Contemporary dance, electro-acoustic sound, and video scenography collide in a performance of urban resilience
Inspired by the notes and interviews of Oscar-winning director Andrzej Wajda, BLOKOWISKO – the Polish term for a housing estate, often used with a sense of bleakness – transforms a fragile human story into a living performance. It shows how a fleeting encounter can leave indelible traces, shaping both personal memory and collective experience.
BLOKOWISKO fuses electro‑acoustic sound, socially charged choreography, and immersive videography into a landscape of loss and resilience. Created by composer‑performer Blanka Barbara Stahl, BAFTA-winning choreographer Anthony Matsena, visual artist –8, and creative strategist Ignatius Sokal, the work was devised in the studio of Olivier-award-winning choreographer Russell Maliphant OBE.
The story is devastating in its simplicity: an actor meets a woman, they share a single day, and the next morning he cannot find his way back to her through the endless housing blocks of an unforgiving city. What remains is the silence of a connection lost, and the weight of love that slipped away.
From this fragile moment, BLOKOWISKO unfolds as a shared human experience. It asks how intimacy shapes us, lingers within us, and dissolves into the universal need to be found, remembered, and not to vanish without trace.
By giving form to a story Andrzej Wajda imagined but never filmed, the work honours his legacy while insisting on its relevance today – resonating through the anonymous apartment blocks of contemporary cities and the fragile bonds strained by scarcity, migration, and the vastness of urban scale.
Co-produced by Untold Productions and Polish Cultural Institute in London.
