Edyta Kozak & Mirek Kowalczyk / Made Inc.: Plik 01 / File 01
Magdalena Reiter & Katarzyna Chmielewska / Dada von Bzdülöw Theatre: All these Apropos
Gábor Góda / Company Artus: Cain's Hat
Maja Delak: "6agon"




Edyta Kozak & Mirek Kowalczyk / Made Inc.: Plik 01 / File 01

Poland

video, dance, music: Made Inc.
dancers: Magdalena Jêdra, Rafa³ Dziemidok, Beatriz Blanco

File 01 is the type of project that utilises the means, methods and technologies of the present post-industrial world in an attempt at defining it. It seeks to show the situation of humanity in the time of media and virtual worlds, advertising and information campaigns. Present-day art does not work with moral statements, it does not even comment on obvious damage being done. Instead, it allows facts to be told and images to have an impact, letting our consciousness and subconscious be the judge.
          The creators of the File 01 performance have constructed a sort of educational programme, a play about the present world in which they combine video projection and live movement performances of people and toys with sounds, and contemporary music; stimulating various environments and images. The individual scenes begin and end with a siren and are controlled by an amplified voice - a "Big Brother" to whose orders everybody succumbs. The individual sequences are combined through coincidence - this is the only certainty on which you can always rely. At the beginning of the performance the audience decides by means of a lottery which images they are going to see, and in which order. Contexts are created by chance and are a question of an individual interpretation. It is reminiscent of Cunningham's Events and the Laterna Magica kinoautomat (audience-controlled film) at the same time. The authors aim to emphasise the present-day autonomous existence of facts and events, the kind of parallel existences in which people can remain in isolation like individual TV channels, existing without receiving the attention of others...

Made Incorporation was founded in 2001 by Edyta Kozak and Miros³aw Kowalczyk, who have been working for years in various artistic fields, making projects including choreographies, visual works, installations, music concerts, and video. Their individual and group works have been presented in Poland and abroad. Plik 01/File 01 is their first joint project. Miros³aw Kowalczyk's work is always presented under nick-names such as: U A I. The main goal of the group is the realization of interdisciplinary projects where selected artists are dealing with various artistic genres in order to seek new forms of expression and ask questions about the position of artists and of humanity in the present.

MADE Inc., Jutrzenki 111, Warsaw, Poland, tancer@wa.home.pl






Magdalena Reiter & Katarzyna Chmielewska / Dada von Bzdülöw Theatre: All these Apropos

Poland

concept & choreography: Magdalena Reiter
dancers: Magdalena Reiter & Katarzyna Chmielewska
music: Mazzol, D. Troop
production: X-group (PARTS & Brussels 2000)

The Beckett short story Enough served as the creators' inspiration for this impressive, intimate pas de deux in which they gradually generate the atmosphere of intimacy between friends in a sophisticated fashion and with the mythical grace of two female energies. The focus is on communication and relationship- but also on femininity - femininity celebrated in black dresses barely concealing the dancers' breasts, like spider webs. Physical intimacy, variations on movement in sync, completions of the partner's step variations, and parallel impulses are the harmonizing means of communication.
          This piece of choreography is a meeting point between literature and dance and to some extent its theme is embodied in the text. The dancers speak in a text of prose and verse at first, but then move on to a similar language of movements. Once the spoken words are uttered aloud we find their content cannot be understood, their meaning escapes us. Through the microphone, the dancers speak out orders, slogans, and incomplete sentences. The sentences stir up uneasiness and cannot be completed. They are ruins of a text that cannot communicate anything. As in Beckett, the words are as a trap. In the interplay of the bodies however, the rhythm of their breath, and in their shared dynamics and calmness there is specific content and coherence. The choreography releases unusual moods in the space. It radiates with the serenity of the Zen garden, but also with erotic tension, working with both the symptoms of misunderstanding and with the intimacy of shared secrets.

Katarzyna Chmielewska - graduated from the National Ballet School in Gdañsk, and studied at the renowned P.A.R.T.S. studios in Brussels under the leadership of Anna Teresa De Keersmaerker. She has worked in the Baltic Opera and Dance Theatre of Gdañsk and performs also at the Municipal Theatre in Gdynia. She has been associated with Dada von Bzdülöw Theatre since 1993. She has choreographed the performances Sonata, and Lapiti versus the Rest of the World (Lapiti kontra reszta œwiata). At The Crash international festival in K³odzko she received an award for her role in It Wasn't, It Won't Be, So It Isn't (Nie bylo, nie bendzie czyli nie ma).

Magdalena Reiter - graduated from the National Ballet School in Gdañsk and P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels. She performed in Pierre Droulez, E. Corbetta, and A. Tallis' Hypothetical stream 3. She has collaborated with Dada von Bzdülöw since 1998.

Dada von Bzdülöw - founded in 1993, becoming the first dance theatre in Poland. Since its inception it has focused on the creation of performances where there is free choice of creative methods.

