Spending Time Dancing - Kejžar’s artistic experimentation with dancing discharged from the drive for choreography. Premiere at Španski borci, Ljubljana 14, 15, 16 September

GIBANICA 2023
24 February, 20.00 at Cankarjev dom, Ljubljana

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Author: Matej Kejžar
Dancers: Dora Brkarić (Croatia), Viktoria Bubalo (Croatia), Daniel Petković (Slovenia)
Set & lights: Petra Veber

Production: Pekinpah

Premiere:
14 September 2022 at 21.00,
Španski borci, Ljubljana

Repeat performances:
15 & 16 September 2022 at 21.00, Španski borci, Ljubljana

Supported by Republic of Slovenia, Ministry of Culture and City of Ljubljana, Department for Culture

Spending Time Dancing presents Matej Kejžar’s artistic experimentation with Dancing discharged from the drive for choreography. In order to relieve dance from the burden, constructed in the concept of choreography, the burden of a carefully planned succession of movements as progress, the dancers indulge in the processes that defy the linearity of both movement and time.

The way time is spent can be, to some extent, vulgar and common, a series of time particles being placed one after another, or a directed productive process. What happens when Spending Time collides with Dancing? What relation are they in? Where Dancing approaches the non-linear, non-algorithmic, and non-constructive ways of spending time, it explicitly cuts into the contemporary idea of progress – by being seen as its opposite, Dancing speaks to the concept of “waste of time”.

Enters the common capitalist presumption that any activity that does not fulfill the conceptions of productivity as the main purpose of any life is not only irreversible but precisely wasted. However, waste is not always for no purpose. Think of the enormous potential of waste being made into compost which nourishes and fertilizes the soil. Whereas contemporary societies tend to only speak about “growing” the food, they disregard the processes of decay as crucial for life to flourish. In terms of Dancing, choreography as a process of constructing something in time hides its crucial counterpart, the wasting of time. In that sense, wasting time seizes to be time wasted and becomes a new, and critical, perspective on contemporary Western and patriarchal conceptions of progress as the ideal. We do not necessarily grow when we work, but when we Spend Time Dancing, we flourish.