Introduction

This year’s festival draws attention to the idea of connecting, collaborating, and relating. Having singled out the domain of woman as last year’s topic, more specifically, the position of women artists in the art sphere, this time we aim to shift the focus onto reflecting the notion of relation/ship. Establishing a relation touches upon the topics of coexistence, cooperation, and connections among different domains.

The theme of collaboration has emerged from our years-long cooperation in producing the joint edition of the festival. This year, already for the fifth time. Together, we have explored how different performing practices communicate, how they add to and benefit one another or even result in innovative forms of performing arts, while at the same time, we have always pursued our interest in the idea of how life enters art and vice versa.

Connection as such is opening up an insight into how relationships, interpersonal or other, begin, develop, are deepened and maintained. This year, we will address the different mode(l)s of cooperation between individuals, groups, and institutions. We will explore the forms, contents, as well as the conditions that are a source of artistic ideas.

This year’s festival offers as much as eight excellent performances of home and international artists and an appealing side programme. The festival opens with VideoPerforma, an exhibition by Enya Belak Gupta entitled S P A C E between, which brings an experiential dimension to the idea of meeting with the (un)known, followed by a dance performance OUT OF ANY PRESENT by the Portuguese choreographers Sofia Dias and Vítor Roriz.

Next on our programme is a dance performance for children FLYING COW by the Dutch dance theatre company De Stilte, hosted in cooperation with the Summer Puppet Pier. The collective will also show their multimedia performance AIN’T MISBEHAVING, which addresses connections and relations between parents and children and has parents reconsider who is actually misbehaving. After the performance, we are organizing a presentation of the combined season ticket for independent cultural organisations in Maribor MAMO (WE HAVE).

The lecture ANTHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE CRITICISM 1918 – 1960 by Rok Vevar will reveal a little-known side of contemporary dance, its connections with ballet, and address the audiences’ interest in kinaesthetic manifestations. Aphra Tesla and Dmitry Globa-Mikhailenko will show their ritual multimedia noncontemporary performance THE CLAUDEL CASE for the first time precisely at our festival.

Irena Pivka and Brane Zorman have come up with an application that will take you for a sound walk 2.WALK. The dance performance NATURE POETRY by Jasmina Križaj, Simon Wehrli, and Daniel Gisler will invite you to take a look at two contrasting elements: nature and culture, while SOLO FOR TWO VOICES presents an interpretation of a poem, the rendition of which has emerged out of an open dialogue between Magdalena Raiter, Milan Tomášik, and Anja Golob.

The festival’s art laboratory with Anja Bornšek is aimed at facilitating a space for an in-depth exploration of the phenomena of encounter and coexistence. In our public discussions, prepared in cooperation with Radio and Television Maribor, we will focus on how to establish and develop long-term cooperation and how to channel this kind of relations to other areas.

We sincerely hope that you will experience this year’s festival as a condensed series of encounters and that the performing of what’s individual and particular will flow back to collectivity.

Mojca in Jasmina