Parquet Ball – Above the Parquet

Opening night September 9^th 2020, Golden Hall of the National Gallery Ljubljana 
Running time on Friday, 16^th, 40 minutes. No intermission. 
Running time on Saturday, 17^th, 2 hours. No intermission. 

In collaboration with the National Gallery Ljubljana and Kino Šiška.

Idea and choreography Mateja Bučar
Idea and visual concept Vadim Fiškin
Movement, dance, co-creation Kristina Aleksova, Maja Kalafatić
Sound Borut Savski
Light Jaka Šimenc
Construction of the parquet ball Matija Jakin, MOJ HOBI
Mechanisms Zavod Zet
Head of production Tina Dobnik
Special thanks to Stephan Doepner, Aleša Valič, Zavod ZET 

Parquet Ball is the title of Mateja Bučar’s latest dance piece. More than just a general indication of the contents, or the essence of the production, its secret point and the implication, the title here is everything, or as the famous Latin adage dictates, nomen est omen. Parquet Ball does first remind us of precisely stylised ballroom dances, balls and highlights of the social season as dance art in the bourgeois society anticipated them: perhaps we imagine couples in formal attire circulate luxurious halls, and muslin swirl
around the elegant figures in tails … But this colourful allusion is confronted with the austere literality of the title Parquet Ball – a ball made of parquet wood, in other words, an actual parquet ball. In the core of the production there is, thus, the literal materialisation of the title, a round object made of parquet which in its associative restlessness, self-reference, tautology and in alternating presence of a dancing body moves around the space. The duality of the functionality and the physicality thus permeates the entire course of the show: despite the frequent reminiscences of the movements from the classical ballet, surprisingly obvious in the parts that the ball performs,
the dance nevertheless occurs as a study of its own elementariness. The reflection of the radical materiality becomes particularly
dense in the sequences in which two parquet balls appear in the dance – after that moment, there is no longer any doubt: all
the performers are just material that shares touching points with other materials and draws a designed arch-scheme of the bodies in dance movement.