Realisation: 2024
Concept and co-choreography: Mateja Bučar
Performers and co-creators of movement and dance: Andreja Rauch Podrzavnik, Nataša Živković, Kristina Aleksova, Katja Legin, Tina Valentan, Bojana Robinson, Nina Pertot Weis, Loup Abramovici, Beno Novak, Jana Menger, Jerneja Fekonja, Tini Rozman and Jernej Bizjak
Music and sound: Drago Ivanuša in J. S. Bach
Text: Robert Pfaller, Rok Vevar
Costume and light design: DUM
Production: DUM
Coproduction: Cukrarna and CoFestival 2024
Supported by: The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the City of Ljubljana, Department of Culture.
The performance In Perfect Order is a sort of continuation of Pol-na-črta. A closed straight line of dancers, which can be a straight line only if it extends beyond the visual field of the stage—allowing the audience to imagine its infinite continuation—is a sort of impossible ideal of classical choreographic formations, an effect that delights the audience with an aesthetic experience. A straight line in dance is, on the horizontal plane, merely an optical illusion that effectively conceals inevitable curves. It can only be perfect on the vertical plane: in the fall of an object from a height to the ground, a fall inevitably choreographed by gravity. Mateja Bučar will thus, together with local dancers, immobilize the corporeality of contemporary dance, sit on its limbs, and say to it: “Relax. You are at home here.” Everything else is merely a rising up into curves. The relationship between the vertical and horizontal positions of the body brings to mind Camus’s The Rebel: “If God wants to become man, he must first despair.” Thus, it is primarily contact with the ground, the use of weight, and resistance that lead to a bright future.
The choreography, set within a space with the volume and length of the Cukrarna lobby, allowed a series or line to be clearly traced, to unfold, develop, curve, stretch and contract, to intensify and subside. On the one hand, the austerity of a pure line; on the other, the complexity, wildness, and cunning of movement languages and articulations that would voluntarily intertwine with one another, one after another, among themselves, while constantly weaving into the inwardly highly complex and outwardly utterly simple purity of a single line. They sought to capture the paradoxical moment between complete liberation and strict discipline, in which the living, thinking, and dancing are perpetually and fatally ensnared; the title, perhaps, also hints at some of this paradox—one that extends more broadly into contemporary life: In Perfect Order.