KSENIJA, XENIA – KSENIJA HRIBAR'S LONDON DANCE YEARS 1960–1978
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Author: Rok Vevar
Series: Special Editions, Book No. 20
Series Editor: Amelia Kraigher
Editors: Iztok Ilc, Gregor Moder
Published by: Maska and JSKD
Co-publisher, Representative of the Temporary Slovenian Dance Archive: Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia
Language Review and Proofreading: Iztok Ilc
Name and Subject Index: Iztok Ilc, Rok Vevar
Design and Layout: Ajdin Basić, Iztok Kham
With financial support from the Slovenian Book Agency and the project Dance On, Pass On, Dream On (within the framework of the Creative Europe programme).
Ljubljana, 2020
ISBN 978-961-6572-59-0
COBISS.SI-ID 20323843
Choreographer and dancer Ksenija Hribar (1938–1999) was a member of the ballet ensemble of the Slovenian National Theatre Opera Ljubljana between 1953 and 1960. In 1960, she traveled to London for the first time, where she attended the ballet school of the famous pedagogue Marie Rambert until 1962. After returning to the ballet ensemble of the Ljubljana Opera, she began to abandon her desire for a dance career when, in April 1965, British ballet enthusiast G. B. Wilson visited her in Ljubljana and gave her the news that the Martha Graham Dance School was opening in London, which Hribar had become enthusiastic about after seeing the film The Dancer's World (1957) at the Ljubljana Opera in September 1962, when the American choreographer came to Zagreb and Belgrade on a guest tour. Hribar immediately traveled to London and enrolled in the school before it was officially founded. Between 1965 and 1968 she attended the London School of Contemporary Dance (later the London Contemporary Dance School), and in 1967 she became a member of the ensemble, which in the spring of 1970 took the name London Contemporary Dance Theatre. In this ensemble she danced in more than forty choreographies, worked with a number of top contemporary dance choreographers of the time, participated in a number of alternative contemporary dance performances, and in August and September 1970 she helped the LCDT ensemble organize its first international tour of the SFR Yugoslavia. She danced with the ensemble until September 1974. After studying theatre studies at the Victoria University of Manchester, she returned to Ljubljana in early 1980, where she founded the Ljubljana Dance Theatre in the mid-1980s.
The monograph Ksenija, Xenia – The London Dance Years of Ksenija Hribar 1960–1978 sheds light on the choreographer and dancer's British dance story, which was known to the domestic public only fragmentarily due to her untimely death. The book is based on extensive research, in which the author collected several thousand documents about the life and work of this striking figure, conducted interviews with the choreographer's British colleagues and acquaintances, and dug up the artist's voice in the available contextual material. The biographical study takes the reader through the exciting and pioneering dance years of the British capital, when London was becoming a global cultural phenomenon. There, Ksenija Hribar met a number of key names in the history of ballet, dance, and culture of the 20th century, got to know some encyclopedic dance names at their beginnings, or worked with artists who already enjoyed an international reputation in the field of contemporary dance at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. Ksenija, Xenia – The London Dance Years of Ksenija Hribar 1960–1978 is the first domestic biographical study of its kind in the field of contemporary dance history.
The book was co-published by the Maska Institute, with the support of JSKD and NDA Slovenia. It is the fruit of the Temporary Slovenian Dance Archive, which Rok Vevar founded in 2012 and moved to MSUM in April 2017.