Ania Nowak, Future Tongues. Photo: Maurycy Stankiewicz
Departing from the Tower of Babel and the 1982 errotic science fiction film Café Flesh — in which a nuclear apocalypse splits humanity into the sex-positive few, forced to perform, and the sex-negative many, compelled to watch—Nowak's performance speculates on the future of human communication. In Future Tongues, intimacy—its pleasure and its discomfort—is treated as an endangered language: a form of embodied exchange increasingly out of place in a digital culture shaped by AI and authoritarian politics.
Supported by Adam Mickiewicz Institute and Ministry of Culture and National Heritage Republic of Poland.
Reviews:
The show’s hypnotic rhythm never falters, building to an electrifying climax. In a standout scene, the extinct Latin language is hilariously warped to fit modern speech, nodding to lost artifacts of communication. With Future Tongues, Nowak delivers a dazzling, multi- layered work where intellectual ambition never eclipses raw exuberance and irreverence.
Evgeny Borisenko www.springbackmagazine.com
[T]he choreographer intercepts words, transforming and regrouping them to test the ways their originally assigned sense can shift. They dismantle the cultural, national, and sexual identities artificially attached to language and speech. Here, sexuality is an empathic and vital force. Likewise choreography, which becomes one and the same with tenderness and empathy – equally on the level of the produced material and the production process.
Anka Herbut Polish Theatre Journal
In recent years, queer has stopped being primarily concerned with critiquing normative identities or models of sexuality. Artists have begun to consider how to queer time and space, institutions, phenomena and systems. By queering language, Nowak initiates the production of new communication. This work seems interesting to me also because it explores the emancipatory potential of choreography, using queer strategies among others.
Kamila Wojtkiewicz Vogue Poland