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MAIN EVENTS

East Dance Academy – Main events



22 – 26 November, Jože Pučnik Airport, Brnik

Irena Pivka, Brane Zorman, Diaspora (intermedia project)

“The term ‘diaspora’ refers to any population sharing a common ethnic identity who were either forced to leave or voluntarily left their settled territory, and became residents in areas often far removed from the former. It is converse to the nomadic lifestyle. Diasporic cultural development often assumes a different course than the population in the original place of settlement, and tends to vary between remotely- separated communities in culture, traditions, and other factors.”

Irena Pivka is an artist, set designer, and architect.  
Brane Zorman is a sound manipulator, composer, and artist.


22. November, Cankarjev dom, Duša Počkaj hall at 8.00 pm

Irena Tomažin, As a Raindrop Into the Mouth of Silence, performance

As a Raindrop Into the Mouth of Silence is a theatre project exploring communication noise. Throughout the performance, two persons on stage test the possible modes of interpersonal communication – two persons of changing identities, caught in the space of infinite connotations. They make use of everything they are, are capable of, and discover – taking the mentioned noise, i.e., sound, as literally as possible.
 The performance deals with dialogue as a form of communication and, in relation to it, asks: Whether, to what extent, and why this process or its products  always involves violence?

Was in the beginning really the word?
What does a breath say?

Well? Nothing.*

* S. Beckett: What Where (1983)

Irena Tomažin is dancer, singer, and choreographer.

Entrance fee: € 10,

€ 8 for students, pupils, and pensioners


23 November, Štih Hall

Working With Contemporary Performing Arts Archives


10.30 to 13.30 Lectures, presentations

Heike Roms, What’s Welsh for Performance? Staging an ‘Oral History of Performance Art in Wales’


For more than forty years, artists have created performance art in Wales, yet their work remains largely confined to half-remembered anecdotes, rumours, and hearsay. An Oral History of Performance Art in Wales aims to uncover Wales’ hidden history of performance through publicly-staged conversations with the key artists who have shaped the development of Welsh performance art since the mid-1960s.
Using video extracts from the interviews, the lecture will explore the theoretical, practical-curatorial, and methodological implications of staging these conversations as public events in front of a live audience (which often involve past collaborators or witnesses of past performances). These include a consideration of the inherent performative nature of the interview situation and its usefulness for performance documentation; strategies for encouraging shared remembering and interactive archiving; problems of artistic authorship and scholarly authority with regard to non-mainstream performance art; and an investigation of the disparities that frequently occur between personal memory and audio-visual documentation of past performances.

Heike Roms teaches Performance Studies at Aberystwyth University.


Manuel Pelmuş, Interviews with choreographers in Romania

Manuel Pelmuş will introduce some of the tools and methodology he has used to relocate several key events that took place in Romanian contemporary dance during the totalitarian period. He will introduce excerpts from the interviews he has conducted with the main protagonists of the dance scene of the 70s and 80s. His main focus is to contextualize a practice that remained mainly unofficial, non-institutionalized and almost undocumented. He intends to reflect and discuss the political and cultural implications of that practice, as well as to reflect upon its relevance and impact on today's performing arts field and society at large.

Manuel Pelmuş is one of the most internationally-reknowned representatives of Romanian dance.


Janez Janša, Procedures in Reconstructing Pupilija, papa Pupilo, and the Pupilceks

Janez Janša will analyze different approaches in dealing with the material from the original 1969 performance Pupilija, papa Pupilo, and the Pupilceks. The dramaturgy of reconstruction was based on a complex relation towards, copying, appropriating, re-enacting, and demonstrating the original show.

Janez Janša is director of Maska and performance artist.

Ayara Hernández Holz, Performance Remains: Towards an Organic Documentation
A collection of memories of performances as remembered by the audience

Performance Remains: Towards an Organic Documentation is a collection/archive of memories of dance performances as remembered by the audience. The project deals with the questions: What remains in the memory of the people after a performance “disappears”? What do we remember? How do we remember?

For the creation of this archive the artist will invite people from different cultural, social, and geographic contexts to tell their memories of any performance they wish to remember. The structure of these limited encounters will depend on what the person's choice.

Ayara Hernández Holz is a dancer-choreographer from Uruguay.


15.30 to 18.00 Lectures, presentations

Joe Valenčič, Slovene Dancers in the USA

The lecture will focus on Slovene modern and postmodern dancers who emigrated to the United States and made their professional career there.

