16

A production of the Master’s Programme The Art of Movement, co-produced by Dance Theatre Ljubljana

Running time 45 minutes. No interval.

Costume designer Katarina Škaper
Composer Philip Glass
Lighting designer LCLights

Cast
Rosana Hribar
Gregor Luštek

Mentors
Movement
Professor Tanja Zgonc

Eppur si muove! (Galileo Galilei)
How to taste a relationship, hear a movement or see a word that was never uttered but remains on tiptoes and on the surface of breastbone? How to feel speech as a series of excessive words that burden the body and slow down the pace? And yet it moves, constantly, entirely on the surface and always differently! The past years of the dance and choreographic couple Rosana Hribar’s and Gregor Luštek’s joint work and creation feature mainly a series of duets of a spectacular Tarantinoesque pas de deux. Yet in the duet 16 a new page is opened in their work and its new features are the stamina of their dancing, a softer movement tonus and the years accumulated. 

A brutal sincerity
The series of duets by Rosana Hribar and Gregor Luštek have been conceived as a performance on life that reveals an insight into the intimate and professional collaboration of a choreographic couple; for a number of years they have featured a specific movement expression that has left an indelible mark on Slovenian contemporary dance. Their choreographic uniqueness and the emotional charge create an autonomous dance language that in the duet 16 needs no external justification as it erases its own set borders as it unfolds, swaying between the personal and the intimate, language and speech, physics and chemistry, emotion and Eros. The speech of the two becomes (and remains) one in a specific unspeakable energy that crosses the fields so that the dancing out dominates the space. Their dance takes over the space, grabs it by the neck and re-shapes it leaving behind sweat in the air and a cramp in the stomach. A brutal and straightforward sincerity. Every two years they set outthe past period of life into several time units and materialise it in space; in the duet 16 they confront the external limitations of the dancer’s body (40+). And while the sediment of various dance expressions and intimate experiences acquires a more mature, resistant and endurable tonus, the desire (to dance out) manifests itself as a mirror image of the lust for life.

No one had the right word for movement and its essence. (Pino Mlakar)

Foto: Željko Stevanić

Foto: Željko Stevanić

Foto: Željko Stevanić

Foto: Željko Stevanić