Running time: approx. 1 hour and 5 minutes

DUO DENDROCOPOS – Jan Čibej and Luka Poljanec, percussion: acoustic concert

Programme:
Casey Cangelosi: Plato's Cave
Peter Eötvös: Thunder
Dai Fujikura: Chattering Birds
Louis Andriessen: Woodpecker
Maki Ishii: Fourteen Percussions
Alyssa Weinberg: Table Talk
Matej Bonin: Trash Me Out

DUO DENDROCOPOS brings together two young percussionists Jan Čibej and Luka Poljanec. They were fellow alumni at the Academy of Music in Ljubljana under Prof. Simon Klavžar and at the University of Music and Theatre Munich under Prof. Alexej Gerassimez. The duo was established in 2017, when they took up the challenge of participating in the International Percussion Competition in Luxembourg in the Percussion Duos category (IPCL 2018). In February 2018, by winning both the First Prize and the Jean Gieres Audience Award, the Duo Dendrocopos were the competition’s incontestable laureates.

The dance-performative research project Exquisite Corpse is part of a series of projects by young (though not necessarily) authors produced by Emanat that explore stage language. The aim of these explorations is to break the concentration of creative processes that focus exclusively on the product and redirect them towards the development of performing language and a reflection on the issues of WHAT and HOW in relation to artistic creation. In collaboration with Cankarjev dom, a public presentation will be performed using freely the surrealist play principle of the “cadavre exquis” (the exquisite corpse) to reflect on the structure of the presentation, the development of the performative language or the working methodology developed through the research process. Pia Mačerol and Burja Podlesnik will present their movement research.

Pia begins her research from a point of silence, which she consciously and purposefully interrupts with her body. When she speaks of silence, she refers to the absence of music as a basis or condition for movement. For her, silence is both a prerequisite and an invitation to explore her own loudness—an exploration she hopes will also resonate with the voices of the audience. She views silence as a challenge that propels her—almost like a throw—into space. There, she engages with the exploration of physically sounding capabilities of her body. She investigates how different physical proposals generate a variety of sounds, spoken and unspoken voices—and vice versa. One of her research approaches involves placing her body—or specific parts of it—in relation to spatial surfaces and everyday objects that she introduces into the space. She develops her performative language through (structured) improvisation, currently focusing on repetition and bypassing, which gradually become perceptible through the persistence of time.

Pia Mačerol (2000) is a dancer, creator, performer.  She received her secondary dance education at the Secondary Preschool Education, Grammar School and Performing Arts Grammar School Ljubljana, majoring in contemporary dance. She studied at the New Education for Contemporary Dance (NEFCD) program at the Swedish school Härnösands Folkhögskola. She graduated in June 2025 from the Bachelor of Dance program at ArtEZ University of the Arts in Arnhem. As an author, she created the solo Mouthwash, which she presented at the experimental event The Eve of Imbolc organized by 187 Nights Rotterdam, co-created the duets I’m Counting On You and Attached, and the group work Good Job.

Movement research, performance: Pia Mačerol
Mentoring: Loup Abramovici
Lighting design: Veronika Hana Grubič
 

The movement research is based on the deconstruction of movement, which is realized through the principles of push and release. The push of the ground triggers movement paths within the body and acts as a guide, while the release of the established path hinders it. The simultaneous presence of both actions is reflected in the constant demolition and re-establishment – deconstruction and construction of the body. Like an upside-down hanging doll, dependent on the movement of strings. The author is interested in the added presence of movement initiations with various parts of the body that do not primarily originate from the push of the ground and their influence on the already present momentum, fall and suspension in the body's movement. The research acts as a preliminary to the author's future choreographic work Men in Underwear. 

Burja Podlesnik (2001) is a dancer and choreographer. After studying contemporary dance at the Secondary Education School, Gymnasium and Art Gymnasium in Ljubljana, she continued in Sweden in the NEFCD (New Education for Contemporary Dance) program and graduated from ArtEZ University (Bachelor of Dance) in Arnhem, the Netherlands, in 2025. With her solo Among the dark pines, she received the award for best dancer at the Opus 1 international festival of young dance artists in 2019 and during her studies she delved into choreography with the following works: solo Snippet, group work Leftovers and duets In My Room and On the Mat. With a critical response to current reality, she strives to transform the space given to things without space and to give sound to things that otherwise remain silent.

