Kaja Kraner, Neodvisni
Podobe naravnega reda

PARADA PLESA, March 2023, Daliborka Podboj

The dance performance Allegories of the Months – Attributes (2022) took place at Maribor Puppet Theatre on 4 February 2023 as part of the accompanying programme of this year’s 38th Winter Dance School in Maribor. Directed by Barbara Novakovič (direction, movement, visual concept) and performed by the well-trained creative and dance duo Beno Novak and Kristýna Šajtošová (co-creation of movement, dance), the production is part of the trilogy Allegories, 2022–2025, produced by Muzeum Institute in cooperation with the Španski borci Cultural Centre. The guest performance in Maribor was organised as part of the festival Platform before Platform, Moja Kreacija Institute, in collaboration with the 38th Winter Dance School of the (JSKD) Maribor. The performance text states that the concept [of the natural order] of the seasons began [to shift] due to climate change; with the body at the centre of the action, individual months are represented on stage by images of the active, festive or work cycle and through the personification of the types of the months from a series of images from art and literature.

In the middle of the stage, we immediately notice the illumined white floor, a rectangular performance space on which He and She try to enter, each on one’s own side. Although slowed down, the initial movements of entry are beautifully designed as an image of the start of a race. When stepping onto the whiteness at the far end of the stage, they advance as if conquering something covering the ground under their feet, which is invisible to the eyes. They march in a perfectly straight line, parallel and in unison following the rectangular outline in cyclic repetition. One gains the impression that they are incessantly marching, running and chasing their own time. When the lights illuminate the entire stage, we observe a long, narrow (golden) strip of parallel and right-angle lines on the back wall. A possible field divided into countless miniature plots or the cyclical paths of seasons and their celestial constellations turns out to be a filigree puzzle made of wooden sticks (construction of the scenic elements: Marko Udvanc). In their duet, He and She intertwine the paths of their various everyday oscillations and vortexes, which carry them, even push them, away from their established rectangular outlines, even to the edge of the stage. The dance is a whirlwind of lifts. When He is Her carrier and protector, She is suggestive in her graceful feminine poetics, especially when, with a large sieve in hand, She sows the magic of the new while He rapturously observes her. The actors are clothed in the colourful warmth of light tones: beige, brown, and blue. The hues of nature flow with the sound ambient, which the duet strengthens with their footsteps and rustling bodies (sound design: Gal Škrjanec Skaberne). The movement poetics and energy of the duet are followed as a life journey of two co-creators, reflecting both the energy of living “down here” and that of the cyclical orbits of the celestial bodies “up there”. On the dance floor, the elevations and even buoyant heights of summer provide a flexible metaphor for the desires of earthlings who constantly gaze towards the weather in the heavenly blue skies, particularly in anticipation of their fruitful harvest and the year’s monthly attributes; most likely a prelude to the trilogy about allegories and changes.

Undoubtedly, the theme of the seasons and current weather changes is (overly) comprehensive. Nonetheless, it is directorially concentrated into the movement-visual outline of this nearly one-hour performance. In the duet and execution by the two excellent co-creators and dancers, Allegories of the Months – Attributes delineates, above all, a new freshness of movement perceptions in an abstract metaphor of living and dying in the circular flow of time.

Translation: Jana Wilcoxen