Agata Skwarczyńska’s ‘Anatomy lesson – reconfiguration’ is intended as a dialogue with Tadeusz Kantor’s happening,
At the same time is a new realisation in the catalogue of attempts to reconstruct the famous painting, an event whose intention is to shift meanings and gestures. The concept of the performance this time emerge from a female perspective, and the performers are disabled and non-neurotypical people, often excluded from the ‘centre’.
Rembrandt’s painting bears witness to a crime carried out by the researcher, a process of destruction, in which the body is broken into pieces. Also in the case of the present reconfiguration the focus shifts towards the object of dissection: what lies on the dissection table, defines not only the area of discovery, but also its scale and momentousness. On the dissecting table there are successively: a dressed mannequin, a taxidermied fox attached to a rock, a monstera removed from a pot. Performing Kantor’s part, Amelia Blus applies a similar dissection procedure to each, using paraphrased text from the original happening, the unique properties of the objects revealing the limitations of Kantor’s method.
Also transformed in Agata Skwarczyńska’s project are the Rembrandtian and Kantorian figures of the doctor’s disciples gathered at the dissecting table. In the performance, they step out of the roles of extras supporting the scholar’s knowledge-power discourse with their attention and actively contribute to the deconstruction of the image.
As Zuzanna Berndt points out in her review : ‘In the new Anatomy Lesson one can see both the Skwarczyńska’s awareness of the aesthetic and political aspects of Rembrandt’s and Kantor, as well as her sensitivity to the group dynamics creatively involved in the creation of performance. For her, the works she refers to are an open score that does not define the framework of what can happen, and sets out a path to go beyond patterns of thinking that, from today’s perspective, are worth abandoning.”
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