PSR CoFestival 2022 – Gallop & Screensaver

CoFestival 2022 could be divided into three thematic strands. The first one deals with choreographic material through collective or subjective time (Moritz Ostruschnjak, Michiel Vandevelde, Mateja Rebolj and Magdalena Reiter, Alma Söderberg with Cullberg), the second one observes the body and life through the prism of virtual and digital landscapes (Yuske Taninaka, Aleksandar Georgiev with his team, Barbara Matijević and Giuseppe Chico), while the third transforms the contemporary moment into a poetic image that inevitably flows out into the wild (Věra Ondrašíková and her collective, Mala Kline). 

CoFestival 2022 was opened with Moritz Ostruschnjak’s striking dance solo Dance Instructions (It Won’t Be Like This Forever), in which an entertaining encyclopaedia of dance vitalism confronts the issues of contextual meanings. Barbara Matijević and Giuseppe Chico, returning to us after five years, deal with the sediments of our digital landscapes and habits in their performance Screenagers Vol. 2. In his solo Gallop, the young Japanese artist Yuske Taninaka uses biometric methods employed in forensic research by criminologists to address identified bodily material. Aleksandar Georgiev takes as its choreographic score the meditative and ornamental digital landscapes of Screensaver. Věra Ondrašíková and her collective in their performance Witness deal with the paths and byways of our contemporary conundrums with the changing nature. In her multidisciplinary performance Venus, Between Captivity and Flight Mala Kline unravels aspects of Botticelli’s Renaissance painterly landscape and its mythology between image, body and dream. In a remarkable performance Goldberg Variations, with which Steve Paxton once created an emblematic modern dance solo, our old acquaintance Michiel Vandevelde exposes Bach’s score to the microscopy of the contemporary dance moment to tackle issues of normative and singular bodies. Also Magdalena Reiter and Mateja Rebolj, who are again collaborating again in the performance Preludes and Fugues after two decades since their work Forma Interrogativa, place their dance present and past in Bach’s musical landscape. This year’s CoFestival will conclude with Alma Söderberg’s Noche, which, together with the renowned Cullberg ensemble, places her choreo-vocal work in an open moment of vulnerable syncope.

This edition of the CoFestival is accompanied by a discursive programme with talks, book presentations, a film programme and the launch of a new publication marking the tenth anniversary of the festival. 

Within and through LLB support we presented two performances: Screenserver by Aleksandar Georgiev and Gallop by Yusuke Taninaka.

Gallop by Yusuke Taninaka

With his solo Gallop, the young Japanese artist Yuske Taninaka enters the international arena as a meticulous researcher, an insightful analyst and a lucid creator. The artist subjects the biometric tools used by criminology and physiotherapy for the kinetic analysis of an individual’s movement to employ body weight as a factor that renders these tools questionable.
cofestival.si/2022/en/yuske-taninaka-galop-2022/

Screensaver by Aleksandar Georgiev

The choreography creates a dance rhetorical zone in which choreographic forms or procedural forms from recent dance history are brought together in the meditative image of switched-off computer screens, where they can be seen as a play of surfaces. A dance of a future nostalgia, a consolidation of differences in case we give up choreographic depth.

cofestival.si/2022/en/aleksandar-georgiev-skrinsejver-2020/

Download the CoFestival 2022 brochure in the upper right column.

Gallery pics by © Urska Bolijkovac