Or, as Bojana Kunst states in her text Performing the Other / The Eastern Body, we need to “open up the body in-between with all different possibilities: volatile, impossible, energetic, translatable, vague, uncomprehensible, attractive, magnetic, inappropriate, alluring, disgusting, crazy, etc”. She also adds that these possibilities are “exactly the possibilities researched in the body of contemporary dance and it is no coincidence that the development of contemporary dance goes along with different concepts of understanding the body”. The selection of the festival is programmed in that direction.

Still Lives is a realization of Isabelle Schad’s idea of involving non - professionals in the creative process who, through the choreographer’s method, create a new piece. Bara Kolenc’s Atelier is a performance realized with direct participation from the audience, and explores the artistic creativity by deconstructing the character of artist Karla Bulovec. Through Ulysses Jurij Konjar develops a personal narrative of his own journey and investigates the perception of various subjects in relation to said narrative.
The Nomad Dance Academy evening presents four 2008 and 2009 students and their latest creations. Žana Pančeva in collaboration with the dancers works on decoding the choreographic codes and decomposes the ideas of love and infatuation. Kire Miladinoski’s (Not) Close considers the relations between two people in an open, unformatted space – their physical, spatial connection or disconnection. Aleksandar Georgiev in Heidi constructs a figure through which he explores features such as naivety, fragility, jollity and physically relates her to the male body, while transforming it into a body that does not exhibit gender, but states of mind. Elia Mrak’s solo investigates the moments he is into, in which through exhausting the movements he exhausts the subjects to the point in which they acquire new meaning.

The final festival evening we shall see three works by Compagnie Linga, in three different media – film, performance and concert. The authors of all three works delve into the relation of dance with music and vice versa, the context in which they are created and the intimacy of the creative process. Elodie Long’s film achieves this through an installation in which the visitors confide their secrets, that is, the venue is turned into a confessional of a sort. In their new performance no.thing, Katarzyna Gdaniec and Marco Cantalupo intimize the issue of emotions today by researching the relation between dance and music. The hip-hop music performance by Roberto Garieri and DJ Eagle, the final event of the evening, explores the link among text, music and dance, and essentially handles the concert in which the genre is created.

An addition to the festival programme is to be the Fast Forward Laboratory lead by Helene Larsson and Corina Oprea, which, through collaboration with local dancers, choreographers and dance managers, is to research the conditions in which contemporary dance is created, its relation with the institution, as well as the ways in which this dance form could reform institutional contexts. This programme is part of our general aim to influence the creation of cultural policies meeting the particular needs of this art form.

This year’s festival is taking place on three stages in Macedonia, partnered with the Macedonian Opera and Ballet, Macedonian National Theatre and the Youth Cultural Centre, which allows for a professional production and complete realization of the programme. This has been particularly important in line with establishing long-term partnerships which could in the long run contribute to achieving better conditions in which contemporary dance is created, presented and fostered. This approach is yet another attempt to influence the constructing of cultural policies which would facilitate the smooth continuation of these processes, thus producing better results.

We sincerely hope that with the festival programme, as with the festival’s partnership with the institution, we shall familiarize the audience with the new, innovative, contemporary dance production and present new, progressive forms by contemporary authors.

Biljana Tanurovska - Kjulavkovski
Iskra Šukarova

Programmers of the festival