ALLEGORIES, (2022-2025)

Calendar 2025
Synthesis performance of the Allegories trilogy

The trilogy ALLEGORIES, 2022–2025 was concluded with the performance Calendar. The conceptual point of departure for the project is the Fontana Maggiore in Perugia, a structure comprising two marble basins and a bronze bowl, topped by three bronze female figures supporting an amphora from which water flows.

Dancer Urša Vidmar, appearing as a Grace-like figure, holds a sphere in her hand (Raphael’s famous representation of the Three Graces shows them holding spherical objects, M. C. Escher is also known for exploring the spherical form).

In the performance, the water pitcher symbolises the astrological sign of Aquarius and also recalls the fountain, whose relief panels and sculptural figures were executed by the outstanding thirteenth-century sculptors Nicola Pisano and Giovanni Pisano. Iconographically, the scene is connected to genre and female portrait representations depicting acts of labour (as in later seventeenth-century Dutch painting).

The scenes of the performance are traversed by two principles, which also constitute the thematic cycles of the Fontana Maggiore: the mechanical arts (Artes Mechanicae) and the liberal arts (Artes Liberales), complemented by the astrological signs. The staging does not aim to encompass the entire iconographic corpus of the fountain’s relief panels but instead focuses on a broad perspective that captures the content from a particular vantage point.

Thus, we see the figure of a Grace with the sphere, followed by spring’s awakening of tree leaves, merely suggesting the well-known pose of the sculpture known as Spinario – the Boy with Thorn (who appears also in Heinrich von Kleist’s philosophical essay “On the Marionette Theatre”). This moment – embodied in the dancer’s wrapping of her foot and the putting on of pointe shoes – outlines the month of March under the sign of Aries. Harvesting and threshing emerge in the cycle of June, expressed through the dancing protagonist’s forcefully repetitive movement on pointe, which then spills into August – the time of gifts, labour and burdens associated with stocking up for winter. The astrological sign Libra follows, unfurling directly from a sack of gifts, namely, citrus fruits. The dancer transitions from Artes Mechanicae (harvesting and threshing, ploughing and sowing) into a series of personifications of the zodiac signs, through which the sign of Scorpio is sketched in ballet variations.

The music, created by Gal Škrjanec Skaberne, includes a monotonous enumeration of colours and shades tied to the monthly cycles: palettes of yellow for spring, green for summer, and autumn coloured with shades of red, etc. The whole is enveloped by Edvard Kocbek’s poetic ode to buckwheat.

The lighting design by Andrej Petrovčič creates atmospheres of calendrical states, spanning the tension between vita activa (the time of labour) and vita contemplativa (the time of contemplation), connected to the combinatorial logic of the zodiac.

The journey concludes with the intertwining of these principles in the shimmering movements of the arms, simultaneously representing the calendar itself and reminding us of time’s transience, our connection with the movement of the cosmos, and the celebration marking the year’s end.

B.N., H.P.