Off-beat
Off-beat
To confront breathing with the rhythm of music, the movement impulses of a contemporary dancer with baroque music, to enter into a dialogue with the originators of contemporary dance. in his dance solo Off-beat, Milan Tomášik explores a contemporary dancer's relation to rhythm, placing his inhale and exhale in relation to the coded rhythmical structures of baroque music and simultaneously moving between the external influences from the history of dance and the inner concentration of a dancer.
»For hours I would stand quite still, my two hands folded between my breasts, covering the solar plexus[...] I was seeking and finally discovered the central spring of all movement, the crater of motor power, the unity from which all diversions of movements are born, the mirror of vision for the creation of the dance.«
Isadora Duncan
ABOUT THE CREATIVE PROCESS [excerpt]
The question of the origin of dance, of a dancer's relation to the world and life that Milan Tomášik is interested in and can be discerned in the quotations he selected is an existential - ontological question. It is asked from the viewpoint of a dancing body, which through the bodily rhythms of breathing and the heartbeat, sees rhythmicity as the primary segmentation of time and life wherein both dance and music originate. [...] If I consider Baroque music and dance as a possible point of origin, I would describe it above all as a time in which the dancing of dance and the watching of dance separated and I think this performance captures both aspects. This is probably why Off-beat has always struck me as a performance on the membrane between the inner and the outer world, between the dancer's improvisation in a particular moment and his confrontation with the audience, between the audience experiencing the performance and the audience watching and being watched.
Dramaturge
ABOUT BAROQUE MUSIC [excerpt]
One of the composers of dance music for theatre in Early Baroque was of Slovenian descent - Janez Krstnik Dolar (Kamnik, ca. 1620 - Vienna, 1673). He was a member of the Jesuit order, which typically used music and theatre in education and the public manifestation of their faith. It is possible that his three preserved dance suites (i.e., balletti with the sequence of French dance movements) were originally composed for dance inserts in Jesuit school plays in which the pupils danced Baroque dances led by a dancing master. [...] The dance movements in Dolar's three preserved suites provide an interesting insight into the existence of Early Baroque suite and the possibility of examining its original dance purpose when the impulses of suite dance music and impulses of dance were still completely unified. They are therefore more suitable for researching the connection between dance and music than the "established" Baroque suite by Late Baroque composers, which is basically already a form of stylised dance music that was perceived especially as exceptional music for listening. Involving Dolar's music in the structure of contemporary dance provides the possibility of drawing on the local Slovenian music and dance heritage, while the relative anonymity of the composer also helps us avoid the use of his works in the function of recognisable musical accompaniment.
Lidija Podlesnik Tomášiková
»I think that it's important to state that the dance does not interpret the music; the music is a setting for the dance.«
Martha Graham