“This resting, patience” is a choreographic performance that blurs the boundary between dance and installation. Since its premiere at Sophiensæle in Berlin in 2024, it has been presented dozens of times at leading European festivals, including Kunstenfestivaldesarts and ImPulsTanz, and immediately before its Warsaw performances at Festival d’Automne in Paris.

Rather than following a conventional narrative, This resting, patience invites audiences to dwell in time. For three hours, Ewa Dziarnowska and Leah Marojević dance on a blue carpet covering the entire performance space, accompanied by the looping refrain of Dionne Warwick’s What the World Needs Now. Moving between solos and duets, their choreography unfolds through gestures of attraction and distance, tenderness and tension, playfulness of form and feeling. The proximity between the performers and the audience transforms the act of watching into a form of participation.

For Dziarnowska, improvisation and embodied knowledge matter more than virtuosity. Her artistic practice emerged from a resistance to rigid institutional frameworks and a fascination with what takes place in the body in the here and now. What she describes as an “erotics of attention” is not about being looked at, but about being fully present – with another dancing body and with the audience.

This resting, patience is an invitation to slow down and pay attention, proposing dance as a practice of closeness rather than spectacle.

Choreography, Performance: Ewa Dziarnowska
with: Leah Marojević
Sound: Krzysztof Bagiński
Lighting: Jacqueline Sobiszewski
Costumes/Styling: Nico Navarro Rueda, Franziska Acksel
Dramaturgical Support: Jette Büchsenschütz
Artistic Dialogue: Suvi Kemppainen
Photography: Spyros Rennt
Video Documentation: Margarita Maximova
Special Thanks: Maciej Sado

Premiere: 13 January 2024, as part of Tanztage Berlin, Sophiensæle, Berlin

Production: Ewa Dziarnowska, co-produced by Sophiensæle.

The 33rd edition of Tanztage Berlin is a production of Sophiensæle. The project is co-funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion and the Capital Cultural Fund (HKF), with the kind support of Tanzfabrik Berlin e. V. and Theaterhaus Berlin Mitte.

This event is presented as part of Mateusz Szymanówka’s curatorial programme, “How to Tune the Body“.

The event is organized in collaboration with UNSOUND FESTIVAL 2026.

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photo by Spyros Rennt

About the Choreographer

Ewa Dziarnowska is an artist, choreographer, and performer based in Berlin. Working at the intersection of dance, performance, and artistic research, she develops improvisation as both a creative method and a way of thinking about embodied practice. Her work focuses on relation, rhythm, attentiveness, and the experience of time, while exploring the social and aesthetic frameworks within which dance is created and experienced.

Her work has been presented at festivals and art institutions across Europe, including Sophiensæle (Berlin), Tanzquartier Wien (Vienna), Santarcangelo Festival, MDT Moderna Dansteatern (Stockholm), and Mind Eater Festival (Oslo). As a performer, she has collaborated with Alex Baczyński-Jenkins, Michele Rizzo, Enad Marouf, and Elena Francalanci.

She is the creator of several choreographic and performance works, including This resting, patience, which, since its premiere at Sophiensæle in Berlin, has established her as a distinctive voice on the international contemporary dance scene.

About the Mateusz Szymanówka’s curatorial programme, “How to Tune the Body”

“How to Tune the Body” is a curatorial programme conceived by Mateusz Szymanówka, Dance Curator at Sophiensæle in Berlin and Artistic Director of Tanztage Berlin. Opening TR Warszawa to the international independent performance scene, How to Tune the Body presents two works that have been shown at some of Europe’s leading dance festivals and venues: This resting, patience, a three-hour work situated between installation and performance by the Berlin-based Polish choreographer Ewa Dziarnowska, and Batty Bwoy, a solo by the Norwegian-Jamaican dancer and choreographer Harald Beharie, whose work will be presented in Poland for the first time. Each performance will be accompanied by an artist talk. The programme will conclude with a workshop for performance practitioners led by choreographer and visual artist Ania Nowak.

The programme is guided by the notion of presence as a political practice – a mode of being that embraces instability, non-linearity, and difference, rather than producing fixed narratives and stable identities. Presence is understood here not only as sensitivity and responsiveness to what unfolds within the body, around us, and between us, but also as the very act of being in relation: between past and future, self and world, materiality and imagination.

Mateusz Szymanówka is a dramaturg and curator who has been working at Sophiensæle in Berlin since 2020. He is responsible for the dance programme and curates the Tanztage Berlin festival. He has also co-curated the thematic programmes and festivals Queer Darlings 3 (2022), Queer Darlings 4 (2023), Leisure & Pleasure (2023), Making Life in the Ruins (2025), and Never Work (2026). His previous collaborations include the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Nowy Teatr, Studio Theatre, and Pomada Queer Festival in Warsaw, Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, Art Stations Foundation in Poznań, HAU Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin, and donaufestival in Krems.