On 7-12 November 2015, the Lublin Dance Theatre and the Centre for Culture in Lublin will host the 19th International Dance Theatres Festival. The organizers hope the event will spark a debate on dance by grafting it in the urban space and visiting the areas off the beaten Festival track. In their own words, ?remembering the times when the term ?dance theatre? created confusion amongst its spectators, when many considered the very idea of putting those two artistic formulas together unthinkable, we decided to research the capabilities for presenting dance in seemingly unsuitable spaces.?
?Is a factory a natural setting for presenting dance? Is dance as approachable in an art gallery as it is in a commercial venue? Or maybe even more so? How will a performance lecture be perceived in a space used for presenting knowledge in less dynamic ways? What kind of relations can be generated between space and movement? Can a city be used as a repository of stages for dance presentation??
?Searching for those specific locations had turned out to be one of the most rewarding aspects of our idea. Contemporary cities are dynamic organisms, they are in a state of constant change, and as such they are always ?in motion?. The cost of this mobility is that certain parts of a city can sometimes be forgotten, while others surface into recognition. Our search has led us to revisit many among such forsaken areas. As a result, we have uncovered new dimensions of Lublin, a city we live and work in everyday.?
?Still, we are not entirely abandoning our main headquarters, the Centre for Culture in Lublin. Our main stage will still be a venue for many a dance wonder! Some of our artistic guests will present their works brought to life in surroundings unusual for a dance creation process, from mountain tops to desert sands. Those artists will try to transpose the experience gained through creation to our main stage. Others, on the other hand, will change the stage into a laboratory of sorts, where they will play a game of perception with their audience, while also questioning the existing norms of who should be performing on stage, and how they should do it.?
?The International Dance Theatres Festival is much more than just dance performances, though. As was the case in the past, the 19th edition of the Festival will include contemporary dance workshops, dance critique classes and conversations with artists during which our audiences will be able to get to know our outstanding guests in a more direct and personal way.?
In the grain of its past editions, the Festival will confront the work of senior artists with the representatives of young generation dance artists in Europe, including the Austrian collective SILK Fluegge which fuses urban dance with breakdance and contemporary dance; Portugues artist Marco da Silva Ferreira, who turns to the idiom of street dance to build the tension between the individual and collective urban identities; British duo Igor & Moreno, representing the 2015 Aerowaves priority companies.
Also performing will be artists from France (Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard and Noé Soulier), Israel (Liat Dror Nir Ben gal Dance Company) and the Czech Republic (Markéta Vacovská, Lenka Dusilová & Spitfire Company & Damúza ), as well as a group of artists showcasing Eastern Europe: Anton Safonov, Buchok ART Family (Ukraine) and Sergey Poyarkov & Igor Chipovsky (Belarus).
Returning to the Lublin Dance Theatre will be Külli Roosna & Kenneth Flak, with whom the Lublin-based company collaborated in Stalking Paradise (2014). During the Festival Roosna and Flak will present another episode in their trilogy Wild Places : : Mountain. The trilogy touches upon a major issue of our time: the relation between people and the environment, which the duo inspect and translate into artistic initiatives in three different sceneries (mountain, city, body).
British artist Claire Cunningham will present a piece inspired by Hieronymus Bosch and performed to Zoe Irvine?s hypnotic music. Cunningham?s performance takes on issues of religion and the valuation of non-normative body in the light of religious art, rendered through a series of trials of body and faith.
Poland will be represented by the Podlasie Dance Association, who will present The Beauty of Lifechoreographed byKarolina Garbacik; also appearing will be Aleksandra Hirszfeld (direction), Marta Ziółek (choreography), and Magdalena Kuciewicz (stage design), who will present their performance project Monadology. Treatise on relationality, which premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. The show has also been presented in Szczecin (TRAFO ? Trafostacja Sztuki); its Lublin presentation will be hosted by the Labirynt Gallery.
The 19th edition of the Festival will conclude with the presentation of the legendary Susanne Linke (in collaboration with Renegade), who will present her ?Ruhr-Ort?, in which she revisits her 1991 choreography which focused on the steel mill workers and miners. In Linke?s piece, physical exhaustion eventually becomes a form of dance, amounting to impressive images of the toil of the working class in the Ruhr.
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Downloads:
Tickets for the 19th International Dance Theatres Festival may be purchased starting 2 November at the Centre for Culture in Lublin ticket office (ul. Peowiaków 12), and on the day of the performance (1 hour before each show).
Single entry tickets for performances on 7-12 November 2015:
– reduced PLN 20
– full price PLN 30
– tickets for Ruhr-Ort, Ein Tanzfonds Erbe Projekt by Susanne Linke& Renegade PLN 30/40 (only at the Centre for Culture ticket office)
Booklet tickets (only at the Centre for Culture ticket office):
– reduced PLN 150
– full price PLN 250
– IDTF and Centrum Ruchu workshops participants ? PLN 120