This Resting, Patience

„This resting, patience” is a choreographic performance that blurs the boundary between dance and installation. Since its premiere at Sophiensæle in Berlin in 2024, it has been presented dozens of times at leading European festivals, including Kunstenfestivaldesarts and ImPulsTanz, and immediately before its Warsaw performances at Festival d’Automne in Paris.

Rather than following a conventional narrative, This resting, patience invites audiences to dwell in time. For three hours, Ewa Dziarnowska and Leah Marojević dance on a blue carpet covering the entire performance space, accompanied by the looping refrain of Dionne Warwick’s What the World Needs Now. Moving between solos and duets, their choreography unfolds through gestures of attraction and distance, tenderness and tension, playfulness of form and feeling. The proximity between the performers and the audience transforms the act of watching into a form of participation.

For Dziarnowska, improvisation and embodied knowledge matter more than virtuosity. Her artistic practice emerged from a resistance to rigid institutional frameworks and a fascination with what takes place in the body in the here and now. What she describes as an „erotics of attention” is not about being looked at, but about being fully present – with another dancing body and with the audience.

This resting, patience is an invitation to slow down and pay attention, proposing dance as a practice of closeness rather than spectacle.