Joe Valenčič writes, lectures, and produces documentaries on Slovenian-American immigration history and popular culture.


Rok Vevar, Dance on Video before Video Dance: Contemporary Dance in the 60’s on TV Slovenia

In the 1960s, contemporary dance in Slovenia was not integrated into the Slovene cultural horizon nor were there any infrastructural and/or financial conditions for its operation, but the growth of the new television medium enabled some choreographers to work and create in a way, characteristic of many western dance contexts, where they could increasingly develop their dance poetics, aesthetics, or concepts. The need for TV programmes engaged dancers in both the programmes of the growing new pop culture (entertainment programmes) and art programmes that wanted to focus specifically on dance. At the time, television was a new, growing, and emerging medium and – precisely because of this – it was also an undefined field – the field of a formal and content “transition”. For a short period of time, in this field, dance recognized its emancipated place of “freedom”.    

Rok Vevar is a dance and theatre critic and dramaturge.


18.00 Lecture, demonstration

Samo Gosarič, Walk Performance
             
This project will be realized in two stages: first, through examining and then reconstructing walking performances of the neo-avantgarde period (1960s and 70s) from Southeast and Eastern Europe where this practice was relatively frequent due to various social factors. The research is connected to the changed concept of an artwork that emerges in the neo-avantgarde with the author withdrawing from the central point of an artwork. At the same time, art actually becomes the way we view artworks; it is the mode of observation itself that establishes something as artistic. Into this context, various performances of walks as staged situations are inscribed in which the “artisticness” is produced by the context of the action and not the technical realization itself. In examining particular walking performances, I would like to consider especially the procedures that the particular actions used to deal with context and various discourses of meaning. I will use two approaches in the reconstruction of these performances. At a time when the mottos of the 1960s – originality and creativity – have became almost a dictate, I see a field of freedom in repeating a past gesture. Consciously not creating anything new – in the sense of artistically recreating or appropriating – also means that you, as the author, withdraw from the artwork, similar to the neo-avantgardists. The second approach, which is directly related to the walking performances, is the introduction of the questions of social choreography, the expected ways of moving in urban space. Here, the author will first examine how each of the considered performances fits into the social choreographies of their own time. Regarding the level of reconstruction, the choice of the environment could, due to its social choreography, completely change the meaning of a particular action.

Samo Gosarič is a performer and writer.
   

24 November, Čopova Street at 12.00 am

Samo Gosarič, Walk Performance
 
                               
Re-enactments of walking performances from the 60s and 70s
Cankarjev dom, Kosovel Hall
15.00 Screenings
Cinematic Modes of Choreography
Lecture/screenings

Tanja Vrvilo, Recordings of Contemporary Dance Performances from Croatia

The author will present her research on choreographic thinking in the field of cinema, which is based on Croatian narrative and non-narrative film. Her starting points are the fundamental historical and theoretical determinants of film in terms of technology and recording – film as a reflection of the scientific and philosophical spirit of the times, in which film and philosophy seek to reflect upon movement together. She has studied the continuity of movement, describing the figure (rather than the figure in a given moment) from its prehistory, from chronophotography to the aesthetics of attraction, film choreography between composition, mise-en-scène, deframing, and montage in a broader sense – choreography for the camera and choreography of the camera. It is a non-cinematic and pro-cinematic reality: bodies in a (cinematic) landscape; corporal figurations in narrative and non-narrative film; body as a form, figure, or object (body in the literal sense). It is dance film or film dancing in various types of experimental or avant-garde film – art film, abstract film, structural or conceptual film.
Tanja Vrvilo presents two fundamental but opposed modes of corporality in experimental film: the choreography of the everyday and the ceremonial (festive) body (Deleuze) in the experimental films by Vlado Kristl and Ivan Martinac.

Tanja Vrvilo is a Croatian film curator.


