Introduction
Mention this Ruchome Teksty in some niche circles and you’ll find it’s like a secret handshake. (Moving Writing, I’m going to say, if anyone asks.) It started out as a zine published on A4 paper, likely on the home printer of founder Aleks Borys, back when lockdowns were keeping dancers from dancing, choreographers from inventing ways to dance. And thus this spark of an outlet has lived on, a poor-but-sexy platform for creators working with movement-based performance who occasionally or habitually make writing a part of their oeuvre.
Not long ago it was announced that Ruchome Teksty got public funding at last. A performative evening would ensue and then an actual issue (not on printer paper is my bet). Now the contributors would get paid.
As I was working on my possible submission (a personal essay about what it feels like for me to take photos during movement practices) CI teacher Andrzej Woźniak—Aleks’s current partner-in-publication—texted me a question so synchronistic I had to take some deep breaths. Would I document, for a fee, the Ruchome Teksty inaugural performance and discussion on Saturday, November ninth? Yes I would!
And now here are the photos I took, shown just slightly out of chronological order.
The Photographer’s Cut
Acknowledgments
List of performers, in alphabetical order—Aleks Borys, Tamara Olga Briks, Dana Chmielewska, Alicja Czyczel, Magda Fejdasz, Mona Rena Górska, Kinga Jaczewska, Karolina Kraczkowska, sos Osowska, Weronika Pelczyńska, Maria Stokłosa, Mary Szydłowska, Andrzej Woźniak. (Aleks and Andrzej often use all lowercase letters when writing their names, regardless of contextual capitalization. I am not there yet in terms of adopting this convention for any kind of proper noun in my own writing. But—as demonstrated by my recently acquired ease around the pronoun they, elusive until it wasn’t—I am a work in progress, so maybe writing aleks and andrzej even on my own blog is just a matter of time.)
Funding and support—CSW (Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej) Zamek Ujazdowski, the entity hosting the 2024 11 09 performance and future Ruchome Teksty events slated for the months ahead; and KPO (Krajowy Plan Odbudowy) dla Kultury, Poland’s post-pandemic national sponsorship program for the arts.
A Note About the Performance
Just because I am taking photos at a thing doesn’t automatically make me love the thing, though this often helps. But the show at the CSW Laboratorium performance space on the second Saturday of November 2024 did not need any help. It would have captivated me even if I hadn’t been (a) fixated on the aesthetics of composition and the demands of timing or (b) intoxicated with the power of affecting collective memory.
So what was it like, this inaugural movement-and-writing show starring Aleks, Andrzej, and eleven more dancing friends who have all contributed to Ruchome Teksty? To me it felt powered by courage but bright and playful. Spontaneous, but gracefully so, in the way analytical and introverted people tend to be spontaneous, with little to no shouting involved. Visually stunning, both because of the skill of each person on that stage and because of the inspired blocking that takes effect when performers are truly seeing one another. And the writing—most of it serving as the audio track for the movement and read aloud in a range of performative ways from the sheets of paper scattered everywhere—seemed like the perfect excerpt from four improbable years of grassroots co-creation.
A Note About the Photos
In this post I have shown 40 images out of the total of 116 that I kept from among the four hundred I actually shot. Each has been edited at least minimally in Lightroom, mainly with regard to crop and geometry, but very little further post-processing was required. This was a relief and a triumph—and goes to show that great lighting is basically the secret to great photos. (So are subjects with excellent posture and a gift for performing, especially when they are doing what they love and/or feeling invited to be their authentic selves.)
All photos taken in ambient lighting using the Fujifilm X-T5 set to manual apertures (wide open mostly) and shutter speeds of around 1/250 sec (with ISO at various settings in the 200 to 800 range). For the first photo I used the Fujinon XF 23mm f/1.4 prime (equivalent to a classic 35 mm focal length). All others were taken with the tender-yet-uncompromising Fujinon XF 56mm F/1.2 (85 mm in classic terms), by far my favorite lens.
I’ve made all the image previews in the gallery match the aspect ratio of the vastly predominant landscapes. This truncates the five portraits I’ve included, but they can be viewed in full in lightbox view.
These might be my favorite documentary event photos so far. Yes, I’m developing skills, but these were simply some unfathomably beautiful circumstances to photograph.