Dada von Bzdülöw Theatre, Klub Zak, ul. Grunwaldska 195/197, 80-826 Gdañsk, Poland, ibzdyl@wp.pl, kasia_chmielewska@wp.pl






Gábor Góda / Company Artus: Cain's Hat

Hungary

direction, choreography: Gábor Goda
dancers: Tamás Bakó, Gábor Goda, Bea Gold, Erzsi Kiss, Béla Pinter
lighting design: Gábor Kocsis
music: Erzsi Kiss
costumes: Kriszta Remete

When the Artus company first came to Prague two years ago as part of the "This is the East!" showcase to perform the Hungaro-Israeli piece Gas Heart, we wrote about it in our magazine under the title "Land of the Black Hats" (in Taneèní zóna 2/2000). It discussed how dancers from "the poorer Europe" are magically attracted to the leitmotiv of the black hat. The magic lives on as Artus returns to us with the word "hat" in its title.
          A hat can be worn on the head as metaphysical protection, or from we can create a face out of it and it becomes a metaphysical mask. - Two dancers, faces bared and face-to-face. Intimately, carelessly, they start touching each others' faces. Each covers the face of his partner and "removes" it. Not even Emmanuel Lévinas (the Lithuanian-French philosopher) could better capture the existential dimension of the face of "the other". This taboo, the reaching into the face of another person is physically powerful, unbearably intimate and brutal at the same time, full of symbolism, old testament-style symbolism no less. It could be brotherly love, or it could be brotherly hate.
          I don't know why, but it seems to me that myth, that primordial material of the narrative, always seems to induce dance makers to use primordial substances - stone, wood… Here as well, we see stones, sticks, staves - though the dancers of Artus are thinking cabbalistic thoughts under their hats. Two pairs in black with wooden staves in hand create their own sign-language made up of gestures and movements of their staves, are these Central European mudras in development…?

The ARTUS Hungarian Performing Art Company was founded in 1985 by Gábor Goda, principal choreographer and artistic director of the theatre. Recently ARTUS began incorporating other art forms and new technologies into its work in order to transcend the borders of contemporary dance and explore new content. The ARTUS-STUDIO centre for contemporary Hungarian dance was founded in 1997 for the same reasons.
          ARTUS has an established position in the national dance scene and many of its performances have been awarded with prestigious Hungarian awards. Its works have played on four different continents. Recent works include Gas-Heart (in co-production with the Vertigo company of Israel, 1999), Noah-Trilogy I-III (1999), Chinvat - The Ninth Bridge (2000), and Einstein's Dreams (2001).

Company Artus, Kökörcsin u. 9, 1113 Budapest, Hungary, artus.goda@nextra.hu, www.artus.hu






Maja Delak: "6agon"

Slovenia

choreography: Maja Delak
dancers: Neda Hafner, Barbara Kanc, Bara Kolenc, Špela Medved, Ana Štefanec, Nataša Živkoviè
lighting design: Jaka Šimenc
audio: Damjan Delak
stage design: Marko Peljhan
costumes, masks: Neda Hafner

The acronymic title of this piece seems to be a reference to ancient Greece. And indeed the choreographer looked for inspiration for this spiritual and ecological composition to Greek history and cultural values. Like the young sacrificial offering, princess or girl going through the process of initiation, she endures six ritual dances of youth, a test, a fight - agón, the purpose of which is the summoning or renewal of lost experiences. It is the expression of a reaction to the relativities in our world, speed, ambition, self-control, and the loss of natural passions.
          The performers draw their main thematic elements - sorrow, love, the chorus and suicide - from the play Antigone, and get their fundamental choreographic structures and pictorial gist from the performance style of Greek tragedies. Like a Greek tragic chorus they take up masks to cover their faces, names, age and other identifying characteristics, letting their bodies speak in pure movement, free of all commentary. The words spoken by their bodies are the radical expression of an opinion, and this is why the dance is functional and not ornamental. They must continue on their path all the way to its end and surrender their bodies in order to make this test, contest - agón valid. They must keep dancing until they are dancing with death, in the dance of the chosen - one of the great theme of dances, as important now as it was in prehistoric times.

Maja Delak - dancer, choreographer, and teacher. After graduating from ballet school in Ljubljana she wanted to devote herself to contemporary dance but in the eighties this was not possible in Slovenia. Except for occasional workshops with foreign teachers, there was no way to study in this field. Delak left Slovenia to study in Angers, France at the CNDC L'Esquisse. In 1993 she joined the world-renowned EN-KNAP company, led by Iztok Kovaè. At first she worked as an dancer, but in 1995 she presented her choreographic debut - Manifestation of an Introvert which went through several different versions. In 1999 she present ed her piece Gina & Miovanni and with this her works became part of the group's repertory. Since 1999 she has been devoting much of her time to teaching dance in the new contemporary dance program at the Arts School in Ljubljana.

En-Knap Company / Maja Delak, Metelkova 6, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia, marija@drogart.org, www.en-knap.com