17.30 Screenings of short films (1968-72)
The Fried Brain of Pupilija Ferkeverk   

Monument G,  “A performance of excerpts from the rehearsals of a performance based on Bojan Štih’s play Monument; this appeared on TV Slovenija in 1971. Monument, directed by Dušan Jovanović and performed by Jožica Avbelj, was produced by Experimental Theatre Glej in Ljubljana in 1971”
OHO – happenings, actions, performances, experimental films, short films by Naško Križnar


19.00 Archiving live
How We Occupied the Faculty of Arts
Discussion with the organizers of the occupation of the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana in May 1971

25 November, Kosovel Hall


What Do We Actually Do When We Reconstruct?
Lectures and debate

10.30 – 13.30 Lectures (in English)

Goran Sergej Pristaš, Liberation of Zagreb

Reconstruction requires a previous interruption of myth;a sort of Brechtian literarization; an introduction of the originating speech, of mythological operation before the interruption, of communication that no longer establishes a community, but points to the performers that now have nothing in common with those in the situation origination, however aestheticized their social choreography may be.
“This literarization of the theater, as indeed the literarization of all public affairs, must be developed to the greatest possible extent. Literarization means putting across ideas through actions; interspersing the ‘performed’ with the ‘formulated.’ (...) So far as the communication of the subject matter is concerned, the spectator must not be misled along the path of empathy; instead, a form of intercourse takes place between the spectator and the actor, and basically, in spite of all the strangeness and detachment, the actor addresses himself directly to the spectator.“ (Brecht)

Goran Sergej Pristaš is a professor at the Academy of Drama Arts in Zagreb and theatre director, dramaturge, and performer.

        
Maaike Bleeker, Reenactment and the Meaning of Understanding

Reenactment habitually derives its rationale, firstly, from the belief that a simulation or reconstruction of past situations is a useful way of making history ‘come alive’ and, second, that participants can learn something from the experience that would be less accessible using conventional methods of studying the past. My presentation engages with the question of what reenactment as methodology can teach us about what it means to understand and how understanding might be conceived of in terms of embodied rationality.

Maaike Bleeker is a professor of Theatre Studies at Utrecht University.


Bojana Kunst, What Did Not Happen

The lecture will reflect on the problem of historicization in art from the perspective of potentiality. Potentiality is a temporal mode where we uncover how life is coming into being. When speaking about potentiality we have to be aware of the paradox inherent in potentiality itself: namely, one can become aware of his or her potential to exist, create, and spring forth from oneself only when this potential is not realized. Potentiality will be analyzed as a temporal and spatial constellation divided from the action itself, a mode wherein the potential of the thing or man is unrealized.

Bojana Kunst is a philosopher, dramaturg, and performance theoretician.She is currently a researcher at the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts - Department for Sociology.


16.00 Presentation

Antonio Caronia, Re-enacting history – RE:akt! platform

Janez Janša, RE:akt!

RE:akt! - meaning not only "to act again" but "to respond to/react upon" and “Regarding: act!"- confronts current ideological and intellectual canons, power structures, policies, and distribution channels by re-enacting selected historical and culturally-relevant events. Through processes of analysis, deconstruction, re-enactment and (re-)reporting, the intermedia research and presentation project RE:akt! examines media's role(s) in manipulating perceptions and creating (post)modern historical myths and contemporary mythology.
Therefore, RE:akt! also displays a linguistic and meta-linguistic dimension, according to Deleuze's view, that repetition only operates through difference; there is a change in every repetition, a change taking place in the mind that is gazing at it, and we know very well that every mind change is, above all, a matter of language.

Antonio Caronia teaches “Design of Social Communication” in the Accademia di Belle Arti (Fine Arts Faculty) of Brera, and “Aesthetics of Media” in the NABA (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti), both in Milan.

Janez Janša  is a conceptual artist, performer, and director of Aksioma, Institute for Contemporary Art in Ljubljana.



19.15Performance (in Slovene, simultaneous interpreting into English)

Janez Janša, Slovene National Theatre – performance
     
Slovene National Theatre reconstructs actual historical events – political demonstrations that took place in several villages across Slovenia in the year 2006. It performs the story about the conflict of two communities – which proved to be a prime media event – through the theatrical forms of Greek chorus and radio and television transmission. The combination of the traditional theatre form with contemporary media creates a shattering event and re-opens the question of tragedy in the present day.

Janez Janša is a performance artist and director of Maska.

Entrance fee: € 10,
                   €  8 for students, pupils, and pensioners

Maska, Institute for Publishing, Production and Education
Metelkova 6
SI-1000 Ljubljana
Slovenia
Europe

Tel.: + 386 1 431 31 22
        + 386 1 431 53 48
Fax.: + 386 1 431 31 22
info@maska.si