by Alice Heyward
“The working class is growing in number, growing in strength, and growing in knowledge. It is simultaneously developing itself and its weapons. One of its most important weapons is our modern revolutionary dance.” — New Dance Group program note.
Founded in 1932 in New York City, the NDG was a collective of dancers and choreographers committed to social change, wielding dance as a tool for revolution and progress in the working class struggle during the Great Depression. Dance and song, humanity’s oldest and most visceral creative expressions, have been shaped by—and, in turn, have shaped—social and political movements. In producing new bodies, dance, choreography, and performance have always been deeply entangled (as tools of propaganda or mechanisms for liberation) with personal and collective experiences of the economic production continuum that’s given rise to the inequalities of today’s late capitalism.
Romuald Krężel’s All That I Left Behind Is Here draws from his upbringing as a ‘lower-class’ subject in post-communist Poland and his present life as a freelance choreographer and dancer in Berlin. Through this lens, he interrogates class as an invisible yet defining force in artistic production within the performing arts.
The solo dance format today—in contrast to collective social dance as an enduring (folk) ritual across cultures and as a political ‘revolutionary weapon’ in the past—often reflects a neoliberal aesthetic of individualism in the contemporary West that is embedded within the economic and cultural framework of advanced capitalism. ATILBIH complicates the solo format by drawing attention to the social-political spheres of the past that have shaped its author as a subject who is not self-determinate but, rather, a product of many circumstances: ‘All that is left behind’, and his reckoning with them, being ‘here’. We enter the industrial theatre space at Uferstudios and take seats in the tribune while Krężel, crouching by the amp, doodles with a metallic pink Stratocaster, casually plucking its strings. He leaves the guitar once we’re settled in silence, producing just enough feedback for a delicate interaction between its volume and effects pedals: a vibratory murmur stretches through our shared environment.
PC Dorothea Tuch
The visible cause-and-effect production of theatrical elements weaves the entire show together. Early on, Krężel takes a handheld smoke machine, pumping short plumes into a pair of ballroom dance shoes and, later, into a black ballroom jacket, activating objects as billowing ghosts that matter in his history and, thus, his present. The display of staging mechanisms Krężel implements suggests a fragile carving out of one’s path in the Western European dancescape rather than entering ‘staged’ circumstances of privilege set up by existing class and social hierarchies.
This process develops with live looping of guitar phrases, initially via a Fender amplifier alone, then picked up by house speakers and amplified, using more progressive delays and pitch modulation. Krężel fills these self-made sonic containers with repetitive diagonal dance passes across the stage, recalling his ballroom classes as a child, now coloured by the grunge energy of his rock music set-up and a white crochet balaclava mask covering his face, evoking protest movements.
Positioning his personal dance formation in the working class, the performance travels through the last 30 years of his life, from age ten in the East (smalltown Poland) to the West (Germany): from free ballroom classes at his primary school to his Master's degree in Performance and Choreography in Giessen, and regular international travel for artistic residencies and performances from his base in Berlin. He’s ‘made it’! He delivers a folk-pop ballad soliloquy, anchored by the recurring refrain, “You are-are-are caaaapable,” wrestling with the demons of insecurity that arise without the entitled cushion of privilege. From one perspective, Krężel has successfully ascended the class context from which he came. From another, freelance performing arts scenes—globally, within Europe, and in Berlin’s performing arts ecology—are not only dangerously precarious workscapes but pervasively riddled with class inequity, exacerbated now more than ever in Berlin by violent state funding cuts. The rich, not reliant on state support, will continue to produce their work unscathed, while those from lower-class backgrounds viscerally experience the impacts of political suppression. Why is class so often overlooked in the prevailing discourse on the structural oppression of marginalised groups defined by gender, sexuality, and race nowadays? Approaching this omission from a class reductionist perspective, centring his family background and emotional experience in his professional artistic pursuits, Krężel addresses this absence by carefully crafting the theatrical apparatus to frame self-driven, spirited embodiments, shedding light on the power of class socialisation.
Towards the end of the show, Krężel’s mother, Irena, is introduced as the protagonist of the evening, further troubling the neoliberal concept of the autonomous ‘solo’. A recorded, candid conversation about her arduous, working-class life in Poland, without a trace of victimhood, plays aloud, their Polish language translated into German and English subtitles projected on the back wall. Her various jobs as a cashier and in customer service didn’t involve the international travel of her son’s work lifestyle. Krężel asks his mother if she’s ever felt excluded from his workplace—the theatre, which she wasn’t accustomed to before his professional pursuits—to which she answers resolutely, no: she’s always felt welcome here.
Irena Krężel at work in Poland
This is a moving invocation, debunking manipulative and divisive strategies in global rightwing politics today, which try to evoke fear in the working class by framing public funding of professional artistic work as wasteful, worthless and irrelevant to the masses. Krężel's deep dive into his history crosses boundaries between historical periods and the East and West and illuminates alliances and empathy between different modes of working-class employment, bringing lower-class communities within artistic, cultural demographics to prominence, honouring labouring bodies of all kinds who struggle against the injustice of class oppression.
When they've tortured and scared you for twenty odd years
Then they expect you to pick a career
When you can't really function you're so full of fear
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be
Working Class Hero, song and lyrics by John Lennon
10.02.2025
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