Dancer from the Dance Workshop: Magdalena Hylak

Date:

Tue 8 Jul 2025

Time:

11:00 - 13:00

Venue:

DanceHouse

Admission:

10 euro DI Member/ 15 euro non Member

Merce Cunningham’s ’50 Looks’ dance, taught by Magdalena Hylak

Dancer from the Dance Festival

’50 Looks’ (1979) is a solo constructed from a gamut of 50 positions, originally conceived as a video project. Merce danced “50 Looks” in Events for many years. He assembled the positions using chance operations, in this case, the hexagrams of the I Ching, which determined what step, or “look,” would go first and then what would go next.

50 Looks can be learned by both highly trained dancers and non dancers alike. Patricia Lent, Co Director of Merce cunningham Trust describes it thus: “It’s not about being perfect,” she says on the video. “It’s about rising to the challenge of the task. The solo is an act of concentration.” 

About Magdalena Hylak

Magdalena Hylak is a dance artist based in the West of Ireland. She began her professional career in 2011 by working with Michael Keegan Dolan (IE), Liz Roche (IE) and Lea Anderson (UK) as part of Step Up Dance Project. She then worked with Ríonach Ní Néill (IE), Catherine Young Dance (IE), Emma Martin (IE) and Akiko Kitamura (JP) before starting touring nationally and internationally with John Scott-IMDT (IE) and Nacera Belaza (FR), with over 180 performances in 68 venues across 12 countries.

Early 2021, she started developing her own body of work through “Dances for Nobody”, where she questions the notion of performance. Then with “A Dance”, an ongoing artistic research through raw movement and sound that translates into public performances in unconventional spaces. At the core of her research is the movement and sound outside of the question of style/genre or technique, as well as the exploration of the relationships and tensions between public-personal, inside-outside, visible-invisible. Her dance work can be described as raw, repetitive, highly physical and emanating from within. She is working with the belief that dance is rooted in human existence and that there is no confusion in the public perception of a choreographic work. Therefore, she is interested in community works where she tries to go back to the beginning and work around an absolute idea of movement/dance.

Magdalena Hylak is the Galway Dance Artist in Residence for 2023-2025. She is the recipient of funding from the Arts Council of Ireland (Agility Award 2021, Commission Award-GDP 2021, Dance Bursary Award 2022, 2023), the Galway County Council (Artist Support Scheme 2022, 2024) and the National Dance Residency Partnership (Award 2023). She has been commissioned by Galway Dance Days (2012), Galway Dance Project (2016, 2020, 2021), Clifden Arts Festival (2022, 2023) and Tipperary Dance International Festival (2023).

Book your place on the workshop via Mindbody:

 

Other events on as part of Dancer from the Dance festival:

Performance Platform- July 9 6-7:15pm

Workshop with Junk Ensemble- July 9 11-1pm

Workshop with Mufutau Yusuf- July 6 11-1pm