Andreja Rauch Podrzavnik: Fold (2024)
Monday, 24 November at 9:00 p.m.
artistic performance event in three parts
Kino Šiška, Katedrala
Duration: 60 min.
Andreja Rauch Podrzavnik’s Fold (2024) is the final part of a trilogy, which also includes Carry On (2021) and Origami (2023). A large white paper sheet, like a blank canvas or a dance floor, is a key feature in all three choreographies. Through its progressive use, this sheet gradually accumulates barely perceptible traces, forming a marbled texture born from the expenditure of choreographic grounds. It is vital to understand that this white sheet metamorphoses the object of dance into a precise inventory of its own traces. The performance’s constructivist elements reach a crescendo in Fold, which makes clear with its central visual reference to the Baroque that dance modernism and postmodern dance are significantly indebted to this era. The Baroque’s ornateness is not the only reason for this debt; it is also due to the way its construction unfolded across various media. The Baroque is the aesthetic paradigm through which dance established itself as an art form in Europe in the mid-seventeenth century.
Fold premiered at Kino Šiška on 6 September 2024. The choreography transforms Kino Šiška’s Cathedral into a multi-location ambient, which, in a Brechtian manner, imbues the performance space with the architectural characteristics of volume, shells, and surfaces, as well as all the production facilities of the hall. These elements are alternately illuminated during functional actions – both artistic and technical work. The cast, encompassing and mobilising the entire production team, is placed into “zero-degree movement forms,” from which dance then propels into more complex choreo-kinetic sequences. The work confidently establishes a series of spatial, material, lighting, and sound parallels for the dance-movement sequences, expanding the choreography into other media. It injects significant aesthetic-historical paradigms (constructivism, Baroque) into the piece, providing dance art with much-needed oxygen beyond an exclusive presentism. Fold’s key spatial characteristic is a horizontal line. Over the course of the performance, this gradually folds centrifugally or centripetally into a spiral, leading to a meaningful concluding act. As this line transforms, so too does the spectator’s gaze. Fold is a spatial dispositif of a Klein bottle. A non-orientable geometric body where exterior and interior are one and the same. It transposes elements of dance into spatial applications of the body. The “development of movement” (movement progression) and “projection of movements” (movement projection), along with a series of subsystem elements, constitute the compositional backbone of Andreja Rauch Podrzavnik’s choreographic work. These serve as an impulsive, somatic, and formal engine that pushes corporeal work beyond the skin for movement to continue. Beyond the immediate moment, bodily privacies, or concrete space, dance vibrates in an extended public time. Andreja Rauch Podrzavnik’s Fold, along with Carry On, and Origami, are undoubtedly significant achievements in dance creativity within the Republic of Slovenia.
Concept and choreo-direction: Andreja Rauch Podrzavnik
Spatial design: Peter Rauch
Lighting design: Jaka Šimenc
Movement design: Katja Legin, Bojana Robinson, Andreja Rauch Podrzavnik
Sound design and music: Josip Maršić
Video: Darko Sintič
Set construction: Martin Podrzavnik, Uroš Mehle, Peter Rauch
Production: Federacija
Co-production: Kino Šiška and DUM – Association of Artists
Organised by: Kino Šiška and NDA Slovenia
Cover photo: Nada Žgank