Matica hrvatska VIJENAC Nr 451, 16 June 2011 ISSN 1330-2787 Theatre 28th DANCE WEEK FESTIVAL, 25 MAY 2 JUNE,

, ZAGREB, RIJEKA

ATYPICAL PERFORMANCE PROTOCOLS

By Ivana Slunjski Quality breakthroughs at the Dance Week Festival took place in small-scale performances. The solos and duets that move away from the act of dancing and focus instead onto re-semanticizing of the performance material, understanding dance as phenomenology of body. Far from the much-vaunted titles such as Pina by Wim Wenders, 7734 by Jasmin Vardimon or Project by the Israeli Opera and the Suzanne Dellal Centre, the quality breakthroughs at this years Dance Week Festival took place in small-scale performances, often presented late at night and to smaller audiences. I am talking about the solos and duets by the authors that understand dance as phenomenology of body, moving away from the act of dancing and putting a major focus onto re-semanticizing of performance material, including all possible inter-textual links. The viewer here is invited to share responsibility in the process of exchange, be it the undoing of strategies of memorizing and exposing artistic procedures (After Trio A and Beginning, adopting the offensive (Early Ripen Early Rot), juxtaposing ones own body to the communal body (A Short History About Reclaiming The Authorship of My Body) or the contemplation of the concrete consequences of political indoctrination (Your Majesties). Performances that somewhat deviate from this selection by basing themselves in the visual are Running Sushi, which takes the visual as equivalent to reducing communication to a two-dimensional image or a comic, and Sideways Rain, a performance by Swiss company Alias, which takes it as a measure of the passage of time and fragmentation of individual existences. All of them, however, directly or indirectly, more or less consciously, deal with the question of the politics of looking at dance performance.

Postmodern Dance Postulates

The title of the performance After Trio A clearly indicates that its author Andrea Boi draws from the revolutionary and negational statement by Yvonne Rainer in Trio A. The latter shaped the postulates of postmodern dance by rejecting the spectacular, virtuosity and stage illusions. For Yvonne Rainer, a performance does not build towards the layering of intensities or a culmination and she annuls the dancers position in relationship to the viewer as a passive recipient. After Trio A departs from two Rainers postulates continuity of the dance material and active participation of the spectators but it goes further. Performers Sonja Pregrad and Iva Hladnik face a part of the Trio A choreography which they try to repeat in front of the audience as faithfully to the original as possible. During the piece, the performers develop various approaches to memorizing the dance material, their bodies revealing that a process of memorizing eludes any kind of linearity, getting interwoven into a boundless associative network. Rather than the continuity, the performance favors discontinuity, embracing the dancers mistakes and disruptions in the transfer of the material as eruptive points of creativity. With every repetition, the performers define the performance material anew and again relying on the mentally fixed material and questioning the strategies of memorizing chosen earlier. At the same time, the spectators are focused on the momentary categorization of what they are seeing and developing their own strategies of memorizing, as that which is offered to the view is constantly interrupted by multiple and simultaneous sensations.

Performance Beginning, too, a collaboration by Andrea Boi and visual artist Julia Willms, uncovers the artistic process, and once again unpresumptuously emphasizes the importance of learning and opening up to the other. The focus of the performance is on the interaction between two media, drawing and dance: the movement of the dancer whose shadow projected onto a screen the drawer tries to catch with the movement of her pen. The two performers develop their communication constantly returning the paper strip to the beginning and negotiating the specificity of each medium, with the performance tissue based on the game of movements of varying sensitivity and power.
http://www.matica.hr/Vijenac/vijenac451.nsf/AllWebDocs/Netipicni_izvedbeni_protokoli