PLATFORM 2020: CREATIVE REFLECTIONS

Contemporary dance art – Teaching and education in dance – Therapeutic approaches with art

This year we are researching the field of CREATIVE REFLECTIONS, as art always reflects certain conditions: we are interested in the artistic, the educational, approaches in teaching, as well as their effects. We give priority to artists who have been searching for their opportunities outside of Maribor. The essence of creativity is to see from different perspectives or points of view. The dialogue through the process of the dual movement between engagement and abandonment, as advocated by Glaveanu, allows us both physically and symbolically to explore and create new and different perspectives.

Art reflects personal and social change. Its creativity, expressiveness, audacity, and communicativeness mirror and reflect the personal, social, and political conditions, and introduces them into the culturosocial environment in the form of transformations, the transfer of knowledge to young people, public debate ...  With professional approaches, it also helps, in a therapeutic sense, many individuals and vulnerable groups. It is reflected in various contents.

But, politics has pushed it into a corner for the last year because of preventative health measures and out of fear of mass edpidemics. Despite these measures, it finds ways into new forms of action and seeks new models of creative connection. Creative reflections have a very wide field of activity, and last but not least they are welcome in the everyday life of every individual.

This year's festival, along with the main program of dance performances, offers a discussion on the conditions for professional work of contemporary dance artists, an intersection with the Summer Puppet Pier for the youngest, a public discussion on education and teaching with art (in cooperation with the Contemporary Dance Association of Slovenia), a professional meeting on therapeutic approaches with art, and the premiere of the festival's production, On some night, some girls are dying somewhere.

Opening up thematically are motifs connected to the transfer of dance knowledge and the nurturing of audiences' curiosity. The body is always the source of the impetus for the creation of movement, sound, and visual material. It creates diverse landscapes and reflects on and alters their meanings. It seeks ways and rediscovers spaces of rememberance of residing with the living, with the many, which permeates the body and the senses the moment the forest becomes a new space for practice and connection with the source. Creativity is originality, it is a form of survival. That it why the inner landscapes of thought, the abstract journeys are not only a priority but fact, so that we may know how to reassemble again after each time we fall. A body that arises, a body that grows, and a body that expands and takes the space that belongs to it. Even by exploring memories, or simply in the living space of the community associative flow. This might only be a clash of an endless number of ideas which are constantly repeated and multiplied through variation and selection, despite their possible randomness or absurdity.

The creators of this year's Platform 2020 are: Ajda Tomazin, Jasmina Križaj & Simon Wehrli, Katja Gorečan & Mojca Kasjak, Matevž Dobaj, Alicia Paulina Ocadiz Arriaga, Anja Bornšek, Barbara Kanc, Tina Valentan, Jan Rozman, Katarina Barbara Kavčič, Maja Lamovšek, Zoltán Grecsó, Rebeka Petra Kiss, Jernej Šmid and young dancers in the frame of Youth Platform. Our guests from Hungary in collaboration with Slovene artists will close the festival with the open-for-public event, Dance Communication Lab.

For the freedom of movement and art!

Mojca Kasjak, artistic and program director of the festival