Studio Contemporary Dance Company Zagreb Ensemble, Ginevra Panzetti & Enrico Ticconi: ALL’ARME (2024)
Saturday, 28 November 2026, at 8:30 pm
Kino Šiška, Katedrala
dance performance / Moving Balkans Day @ CoFestival
Duration: 60 min.
The choreography ALL’ARME, selected by the Moving Balkans network, deals with the problem of the mass, group and collective body — its precariousness, and its emancipatory or instrumentalised power.
In February 1973, the American choreographer and dancer Robert Cohan (1925–2021) created the choreography People for the London Contemporary Dance Theatre. British dance critics were confused by the absence of solos, duets and trios, and by the fact that the leading role was played by an undefined human community. Precise critical descriptions suggest that the formalism of kinetic dance forms on stage would have troubled them less than a human community that could be perceived but not identified. Only two months later came the premiere of the choreography Mass, whose title might mean both a religious mass and a crowd. For it, the dancers learned choral singing, which they interwove with dance. Nowadays it is hard to grasp the semantic predicament that British critics faced at the start of the 1970s. Since the very beginning of CoFestival, we have been drawn, for various reasons, to performances that address social or communal dynamics through choreographic means. What has always mattered to us though, is that people should not disappear in them for the sake of dance forms, and that the disciplined body should not be made uniform through authoritarian forms of movement.
The choreography ALL’ARME by the Italian choreographers Ginevra Panzetti and Enrico Ticconi deals with the conditions of unmasking and with the processes of militarisation and radicalisation of people in groups. It contains a series of signs that are highly indeterminate yet at once clear indications of implicit violence that might be developed and carried out. Through a range of dance and kinetic signs, we witness a kind of Kiš-like artistic gesture through which it becomes clear that what stands before us is a distillation: a group of groups. The title of the performance comes from the Italian phrase calling “To arms!” In the performance by the Studio Contemporary Dance Company Zagreb Ensemble, this masculine form of group behaviour, which we sometimes privately, half-jokingly call testosterone choreography, is estranged through an all-female cast. This relieves us of the task of identifying it and turns us instead into observers of its procedures, transformations, alterations, intensifications and weakenings, disintegrations and emergences. Sitting in the audience for this performance could, in the language of old socialist slogans, be called: Nothing should surprise us! The performance, co-produced by the Slovenian Zavod En-Knap, premiered in Ljubljana on 13 November 2024 at the Španski borci Cultural Centre.
Choreography: Ginevra Panzetti and Enrico Ticconi
Performers: Martina Tomić, Ida Jolić/Ema Crnić, Viktoria Bubalo, Marta Krešić, Filipa Bavčević, Nastasja Štefanić-Kralj
Costume Design: Tina Spahija
Music: Hrvoje Nikšić
Lighting Design: Tomislav Maglečić
Producer: Ivan Mrdjen
Public relations: Ivana Sansević
Visuals: Tihomir Filipec
Photography: Nina Đurđević
Video & trailer: Rebel film
Produced by: Studio Contemporary Dance Company
Co-produced in collaboration with: Pan-Adria Network (ArtistiAssociati – Centro di Produzione teatrale, Gorizia; Zavod En–Knap, Ljubljana; Hrvatski kulturni dom na Sušaku, Rijeka; Zavod Flota, Murska Sobota via Ljubljana; Zagrebački plesni centar, Zagreb; Slovensko narodno gledališče Nova Gorica, Nova Gorica; Mediteranski plesni centar Svetvinčenat, Svetvinčenat)
Organised by Kino Šiška and NDA Slovenija
With the support of:
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.