s a l i e n c e n e t w o r k: dance performance by Júlia Vavra

Hanging on the border of in and out. The target here is attention: teasing, manipulating, entertaining, being watched and wanting to be seen.

“s a l i e n c e n e t w o r k” hugs you into exhaustion and overwhelms you with glimpses of memories. It is like a slow-motion surf through a distorted online realm. Familiar sounds and feelings linger in a scattered web. Information hits from several directions. “SN” guides you through different mood boards and images in a strangely unsettling way. Imagination and reality run in parallel and throw us into constant flutter. It is an absurd space, emerging from the combination and contradiction of theatrical, raw, enervated, charged, mysterious, soft and intimate qualities.

This network is a perceptual and dreamlike imprint of how focus is driven at these very specific times. This place helps us face the information load coming from outside, giving us a moment to process and to realise what we are actually looking at.

Júlia Vavra is a Budapest-based freelance contemporary dancer, performer and choreographer. She studied at the Budapest Academy of Contemporary Dance and at SNDO – School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam, majoring in choreography. She likes to think of creations as a way of de- and reconstructing ruling structures. She reads bodies as mysterious, never fully understood, constantly shaping carriers of information. She trusts movement, physicality and creation through unfolding subconscious processes that have transformative power.

She works with contradictions and taboos, and through character building, re-contextualised symbols, twisted codes, irony and humour she tries to reflect on our implicit rules, ethics, behaviours and patterns. She is interested in building complex atmospheres and dramaturgy through the interplay of movement, light, visuals and sound or music.

In her previous work “Artists like me” she poked at the local and global contexts and mechanisms of her profession through brutally honest satire. In “Cold Blooded Mare, A hidegvérű kanca” she reflected on, and worked around, the Hungarian government’s frightening appropriation of Hungarian culture in the image of a female horse. “s a l i e n c e n e t w o r k” continues her latest piece, “d e f a u l t m o d e n e t w o r k”, which focused on the state of daydreaming.

Director, choreographer and costume designer: Júlia Vavra

Dancers: Pääsu-Liis Kens, Eveli Ojasaar, Tiina Mölder, Juulius Vaiksoo, Karin Aarelaid

Sound designer: Ando Naulainen

Lighting designer: Júlia Mohácsi

Lighting technician: Grete Vaalma

Costume consultant: Pire Sova

Dramaturge: Johhan Rosenberg

Producer: Sirli Oot