Though Spider operates through various activities, its primary output are events and festivals, the first one of them organised in Greece in 2010. A year after, the annual festival manifestations of Spider started in Slovenia as well, taking place at Španski borci Culture Centre. Other editions of this festival also happened in the aforementioned cities, sometimes merged with the local festivals (as for example in Athens, with Arc of Dance & Modul dance festival 2014), but usually standing on their own. Between 2012 and 2014, there were about 40 international co-organisers involved in making the events happen.
Background
Spider was initiated by three dancers and choreographers: Matej Kejžar (Slovenia), Michaël Pomero (France) and Antigone Gyra (Greece) as an international interdisciplinary structure that could transcend the established national borders, festival formats and artistic practices. They engaged various artists from different cultures and from various artistic fields and milieus (dancers, choreographers, musicians, writers, sculptors, visual artists), soon temporarily enlarging the urban triangle of Athens-Lyon-Ljubljana with events in Zagreb, Salzburg, Istanbul, Sofia and Maribor (the latter in the context of Maribor, European Capital of Culture 2012 programme).
There was a number of events and festivals held under the brand of Spider and its various editions - SPIDER RES (performance residencies and research), SPIDER EVENT/GATHERINGS (performance gatherings of international artists, workshops, showings of residency results), SPIDER TALKS (a public debate and project meetings) and SPIDER EXPAND! (a festival format of Spider, called An Itinerant Artistic Manifestation and repeated in Berlin, Brussels, Athens, Lyon, Zagreb and Ljubljana).
Spider Ljubljana
Spider was first held in Ljubljana in 2011 in Španski borci Culture Centre. It lasted three days and in partnership with En-Knap Productions and ŠKUC Association hosted a number of dance performances, workshops (on dance, visual creation and writing), discussions and parties. A year later, the same place hosted the international dance project Spider: At once, and in 2013 – under the name Spider Expand! – a festival was once again organised, hosting artists from Slovenia, Croatia, France, Belgium, Austria, Netherlands, Hungary, Brazil in Great Britian. The festival than moved to Stara Elektrarna - Old Power and called itself Spider White in 2014 and Spider Slang in 2015, still bringing an exciting and genre unbound program, from body art to contemporary dance, from exhibitions to concerts.
Some of the foreign artists that were invited to the Ljubljana based Spider events were Cécile Laloy (FR), Gabriel Smeets (NL), Pavlos Kountouriotis (GR / UK), Fernando Belfiore (BR / NL), Benjamin Sebastian (UK), Julien Monty & Michaël Pomero (FR), Sigrid Stigsdatter Mathiassen (DN), Alexandros Psychoulis & Yannis Arvanitis (GR); of the local ones, there were Matej Kejžar, Leja Jurišić and Teja Reba, Urša Vidic, Andreja Kopač, Ana Romih, Rosana Hribar, etc.
Due to the collaborative nature of Spider, it means that these artists were hosted in other city nodes of the network as well.