Movement research: Burja Podlesnik
Performance: Oscar Magnusson
Lighting design: Veronika Hana Grubič
 

Konkvistakon (The Conquistacon) is a theatre you build when you cannot afford to mourn. It is the dramaturgy of empire disguised as spectacle, a funeral in the guise of a celebration. It is the silence of the conquered transformed into a soundscape. It is an anti-mourning apparatus – a ritual, ideology, and mode of performance that transforms death into raw material, territory, or symbolic capital.

It does not speak on behalf of the dead. It speaks only against the systems that dictate their absence. It does not simulate real tragedies. Instead, it maps the dramaturgy of conquest, domination, and curated historical consciousness as manifested in political aesthetics. It does not exist in the future or in fantasy, but in the cracks of the present — in media releases, in museums, military ceremonies, command centres, art biennials, and theatricalized regimes that distort human grief, erase complicity, and glorify violence as a "necessity."

The conceptual framework of the performance Konkvistakon, based on the play Osvajalec (The Conqueror) by Andrej Hieng, blends ideas of "necropolitics" by Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe with Slovenian dramaturge, editor, and writer Petra Pogorevc’s "theatre of mourning".

Programme:
Tr e es, for bass flute and bass clarinet    
Between You and Me for flute, viola and harp                                                                   
...rain's cool finger-tips..., for string trio
Hinnulei, for solo cello       
Almost Silenced, for saxophone quartet                                           
Soj, for flute and clarinet 
...and, after all... for alto saxophone and percussion
Saturniidae for solo clarinet                    
clusters of blooms, for ensemble

Musicians:
Anja Clift, flute
Valentina Štrucelj, clarinet
Jan Gričar, saxophone
Igor Mitrović, cello
Marija Maja Rome, viola
Doris Šegula, violin
Urška Rihtaršič harp
Simon Klavžar, percussion
Nejc Grm, accordion
Miha Rogina, saxophone
Luna Vavourakis, saxophone
Maksim Gal, saxophone

After graduating in composition from the Ljubljana Academy of Music (Prof. Dane Škerl), Urška Pompe pursued postgraduate studies at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest (composition: Emil Petrovics, chamber music: Gulyas Marta, solfeggio: Hegyi Erzsebet) and in Basel, Switzerland (composition, Prof. Roland Moser). Throughout her studies, she attended prestigious international masterclasses led by distinguished mentors, most notably Brian Ferneyhough, Jonathan Harvey, and Pierre Laurent Aimard (piano). She has received several awards and recognitions for her work, including Slovenia’s 2007 Prešeren Fund Award for artistic achievements. Her works have been performed at international festivals. In May 2025, Pompe’s Saturniidae was listed among the recommended works at the 71st International Rostrum of Composers. She is a full professor of music theory at the Ljubljana Academy of Music.

Duration: 50 min

Warnings: This production includes theatrical haze, strobe-like lighting effects and occasional bright flashes of light.

In a stage show that combines stand-up, Elon Musk and the psychopolitics of Byung-Chul Han, Jan Rozman, like many other men in crisis, embarks on a journey of self-discovery. In his latest work, Rozman asks himself the question: What is it in me that never makes me feel enough? Will he manage to stop the buzzing he feels in his own body in time, or will the next time he switches on the screen, the unstoppable plunge into the black hole of thinking about the impossibility of (bodily) autonomy begin again?

Jan Rozman’s performance Wetware questions the autonomy of bodies in surveillance capitalism through a choreographic intervention in a stand-up format.

The surveillance devices we have voluntarily opted for – our smart devices – track our every move, voice, glance and touch. The algorithms that power them have become better at fulfilling our supposed desires than we are. But at the same time, they also fulfil our greatest fears. Technology is a total institution that we carry within us. Psychopolitical reward and control systems are reflected in somatic processes in tissues, organs, the body and not least in the artist’s performance.

Introduction to 21st-century Composition
In collaboration with Inštitut .abeceda

The concert will be preceded by a Q&A with the featured artists at 19.00.

