Agnieszka Stach
Between heart and mind. After an intensive music education in her childhood, she decided to study law, which she abandoned in favour of tango. She is fascinated by film and advertising. She loves to invent and implement initiatives that have never been undertaken before.
Agnieszka Stach is a Polish Argentine tango dancer, born in 1989. She started her career with Facundo Peñalva. Since 2015, she has been running a school in Cracow and teaching with Tymoteusz Ley. She occasionally performed with such dancers as Sergio Almiron, Malachai Payne, Joscha Engel, Vladimir Tarasov, Adrián Luppi, and Waheed Al-Masri.
A few words about her life before tango engrossed her and the activities that shaped Agnieszka's current artistic profile:
HEART
At the age of 6, Agnieszka was enrolled in a violin class as a child with an exceptionally developed ear for music and sense of rhythm. For the next few years, she commuted to the music school from a small village in the Bieszczady Mountains, thirty kilometres through endless serpentines. Shortly afterward, at the age of 10, she started parallel training in a ballroom dance group, and two years later she was noticed in a song contest and recruited to the prestigious vocal group SOUL, as its youngest member. Together with both groups, she has given hundreds of concerts and participated in several recordings over a period of about ten years.
As a teenager, she gave up her education at a music school and participation in the SOUL band due to excessive activity and joined Orkiestry Jednej Góry MATRAGONA—an ethnic band playing world music—as a violinist and vocalist. It was primarily a period when she developed her sensitivity to sound and art of improvisation.
MIND
Legal studies in Cracow and the associated change of city interrupted her musical development. Agnieszka focused on law and her new passion, which was advertising. She was the first student in Poland to establish two legal blogs promoting simple legal issues: : Prawowalgorytmach.pl and prawatworcow.pl. Her activity was recognized by TEDxKraków, which invited her to deliver a speech in 2013.
PEOPLE
Agnieszka has been organizing and initiating the community around her since she was a teenager. For seven years, she co-organized artistic workshops in Balnica, where for a week amateurs built ethnic instruments, learnt to play them, improvised, and prepared a joint final performance.
In 2010, in cooperation with the WIOSNA Association, she founded the first unit of the Academy of the Future programme in the Polish Subcarpathia, which she coordinated from Cracow for two years. As a result, a year-round programme of individual educational meetings for children who grew up under challenging conditions and had problems at school was created in Sanok. The Academy not only supports them in their education, but above all, allows them to gain self-confidence.
Since 2015, she has officially run the tangonuevo.pl school. The school has a developed curriculum, which is consistent for all instructors. It is known for training intensity and the exceptionally low average age of its students. Since 2016, Agnieszka has been organizing the Krakus Aires Tango Festival.
OBSESSION
Creating legal blogs was the first, unconscious departure from the law and a step towards advertising. While still a student, Agnieszka became an editor at e-prawnik.pl, then a PR manager at Eura7 advertising agency and a strategy manager at the 1000ideas Agency. If it wasn't for tango, she would most likely have specialized in marketing strategies and creating personal branding for freelancers.
Marketing also allowed her to pursue her artistic passion. For years, Agnieszka has been interested in analogue photography, mainly portrait and fashion. To realize her ideas, she used Pentacon SIX and Olympus OM-1 cameras. She depended on her own from taking a photo to developing the photographs in a darkroom. When the first digital cameras appeared, she began to collect shots and assemble them in short films. She studied film directing at the AMA Film Academy for a year.