Duration: 60 minutes

The Machine is a duet between Bojana Robinson, a choreographer and dancer, and a breathing machine occasionally used by her daughter. Although the device has entered Bojana’s life to alleviate her child's medical condition, the artist explores her personal relationship with a technological device that directly and indirectly affects her life.

The choreographer explores the nature of the machine, tracing its evolvement into the performance’s subject and ways of embodying the relationship between devices and humans.
 

The origins of the City of Women festival date back to 1995. Initially a one-off event of the Office of Women's Policy, a year later the festival’s organisation was entrusted to the Association for the Promotion of Women in Culture – City of Women, and the festival ran continuously for the next 30 years. The festival would not have survived to this very day without sisterhood, solidarity, mutual support and awareness of the differences created by class, race and other contexts.

That is why this festival’s edition foregrounds the importance of sisterhood, a theme also addressed by dramaturg, playwright and director Varja Hrvatin. In the fantasy-performative show Sukeban, borrowing its title from the Japanese term for female delinquents and girl gangs formed as a direct result of and feminist response to male gangs' refusal to accept female members, Varja Hrvatin employs the format of an interactive game to problematize the representation of women in the online environment and portray a world of female superheroes fighting against sexism and discrimination.

Predstava je v slovenščini z angleškimi nadnapisi.

Ustvarjalna ekipa poziva gledalke k možnosti aktivnega in anonimnega sodelovanja v predstavi, za kar potrebujejo le mobilni telefon s povezavo na splet.

In her new work, Counterfeits, Imprints and Other Intrusions, Magdalena Reiter returns to the solo form revisiting and questioning some of the topics she has dealt with as an author in recent years – from the attempt to analyse collective memory in the context of the influences of visual and film iconography to the reference field in which she has formed herself as a dance maker. She emphasizes the power, as well as the violence of visual imagery and the instability of influences that mark both our collective consciousness and her personal creative path. Through the body in motion, she opens up a dual relationship and a dialogue with the field of references, which involves both respecting and dissecting the elements down to their most elementary particles.

The performance is being created as a choreographic hyperreality that is both playful and analytical, literal and metaphorical, raising perhaps the most relevant question of Reiter’s new performance – the performative body at the moment of going on stage and the extent to which it is possible to escape the limits of one’s own reproduction.

Magdalena Reiter (PL / SLO) je koreografinja, plesalka, pedagoginja , ki od leta 2002 živi in ustvarja v Sloveniji. Je diplomantka Državne baletne šole v Gdansku, Poljska, in akademije P.A.R.T.S. (Performing Arts Research and Training Studios) v Bruslju, Belgija.

V produkciji nevladnih organizacij ali v okviru javnih zavodov in plesnih skupin (Studio za suvremeni ples, Anton Podbevšek Teater, Lutkovno gledališče Ljubljana, Polish Dance Theatre – Poznan Ballet, Bodhi Project idr.) je ustvarila več kot dvajset avtorskih solov in skupinskih projektov, ki so bili prikazani doma in v tujini, med njimi: Vibracija posamezne strune (s Katarzyno Chmielewsko in Jakubom Truszkowskim), Preludiji in fuge (z Matejo Rebolj), Conversation pieces, Alica v Čudežni deželi, Forma interrogativa, Attention, Transland, Pars pro Witacy, Bližnji plani, Solo za dva glasova (z Milanom Tomášikom in Anjo Golob) idr. Njene predstave so bile prikazane tako doma kot v drugih evropskih državah.
Kot koreografinja deluje v gledališču, operi in filmu. Kot pedagoginja in mentorica je poučevala v Sloveniji in tujini (Folkwang Universität der Künste, Zagrebška plesna akademija, Zagrebški plesni center, SEAD – Salzburg Experimental Dance Academy, SVŠGL, skupina En-knap / EKG, na delavnicah v Franciji, Italiji, Avstriji, Belgiji, na Poljskem idr.). 
Je prejemnica nagrade Ksenije Hribar za koreografski opus (2023). 

Je pobudnica in umetniška vodja VIBRE – Mednarodnih delavnic in festivala sodobnega plesa v Ljubljani (2013–2020) ter ustanoviteljica Zavoda Mirabelka. 

Izvedba skladbe:
Žiga Faganel - violina
Alja Mandič Faganel - violončelo
 

The performance forms part of Magdalena Reiter's body of work with the umbrella title Povečava, which is funded by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia throughout the 2024/2025 period.

COUNTERFEITS, IMPRINTS AND OTHER INTRUSIONS: Magdalena Reiter from Mirabelka productions on Vimeo.

in Vodopivec is returning to the stage with a fresh stand-up comedy show titled "Elektro Banana." You can expect a new hour of material, inspired by all the crazy events of the recent period, as well as directing his first film, going through a divorce, and writing this text.

Did you know that comedians write the descriptions of their own shows?

"Elektro Banana" is Tin's sixth show, following his past performances in "Superdupermega / 360 degrees" (2011), "Replika" (2012), "Desert" (2014), "RocknRoll" (2018), and "Peti element" (2019).

"After such a varied performance, you can't be bored!" once wrote the legendary British critic Steve Bennett about my performance. Pretty cool, right?

Special guest: Alen Mastnak

Arms that never knew me is a solo performance choreographed by Charlie Brittain in collaboration with performer and co-choreographer Milan Tomášik.

The performance is woven from reflections on the multiple facets implicit in the question, of ‘what it is to be human’. The body unfolds as living memory, an organism acting in dense, charged structures intertwined between cruel reality and fleeting dimensions. After a trilogy of resonating solo works, Within (2006), Off-beat (2011) and Solo 2016 (2016), it is Tomášik’s first solo performance where the authorship is conceptually and choreographically shared. 

