STRIPPED

Zagreb Dance Company (Zagrebacki plesni ansambl)
in cooperation with
Zagreb Youth Theatre (Zagrebacko kazaliste mladih)

STRIPPED
Duration: 55 minutes

Choregrapher: Snježana Abramović Milković
Dancers: Sara Barbieri, Zrinka Lukčec, Andreja Široki, Tomislav Kvartuč, Marin Lemić, Marko Milić, Nikola Orešković, Ognjen Vučinić
Dramaturge: Saša Božić
Light and set designer: Branko Cvjetičanin
Costume designer: Dženisa Pecotić
Music: Damir Šimunović
Music adviser for opera: Zlatko Madžar
Assistant choreographer: Ognjen Vučinić
Assistant costume designer: Emina Tataragić
Executive producer: Mirna Čubranić
Photo by:Jasenko Rasol

The project was realized with the financial help of the Office for Culture, Education and Sport of the City of Zagreb and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia
Music from G.F. Handel’s Radamisto, G. Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore and Don Pasquale, and G. Verdi’s La forza del Destino is used in the show

STRIPPED is a new production of Zagreb Dance Company, a full-length choreography by Snjezana Abramovic Milkovic. Inspired by the genre patterns of opera art, this project features 8 dancers: company members and the invited guests.

The world of opera is highly fictionalized and enables playing with stereotypes and myths that our contemporaneity is based upon. The melodrama of opera is connected with the general melodramatic sense of life that attacks us through media on everyday basis. Melodrama, as a genre, uses big themes, strong affectation, melancholic sense of loss, but at the same time it promises a sudden turn – a possibility that unexpectedly a new time, a different fate might occur.

STRIPPED is a serious, thoughtful dance project which ironizes the contemporaneity and male-female relationships, simultaneously using the language of allusion and evoking a sort of baroque imagery, behind which emerges the animal principle of reality we are dipped in. A certain confusion of gender roles, taken over from the operas of the baroque masters, tries to affirm liberation from stereotypes which always shape our experience. 8 excellent dancers lead the viewer through the landscapes of extremes and false myths which the reality offers to us.

The combination of abstract movement and overemphasized dramatic or lascivious gestures characterizes the dance language. Dance material is based on the study of the baroque painting; bodies emerge from the space in seemingly impossible shapes, but they never lose control, either emotional or physical, and the individual disappears in wider formations of the group. Insisting on sudden interruptions and introducing gestures within the constant flow of the movement, the choreography achieves an unexpected tension.

As a performance, STRIPPED ironizes its own procedure, its own code, and asks the following question: if we try to strip our external selves, will we find anything at all? Paradoxically, it seems that the project celebrates the surface, not the notch in it. Manipulating with the recognizable and imaginary quotations, STRIPPED represents the spectacle of the surface, but also warns against the balefulness of the spectacularity at the time of the complete entropy of emotions.

Saša Božić