Mateja Bučar: Hurry-Scurry, Stay in Line (2024)

Wednesday, 13 November at 8:00 p.m. and Thursday, 14 November at 6:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m.
performance
Cukrarna
Duration: 45 min.

In 2017, Mateja Bučar presented her work entitled On-the-Line at the venue Cankarjev dom. The original Slovenian title (Pol-na-črta) can phonetically be read both as an unbroken line drawn on the road, as well as a half-made plan. This very union of wittiness and clearly expressed choreographic problems usually taken on by Mateja Bučar constitutes her artistic signature. The performance Hurry-Scurry, Stay in Line is a kind of sequel to On-the-Line. The straight line of dancers strung together, which can only be seen as a timeline in the event that it surpasses the optical stage space, making the viewer imagine it’s endlessness, is a sort of impossible ideal of the classic choreographic orders, of an effect that satisfies the audience through an aesthetic experience. In dancing, a straight line is, horizontally, but a visual effect that effectively hides the unavoidable crookedness. It can only be perfect on a vertical level: when an object drops to the floor in a fall inevitably choreographed by gravity. Thus, Mateja Bučar, along with her Slovenian dancers both male and female, will immobilise the corporeality of contemporary dance, sit on its body members and address it as follows: »Relax. You are at home.« The rest is simply a resurrection into crooked lines. In relation to the vertical and horizontal positions of the body, Camus’s The Rebel springs to mind: »For God to be a man, he must despair.« The way to a bright future therefore leads above all through contact with the ground, use of gravity, and rebellion.

The choreography is conceived for a space with volume and length, such as the entrance hall of Cukrarna, in which a queue, or rather a line, can be clearly delineated, where it can unwind, unfold, curve, stretch and contract, agitate and calm down. On the one hand, the austerity of a clear line, on the other, the complexity, the wildness, the intricacy of the languages of movement and articulation, which will braid themselves into each other, one after the other, into each other, constantly swirling within the internally highly complex and externally utterly simple clarity of a single line. We want to capture the paradoxical moment between total liberation and strict discipline in which living, thinking and dancing are always fatally trapped, and some of this paradoxicality, which extends to contemporary life in a broader sense, is perhaps also suggested by the title: Hurry-Scurry, Stay in Line.

Idea and co-choreography: Mateja Bučar
Performers and co-creators of movement and dance: Andreja Rauch Podrzavnik, Nataša Živkovič, Kristina Aleksova, Katja Legin, Tina Valentan, Bojana Robinson, Nina Pertot Weis, Loup Abramovici, Beno Novak, Jana Menger, Jerneja Fekonja, Tini Rozman, Jernej Bizjak
Music, sound: Drago Ivanuša, J. S. Bach
Text: Robert Pfaller, Rok Vevar
Co-production: Cukrarna and CoFestival 2024 (Kino Šiška and NDA Slovenia)
Funding: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and Municipality of Ljubljana, Department of Culture.

Cover Photo: DUM

Free entry