dance performance (premiere) – pre-festival event
Thursday, 21. 11. 2019
Elektro Ljubljana / The Old Power Station at 8 pm
Concept, direction & choreography: Jan Rozman
Performers and co-creators: Peter Frankl,Kaja Janjić,Julija Pečnikar,Daniel Petković
Dramaturgy: Varja Hrvatin
Sound and video: Vid Merlak
Costume design: Tanja Pađan (Kiss The Future)
Light design: Urška Vohar
Set design adviser: Dan Pikalo
Graphic design:Matija Medved
Video documentation: Hana Vodeb
Photo documentation: Nada Žgank
Executive producer: Sabina PotočkiProducer:Emanat
Partner: Bunker/ Old Power Station, Ljubljana, Mediterranean Dance Center, Svetvinčenat, Croatia
In collaboration with: CoFestival 2019, Ljubljana
Who is ‘me’ in ‘meme’ in ‘MEMEMEME’?
MEMEMEME is the space of a community’s flow of association, a clash of an infinite number of memes* and their reverberations. Through the performers’ bodies – organic generators and bearers of ideas – as well as digital video and sound references the performance layers gestures, movements, images and expressions. It explores the potentiality of semantic splits and gaps opened up by the fragmented nature of modern communication and questions the social mimetic drive – this almost unstoppable tendency to imitate.
*A meme is any idea that is, despite its potential randomness or nonsense, repeated and multiplied through variation and selection. As a consequence of the near universal use of the internet in the digital age, the most widespread, flexible, resilient, and circulated are precisely (viral) internet memes.
Jan Rozman (1991) is a freelance dancer, choreographer, improviser, performer, and performance maker, based in Ljubljana and Berlin. His artistic practice engages with extended embodiment, material semiotics, textures, gaps, errors and confusions, ecology, imagination, (science) fiction, and humour as he searches for relevant performative articulations of the post-internet/anthropocene era.
He studied contemporary dance at Arts Secondary School in Ljubljana and choreography at School for New Dance Development (AhK) in Amsterdam. He received his Master’s degree in solo/dance/authorship from Inter-University Centre for Dance (UdK), Berlin. He also graduated in physiotherapy from the Faculty of Health Sciences (UL), Ljubljana. In 2019, he received the Ksenija Hribar Award, presented by the Contemporary Dance Association Slovenia, as the most “promising choreographer” and was also the recipient of the DanceWeb scholarship at the ImpulseTanz Festival in Vienna.