Following my heart I tried to make selection of performances which use minimal means, live processes, vulnerable bodies, intimate relations to audience. Structures of games, evocations, rules and ritual. Fights / battles / contests / conversations / dialogues.

Perhaps theatre that is more like dance, dance that is more like performance art, performance art that is more like music, which is in any case more like theatre. Or the spaces in between.

Following my heart I tried to make selection of performances which use minimal means, live processes, vulnerable bodies, intimate relations to audience. Structures of games, evocations, rules and ritual. Fights / battles / contests / conversations / dialogues.

Perhaps theatre that is more like dance, dance that is more like performance art, performance art that is more like music, which is in any case more like theatre. Or the spaces in between. Not that the exposure or genre crossing of performance and its mechanisms is at this point a big deal. More that in this basic or essential set of co-ordinates might lie the possibilities for real encounters, challenges, questions and deep conversations about where we are, what we want, and where we are going to.

Not so much complex imaginary worlds as spaces and ideas unfolding, made in the here and now of actions, texts, exchanges. Performances that are simple, very simple, deceptively simple, totally complex. Things with a ghost of theatre/theatricality but (often) a sense of reduced means, a strict economy. And always a question - as if to say “What can we do here?” or “What might speak here?” or “What might resonate or cause trouble here?”

The how of politics. The what of social relations. The breaking of language. The ecology of ideas. The war of realities. The vital, strange and troubling otherness of art.

Some artists in the program (Kate McIntosh, Eva Meyer-Keller, Miet Warlop) I watched, talked to, even worked with over more than a few years. Others (Sofias Diaz & Vítor Roriz, Mare Bulc, Clément Layes, Urnamo, Kassys) I’ve seen only once, never met or met only briefly – encounters sparking a hunger to see and know more. So for me the curation is a way to consolidate conversations and to start new ones… to get to know something, to make new encounters in performances as well as in talks, workshops and discussions. I hope for the audience in Ljubljana it can be the same.

The solo form, in the context of contemporary dance in Asia, persists as a phenomenon.

Independent dance-makers – determined not to compromise on their individuality through commodification or re-locating their practice via migration – have tended to turn solo. A strategy taken out of necessity and pragmatism because of the difficult economy they have chosen to work within: weak policies, funding, and presentation structures.

While partly circumstantial, the condition has also allowed these undaunted artists to create and speak in a different and strong tenor.

The solo form, in the context of contemporary dance in Asia, persists as a phenomenon.

Independent dance-makers – determined not to compromise on their individuality through commodification or re-locating their practice via migration – have tended to turn solo. A strategy taken out of necessity and pragmatism because of the difficult economy they have chosen to work within: weak policies, funding, and presentation structures.

While partly circumstantial, the condition has also allowed these undaunted artists to create and speak in a different and strong tenor. From my mapping of exceptional individuals, I platform in Exodos Festival 2013 a suite of solo dance artists with a distinct singularity and articulation, different from their peers.

This is a generation of well-educated and globally-mobile choreographers from Asia, in their 20s and 30s, each working in marked self-reflexivity, approaching their subjects and materials with a conceptual bent, at the same eliciting pleasure from the act of dancing, moving or presenting bodies on stage.

Their notion of ‘virtuosity’ departs from the stereotype of the solo form in traditional dance genres as a vessel for technique display and diva presence, moving us instead into viewpoints on self-making and embodiment itself, by various means of irony, ambivalence and reversal.

Such a tendency resists idealizing the ‘solo’ as an emancipation from the collective and/or the absolutism of selfhood. In the single body is the condensation of multiple selves constructed by a process of hauntings.

By ‘hauntings’, I refer to the way that Sujata Goel (‘Dancing Doll’) picks up her past residues as a ghost doll enfleshed and animating a smorgasbord of bharatanatyam-bollywood-ballet. Geumhyung Jeong (‘Oil Pressure Vibrator’), in a deceptively ‘flat’ lecture-performance, splices her past archive of works into a bio-mockumentary on sexual hunger which peaks at the imagined destruction of her ‘real’ self.

Through Daniel Kok, (The Gay Romeo), we see an ‘ethnographer’ on a sex date exposing his field data and finally himself as a (re)collective object of desire - a pole dancer. In similar vein, Eisa Jocson (‘The Macho Dancer’) is possessed in the lexicon and politics of seduction through two Filipino labour icons: the pole dancer and the macho dancer.

The ‘everyday’ vernacular is re-written from free-verse haiku by Zan Yamashita (‘It’s Just Me Coughing’) who selects words related to corporeality and repeats them as a ritual of banal actions, a memory of fragile existence. In his films, Moe Satt (‘Face n Fingers’ and ‘Hands Around Yangon’), enacts both abstract and concrete realities of the social body: first as fingers forming phantasmagoric gestures that besiege his face, then as a docu-record of his people’s free-wheeling hands in the daily public.

All that is remembered can be restored, however random, spin-doctor Choy Ka Fai (‘Notion: Dance Fiction’) proposes as he transplants movement archives of dance greats, dead or alive, via electricity nodes onto the body of a live sample dancer. In co-authorship with choreographer Arco Renz, dance maestro Eko Supriyanto wrestles with temporal and spatial principles that are foreign to the Javanese cultural equilibrium that has conditioned his body, while Melanie Lane, of half-Javanese descent, seeks a stable world of terpsichorean principles and architectures, as the ground below her literally trembles.

Bouquets to Nataša Zavolovšek and Katja Stušek, and the entire team of Exodos Festival 2013! Many thanks for making this platform happen. Enjoy, everyone!The solo form, in the context of contemporary dance in Asia, persists as a phenomenon.

