The Dance On Ensemble performs Lucinda Childs’ “Works in Silence” as part of Kondenz Festival 2022 by Station Service for Contemporary Dance.
With a post-show audience talk facilitated by the Critical Practice and mentorship programme “Made In Yu”.
Rok Vevar, theoretician and dance archivist from Ljubljana, introduces the choreographic oeuvre of Lucinda Childs with a retrospective look at her Judson Dance Theater period (1962-1964), with some extensions up until 1968, in order to understand where her work was heading to after she returned to the stage in 1973 and made the pieces that are part of the Works In Silence (1973-178).
Part of Kondenz Festival of Contemporary Dance and Performance, Belgrade
The 15th Kondenz festival of contemporary dance and performance takes place under the motto of “radical vulnerability”. Through a programme of performances, lectures, presentations and conversations, we want to speak from our position as independent dance artists, as individuals who choose to work on the stage, and as a collective that struggles to maintain and preserve the collective spirit. We are also citizens in a society that is falling apart at all seams. Let’s talk about how radically threatened we all are and how okay it is to show our sensitivity, our weaknesses, but also our passion not to give up.
Are we today as bodies, sentient machines, and as communities, groups, alliances, couples… radically vulnerable, on the edge of survival of this form of sociability? Are we a badly wounded body that needs a look full of love, another touch, a beautiful memory, a kiss, a brace, before it closes its eyes forever?
With this year’s programme, we therefore return to the past by evoking the work of two great female artists, Lucinda Childs and Katalin Ladik. We expose all our weaknesses and vulnerabilities in the works About exhaustion, Vulnerable Bodies, Trança, Why not(?), and rush into a future that is brave and feminist.
