DIVAS was created to support artistic exchange and queer friendships in the field of performance arts.

It was started by Rafał Pierzyński and Aga Pędziwiatr in 2016 and since then is based in Zurich, Switzerland.


 

 

They blend and mix dancing, singing, writing, and touching into different immersive formats like performance-treatments, rituals, letters, or stories - sometimes performed one on one.

 

DIVAS explore touching, embodied communication, and magic in order to question the notions of normativity, identity, and sexuality. Uncovering layers of their life conditioning and violence of living in western, binary and capitalist culture seems like labour they were born to do. Living from a queer perspective is a process.

 

They wanna go outside the social norms and their own comfort zones. Through their practices, they question issues connected to notions of normativity, identity, freedom, sexuality, communication, also capitalism, and political concerns from discrimination to ecology.

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DIVAS are mostly inspired by their travels - those that happen inside as well as those through time and space.

Each of divas is bringing their personal experiences related to growing up in the blocks of flats, going abroad, and last but not least - the presence of wonderful women in their life.

 

DIVAS are supposed to share the light. The name for the collective is an attempt to continue and add to the figure of a diva as open, strong energy that is not connected to the concept of gender, pop culture nor consumption but rather to an urge to nourish and share the strength that comes from the open body-mind, physical practices and the light of stars that we all carry inside.

 

In their performances, they use nakedness, clothes, masks, poetry, humor, and other elements (often coming from the mass culture) in order to underline what kinds of corruption capitalism is bringing into our lives. Also to talk about difficult topics and provoke reflections and simply laugh together and about each other, sometimes through tears.

 

The most interesting places for DIVAS are those which escape the conventional stage settings. They love long and slow transformations in new spaces, insisting that everything around them slows down as well, creating atmospheres of a weird dream. DIVAS are performing in galleries, theatres, staircases, and parties.

 

DIVAS exchange letters when they are far from each other as well as when they are close. They write from a perspective of inanimate objects connected to water, who is probably a synonym of love.

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Aga is a Soap, Rafal is a Mask and Magda is a Shower. Some other magical creatures that were a part of our journeys took part in this practice as well becoming among other things Towel or a Stream.

 

In their past projects, they also explored the work through touch (or rather getting in touch) mostly based on Rafal's research during his master studies (Embodied Communication- attending to the modes of touch) and his experience with the craniosacral biodynamics.

 

They created a format of CLINICA DE DIVAS TRANSFORMATIVAS that is a one to one fake healing performance using story-telling, poetry, lip-syncing and bodywork.

 

They occasionally write poems, especially while going to a sauna.

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DIVAS collaborated amongst others with Esther Eppstein, Magda Drozd, Agata Grabowska, Pitchaya Ngamcharoen, Marcel Babazadeh, Nagi Gianni and Yazmin Taco.