Visiting Artist - Showcase

The five artists, who come to Plovdiv from Norway, Portugal, Croatia, France and the UK, are part of the Visiting Artist Programme, supported by the European Union, in which One Dance Festival partners with 23 European festivals from 22 countries. It also includes Europe Beyond Access, a project of leading European cultural organisations to promote access for artists with specific needs in the performing arts sector.

19:00 - 19:20 - Performance by Clara da Costa - Peel The Onion (Duration: 20 min) OUTDOOR

19:30 - 20:00 - Performance by Lilian Steiner - Dance Becomes Her (Duration: 20 min)

20:00 - 20:15 - Performance by Nataša Kustura - Melusine: Revisiting (Duration: 15 min)

20:15 - 20:30 - WINE BREAK

20:30 - 21:00 - Performance by AURA - Sex and Death (Duration: 30 min)

21:00 - 21:20 - Performance by Nabinam Dance Company - FERA (Duration: ± 20 mins) OUTDOOR

Peel The Onion is a solo performance about the physicality of human sensations, feelings and interactions. About the social masks we voluntarily or involuntarily put on to adapt to certain situations. About those many or few shields and layers that cover the essence. When body language, posture, facial expressions, and gestures do not convey true emotions, thoughts, and desires because they may not be conscious in the moment. 

The show, created and performed by Brazilian choreographer Clara da Costa, who works in the Czech Republic, seeks to uncover the core of human authenticity and complexity. Like the layers of an onion's head that we can peel away one by one, the deconstruction of social masks can lead us to a new understanding of how we communicate with ourselves and others. Here, now, and in a world where virtual space and social norms impose new codes of behaviour and override the universal language of face-to-face communication. An in-depth exploration of nonverbal communication, Peel The Onion holds a mirror up to emotions to look at their purest form. When we peel back the layers, beneath the surface, we may find that beauty is in the eyes of those who feel it.

The dancing body is not one that grows solo. It feeds off those around it, consciously and subconsciously, in a pinpoint moment in time and across expanded duration. Both through and without language, learnings accumulate within the body, within the spaces it occupies and in the archive of memory... and the dancing body is a tool acquired by Dance itself. Dance wears us, like a costume 

Dance Becomes Her is a performance-lecture that addresses the ways that dance and embodied knowledge are shared between and archived within bodies across time. It articulates thoughts on this topic through simultaneous dancing and speaking. The text that is spoken is predetermined and carefully crafted, while the dancing is largely improvised, framed by some key predetermined structural choices. In this performance lecture, language and movement collide and mix and slip past each other in ways that help to articulate and demonstrate the subject, in ways that either form operating alone cannot.

Melusine: Revisiting is a 15-minute homage to the full-length performance Melusine, co-authored by Croatian artists Nataša Kustura and Matea Bilosnić in 2022. This short piece serves as a meeting point between the past and the present. By re-entering previously created material, the performer revisits old patterns and concepts, using body memory to navigate their form in a new space and time. 

Inspired by the archetypal animal-woman figure and vivid legends, Melusine explored the tension between historically inscribed perceptions of the female body and a reimagined, modern archetype. The body is treated both as a machine and an intuitive, living being, as the performer subtly evokes the potential of physical endurance.

Sex & Death: Between Libidinal and Liminal States is a diptych that consists of exploring issues related to pleasure and loss, bondage and ritualistic funerals, lust and the resolution of sins, flesh and corpses, dominatrixes and mourners, libido and Libitina. Imagine two 1-to-1 space-time situations. The first consists of a performance between performer and spectator that explores desire, intimacy and radical tenderness within a dark room composed of stimulating installations, objects and sculptural costumes. The second involves the installation of a funeral concept store where each person immerses themselves, through virtual reality and artificial intelligence, in the “Afterlife”, an experience around their death and future form.

FERA is a raw and physical solo performance exploring the tension between vulnerability and power through the lens of what we consider physical limitation. Rooted in the artist’s personal experience with a non-normative body, the piece challenges perceptions of ability, beauty, and identity.