OFFICIALLY 18 – A TRANSITION
As adolescents move into adulthood, the 18th edition of the Platform for Contemporary Dance reflects many similarities. Adolescents are usually expected to take on more responsibilities as demanded by society. What is expected from a festival that has reached its legal age? Greater responsibility? Increased stability? Enhanced recognition? Or merely the preparedness for greater challenges and opportunities and a wider range of choices?
The 18th edition of the Platform for Contemporary Dance certainly leaves and documents the traces of contemporary dance art through its carefully curated program, invited guest performances, innovative and complex program structure, festival productions and co-productions, collaboration with partners, and in its very essence. It is a platform for artists, for contemporary dance, and for the cultivation of audiences. When the magnificence of contemporary dance artworks as a cultural offering opens up and explores new worlds, and when it seems to have moved beyond itself, showing nothing but its own passage… that is when the visibility of the invisible or the visibility of transition comes into view.
Jean-Luc Nancy articulates the concept of the visibility of the invisible as an ideality that has become present, either through a paradoxical presence of its themes or through its own absence. From Plato onward, this creates beauty. This is perhaps even more pronounced from Plotinus onwards, where the pursuit of beauty signifies becoming what you are. In its intimacy, light, and pure vision, beauty is described as "the only eye capable of seeing the final beauty." This final beauty, or the radiance of truth or the meaning of existence, is seen as art or the sensory experience of absolute meaning. Nancy suggests that this is what allows beauty to transcend itself into the "sublime," then into the "terrible," and likewise into the "grotesque," into the decline of "irony," into a general entropy of forms, or into the pure and simple presentation of a ready-made object.
Transition introduces a new thesis: the remainder signifies a step, a walk, a dance or a leap, a sequence, a flight, a fall, an arrival, or a departure.
It involves a transition, a departure, a sequence, a passage, a distancing, a rhythm, a walk, or steps… Perhaps it is a search for a lost dance pavilion, a mobile studio, a quest for identity, a collection of bodies, a reconfiguration of roles and norms, or simply a new approach to reconceptualization.
It is certainly a quest for identity and a trace of past experiences that overlap and diverge, influencing the way we move and the decisions we make. Bodies, framed by faded memories, and words that act as living archives remind us that some traces of the past strengthen us, others may hinder us, and yet others drive us to explore deeper into the realms of sensory depths...
Images that blur and recede, where ideas are born or disappear. A space that undeniably leaves its mark, but not as an imprint of its form, but rather as an outline.
Transition embodies the entire scope of meaning and presence, which, through its unconventional and expressive nature, simultaneously conceptualizes and invigorates. It is an exploration of identity, gender, multiplicity, grace, radicalism, politics, humor, and absurdity aimed at discovering new ways to position the body. Although it might appear chaotic and powerless, it is precisely in these moments of direct self-recognition that the power of action and existence is revealed.
A transition that leads to both transformation and a breakthrough. Imperfection that becomes perfection.
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