REVIVING THE TALL BUILDINGS

Production: BELEF and Mimart
The author of the project: Nela Antonovic
Participants in the project: MIMART Theatre and climbers group Gekon and Zeljko Jankovic on electrical drums, live.

Nela Antonovic was born in Belgrade in 1953. She graduated from the Faculty of Technology, University of Belgrade, Department of Organic Chemical Technology and as a Master of Science worked as a researcher in the Institute for Chemistry, Technology and Metallurgy.

By method of research workshops the Mimart Theatre achieves the theatrical, interactive and artistic research with an aim to emanate the emotional sum of intimate creative stories through the movement. The investigation of the non-verbal communication of movements had crucial influence on the development of the symbolic language and rituals of Mimart, specifically through taking care of the street theatre and ambient performance. For the nineteen years the Mimart has been gathering, educating and supporting young dancers to work on themselves through a creative process of a team work.

Nela Antonovic is the author of about a hundred choreographs, street performances and interactive art performances, as well as twenty six plays-choreoprojects of the Mimart Theatre. In her works, Antonovic wishes to initiate reflections about the spiritual road, as a definite choice of life here and now. Ideas and phenomena she deals with are easily translated from visions into movements, thanks to the magic method of dance training and through workshops of creative visualization.

Reviving the tall bulidingd is a performance with an aim to not only achieve a high level artistic impression, but to draw attention to the big buildings. I have been thinking of the scary fact that people do not need to go out of the building for months. To be captured in a big building of a city was the starting idea for Ana Spasic, who designed costume-installation: a gentle reptile animal grabbed with its little pawns Lidija Antonovic, the girl who walked between the audience and the actors, as a model, wearing the armor.

Big buildings are small cities. People living there know each other and greet themselves in elevators. The elevator in a big building is like a street in a village, it is the means or the place of linking people within the building and in between the floors. The key words for the initial workshop for this project were: big building, the mountain, floors, elevator, windows, cellar, terraces, the height ... To breathe the life into the big building means to conquer, to climb the building like the mountain, which actually happened in an alternative way by going down of the alpine climbers from the top of the building towards the dancers waiting on the podium in front of it. The stilts usually represent the symbol of the street happenings, this time they are representing the symbol of the height.

The life of big buildings is hidden in their interior. Big buildings stand big and are noted because of that. Big buildings should be presented by mobility, by the way of seizing them.