ABSTRACT
Gardzienice’s performance style is rooted in a concrete training method. From their beginning the group extensively used vocal and physical exercises. This training is one aspect of their activities which has been unaffected by social and political changes. It has remained consistently exploratory and stimulating and has not lost contact with its initial inspiration from Bakhtin. This is partly because of its flexibility, as Staniewski has suggested:
Training with us is an open matter; there is no method in the sense of an applied normative system. I don’t ascribe systematic categories to our work process. But we do use certain sets of exercises which probably have a completely different character than those proposed elsewhere… Training, as I understand it, is necessarily a mutuality of two live presences. It is sharing energy, warmth. As if love-wrestling.1