Introduction to 21st-century Composition
In collaboration with Inštitut .abeceda

The concert will be preceded by a Q&A with the featured artists at 19.00.

Programme:
Maximiliano Soto Mayorga, Anja Kralj: Sinfonia

Anja Kralj, violi
Ciril Zupan, electronics

*
Maj Brinovec: new work
Lan Podletnik Ašič: new work
Giacinto Scelsi: Maknongan

Maj Brinovec, baritone saxophone
 

*
Atli Ingolfsson: The Elves Other's Self
Domen Kužnar: Solo
Ulfar Ingi Haraldsson: new work

Domen Kužnar, viola
 

The dance and movement workshop is dedicated to opening up and finding analogies between the artistic practice and work methodologies used in the performance Mašina. In her original project, Bojana explores strategies of staging and discovering different performative mechanisms for addressing issues from the intimate corpus in the public sphere. The workshop begins with a warm-up focusing on the anatomy of the body and the perception of the body as a whole. In the creative part, we will explore choreographic procedures that incorporate principles of repetition, accumulation and composition in the layering of different elements of the performance.

The workshop is admission free and suitable for everyone with a good prior knowledge in the field of dance.
Registration is required at bojanamisic@yahoo.com. 

Workshop participants enjoy reduced admission to the show (EUR 7).

More on Bojana:
https://koreografski.info/bojana-robinson/
https://nda.si/Bojana-Robinson
 

Running time: The performance lasts approximately 2 hours

Age recommendation: 18+

An original project of the REAKTOR collective, KRIK::GRAFIJE is an exploration of the codes embedded in the individual's body and psyche that guide people’s actions and are expressed through sexuality as pleasure drive systems. The artistic team address the phenomenon of addiction to the pursuit of pleasure on the cognitive and biological levels. The emergence of AI-generated content is progressively challenging our conception of what is possible – thus expanding the individual's reference field of visual material and generating new forms of potential fulfilment of sexual desire. The manipulation of video material, the rhythmising of bodies and voice, and the neuroscientific background of the pleasure drive are the performance’s main areas of research. The show examines the codification systems of individual experience, which are then manifested at the behavioural level and in the way (inter)personal relationships are formed.

KRIK, an ongoing project by the Kolektiv REAKTOR, sheds light on unspoken social taboos with a focus on sexuality and interpersonal relationships. The project was awarded the University Prešeren Prize for innovatively extending the boundaries between art and society.

Based on the novella Ikar by Aleš Šteger
(from: Bogovi se nam smejijo, Beletrina, 2021)
Text and storytelling: Aleš Šteger
Original music: Jure Tori
Directed by: Jernej Lorenci

A show for fathers and sons.

A story about the search for inner freedom.
A story of freeing oneself from the past and personal trauma.
A story about becoming human again, about embracing the hardest thing, 
the death of a loved one.

In Greek mythology, Daedalus, the builder of the labyrinth at Knossos, fashioned the wings with which he and his son Icarus escaped from Crete. Icarus flew too close to the sun and plummeted to his death.

What happens to the father who’s lost a son? How is the father to extricate himself from the trauma of his loss? This is the starting point of the show.

The story takes place today, in our modern world, on a Mediterranean island on the migrant route leading from the Mediterranean to Europe.

Intimate and overwhelming, the show captivates with its powerful narrative and poignant music.

For the past twenty-five years theatre director Jernej Lorenci has enjoyed a successful career directing in Slovenian and international theatres. He has won many important national and international awards for his directing. In 2006, he was appointed as an assistant professor of radio and theatre directing at AGRFT.

Author of over sixty books translated into more than twenty languages and winner of numerous international awards, Aleš Šteger is one of the most internationally recognised Slovenian writers.

Jure Tori is an accordionist and composer. With his idiosyncratic style of music-making, Tori virtually uses sound to draw stories that are open to visualisation. He has formed several groups, including Tori Tango, Tori Trio, Orlek, Flora & Paris and Satori.
Šteger and Tori have been performing together for a number of years, interpreting Šteger's poetry. Two years ago, their performance My War Accordion was produced by Cankarjev dom.