Jumpcore

In his dance performance, choreographer and dancer Paweł Sakowicz explores different variations of jumping. In doing so, he utilises a wide variety of references, ranging from ballet to contemporary dance and rave. Sakowicz works with different tempos and loopings so that the dynamics of the jump are constantly changing and allow for various associations – for example with pagan rituals, dribbling in football or the excess of baroque dances.

In the middle of the exhibition hall of Kunsthaus Hamburg, he enters into a direct spatial and thematic dialogue with the works of the project Dance, Dance, Revolution. By focussing on the moment of jumping as a space of possibility, the performance takes up the questions raised there about freedom, self-determination and protest.

Conceptually, Jumpcore refers to the American dancer Fred Herko and his fatal window jump during an intimate performance: in 1964, Herko took a bath in a friend’s New York flat and then danced naked to Mozart’s Coronation Mass. The performance ended with him taking a running start and jumping out of the window. It is still unclear to what extent the action was planned.

Paweł Sakowicz is a choreographer and dancer. His main artistic interest lies in dance history and questions of cultural appropriation in the field of choreography. His works have been shown at Tramway, Glasgow (2022), the National Museum, Warsaw (2022), Dock11, Berlin (2023), the Santarcangelo Festival (2022), the Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw (2024), the Muzeum Susch (2019), and the Polish Dance Platform (2015, 2017, 2019), among others.