TWENTY YEARS OF MATJAŽ
The memory of my
first encounter with Matjaž is a bit distant: his
appearance in a high school play in Murska Sobota,
somewhere at the end of seventies. Seven boys tried to
manage the stage the best they could and the result of
their effort was not bad at all. Through the years of
involvement in dance one attains a certain sensibility
and is able to spot a young person, talented for dance.
Matjaž was one of my first discoveries at the time when
I was consolidating an organised concern for
contemporary dance awareness in Slovenia. Matjaž was
associated with it from the beginning: he took part in
the established dance performances with his first group
No Words and with the next one Dance Kitchen, while in
the eighties he was a regular participant of the annual
Days of Dance, which I managed to negotiate at
Cankarjev dom where it took place for the following
eleven seasons (1982-1992).
I can remember
the solo performance of Matjaž at one of the
first Days of
Dance: a figure in
white on a kind of a table, of unusual energy and
preciseness of movement, though still without a special
technique, but transformed into a clear dance line,
achieved through a distinct stage presence and inner
intensity. Eager for new knowledge, he was looking for
it everywhere: he attended all the available dance
seminars, enrolled into the Maribor School of Ballet,
in the meantime won some awards at Days of
Dance, after the
establishment of Ljubljana Dance Theatre he stayed at
our house as a male version of Haustochter (as Pia
Scholz, later married Mlakar, in Hamburg). Basically,
he became our Haussohn and the temporary older brother
of my two sons. He was conscientiously attending probes
at the Dance Theatre and performances, then was coming
home worn out, sometimes happy, sometimes frustrated
and angry, and yet again full of vigour. At that time
we already struck up debates on dance: he was troubled
by something all the time, though it was hard to define
what it was exactly. He was drawing grandiose set
designs into his notebook (with some sort of skulls, I
think), was writing down his ideas and had every day a
new one in his mind. Certainly he knew that he did not
only want to dance, but he wished to create dance
performances.
I
appreciate it very much that at that time he was
already aware that one cannot become a choreographer
just with a bit of sense for dance and inspiration;
what one needs is a wide practical and theoretical
knowledge of the nature of dance material, which is
movement. Choreography in this sense is foremostly a
craft that has to be trained. Farič went seeking this
specific knowledge elsewhere, to the school of
contemporary dance Palucca Schule in Dresden where he
absorbed the basic principles of the modern German
dance. Nowadays some may find these principles somewhat
oldfashioned, though they helped make Matjaž one of
rare Slovene dance authors who know about true essence
of dance medium. He does not try to substitute it with
trendy performance strategies which enact dance with
contemporary performance expression and exterminate the
autonomy of dance. Which principles do we mean
precisely? Foremostly the need to create and perform
through body movement, the organisation of movement in
time and space (kronotopos), while taking into account
various dynamics and qualities of movement, the
research methods of dance material, and, of course, the
intimate connection between movement and emotion which
gives the dance line its colour and meaning. In Dresden
he got to know and try out the »smallest« dance form,
the author dance, which was an absolute must in
preparing for greater choreographies to follow.
Thinking
and rethinking of such and similar aspects of dance and
dance expression led to an almost two years long
correspondence between him and myself, through which we
both learned a lot (I still keep these letters as
highly cherished documents). The author dance
project Dreams of
Maro H., which Matjaž
presented in Murska Sobota after the return from
Dresden, included all the above mentioned while it also
made me notice with delight that in spite of the
technical progress he has not lost the specific inner
content and the characteristic movement, and for that I
still like better solistic creations of Matjaž
(Solo,
3.oLo) than his
future grand choreographies, which were a logical
continuation of his personal development.
After
twenty years of creativity Matjaž has an extensive opus
behind him in which he went through almost everything,
from co-operating in the projects of others (Rdeči
pilot), defining the movement in theatre and opera
performances, establishing dance formations (Eastern
dance project – I still like the performance
Sixth of
April where he sensed
the conflicting times to come and showed the sense for
combining dancers of different origins), a string of
autonomous projects in the eighties and nineties
(Fracture,
Crossroom,
Derr,
Icht),
establishing, managing and teaching (in project groups,
Dance Studio Intakt) to dance performances with larger
number of participants, including the use of various
kinds of scene music (classical to contemporary live
rock in Terminal,
1999). In the meantime he was experimenting with new
technologies (Clone,
1997; A circle in
the body – A square in the head, 2003). I
specially remember the performance Island
(1999): in the
time of its making Matjaž must have sensed some of his
movement stereotypes so he resolved them by innovative
research of the group composition.
I
cannot overlook the grand performances of Matjaž since
he was almost the only one in Slovenia, who
consciously, in the spirit of postmodern currents,
undertook personal adaptations of renowned musical and
ballet works (Le Sacre du
printemps,
Romeo
and
Juliet,
Swan
Lake,
Trilogy,
1994-1997). For a venture like this, just a
(fashionable) idea is simply not enough, it all
requires a lot of study, knowledge and courage. Whoever
wants to cite a cultural legend or reinterprete it has
to know the subject in detail - in this case everything
from historical background, the original, the later
versions, dance materail as well as musical scores.
However, it all did not keep Matjaž at rest: the new
version of Le Sacre du
printemps (2004) that was
staged in Studio za suvremeni ples in Zagreb, in many
ways exceeded its original version from Ljubljana
(1996) in composition and dramaturgy.
Matjaž
is also one of the first authors on the Slovene dance
scene that managed to penetrate the ballet scene with a
contemporary choreography. In the year 2001 he
staged Temptation
(after
Cankar) with the
National Ballet from Maribor and so contributed to a
wider exchange of ideas and realisations between
contemporary and ballet dance spheres which is today
already very wide. In the last years the projects of
dance group Flota, which is the trademark of Matjaž,
are generated in co-operation with foreign partners and
groups.
Due to extensiveness and variety of his work, summarising the contemporary Slovene dance author Matjaž Farič is a complicated job. However, in the time of disintegration of clear directions, blending of genres and discourses, artistic ludisms, which (seemingly) enable everyone to do anything, in the time when »dancers do not want to dance anymore« (Gerald Sigmund) Farič in his core remains faithful to pure dance, retaining its autonomy without at the same time giving up on new explorations