until forced to interact with another.
From quirky moments of flirtation to those of painful revelation, Factor T is daring, but always with a sly smirk. Throughout the piece, the dancers evoke magnets, at times attracting and opposing each other, with seemingly no voluntary ability to control themselves. The work culminates in a circus-like frenzy, with each character’s restraints having been gradually loosened until only impulse remains.
Factor T leaves its audience stunned silly and out-of-breath – art at its most effective.


Staś Kmieć, Modern Dance Company From Poland Takes Manhattan, NYC Reviews, 2008

Gdansk’s Dada von Bzdülöw Theater presented the U.S. premiere of its modern dance theater piece Factor T.  in September at the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival.  Having made a splash in New York City after an engagement at the famed La Mama E.T.C. with Several Witty Observations (á la Gombrowicz) in 2006, the company returned to Danspace Project with a completely different and unique work.
Directed by Leszek Bzdyl, the company’s name – a derivative of Bzdyl’s surname, is a humorous comment on the region’s historical shifting of ethnic identity.  The company invokes much humor, along with irony and reflection in its work.
Based on the writings of Polish experimental filmmaker, novelist, philosopher, and poet Stefan Themerson,  Factor T. is a theatrical interpretation of Themerson’s theory that the eternal tragedy (factor T.) of mankind lies in the conflict between a compulsion to satisfy certain urges and an aversion toward the actions that such satisfaction may require.
Factor T. was created as a part of Out of Bounds — choreographic encounters between Poland and Philadelphia
The work incorporates a basic lighting plot adapted from the lighting design by Michał Kołodziej, costumes by Hiroshi Iwasaki, and original music by Mikołaj Trzaska, one of Poland’s best jazz musicians.
The four member ensemble for this particular piece features Bzdyl, Katarzyna Chmielewska, Rafał Dziemidok, and Philadelphia dancer Bethany Formica.  Formica, a Polish American, attended an audition workshop process, which resulted in her acceptance into the piece.  Each dancer is uniquely different in body type and style, and the partnering is challenging and visually compelling.  The inventive choreography has a wonderfully dangerous edge and utilizes a broad vocabulary of movement and concepts from the post-modern era.
The audience enters the performance space to see the performers draped over the chairs in the square formation seating arrangement.  Factor T. begins with bare-bones simplicity in movement and costuming and evolves with complexity of costume, choreography and psychological thought – challenging the boundaries of traditional views, not only in dance, but life.  With its frenzied culmination, the piece ends stripped bare of soul, mind and demeanor.  From simple pedestrian movement and everyday gestures, the dancing peaks with a litany of assemble, coupé-jeté manege, step-ball-change, and even a kick line.
The collaborative choreography incorporates the frequent use of props and the spoken word, particularly effective in a complex counter analogy and a review of The Ten Commandments.
The piece is never “safe” and is surprising in its inventiveness. Whether paper airplanes fly over head, or the audience is manipulated and directed, or a never-ending succession of increasingly elaborate vintage garb, Factor T. takes its audience hostage for a unique journey.


Stave Antinoff, Broad Street Reviews, 09.13.2008

When a dancer asserts an idea in the program notes, and that idea is executed beautifully in performance, but the idea is not quite true, or even false –– has that artist succeeded or failed? The idea proposed by Dada Theater of Poland in Factor T is this: “The eternal tragedy (factor T) of mankind lies in the conflict between a compulsion to satisfy certain urges and an aversion toward the actions such satisfaction may require.” This proposition is expanded on Dada’s web site with a quote from Factor T, an essay by the Polish novelist and philosopher Stefan Themerson: “In other words, committing deeds, which the [silly human] biped sincerely hates to commit, is its life's need. … This is a conflict, which – the thoughtlessness of the fortune – we cannot avoid. Hence, it is a Tragic [T] conflict.”
The excellence of the Dada troupe’s performance was, in one sense, equally unavoidable. Within seconds of the opening, Katarzyna Chmielewska shows herself as such an astonishing dancer that it would have been impossible not to be spellbound, whatever her message. She seems incapable of a movement that’s not infused with splendor. But the show must rise or fall on the artistic expression of Factor T. As the program asks rhetorically: “Is it possible to see this struggle in performance?”

