Who We Are and Where We’re Going

This was the first post published on the MOVYTZA blog in 2018. We are keeping it as a snapshot of where we started — before MOVYTZA evolved into what it is today.

We are starting this blog, so it feels appropriate to introduce ourselves.

Ania and Wojtek.

We are an artistic couple: dancers, sensitive people, constantly looking for balance, harmony and inspiration — the things that keep our passions moving. We settled in Rybnik. This is where we live and where we create.

At the time this text was written, we were also running a place that was very close to us and very much aligned with the way we thought about life. We wanted it to bring together people who were looking for something more.

We were not interested in competing or taking part in some imaginary race. What mattered to us was much simpler: to do our work professionally and to do it properly.

It was difficult to describe MOVYTZA with a single word because our activity was divided into two areas.

Art

As artists connected — probably for life — with contemporary dance, theatre and music, we produced our own performances, created choreography for theatres and appeared in productions as guest performers.

But we never wanted to stay only inside theatre walls.

Theatre is about people. It is about meeting another human being.

We wanted to look for those meetings outside conventional theatre spaces as well. That was why we loved outdoor productions — while quietly praying for good weather — and why we enjoyed meeting and working with new people.

We collaborated with municipalities, private companies and institutions. That variety gave us energy. It allowed artistic work to move between very different environments and audiences.

There was also another, smaller scale of work that appeared unexpectedly.

After some of our larger productions, watched by audiences of several thousand people, couples of different ages would approach us and ask whether we could create choreography for a special occasion. Not necessarily a wedding first dance.

We were happy to take on projects like these too.

There was something deeply satisfying about watching art bring two people closer together and seeing the joy they experienced when they finally performed something they had worked on together.

Those encounters reminded us that the scale of a project does not determine its value.

Recreation

The second part of MOVYTZA at that time was recreation — understood simply as spending free time in a way that actively engages the body, the mind or both.

We had quite a few ideas.

There were regular movement classes such as Pilates, yoga and dance, as well as developmental and psychological workshops. There were workshops devoted to creating miniature forests in jars, cosmetics and nutrition. Activities for adults and children. Partner dancing, solo dancing and many other formats.

Most importantly, we wanted to remain open.

If somebody had an interesting idea for something that could happen in our space, there was a good chance we would try to make it happen.

It sounds like a lot because it was.

But the people visiting MOVYTZA also influenced what the place became. That interaction created a particular energy: people arrived, discovered something, returned and told others that this place existed.

A place worth returning to

At the end of that first blog post we wrote one very simple sentence:

MOVYTZA should be a place you want to come back to.

Years later, the form of MOVYTZA has changed considerably. The physical space and the range of activities described in this 2018 text belong to an earlier chapter.

But reading it again, the underlying idea feels surprisingly familiar.

We still work between different worlds. Art and production. Theatre and business. Creative ideas and the practical responsibility of making them happen.

And perhaps the sentence about creating something worth returning to was never really about a room in Rybnik.

Perhaps it was about the kind of experience we wanted to create in the first place.

To see what MOVYTZA has become since then, read about MOVYTZA today or explore our selected projects.