Mobility Dance Project, co-funded by the Creative European Programme of the European Union

The international project Rail2Dance, which includes theater partners from Germany Die Theater Chemnitz, Slovenia PTL – Plesni Teater Ljubljana / Dance Theatre Ljubljana, Sweden Norrlandsoperan and Finland Tanssiteatteri MD, takes public space and the codes of behavior that define these spaces as its central theme. With the help of dance movements, collective choreographies, dance pictures and games, the dancers of the project change and transform the codified rules of behavior determined for a certain space. The creators of the project are interested in places of passage and movement, such as railway stations, city squares and streets, and public transport. With dance interventions in public space, they not only reflect everyday practices in public spaces, but also question the meaning of community, which is increasingly disappearing in the modern world. The dance step sheds light on the taken-for-grantedness of everyday life and pre-set rules, which require specific movement and behavior for each space, and sheds light on our alienated environment, in which we still too often just walk past each other. With collective pop-up dance choreographies that suddenly emerge in public places, we can connect, at least for a moment, in a potentially different world, where we can dismantle social codes of behavior and create new rules. By spreading dance from theater to public space, the wall that can often be created by closed-in artistic creation is also broken down. Movements that merely transform spaces and the bodies in them are capable of bridging social differences, even if it’s just a moment of holding hands together, singing at the train station or lying down in the main square. In this way, the project seeks and educates a new audience for contemporary dance, which in the future might also enter theater halls.

The ideas, which were developed in Ljubljana with the help of mentors, will later branch out and be upgraded into individual and space-bound choreographic projects of all participants. The project will end in May 2023, when a group of dancers will dance their way from Tampere (Finland), and will pass Vaasa (Finland), Umea and Malmö (Sweden), go via Chemnitz (Germany), and will end the journey in Slovenia, first in Maribor and then in Ljubljana.

About Artists

MENTOR

CORE ARTISTS

EXPERTS

TOURLEADER

Kick Off Residency in Ljubljana 2022

The kick off meeting of the international dance project Rail2Dance began on September 4 in Plesni Teater Ljubljana, where the dancers, under the mentorship of Anthony Missen, began to get to know each other, collaborate and create. First, the creators considered what public space means to them, how to interfere with it with the body and how the everyday, routine movement changes, if our path crosses a dancing body.

The mix of conceptual design and fun interventions in the public space created an extraordinary atmosphere both among the group and among random individuals passing by. Dancers joined their bodies with public architectural plastic, played basketball with corks, lay on the floor of Prešeren Square, stood and held hands on Čopova Street. Later, they also danced on the train from Ljubljana to Kamnik and back, they got on the bus and created dance pictures at the train station. They were interested in spaces of passage and movement, they explored the public space of Ljubljana, began to change it and illuminate its invisible corners. In addition to practical dance interventions in urban architecture, each of them simultaneously developed their own dance method, reflected on their city and compared it to the creation in Ljubljana.