Preludes and Fugues
Magdalena Reiter & Mateja Rebolj at Cofestival

In 2003, Magdalena Reiter and Mateja Rebolj created the  intergenerational dance collective Forma Interrogativa. Twenty years later, their second collaboration Preludes and Fugues is a moving inventory of their artistic oeuvres, their dance life and their times.

Dancing to seven preludes and fugues from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Magdalena Reiter and Mateja Rebolj, enter into a dialogue with the time that has settled into their bodies.

“Every body, and especially the woman’s body, is a space where personal experiences, culture, society, collective and private memory collide and intertwine. The juxtaposition of two dancers in two different age periods thematically addresses the question of the body marked by time. Life’s motifs evolve and build on each other through the passage of time and each singularity, but in the end all the bodies play out the same topics.”

More

Open Sketchbook by Đorđe Balmazović/Škart
at Cofestival

Drawings: Đorđe Balmazović

The Open Sketchbook exhibition consists of drawings made during the observation process of the Silver Gold project development, executed by an intergenerational dance and choreographic collective. The materials are part of a procedural work and are a visual response to the kinetic situations of contemporary dance practice.

Dragana Alfirević, the initiator of the Silver Gold project, invited visual artist Đorđe Balmazović to follow the process as an outside observer, but his role soon turned into that of a documentarist and co-creator. With a gaze that intersects the visible with the sensual, the artist has thus begun to transform dance into kinetic figures, bringing them into a field beyond their fleeting immediacy. In this way, images of dance in dance itself were created, as the hand that is drawing itself moves and at the same time folds, curiously searching, exploring, deciding, and last but not least, with its presence, supporting the bodies in movement. This exhibition is a kind of homage to dance, and at the same time it is dance itself.

Đorđe Balmazović is a member of Škart group, founded in 1990 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. In the 1990s, the collective produced poetry fanzines and distributed them in street actions. In 2000, Škart founded two groups – the Horkeškart Choir and Orchestra and the Women’s Embroidery Group. Since 2012, the collective has been running workshops for children, migrants and the elderly.

Curator: Bojana Piškur

More

COFESTIVAL 2022
International festival of contemporary dance

 

 

CoFestival 2022 can be divided into three thematic strands. The first one deals with choreographic material through collective or subjective time (Moritz Ostruschnjak, Michiel Vandevelde, Mateja Rebolj and Magdalena Reiter, Alma Söderberg with Cullberg), the second one observes the body and life through the prism of virtual and digital landscapes (Yuske Taninaka, Aleksandar Georgiev with his team, Barbara Matijević and Giuseppe Chico), while the third transforms the contemporary moment into a poetic image that inevitably flows out into the wild (Věra Ondrašíková and her collective, Mala Kline).

This edition of CoFestival will be accompanied by a discursive programme with talks, book presentations, a film programme and the launch of a new publication marking the tenth anniversary of the festival.

More

Along the Urban Pathways of the History of Slovenian Dance and Theatre

With Rok Vevar, part of Cofestival 2022

In recent years, Slovenia has also witnessed a tremendous growth in tours of the capital through the prisms of different communities or cultural-historical highlights, in which visitors learn about the stories hidden behind the walls of buildings and institutions, our past and present, on a two-hour walk.

This year’s guided tour will not be special in this respect, as participants will once again learn about the many architectural landmarks of the city and historical facts related to the development of Ljubljana and Slovenia, along with interesting stories, but on this occasion the focus will be on contemporary dance and theatre.

On this walk we will get to know the venues of the first contemporary dance schools in Ljubljana, the period of its coexistence with ballet; we will try to clarify the causes and consequences of their separation, the venues and struggles of extra-institutional artistic practices, the establishment and development of the alternative and the most significant festivals as well as other gathering places as major pillars of social life. Rok Vevar, the guide, will be reflecting on this tour around Ljubljana through the prism of uncovering an overlooked part of history, highlighting in particular the role of women artists and their unwavering stance when confronted with the numerous obstacles of a masculine-centric world.

Rok Vevar is a theatre scholar, writer, researcher, curator and historian of contemporary dance, who has been a multifaceted presence in the field of contemporary Slovenian performing arts for more than two decades. He is the initiator and founder of numerous festivals and initiatives, as well as the Temporary Slovenian Dance Archive (2011) and, last but not least, the author of the monograph Ksenija, Xenia: Ksenia Hribar’s London Dance Years 1960–1978, in which he focuses on the early period of the artistic career of this dancer and choreographer, who is considered one of the central figures of Slovenian contemporary dance history.

More

Test