The ultimate eternal tragedy?
Now, if we define the “eternal tragedy” as the contradiction between desire and aversion, the depiction of sexual conflict is inevitable. At the outset of this performance we see the conflict between the drive to couple and the drive to break free of a relationship. Later in the show, when Factor T takes on more metaphysical tone, the conflict develops into one between sexual urges and religious and ethical norms. Rafał Dziemidok, a burly five-dimensional presence who dances so wonderfully precisely by his inability to dance a conventionally graceful lick, recites the Ten Commandments with increasing desperation while a betrayed wife, Puritan in her high-collared full-length black coat (but wearing the garb of a dominatrix underneath), beats to death her adulterous husband. Here for me is the first misstep in the conception of Factor T.
“The eternal tragedy of mankind,” at least in sexual terms, doesn’t lie in the repression of sexual urges. The sexual tragedy of humankind, I would argue, is that sexual desire— whether expressed or repressed— ultimately fails to satisfy the longing of the human heart.

Munch’s sexual dilemma
Freud knew this. Schopenhauer hammered his readers over the head with this in his great work, The World as Will and Representation (see especially his chapter, “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love”). Look at the sexually repressed paintings of Edvard Munch, such as The Voice, and the inherent betrayal of sexuality gratified in works like Munch’s Ashes, Vampire, Separation, and Under the Yoke –– humanity remains chained either way. This chain constricts all human doing. The eternal tragedy isn’t aversion to what we must do but, as Kierkegaard observed in Either/Or: “Do it, or don’t do it, you regret both.” Insofar as the word “nihilism” is often associated with Dada, this is the real nihilism, the real difficulty of human life that all 20th-Century Existentialist thought, literature and art tried to escape.
The exploration of the religious dimension of the tragedy, while very entertaining as most everything in the Dada troupe’s performance, also falls short of adequate expression. The eternally tragic factor of spiritual life is not contained in Dziemidok’s question to the audience: “How do you combine your dislike of religious fundamentalism with your adoration for transcendence only religion can produce?” Surely one can pursue spiritual transcendence, or enlightenment, or salvation, without being fundamentalist. The tragedy in the quest for transcendence lies in our aversion to that very quest— in the contradiction that the self, dissatisfied with itself, longs for transcendence and yet flees from the quest because it’s so damned arduous, and the payoff isn’t guaranteed. A lifetime of meditation or spiritual practice won’t necessarily cure your anxieties.

That old Holy Grail quest
The mantra at the beginning of Dziemidok’s comic sermon: “Holy Grail? Or the Quest for the Holy Grail?”–– which he declaimed while behind him a “grail” that looks more like a piece of worthless trash drops from the ceiling–– hits closer to the mark. So long as one is on a “quest,” one never finds. Yet as one has not found, one must quest. “There is a goal, but no way,” Kafka wrote. “What we call way is hesitation.” And: “If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without climbing up it, it would have been permitted.” Elsewhere in this performance, the conflict between desire and aversion is clearly rendered. It was hard to hear, but I gather that Leszek Bzdyl, with his delightful life-beaten face, asked the audience whether someone has a cigarette while warning us not to smoke. Stretched over a red beach ball that symbolizes Mother Earth, he stops breathing so he will no longer emit carbon dioxide.
Bethany Formica, excellent throughout, arouses desires none of her favored males in the audience would dare act upon in public as she stares them down in increasingly seductive attire. The audience is handed knives with which to kill the company members for boring them. The Puritan who destroys her adulterous husband engages in a sadistic lesbian affair. Formica’s seductive glances are not only sexual; they portray the artist’s tragic need to endlessly seduce an audience.
All these contradictions are danced and acted marvelously. Yet I cannot but think they are secondary, not fundamental, aspects of the eternal tragedy of humankind.