Imre Vass: MMXXV (2026)
Thursday, 3 December 2026, at 8:00 pm
Španski borci, Big Hall
dance performance
Duration: 86 min.
In recent decades, the realm of sexual arousal and fantasy has multiplied and expanded through the digital imaginary of the world wide web, more than at any other point in human history. Sexual, romantic, and other interpersonal relationships have become saturated with an inflation of image-making and scripting. In the Year of the Snake, Imre Vass takes this on with a contemporary choreographic approach that is not without humour.
The artists who created MMXXV, and who will perform in it, are well known to Ljubljana audiences. Choreographer Imre Vass was last year’s artist-in-residence at Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia, within the Creative Crossroads programme of the European project Life Long Burning, while the choreographic works of Adrienn Hód and Csaba Molnár are already familiar to our audiences, having been presented several times at Španski borci in Moste; Csaba Molnár also created Mojstrovina (Masterpiece) for six dancers with the En-Knap Group ensemble. The perceptive, intelligent, and disarming humour of Hungarian choreographers is hard to match anywhere in the landscape of European contemporary dance.
In MMXXV, Imre Vass invites us to surrender to the sensory experience of listening to the album MCMXC a.D. (1990) by the German-Romanian phenomenon Enigma, which, thirty-five years ago, took over European music charts in the New Age pop genre. The performance creates an ambient laboratory in which, following the choreographic actions of the dancers, our senses can relinquish themselves to an analytical exploration of the impulses that stimulate our sexual arousal. The performers “do not impose their own theatrical or compositional ideas on Enigma, but instead surrender themselves to its guidance. They dive into it, release the impulses hidden in their pelvises, and, to the emblematic, synthesised sounds of the shakuhachi flute, let desires awaken within them − connecting freely, without shame or restraint, with themselves and with other human and non-human materials and beings capable of catching their attention.” Category: dangerously free. Liberated sensuality as a political programme, so to speak.
Concept, Directing: Imre Vass
Choreography, Performance: Márton Gláser, Adrienn Hód, Imola Kacsó, Csaba Molnár, Imre Vass
Lighting Design: Kata Dézsi
Costume Design: Márton Gláser, Adrienn Hód, Imola Kacsó, Csaba Molnár, Imre Vass
Stage Design: Imre Vass
Production, Executive Production: Brigitta Kovács \ Next Stage+
Production Partners: Katlan Group, Workshop Foundation
With the support of: Life Long Burning, Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia, European Union, art quarter Budapest, under500 festival, Artus, EMMI, Ministry of Innovation and Technology of Hungary, Next Stage+
Organised by NDA Slovenija and Kino Šiška in collaboration with Zavod EnKnap