SHAPE+ broadcast series : RP Boo & Gary Gwadera

Gary Gwadera is the solo project of Piotr Gwadera—a composer, improviser, drummer and anthropologist-dreamer from the city of Łódź, Poland. In 2024, he released the critically acclaimed album “Far, Far in Chicago. Footberk Suite” an imaginary musical journey through time and space, where Polish traditional dance, oberek, and Chicago footwork find common ground in dynamic, triple rhythms.

This year, at the Unsound Festival in Osaka, Krakow, and New York, his dream came true when he played with footwork pioneer RP Boo, one of Chicago’s most legendary figures.

This hour-long mix features their performance “Another Brain, The Birth of Footberk” (the title refers to one of the scenes from the legendary “Frankenstein” (1931), which, in RP Boo’s opinion, stylistically corresponds to the music of the Polish village, played in the U.S. by folk bands of the Polish diaspora), which took place on October 30, 2025, during the Unsound Festival at the Lincoln Center in New York. The live set is bookended by an oberek from the Opoczno region, played by Władysław Koperkiewicz’s band.

Gary Gwadera is an artist of the SHAPE+ platform for innovative music and interdisciplinary art, co-funded by the EU and Pro Helvetia.