Choreography

Microphone Controller (2024)

Where gesture becomes music and listening becomes physical — Microphone Controller reimagines the rock concert for Deaf and hearing audiences through choreography, embodiment and language. In this 55-minute solo, voice and music are displaced from the hearing perspective and thrown into the body.

Rooted in the CODA (Child of Deaf Adult) experience, this work draws on language immersion, responsibility, and translation between worlds. A lived complexity is refracted through the mythology of fame—asking what the power of voice costs, and who pays the price.

As spectacle fractures into intimacy, Microphone Controller reveals a performer navigating pressure, identity, and the unstable terrain between communication and expression.

“—a multilayered experiment that subverts stereotypes around Deafness, voice and pop culture. The piece treats participation as a sensory event and challenges the audience to question their own hearing.”
Jette Büchsenschütz, Berlin

Common Fate (Work in Progress)

“Motion is key. It overrides differences in appearance, and serves an evolutionary purpose. Those that move together, are bound to the same fate.”

‘COMMON FATE unfolds in a sea of bass pulses, where sign language and movement collide. Rooted in the Gestalt Law of Common Fate—the impulse to group bodies that move together—the duet exposes how perception binds us to narratives of harmony and unity.

The dancers interpret, interrupt, ignore, connect, and separate—wrestling a conflict. To be understood, or to move. Yet perception persists. Even as the duet defies narrative, it reveals how relentlessly story is thrust onto signing bodies.

Face to Face (2022)

Using hand gestures, rhythmic play, or simple embraces, Lukas Malkowski and Naishi Wang speak through movements. Sometimes mirroring the other, sometimes doing the opposite, their fluid or syncopated gestures are X-rays revealing volatile and impregnable states of being. A hymn to imperfect transmission, Face to Face depicts the ramifications of our relations to the world, to the other, and invites the audience to decrypt its secrets.

Face to Face (2022) Festival TransAmériques, Internationale Tanzmesse Düsseldorf 2022, Performance&Choreography by Naishi Wang & Lukas Malkowski, Lighting Design by Chris Malkowski, Photos&Videos by Jeremy Mimnagh

DANCING, SIGNING, WRITING (2021)

Almost everything in this 39-minute didactic duet has been generated from American Sign Language and English words. Choreographic intersections of ASL signs, and written English words. Inspired by the work of Christine Sun Kim and Richard Serra’s ‘list of verbs’ Lukas Malkowski and Dawn Jani Birley ask: How can a Word be Signed? How can a Sign be Danced?

Choreography Lukas Malkowski with Dawn Jani Birley
Photos & Video by Jubal Battisti

Waves of Flesh (2020/21)

Giving and taking space are highly nuanced acts. Waves of Flesh is a duet about fluid support. In spectra of touch and intense connection, we aspire towards transcendental intimacy.

Premiere: 2020 Staatsballett Berlin, Online Performance: nah-dran HEART-BREAK in ada Studios 2021

Momentum Contingency (2020)

Momentum Contingency explores actions and consequences. It is a solo performance merging wind, kinetic sculpture, soundscape, costume design and light. The performance is inspired by the “Irresistible Force Paradox”. Until now, Western capitalist thinking has held that we are an “irresistible force” and that our actions are only consistent if they serve our egoistic ambitions. What happens when our irresistible actions create unstoppable consequences?

Supported by the Research Grant Performing Arts (Recherchestipendium Darstellende Kunst) of the Senate Department for Culture and Europe Berlin.

Residency:TRAUMABARUNDKINO, Performance&Choreography by Lukas Malkowski, Photos & Videos by Dana Pajarillaga, Dramaturgy: Antonia Gersch

Funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the framework of the initiative NEUSTART KULTUR, aid programm DIS-TANZEN by the Dachverband Tanz Deutschland.