The first guest of Alma's Evenings is the author Agata Tomažič who will reveal the attractions of her travels in conversation with Dr. Andrej Blatnik.
Agata Tomažič (1977) has authored the book Zakaj potujete v take dežele? (Cankarjeva založba 2016), winner of the 2017 Krilata Želva Award, and is co-author of Blodnik po Istri (Društvo za dolgovezenje, 2019) and several books of fiction. Her latest novel, Čmrljev žleb (Goga 2022), a genre hybrid of family saga and whodunit, is set in an idyllic mountain village Strmčnik. She contributed to Delo and Pogledi, and now works at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU). 

The Alma's Evenings series is dedicated to talks with writers-cum-travellers about their work and the books they love, about their favourite paths and those they still wish to tread, as well as about the music and gastronomy typical of their favourite places.

The literature that the series focuses on is literature that initiates change. Changing the readers, changing the readers’ understanding of the world, changing the world. 
 

One does not need to point out that 21st-century social relations have overstepped the boundaries of "normality". The question is whether we can render them meaningful through learning know how to live together and working towards a common goal, and above all, whether our heart is truly in it. 

Is our social core healthy enough to establish new social foundations? And when in the face of overpowering environmental challenges our "self-preservation" instincts tell us to escape or retreat in the name of safety, this also results in feelings of loneliness, isolation and helplessness. All these changes call for restrictions and adjustments, which implies a call for a new order, new ways of self-organised coexistence, autonomous zones and communes. 

The show Doors Wide Closed provides a series of possible suggestions and ways of creating a sense of freedom when dealing with various physical limitations of spaces. In his play Behind Closed Doors French playwright Jean Paul Sartre establishes the fundamental premise that we are condemned to a life in co-existence for eternity. In its very essence, the show presents an example of a post-apocalyptic interior and off-stage exterior, populated and cohabited by an entity of like-minded people removed from the outside world. Here, they seemingly and literally push back boundaries and confront restrictions through various art forms. With their directness, they create a genre conglomerate that enables parallel readings of the personal and social and a unique interpretation of the role of the body in a "new" social reality.
 

Quartet is a  performance for two dancers and two cameras. The exploratory excursion is dedicated to the internal and external architectures of our relationships. The cameras monitor the actions live,  acting as a mirror and voyeur; they emphase and change what is already visible and reveal what is hidden from view.

The  primary processes of the choreography and the performance itself are reduction, duplication and  montage. Reduction to the most basic elements of relationship, movement and physical  proximity. The walk, touch and gaze that blend together to form the score of the quartet. The gaze of the couple, the  gaze of the cameras, and the gaze of the spectator. And play, as the intrinsic nature of relationships and the very act of performance. A game of the possible combinations of reduced and re-extended elements. The focal point between body and two-dimensional image is the game of dichotomy between pleasure and violence, coexistence and alienation. 

Shown from different perspectives, the fabricated story reveals itself to the spectators enabling them to observe the construction of performative reality.

QUARTET: Magdalena Reiter from Mirabelka productions on Vimeo.

Based on real-life events, My War Accordion tells the story of Matija Zorc, Aleš Šteger's grandfather, and spans the five most tumultuous decades of the 20th century, extending from Trieste – via Ljubljana – to the North Sea and the Slovenske gorice region. Through the mediums of storytelling and music, the cabaret de-ideologizes established historical views and divisions, raising the question of historical guilt and accountability without passing conventional judgment.
The cabaret blends elements of poetry, storytelling, performance art and music with video and sound effects. The text is written as a rhymed narrative; the central motif is the grandfather's black accordion, his lifeline in turbulent times, all that remains after bygone ideologies and turmoil, historical dilemmas and crusades. 

In cooperation with GRIP, Cankarjev dom is hosting a free workshop for professional dancers, choreographers and performers to be held on the day of the performance, 6 May, between 10.00 and 13.00 in Duša Počkaj Hall. The workshop will be conducted by Jan Martens, the founder of the touring dance company. 

The workshop is full. No more places available.
 

In this workshop, the participants will revisit together with the workshop leader a part of the creative process of Martens' latest production, any attempt will end in crushed bodies and shattered bones, working with the complex score of Gorecki's Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings Op.40, which acts as a unifying pillar for the 17 movement solos in any attempt. Each participant will be invited to create their own short solo movement phrases by translating the music (its rhythm, energy, and general feeling) into their own body. The workshop will focus on precision, coordination, rhythm, musicality, and the feeling of moving together with a group in the most individual way possible.

The work of Jan Martens (1984, Belgium) is nurtured by the belief that each body can communicate, that each body has something to say. That direct communication expresses itself in transparent forms. His work is a sanctuary in which the notion of time becomes tangible again and in which there is room for observation and emotion as well as reflection. To achieve this result he creates not so much a movement language of his own, but shapes and reuses existing idioms in a different context to enable emergence of new ideas. In each new work he tries to redraw the relation between the public and a performer.
Martens studied at the Fontys Dance Academy in Tilburg and graduated in 2006 from the Dance Department of the Artesis Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp. Since 2010 he has been making his own choreographic work which, over the years, has been performed with increasing regularity before the domestic and international audiences. 

Since 2011, Jan Martens has been making work that talks about how people relate to each other and to the here and now. This resulted in a wide array of pieces: a duet (Sweat Baby Sweat - 2011), solos (Ode To The Attempt & lostmovements – 2014 & 2018), meetings between people who never saw each other before (The Common People - 2016), group pieces that are buzzing with surrender and ecstasy (The Dog Days Are Over with 8 dancers & Rule Of Three - 2014 & 2017), a work for young people that tackles issues such as gender diversity and gender equality (Passing The Bechdel Test – 2018).