Texts about / Critiques
About performance SPECIES in Kondenz festival (21.10.2016)
by anonimus spectator
A review in biscuits
dispatches / batches from Kondenz Festival 2016,
responding to the line ‘give me a pickle, I’ll make you a cookie’
Firstly let me announce a few pre-conditions to your
reading. This writing is not for the people who attended. You all know how the room felt, how the sounds of the falling scurrying singing worlds communicated to your cells. How you shifted around in your seats. How you laughed.
No, this is for those of you who did not or could
not come to Kondenz (yet).
Secondly, I am British, so I make another translation
of cookies to biscuits. Even though there are differences in squidge and snap, and of course the overall premise of the line of the festival is to take something savoury or salty and make it sweet, regardless of texture, I’m indulging in biscuits for now.
Not the homemade ones; too wholesome, too ernest. No, I am a happy little capitalist who will consider the biscuits that come in boxes, with graphics and emotive design. I consider the industrial revolution of biscuit history in order to think more about commonalities
and unique differences, and contemporary performance.
Vrste / Species
Koncept i koreografija: Jovana Rakić
Dramaturgija: Marko Pejović
Izvođenje, tekst: Jana Milenković, Mina Kontić, Nataša Šmelc, Tamara Pjević
Svetlo i ton: Marko Milinković, Bojan Palikuća
Muzika: BCH
fotografije: Maja Ven
Produkcija: Stanica Servis za savremeni ples
Podrška: Kulturni Centar Rex, Ministarstvo kulture i informisanja Republike Srbije i festival Van Okvira
Meritocracies do not allow for scurrying. You would
not stay on the floor to fly. This performance is a delicate and forceful, intelligent and dramaturgically snappy flow of tempos and textures. It asks me to mis-comprehend my internalised bodily knowledges. It toys with recognisable and evocative forms, making
pastiches and corroding dominant gestures. It is not immediately obvious what biscuit will make sense to do justice to this elegy. An elegy? To four living breathing pulsating creatures who are surely not at the edge of doom? In some ways it is an elegy for
what cost? Some major confusion and alienation. What does an alienated biscuit look like?
the moments when choreography was split off from the techniques developed for and because of it, then canonised in conservatoires, taken from their contexts and made a discourse in their own right for the sake of tuning bodily knowledge and facility. But at
is a yellowy double layer of biscuit with minimal cream fondant in the middle. It was, incidentally invented in 1908, the same year Jose Limon [http://limon.org/]
was born. It Limon who spread the techniques of Doris Humphrey across Europe. No bad thing. Just an interesting legacy, still being processed more than a 100 years later. I don’t think the Custard Cream has experienced quite such fame.
On SPECIES in Serbian- during Bitef festival- september 2016:
