From Gdańsk - Poland // Living between Poland, Argentina, USA
ABOUT
Agnieszka Kazimierska is an actress, vocal practitioner, and theater pedagogue with an academic background in psychology. Born in the historical city of Gdańsk in the dawn of Socialism, from an early age she has been inspired by the beauty and complexity of nature and intrigued by its clash with the dirt and the stink of the man-made, steel-machine world. Learning from the magnanimity of nature and its workings, Agnieszka seeks the qualities of beauty and harmony within diversity in the arts and in human encounter.
ACTRESS, THEATER PEDAGOGUE
Agnieszka Kazimierska is an independent actress, vocal practitioner, and theater pedagogue. Her working style can be described as poetic, playing with the aesthetics of magical realism. Inspired by post-Jungian and depth psychology, her works often explore historical, social, psychological-and-beyond phenomena from a personal angle.
She creates alone or in collaboration with fellow independent artists from Europe and the Americas. Between 2007-2021, she worked as a performer, theater researcher, and teacher at the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards, an international theater research center based in Italy. During her time there, she taught and performed throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas as a member of the Workcenter’s Open Program team, led by Mario Biagini.
CURRENT INDEPENDENT ARTISTIC AND EDUCATIONAL PROJECTS
● Katie’s Tales - a one-woman theater performance, weaved from fragments of poetry, dialogues, and traditional Polish songs. It depicts the life of a young lady waiting for her lover, who, after a terrible event, left with a promise to come back, one day. Her life unfolds during new and savage times - times of waiting and of becoming. Accompanied by two foreign servants, she lives in a garden, under the shades of cherry trees, silent witnesses of her life and of History. Everyday Katy receives visitors and tells them stories of hopes and aspirations, again and again patiently making herself ready for the reunion. The garden, filled with memories: hers and those of generations, filled with unfulfilled dreams and desires, becomes a metaphor of a human psyche, which, for each of us, has a potential for transformation into a Garden Of Eden, one day.
● @ Marys - a theater performance, diptych to Katie’s Tales, in which the spectators become guests of a secret meeting, which in turn becomes a pretext for a conversation about spaces for regaining personal authority, the seeds of new worlds, and living ideals. The performance is imagined as a common-sense-poetic-rural feminist manifesto. (in creation)
● Inner Characters – an exploratory workshop drawing from acting and psychotherapeutic methods.
● SONICALITY – Singing, sounding, vocalizing. A vocal exploratory workshop of extra-rational communication.
● Thinking Groups Laboratory - small groups dedicated to experimenting collaboratively with processes related to thinking, listening, and talking together in a peer-to-peer manner, without a designated authority or leader.
PAST PERFORMANCES
In the years 2007-2015, Agnieszka participated in the creation of and performed internationally in I Am America, Not History’s Bones – A Poetry Concert, Electric Party Songs, and The Night Watch. These performative events were directed by Mario Biagini, and emerged from a research on texts by the American poet Allen Ginsberg and on songs of the Black traditions of the American South.
Between 2013 and 2021, under the direction of Mario Biagini, she was a co-creator and performer in The Hidden Sayings, the Open Choir, Dark Is My Mother, Will Be Heard, HOME. In 2017, she created a solo performance, Katie’s Tales. This piece, also directed by Biagini, premiered in 2018 and is continuing to be performed internationally.
FESTIVALS, RESIDENCIES
Agnieszka has performed in the contest of various festivals, venues, and artistic residencies, such as: the International Festival for Musical Performing Arts “Life is Beautiful” (Romania), Laboratorio Olimpico Odeon del Teatro Olimpico Vicenza (Italy), Ocupação SESC Consolação (Brazil), Grotowski Festival Teatr Dramatyczny Warsaw (Poland), International Diaghilev Festival (Russia), St. Mark's Church and the Bowery Club in New York (USA), the Performance Art Institute and SFMOMA in San Francisco (USA), Festival Fabbrica Europa (Italy), and Occupation Théatre de la Ville (France), and many others.
PEDAGOGY
During her years at the Workcenter Agnieszka co-taught workshops and masterclasses at theaters and other artistic and academic institutions throughout the world, including: La Cartoucherie (Paris), Stanford University (U.S.A), the Stella Adler Studio and New York University (U.S.A), the University of Toronto (Canada), SESC São Paulo (Brazil), Teatr Opole (Poland), Perm Opera Ballet, Diaghilev Festival (Perm, Russia). She has also led workshops in Germany, Poland, Argentina, Canada, and Paris.
CREATIVE PEDAGOGICAL AND COMMUNITY PROJECTS
Agnieszka has co-created, coordinated, acted in, and developed artistic community projects focusing on themes that pertain to vulnerable members of local societies. The projects include: Will Be Heard and Home in New York City (2017-2019, USA), which focused on mass incarceration in the United States and its intertwinement with the capitalistic system of production, and were realized in collaboration with the Andrew Freedman Home, People’s Forum NYC, Stella Adler Studio of Acting and others. Another such project was Invito Al Canto, undertaken in Tuscany between 2016 and 2021, which entailed a series of encounters through singing and conversations with recent migrants to Italy and created a forum for meeting and exchange between Italian-born and new Italian citizens.
ORGANIZATION AND PRODUCTION WORK
Co-ideation, creation, and coordination of a number of international projects, including among others, the Workcenter’s Open Program residencies in New York (2014, 2015, 2017), Berlin (2013), Opole (2016), and two large international gatherings: the Constellations Summer Camp, three weeks of workshops, encounters, trainings, and performances, hosted at Theatre Medrese, in Izmir, Turkey (2019), and a week of online encounters, named Towards Constellations (during the pandemic in 2020). Both of these gatherings were a space and time for interdisciplinary and intercultural learning and exchange that gathered hundreds of people from across the world.
ARCHIVES
Creation and management of the physical and digital archives of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards (2009-2016; 2020-2021).
ACADEMIC
Master of Psychology, 2009, University of Gdańsk, Poland. Research work on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, cultural adaptation of Self Determination Theory by E.L.Deci and R.M. Ryan.
Process Oriented Psychology Intensive, 2014, Warsaw, Poland // WORLDWORK - towards deep democracy, 2014, Warsaw, Poland
La Voce Spiegata, La Voce Eretica, Francesca Della Monica, 2021, Firenze, Italy and online; Breathing and then Voice, Alexander Technique Course, Diamond Institute (NYC), 2021, online
LANGUAGES Polish, English, Italian (basic), Spanish (intermediate), French (basic)
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CONTACT: e-mail: agakazimierska@gmail.com // phone: +393440673943