Andrea Miltner performs at the Czech Dance Platform for the second time in a row. This year with a new project Flashback. This is a title under which everybody can imagine something else, usually a personal memory or experience. We asked how it is possible to work with flasback within the dance and movement world and also, in connection with the motto of this year's CDP, about the importance of 20 years for the development of a dancer’s expression.
You perform again this year at the Czech Dance Platform, this time with a solo project Flashback. When interviewed last year, you were talking about the beginning of work on this project and hoped that working with Jan Komarek and Rainer Wiens would be a true interaction. Have your expectations been fulfilled? What was the creation proces like? The collaboration was most enriching. Both artists are experienced creators on the independent scene and know how to work together, giving each other space to express himself, let his imagination flow and contribute creatively (they know one another from Canada where they worked together in Toronto). They were able to discuss freely, criticise constructively and were generally very supportive of me. Flashback - memory, blending of time, intrusions into the past, present, and perhaps future. How can one handle this topic in dance and movement, and what led you to choosing it?
I knew that I wanted to return to my passion for baroque dance and baroque theatre practice. I have always been fascinated by baroque gesture, whose roots lie in ancient Greek oratory ('memory' in this case going back even deeper into history) and which is in itself 'choreography'. I chose a number of gestures and 'worked' them intensively: I wanted to discover where this pure form of movement would lead me. The result was a journey back to the past and paradoxically forward into the future as I delved deep into my own body's memory. It was a search for a specific movement language, eloquent in its own physicality and was also in a way a search for myself - a natural consequence perhaps of the loss of both parents. The performance is much about the flow of time and the fragility of a single body/being in space. You often work with repetition and variations on one type of movement. What is interesting about it for you?
This is dictated by the theme: that of the memory of the body and memory per se in which the same things frequently return. However it is a repetition, mutation, development and gradual transformation of many different 'types' of movement. I tried to find the essence of a particular movement and reveal a movement language which is eloquent in itself without the addition of emotion or 'drama'. The body becomes an instrument through which this language passes, free from a egoistic desire to express something: 'The song sings the bird'. When we talk about time and various views on it, I’d like to make one more look back into past. Last year in May you performed at Spring Forward festival in Zurich. How do you see the festival, what did your participation bring you?
Fundamental for me was the selection of Dance of the Magnetic Ballerina by the European network Aerowaves - it provided me with further opportunities to perform the piece both at home and abroad. Spring Forward is organised by Aerowaves and enables international promoters to view most of the 'priority companies' live which can be an important factor in their decision to invite a piece or not. As a result of Aerowaves and Spring Forward I received invitations to perform in Amsterdam, The Hague, Aarhus (Denmark), London and Antwerp (Crossroads Festival) with invitations for the future to Copenhagen, Ljubliana and Dublin. In Antwerp the performance was seen by promoters from Scotland and as a consequence has been invited to Edinburgh and Glasgow. The motto of this year’s Czech Dance Platform is 20 years – one small step for mankind, one giant leap for dance! What have the past 20 years in dance meant for you? What has been the development of your movement expression?
The development in my own movement expression has been huge! I started as a ballet dancer, though with a strong interest in contemporary dance, then peformed in musicals before becoming impassioned with baroque. I created my first choreography for an English speaking theatre company in Prague and then moved on to pure baroque dance choreography for period productions of baroque opera with the early music ensembles Collegium 1704 and Collegium Marianum. I soon began to feel a need to make baroque dance relevant to a contemporary audience and started to combine baroque and contemporary dance in my own creations, for example: The Baroque Body Revealed, Pentimento and Vertical Horizontal. I then began to search for different means of choreographic expression and my solo performances Fractured and Dance of the Magnetic Ballerina evolved.
Josef Bartos
Thank you for your thoughts. One got stuck in my mind – that passion makes us different from AI. Just yesterday I read…I am a dance critic. I am a member of an endangered species