House Bolero

So explained Matej Kejžar in an interview following his receipt of the prestigious Croatian Theatre Award (Nagrada hrvatskog glumišta) for the performance House Bolero.

In the same breath, Kejžar also addressed generational hierarchies. With House Bolero, we enter a transgenerational artistic experiment centred on the question: how do we learn from Dance? The performance brings together dancers aged between 21 and 69.
“I was interested in how to create a dance piece together with performers who have been dancing for twenty years longer than I have – pure respect! – while also working with younger dancers, whose enthusiasm and curiosity feel incredibly vital,” Kejžar continues: “That’s how we developed the distinctive language of Bolero.”

The project evolved through group discussions and individual conversations. In House Bolero, conversation – one of the fundamental building blocks of civilisation – intertwines with the instability of dance and the body’s passion for movement. Through this process, the dancers develop nuanced forms of physical presence, giving rise to ever new questions and suggesting an open, constantly shifting understanding of dance: a force that resists every attempt at normalisation, both in society and in art.

The project features dancers from the Slovenian National Theatre Opera and Ballet Ljubljana. It was created at the initiative of the Embassy of the Republic of Slovenia in Brussels, with the support of the Government Office for Slovenians Abroad. The project emerged through a broad, creative, and “borderless” collaboration between artists, institutions, and the wider community.