The III International Dance Theater Festival "Borders of Nature - Borders of Culture" will begin on April 25 at the Polish Dance Theater in Poznań. We will once again be fascinated by the fluidity of the divisions separating the human from the non-human. We will look for an answer to the question of whether the boundaries between culture and nature objectively exist, or whether they are an artificial creation of man, who - perpetuating the belief in their indispensability - can lead to the destruction of the world and himself. We are, for the most part, brought up with a sense of conflict and contradiction between the natural and cultural order. Or perhaps nature and culture are a sum, a common set, and the source of unnecessary divisions is man? How is it that we humans construct differences that do not exist in nature? To what extent can and should borders be questioned in a reality marked by destabilization and crisis?

We have invited performances that explore borders, exposing their od-human origins to participate in the festival:

We will begin with a performance by Sibiu Ballet Theatre, Romania's first multicultural dance company, juxtaposing representatives of different countries, from New Zealand to Ecuador, whose repertoire is a symbiosis of contemporary and classical works. The artists will present the Polish premiere of the performance "One way ticket" choreographed by Sandra Mavhima in Poznań. The piece opens to reflection on the experience of migration - a state of being trapped between two realities, balancing on the border between natural cultural belonging and the need to assimilate into an "alien" culture.

April 25 will be followed by a Conversation with Sibiu Ballet Theatre artists after the performance. The meeting will be conducted in English and translated into Polish.

This will be Sibiu Ballet Theatre's first visit to Poland.

"VONA" -an international artistic project with the participation of female performers from different regions of Ukraine-was created in collaboration with the world-famous Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch (Germany), choreographed by Rainer Behr, a member of the Tanztheater Wuppertal company, invited to collaborate by Pina Bausch in 1995. This is an example of blurring the line between experiences from different cultures, looking at fears together and seeking expression in the universal language of the body. A body that is both natural and cultural when it serves creation.

420 PEOPLE - an artistic collective from Prague, led by Václav Kuneš, a former dancer with one of the world's most prestigious contemporary dance companies Nederlandes Dans Theater, is a group whose artistic experience from regular collaborations with world-class choreographers brings a unique expression of its own to Czech independent dance. In "Why things go wrong" (choreography: Sylva Šafková), we will look at the (un)ethical sources of human behavior, trying to answer the question of whether guilt comes from the primal layers of human nature or is culturally conditioned.

Festival host,Polish Dance Theater will present the performance "Fight for Fire and Growth," directed by Szymon Kaczmarek and choreographed by Mikolaj Karczewski - a choreographic metaphor of the interspecies struggle for progress, the evolution of natural life forms and the attainment of higher levels of cultural development.

We will also invite you to National Dancing, a street action of community dancing of the polonaise, combining the natural human need - to be part of a group - with references to the tradition of Polish culture, of which the refined form of the noble processional dance is a part. Different styles of understanding "the limits of nature" and "the limits of culture" will make up the richness and diversity of Polish and world dance art represented during the Festival.

National Dance is an integral part of the festival program - it is always held on April 29, on International Dance Day. On this day, we also announce the next editions of the International Competition "1 Page - 1 Look - 180 Seconds", inspiring artistic expressions whose theme is dance, theater and movement present in nature and culture.

This year the Polish Dance Theater is organizing the International Dance Theater Festival "Borders of Nature - Borders of Culture" for the third time. During last year's edition, which was dominated by archetypal images of the crisis of values and the ecological disaster that threatens us, we hosted such artists as Jo Strømgren Kompani (Norway), Hygin Delimat (Austria), Monika Blaszczak and Luiza Mateo Dupleich Rozo (Poland/Bolivia). We also hosted the Stanisław Hadyna Song and Dance Ensemble "Śląsk" (Poland), which led the polonaise procession during the National Dance. The first edition of the festival, in 2021, was held online due to the pandemic. We presented performances, discussions, performances, as well as short and feature-length choreographic films. Among our proposals was a film block of dance productions, prepared in cooperation with Companhia de Dança de Almada (Portugal), the New Horizons International Film Festival and Nathalie Larquet, a dance filmmaker, and Julie - Anne Stanzak, a dance artist affiliated with Tanztheater Wuppertal. We also offered registrations of performances, including our "Promised Land" directed by Katarzyna Raduszynska and Marta Wolowiec's "Tens" as part of the Polish Dance Network. Previous editions of the International Dance Theater Festival "Borders of Nature - Borders of Culture" are united by the person of prominent Norwegian choreographer Jo Strømgren - in 2021 the festival program included the choreographic film "Closed" directed by him, in 2022 at the Polish Dance Theater we saw the performance "Salve Regina" performed by the Jo Strømgren Kompani company.