Antistatic Festival for Contemporary Dance and Performance for the ninth time!
This year it brings the body in techno rhythm and makes it a rave machine breaking all the limits (“Ravemachine”); it cheers up gloomy Europe (“Cheerleader of Europe”); it makes us think about why do we laugh at the comic body (“Slap/Stick”); it behaves forwardly on political and religious issues (“Abrahamic Wholeness”); it asks what damage do we cause to ourselves by the very fact of living (“Total Damage”); it seduces lustfully and hot (“Neon” and “Mira Fuchs”) and at the end it unleashes the magic and the transformative power of performance with the spell “AL13FB<3”.
WOW!
8 performances by dance artists from Austria, Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Germany, Macedonia, Portugal, Singapore and Holland. WOW!
Antistatic 2016 continues to feature innovative forms in contemporary dance and performance with strong authorship. This time we focus on the processes of cross-over and appropriation of popular culture in dance and performance that have been going already for years аnd of the ruling culture of spectacle today where everything needs to have the spectacular label WOW! to sell, to receive support and to be successful. But what critical perspective do contemporary dance and performance throw on it and therewith on the notions on body and dance dominating the collective imagination, on their potential to influence, to make statements, to subordinate, to resist or to transform reality? What do they tell us more about ourselves and the world we live in?
We will watch WOW! performances on these issues and will deal with them also in the WOW! programme of Without Distance Platform with talks with artists and Warm up introductions into the pieces – a playful format by which the spectators will be able to go through some elements of the choreography with their own bodies and to receive an unusual insight into them. We believe that this will be a WOW! experience for each of you.
We would like to thank to all the artists, to our collaborators, partners and festival organizers for the understanding they show once again and for tolerating the minimum conditions which the local situation allows. Despite the fact that we received from local funding bodies only 1/3 of budget necessary for such event, we haven’t done a compromise and we offer a quality festival programme which resonates with the subjects and tendencies that shape the new faces of contemporary dance. A big WOW! to you! As Advocates of Dance and of contemporary culture, we wish this WOW! to remain an expression of fascination, inspiration and joy rather than irony.
We invite all of you together to get out of the statics and to be festive, critical, ironical, bold and erotic with Antistatic 2016.
WOW!
Iva Sveshtarova, Angelina Georgieva, Willy Prager and Stephan A. Shtereff