Independent dance-makers – determined not to compromise on their individuality through commodification or re-locating their practice via migration – have tended to turn solo. A strategy taken out of necessity and pragmatism because of the difficult economy they have chosen to work within: weak policies, funding, and presentation structures.

While partly circumstantial, the condition has also allowed these undaunted artists to create and speak in a different and strong tenor. From my mapping of exceptional individuals, I platform in Exodos Festival 2013 a suite of solo dance artists with a distinct singularity and articulation, different from their peers.

more This is a generation of well-educated and globally-mobile choreographers from Asia, in their 20s and 30s, each working in marked self-reflexivity, approaching their subjects and materials with a conceptual bent, at the same eliciting pleasure from the act of dancing, moving or presenting bodies on stage.

Their notion of ‘virtuosity’ departs from the stereotype of the solo form in traditional dance genres as a vessel for technique display and diva presence, moving us instead into viewpoints on self-making and embodiment itself, by various means of irony, ambivalence and reversal.

Such a tendency resists idealizing the ‘solo’ as an emancipation from the collective and/or the absolutism of selfhood. In the single body is the condensation of multiple selves constructed by a process of hauntings.

By ‘hauntings’, I refer to the way that Sujata Goel (‘Dancing Doll’) picks up her past residues as a ghost doll enfleshed and animating a smorgasbord of bharatanatyam-bollywood-ballet. Geumhyung Jeong (‘Oil Pressure Vibrator’), in a deceptively ‘flat’ lecture-performance, splices her past archive of works into a bio-mockumentary on sexual hunger which peaks at the imagined destruction of her ‘real’ self.

Through Daniel Kok, (The Gay Romeo), we see an ‘ethnographer’ on a sex date exposing his field data and finally himself as a (re)collective object of desire - a pole dancer. In similar vein, Eisa Jocson (‘The Macho Dancer’) is possessed in the lexicon and politics of seduction through two Filipino labour icons: the pole dancer and the macho dancer.

The ‘everyday’ vernacular is re-written from free-verse haiku by Zan Yamashita (‘It’s Just Me Coughing’) who selects words related to corporeality and repeats them as a ritual of banal actions, a memory of fragile existence. In his films, Moe Satt (‘Face n Fingers’ and ‘Hands Around Yangon’), enacts both abstract and concrete realities of the social body: first as fingers forming phantasmagoric gestures that besiege his face, then as a docu-record of his people’s free-wheeling hands in the daily public.

All that is remembered can be restored, however random, spin-doctor Choy Ka Fai (‘Notion: Dance Fiction’) proposes as he transplants movement archives of dance greats, dead or alive, via electricity nodes onto the body of a live sample dancer. In co-authorship with choreographer Arco Renz, dance maestro Eko Supriyanto wrestles with temporal and spatial principles that are foreign to the Javanese cultural equilibrium that has conditioned his body, while Melanie Lane, of half-Javanese descent, seeks a stable world of terpsichorean principles and architectures, as the ground below her literally trembles.

Bouquets to Natasa Zavolovsek and Katja Stusek, and the entire team of Exodos Festival 2013! Many thanks for making this platform happen. Enjoy, everyone!

I can hardly believe: despite all the problems accompanying it from the very beginning and all the changes of people (it would be interesting to see how many Ministers of Culture took their office during this period), despite transformations in the society, the state, the community, the team itself… – the Exodos Festival have lived to its 18th birthday! Every single person and all of us ever connected with Exodos can be proud of it.
I really like the inscription to be exhibited at this year's festival: somehow it belongs to us. WE WANTED TO BE THE SKY.

I can hardly believe: despite all the problems accompanying it from the very beginning and all the changes of people (it would be interesting to see how many Ministers of Culture took their office during this period), despite transformations in the society, the state, the community, the team itself… – the Exodos Festival have lived to its 18th birthday! Every single person and all of us ever connected with Exodos can be proud of it.
I really like the inscription to be exhibited at this year's festival: somehow it belongs to us. WE WANTED TO BE THE SKY. This is impossible, of course. Nevertheless it is good to test it, to check if it is really not possible. Probably this is precisely the reason why our festival had so many ups and downs. Art is limitless, and it is hard to limit the programme if there are so many things to be shown to the audience.
Anyway, everything ends with finances. At this occasion I would like to thank all who helped this festival in whatever way during the past 18 years. In the first place Mitja Rotovnik, who always stood by our side, regardless of all the stories around: he will probably never admit it, but I suspect that he likes the festival. Then Breda Brezovar Papež and Tobačna Ljubljana, our long-standing donator: they actually trust in the importance of contemporary culture. Next, the City of Ljubljana, which has always rescued the Festival: I wish that they would really believe in the importance of festivals in Ljubljana, and that they would strengthen the existing ones instead of producing yet another new one – since numerous festivals in Ljubljana are simply good. And the Ministry of Culture: well, after eighteen years they could acknowledge Exodos as an important festival. And the Museum and Galleries of the City of Ljubljana, and the Lighting Guerrilla festival, since we really complement each other. Finally, thanks certainly go to Jan Fabre, Tim Etchells and Fu Kuen Tang, who have recognised Exodos as a good festival and saw us as a worthy team for collaboration.
True, there are numbers of those who have helped… I hope to meet them all this year at the Festival.
After all the years that passed. Well, changes are obvious. And further changes are needed. The artists also think that way. And it also shows in this year's programmes curated by Tim Etchells and Fu Kuen Tang. It is an exchange of ideas, thoughts and communication. An exchange of views and cultures. There will be space for the exchange of opinions on the Empty Stage at the Jakopič Gallery. Welcome.
And it is about co-operation. Therefore, thanks go to all our partners, artists, collaborators, and especially the team. Thank you all.