Fot. Teatr ROZBARK w Bytomiu.
On Tuesday, 12 September 2017, the Theatre Confrontations Festival held a press conference for the 22nd edition of the event, scheduled for 6-15 October. The programme of this year?s edition is diverse both in terms of themes and genres, and contains three pieces representing the field of new choreographic research, each by a member of a different generation of artists. Matteo Fargion, famous for his collaboration with the British conceptual choreographer Jonathan Burrows, returns to Lublin with a piece created by the only professional dance company in Europe made up by ?retired? (i.e. over 40) dance practitioners and choreographers. The company will present excerpts from their latest piece inspired by Schubert?s Alder King.
Drawing on pole dancing and the hostess profession, the Filipino dancer Eisa Jocson explores the work and images of the dancing body in the services industry, presenting various ways of identity- and gender-shaping, as well as the politics of seduction, while also touching upon social mobility in the Philippines. While at the Lublin festival, Jocson will present Death of the Pole Dancer & Macho Dancer.
Agata Maszkiewicz will visit Lublin with her new piece, developed in collaboration with Vincent Trimarche. Still Life focuses on the relation of humans with everyday objects and nature. Maszkiewicz and This hour-long interview/performance invokes statements of Alex, Jenny, Marco, and Emma on such topics as their surroundings, the nature of things, and death.
Also presented at the festival will be Natten ? one of the latest pieces by M?rten Sp?ngberg, dubbed one of the loudest dance events of the recent years. Sp?ngberg is a choreographer, performer, teacher and art critic; his concepts pose a challenge to the foundations of choreography. Natten is his ?horror dance?. According to Sp?ngberg, it is only the night that allows humans to really exist, escape the tyranny of time, nestle in the darkness that does not denote death but pure life.
About the pieces:
Dance On: Extracts from (7)dialogues ? artistic director/composer: Matteo Fargion
8 October, 6 pm
What do you get when composer Matteo Fargion reduces Schubert?s Erlkönig to its basic structure and hands this over to six highly skilled dance artists and six renowned choreographers and theatre makers to engage in a dialogue on stage? The answer is an extraordinary experiment yielding six very individual and personal solos. Christopher Roman has been working with the Bulgarian performance artist Ivo Dimchev, Amancio Gonzalez with the London based visual artist Hetain Patel, Jone San Martin with the British director, author and performer Tim Etchells, Ty Boomershine with the New York choreographer Beth Gill, Brit Rodemund with the London-based choreographer and dancer Lucy Suggate and Frédéric Tavernini with the French choreographer Noé Soulier. These distinctive voices come together to create work of pure dance, performance and dance theatre. Matteo Fargion is the seventh interlocutor as well as the composer of the music and the overall piece, in an evening that introduces the DANCE ON ENSEMB LE.
During Konfrontacje Teatralne Festival, 3 selected solos will be presented.
Eisa Jocson: Death of the Pole Dancer & Macho Dancer
10-11 October, 9 pm
Death of the Pole Dancer interrogates the way we look at what we think we look at. The audience is brought to reflect on what they witness: a woman during the act of pole dancing. The performance renegotiates notions such as voyeurism and restrain, vulnerability and violence, sexuality and powe
Macho Dancer is a solo piece of a woman performing a macho dance. Her becoming a macho dancer challenges our perception of sexuality and questions gender as a tool for social mobility: the macho dancer through his practice is pushed into a marginal, weak position in society. However the image that a macho dancer simulates is that of a strong male. The woman performing a macho dance assimilates that role of a strong male, and with transgressing gender; the performer also seems to change her social status.
Agata Maszkiewicz & Vincent Tirmarche: Still Life
12 October, 10 pm and 13 October, 9 pm
What was the first thing you bought? Is there something you would like to pass on? If you were a Pharaoh, what thing would you like to be buried with?
Still life is a piece that focuses on our relation with objects and things. In a performance-long interview, Agata Maszkiewicz together with Vincent Tirmarche bring into life the stories of Jenny, Marco, Alex and Emmy. Avoiding the real presence of any object on stage, she plays with the notions of becoming, adjusting, discovering, appearing, redoing, creating. Her body replays, acts, repeats, gets still, restarts, rests. The dance choreographed together with costumes, the light, the sound and the videos, manages to create a still-life in itself.
M?rten Sp?ngberg: Natten
14 October, 10 pm
A few hours before dawn. You are in your half-sleep, but you are still observing what is going on around you. You have just discovered that although it is past the fourth hour of the show the dancers are still engaged in their meticulous performance of the script. You drift off. Or so it seems. You are unsure of what you have witnessed or what you have desired to notice. Natten takes place between the night and the day, light and darkness, dance and stillness, alertness and dream-like reverie. It is an act of poetry regarding the action and experience of time ? perhaps one of the most important you can encounter in theatre.
One of the new works by M?rten Sp?ngberg and one of the most acclaimed events in the European performing arts field in recent years. Sp?ngberg is a choreographer, performer, teacher, and art critic, but above all, he?s an artist with ground-breaking ideas who challenges the concept of choreography. Natten is his ?dance of horror.? For Sp?ngberg, the night is the only place where a human being can truly be, where he can escape the tyranny of time, in a darkness that does not represent death but life. Natten is a six-and-a half-hour journey into an abstract eternity and an unfathomable depth. It is a bubble that you can step into and out of whenever you want. You are allowed to look, dream, sleep? But there you must face your own monsters.
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Downloads:
Festival website: http://konfrontacje.pl
