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33 turns
Ljubljana, 3 June 2011, Daliborka Podboj, Parada plesaOur First Ballet Performance: 33 Turns by Sanja Neškovič Peršin
Dance project by the Ljubljana-based ballet soloist in an excellent stage performance by ballerinas Ana Klašnja, Alena Medichi and Tjaša Kmetec
The dance project 33 Turns by Sanja Neškovič Peršin is certainly the first ballet performance to be viewed on the local stages. Moreover, its aesthetics and artistic design also permit 33 Turns to be placed among the modern fine art installations, in which the living ballet tissue is directly installed, placed into the space of the visitors, viewers.
In the same way as Ana Klašnja (the unforgettable Juliet from Yourij Vamos's ballet Romeo and Juliet) and Tjaša Kmetec (the lyrical Syllphyde from Bournonvil's ballet La Syllphyde) are soloists of the Balet Ljubljana, Sanja Neškovič Peršin is a ballet soloist of the Ljubljana Opera and Bellet House. As for the third performing ballerina, Alena Medichi, I can sadly say she got no regular engagement neither in Balet Ljubljana nor in Maribor in spite of being one of the best graduates of the Ljubljana-based Ballet High School and showcasing equal performances with the Ljubljana soloists in her occasional appearances on the Ljubljana stage. I say sadly, because several engaged foreigners do not have the charisma displayed in her dancing by the ballerina Alena Medichi, who came to Slovenia as a little girl, a student of the Russian ballet school, and could in her childhood years already manage the ballet steps on the tips of her ballet shoes. I have been following her performances already at the time of her schooling at the Zagorje-based music school with the ballet teacher Vojka Kokošinek.
Well, Sanja Neškovič, despite her classical ballet profession and successful solo works, as well as modern ballet roles, kept looking for encouragement in the contemporary dance field, ranging among the contemporary choreographers with her dance debut Woof Woof Suzana in November 2000 at the big stage of the Ljubljana Youth Theatre. Even then, the author's performance exposed the body of a ballerina and her living space, where the ballerina stands on solid legs, stuck in a classic ballet form, and is caught in a space form of an inflated air construction hiding her battles and wantings, when nothing but a tiny little woof woof is able to release her inner tension.
And if the choreographer Sanja Neškovič in her dance debut built a transparent enclosure made up of an inflatable construction between the stage and the viewers, her latest choreographic work 33 Turns places the viewer directly into the event on-stage, moving the seats to the back of the stage and thus demolishing the enclosure dividing the stage manipulation and the auditorium. The viewers therefore find themselves in direct contact with the backstage of the ballet hustle and bustle, with the ballerinas, who in their costumes (ballet tootoos and shoes) represent the characters of ballet heroes, but behind the stage curtain become everyday humans involved in certain actions and states.
The viewer thus finds himself in the geometry of the stage at its back side, the stage remaining confined with its side enclosures, while the author chose the fourth side to be black darkness with occasional light manipulation, much like an illusion encouraging the mysteriousness of expectation. At a certain moment, a piercing sound and shaded light turned this black side into an imaginary curtain or even a big, upright scanner scanning the ballerina, making that which was at the back side appear at the front at a given moment. Even though this was but a moment on stage, it managed to vividly depict the state of the performer when the curtain drops and an invisible gap appears between him and the viewers.
The author did not forget the ballet pole, which was quite imperceptibly set among the seat rows, with ballerinas in their characteristic positions leaning on it, thus providing a short ballet pause for their legs.
At another time, we see ballerinas moving screen boxes across the stage, but even this action appears to be a fine arts illustration, given that they are wearing their ballet equipment; even though their movement is natural, it is still caught in the ballet costume form. Another fresh and depictive feature was the colour light manipulation undulating in a series of dotty forms on the sides of the stage, across the objects and viewers, originating from a screen background.
Sanja N. Peršin has proved to be a sensitive observer of her professional medium and the ballet scene on which she has been active for all these years. It seemed like the performance brought to life the artistic images from the pictures of the great Degas (1834-1917), who managed to detail the states and positions of the ballerinas of his age with an eye of a painter. Between the painter's ballet portraits and Sanja's ballerina poses, it seems like not much has changed during these past hundred years, which can be expected given the classic art in question, which still, in this modern world, keeps inspiring its fans. Thus the choreographer's 33 Turns sound out like a bridge between the historic current of both time periods, in which she was able to place the classic virtues of ballet art into the stage framework of the up-to-date present. She did so with mastery and a deep reflection on art, imagination, the virtual and the real.
