Pictured: Ultima Vez, What the Body Does Not Remember.Photo: Danny Willems.
Sunday, 30 June will see the start of the 20th jubilee International Contemporary Dance Conference and Festival of Dance Art in Bytom. The conference will last until 7 July. On 6 July it will feature a special guest – the legendary Ultima Vez ensemble with the revival of What the Body Does Not Remember. The performance premiered in Haarlem, the Netherlands, on 12 June 1987. Back then Wim Vandekeybus and his Ultima Vez stunned the world. “A brutal confrontation of dance and music,” was how the performance was branded when Vandekeybus and the composers Thierry de Mey and Peter Vermeersch were handed the prestigious Bessie Award.
About the performance:
Confrontations between dancers; attractiveness versus rejection; and an eruption of aggression and danger – this is Wim Vandekeybus’ world.
Wim Vandekeybus about What the Body Does Not Remember:
“The intensity of moments when you don’t have a choice, when other things decide for you, like falling in love, or the second before the accident that has to happen; suddenly they appear, with no introduction, important for me because of their extremeness rather than for the significance to be given to them. The decision to use this as a basic material for a theatrical composition is at least a paradoxical challenge, considering a theatrical event as repeatable and controllable. Perhaps when all is said and done, the body doesn’t remember either and everything is a subtle illusion of lack which helps to define or exhaust the game.”
The festival’s audience will be given a taste of wide array of genres and dance techniques. Among the Polish participants are the Polish Dance Theatre, Lublin Dance Theatre, and Anna Piotrowska and Joanna Chitruszko, while foreign guests include, apart from Ultima Vey, Germany’s Folkwang Studio from Essen, Tomer Zirkilevich Group, the duo Yossi Berga & Odeda Grafa from Israel, Robert Przybył, who works outside of Poland (mainly in Germany), and Denmark’s Jens Bjerregaard. All the performances will be shown at the main stage of the Silesian Dance Theatre [Śląski Teatr Tańca] at pl. Karin Stanek 1 in Bytom. The festival will also include workshops on different dance techniques.
Find out more at the organiser’s website: http://www.stt.art.pl/en/
