STEP FURTHER: THE ISLAND PROJECT
Production: BELEF and Small Theatre “Dusko Radovic”
Authors: Bojana Mladenovic and Dusan Muric
Participants:
Bojana Mladenovic (Serbia and Montenegro)
Dusan Muric (Serbia and Montenegro)
Sanja Vinkovic (Serbia and Montenegro)
Isidora Stanisic (Serbia and Montenegro)
Minna Kiper (Sweden)
Maud Le Pladec (France)
Martin Nachbar (Germany)
Rebecca Reilly (Ireland)
The Project
The work on the project began in September 2002.
Twenty young dancers and choreographers from Europe and the world
started an email workshop with an aim of finding common ground
for work on the second phase of the project: to create and perform
a dance play in Belgrade, once forgotten and now rediscovered
isle of Europe. The accompanying programmes of the project are
open classes, improvisation sessions, street performances, workshops,
video and live presentations of contemporary dance expressions.
Next step: the island project has two basic
goals:
1. Creation and performing the play based on the encounter of
the local culture and the contemporary dance with cultures of
the countries participants are coming from; bringing the spirit
of contemporary European and the world movements from the realm
of contemporary dance in the Belgrade cultural life.
2. Promotion of the Belgrade dance stage and establishing Belgrade
as a contemporary dance centre in the European map.
About the play
The play is about an encounter of various cultures
in the “neutral” ground, on the unexplored isle of Belgrade and
about search for common and separate “languages” to express the
common creation, a unique play as a whole. The languages of encounter
will be different languages of cultural environments and dance
experiences and styles that participants bring with them.
The starting point was that which connects us:
an individual experience on foreign ground, surrounded by other
individuals far from their homes and their languages, assembled
around the same aim. (In this case those were the experiences
of the DANCEWEB programme scholarship beneficiaries). We assumed
we would meet again in Belgrade as if on the island: for external
participants that island is unknown, but there are hosts on the
island whom they met and who will become their “guides”, “interpreters”,
“managers of time”. These hosts will be responsible for what would
be presented to the guests and for what the guests would be able
to get acquainted with. On the other hand, the hosts become recipients
and succumb to the influence of various forthcoming streams. In
a formal sense, the play has a multimedia character (the majority
of participants, though being dancers and choreographers have
vast experience working in various elements of the play, many
of them received training in the field of video, costumes, light
design, stage adaptation, music).
During the production of the play (and also
in the progress of the play, on the stage) various video materials
are being used that were brought by participants (as finalised
products based on the dramatic needs of the structure defined
in the email workshop), but also created while working on the
play. Some elements of the scenography (space) and costumes are
products of the participants’ cooperation to a large extent.
