W&M Physical Theatre explore every aspect of our outer layer.

Wojciech Mochniej moves around more than most dancers. Returning from Europe, where he spends several months performing and teaching every year, and has just completed six hours of teaching at the University of Calgary. But he is eager to talk while his two colleagues mark a section of Skins, which his company, W&M Physical Theatre, is bringing to High Performance Rodeo.

Although Mochniej is well-known in the Calgary dance community, it is in his homeland of Poland and throughout Europe that fans track W&M’s touring productions.

In fact, a scandal in Poland inspired the choreography for Skins. Ambulance runs to the hospital were being impeded, hastening the death of patients. The culprits had connections with funeral homes that paid for each dead body delivered.

Reading this story, Mochniej contemplated the horrors of such acts and the selling of bodies. The choreography was influenced by Mochniej’s musings on society — superficial beauty standards, commodification of beauty and the effects of disability and ageism on careers. He looked at other aspects of skin, as well — as tissue, as a container for body parts, a surface layer and the container for the soul and spirit.

He also explored the question of whether this life we are living is reward or punishment. “All these layers motivate how to move the body, so we want the right vocabulary to be most organic and live in the body,” he says. Mochniej, along with his professional and life partner Melissa Monteros and dancer Davida Monk, will use video, dance, sound design and theatre to show quick, powerful flashes of abstract situations and leave the completion of the story to the audience’s imagination.

Mochniej seeks to engage the audience in emotional experiences that they will remember and discuss. “I always want people to see what they want to see. Of course, we are teasing them. We suggest some situations strongly. I think the piece is clear to get the sense of an organic journey and that is what I try to do, is give people an organic experience. They [the audience] are sitting in a circle so they are very close to us. We have some scenes when we are naked. We are vulnerable and so it is how they want to see us — how they want to judge us.”

“Because they are in a circle, they can see each other so they see how others are reacting.”

He emphasizes that his communication is through his body, not in words. “I filter through my body all those experiences that inspire me,” he says.

W&P recently folded Eko Dance under its umbrella, giving the international company wider influence in the training of young dancers. With its newly acquired offices and rehearsal space in Calgary, where Mochniej revels in being able to rehearse any time he pleases, W&M has put down permanent roots.

As our conversation ends and rehearsal begins, the trio scrunch down on the floor in front of a laptop video of Skins for clarification of a movement. Gone are the days of sketchy notes and dances lost in faulty memories.