Tribute

Premiered 7th June 2019, Dance Theatre Ljubljana
Running time 1 hour. No intermission.
The performance is accompanied by a selection of videos of butoh performances by the author/dancer.

Concept, choreography and performance Tanja Zgonc
Costume designer Alan Hranitelj
Composer Aldo Kumar
Lighting designer Andrej Hajdinjak
Creative producer and assistant Katja Somrak
Photography Barbara Čeferin
In collaboration with Platforma sodobnega plesa

The author created the performance Tribute to celebrate sixty years of butoh dance, originally a Japanese form of dance theatre, as well as her thirty-year journey, and above all, to pay tribute to her teachers – the pioneers of butoh, to her pupils, and to her colleagues who accompanied her on her creative path. The story revolves around Khandro, the so-called "sky dancer – traveller", and the four activities of the butoh body: the calming, enriching, inspiring and energetic protective activity, which – much like the phases of the Moon – give rhythm to life, to the stages of the development cycle: birth, youth, maturity, age. This cycle reflects the development of individuals, societies and civilizations, and represents cyclical change and eternal restarting. The performance draws inspiration from the original butoh and incorporates author’s personal aesthetics, which she has developed over the decades of delving into butoh and is based on the exploration of attentiveness, on concentration on details, the spine and facial language, and on connecting movement archetypes, and above all, on the "wisdom of the body". The body carries a memory, stored in cells in the form of images and senses, instinctively perceiving the psyche as an information network with endless communication systems.