Cooling Down Signs
Choreography Vania Gala
Review by Jelena Mihelčić
Translation to English
Photos by Ksenja Spanec
"In the first part of the 30th Dance Week Festival performances that stand out among others are the ones with (un)controlled body. The body that is apathetic, in a trance, clumsy, or regulated by strict rules of social dances. Attribute of democracy inherent to modern dance, paradoxically becomes his trap, freedom becomes limited.
The Portuguese choreographer Vania Gala completely depersonalizes her dancers and denies them the motivation to move, now the motivation comes controlled externally. The show title Cooling Down Signs shows a puppet-like, even robotized body using precise, exquisite and representative modern dance movement, showing only mechanicism. Dancers enter and exit the scene indifferently, performing tasks with dull faces and blunt view. The microphone in the middle of the scene provokes a statement, but any statement or attitude is absent, except a confused "no, I do not know" that ends the show. Young performers use an excellent dance technique and are dressed in modern clothes, whose vibrant colours counter the complete colourlessness of their performance, labelled and branded only with the glittery logo of a famous national retail chain on the knee protector of one of the performers. Vania Gala clearly detected our modern day bodies that are exhausted and immobilized with a huge amount of information available to us and the unarticulated knowledge we have on our disposition but are passing it by indifferently.
This was the least pretentious but the best devised piece in the first part of the festival and it was created as part of Beyond Front @ / Bridging New Territories, a collaboration of several European dance organizations, including the Croatian Institute for Movement and Dance. This networking project provides development support to young dance artists from different countries. The performance is composed of an international team of mostly high-quality performers from Croatia, Austria, Hungary, Great Britain and Slovenia: Teresa Noronha Feiou, Varga Boglárka, Maja Kalafatić and Maria Duenas Lopez, while the announced Croatian dancer Sven Bahat unfortunately got a poor substitute."
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