The romantic of the ballet aesthetics was experienced live and from up close in the performed excerpts of ballet shows: the Dying Swan/Michele Fokine, Giselle/Marius Petipa, the Bluebird from Sleeping Beauty/Marius Petipa, and in the expression of performance by the three ballerinas, when Ana Klašnja, Alena Medichi and Tjaša Kmetec at a certain moment transformed from the unusual stage activists into the romantic creatures of their roles and into artists, admired by the viewers.
The fine arts set design and lighting design was the responsibility and certainly an achievement of Damjan Kracina, who also designed the casting of the contemporary grave of Giselle according to Ana Klašnja's image. Klašnja in the danced excerpt also stands upright from the casted sarcophagus, and since it is a ballet cast, the plaster also eternalizes her "grand battement". Due to the dramaturgy by Jana Pavlič, the performance 33 Turns is interestingly intertwined with the quotations (muzeum info 2011) from the book by Antonin Artaud The Theatre and its Double (translated into Slovenian by Aleš Berger, Knjižnica MGL 119). It can be read from the quotations and the chosen dramaturgic base that Artaud imaginatively addresses the "athletes of the body and heart" and speaks of the vision of a female dancer in tight costumes, who "no longer looks like herself, but like her own bust".
Regardless of what came before: the stage plot by Sanja Neškovič or the drama base in the dramaturgy of Jana Pavlič, the performance 33 Turns is a complex artistic event in which the confined square of the cultural venue manages to intertwine philosophy, ballet, music, video and light effects, and simultaneously do away with the boundaries between the real and the virtual.
DELO, Culture section, 14 May 2011, Zala Dobovšek
Fleeing and Returning Ballet
In an abstract and chamber ambient, partly rimmed with the sensitive closeness of the audience and constant, mostly aggressive multimedia interventions, three ballerinas (Ana Klašnja, Alena Medich and Tjaša Kmetec) rotate the settled motorics of the ballet expression. Since they have been deprived of their consistent implementation of a solid plot or a uniformed choreographic matrix, they no longer represent the symbol of the usual elevated lightness, but peel away the ballet aesthetics in a hacked up, distinctively fragmentary dramaturgy, sequentially penetrating its initiative core - the hard and disciplined physiological mechanics. Ballet first of all means drill, practice, perfectionism, movement mechanics and (painstaking) precision, which - slightly paradoxically - actually "relaxes", detaches and takes a distance from itself only when it is combined with symphonies and scene arrangements, in order to provide the viewer with an integral pleasure (without guilty conscience).
It seems that the usual ballet form does not deny or hide its painstaking skill, it does, however, decorate it, blur it. With the support of the classical music and the stage splendour, it "humanises" it, so to speak. The performance 33 Turns, choreographed by Sanja Nešković Peršin, featuring dramaturgy by Jana Pavlič, visual image by Damijan Kracina and the indispensable musical scores by Sašo Kalan and Camille Saint-Saëns does not allow for this advertising transition and, with its sinister (scenic as well as spiritual) tone, holds on to that same place of expression where the body of the dancer has not yet modified into a concrete (fictional) figure.
The ballerinas, who still keep reaching out for the original ballet language and convey themselves through it - as far as their manoeuvring space would allow it - are deprived of their symbolic multidimensionality. At first, the bodies on the outside mostly variate between machine-like accuracy, flat visual beauty, therefore only as a prescribed subject being controlled by a higher force (the constant and high level of the multimedia dictate). As creatures, they are subjected to the shifting of atmospheres dominantly controlled by the electronic music, geometric light outlines, suggestive video projections and clearly defined transitions that shape the performance as a well considered construct.
The psychological contours of the performers are dismounted, deprived of past or future, however, they are still refined and alluring in terms of movement, but handicapped in their servitude to the "traditional" artistic ideology. The blockade which contracts the learned graciousness somehow manages to suck them in; the distant and glassy looks in their eyes are all too aware of their position of "usefulness and subordination".
With that, they trigger an intriguing multi-layered cut in which the criticism of inexorable artistic norms arises, where simultaneously, the organic body is worshipped as a metaphor for advanced technological apparatus, which in order to function flawlessly, must first overcome the biological extremes and above all collapse deep within itself.
To sum up, the dancing (ballet) body as a spiral of denied spontaneity and as an illustration of perfection and simultaneously raw, unprocessed material, cutting and shifting the mechanics of creative consciousness.
