National Reconciliation: A Show for Tourists

This is an extremely purified stage work, with practically no stage design, no props (bar a single clothes hanger), music is minimalistic. The most remarkable stage element is lighting, which – particularly at the end of the performance – by changing the strength and the colour of the light flooding more or less unchangeable scene, functions to multiply and change the perspectives that give this same scene (literally, too) different nuances and meanings. The performance as a whole is based on these very details and the subtle conveying of the message. The basis for the performance is an improvised and thus unrepeatable choreography by the Polish choreographer and dancer Maria Stokłosa, 'interpreted' by Damjana Černe and Primož Bezjak. (The text for the performance was prepared by Wojtek Ziemilski.) At first, this interpretation ironically refuses certain critical approaches to contemporary dance and focuses on the existence of the body in a given moment (this is of course a new interpretation, which is likewise lightly ironised throughout the performance). One of the key questions that the performance asks is the question what co-creates and co-dictates the body and the movement in a given moment. […] The theatre work calms down and strives for reconciliation in a non-intrusive, thoughtful, open way, with a shift of focus. An effective and telling performance.

National Reconciliation: A Show for Tourists is a dance-theatre performance that touches the 'reconciliatory' frame in an unexpected and at times entertaining way. It refers way more to the performing reconciliation of the body, movement, and nation than it does to that of ideological differences of the political atmosphere. Director Wojtek Ziemilski takes the complex intertwining of movement and body in contemporary dance practices as a starting point, and adds to it an interpretative narrative which seemingly unites the opposing stage processes. He thus attempts to neutralise the individualised body, able of conceptual abstraction, continuously improvising to research the choregraphic and performing possibilities (Maria Stoklosa), and only partly under the musical influence of the unmistakable bossa nova hit 'Garota de Ipanema', with recording and translating the movement into a word. Damjana Černe and Primož Bezjak find themselves in the role of moderators, commentators, explainers of the dancing body; they convey and explain, in English (comprehensible to both tourists and dance analphabets), what constitutes a movement, external attractions and internal impulses and everything that could be written into a dancing body. In it, they search for the origin and the manifestation of the historic movement, biological influences and biographical circumstances – movement and body are never totally autonomous, but are rather subordinate to each interpretation. In this way, they historicise the initial individuality (the Jewish provenance with all the historic baggage), and above all, link it to the national narrative.