Betontanc
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10 Feb 2015
11 Feb 2015
Show Your Face!, a performance by Betontanc and Umka.lv produced by Bunker Institute, at the festival Reims Scènes d’Europe 2015
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7 Oct 2013
Show Your Face! by Betontanc and Umka.LV, produced by Bunker Institute, at the Theatre Confrontations Festival
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19 Jan 2011
23 Jan 2011
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10 Jan 2011
11 Jan 2011
Show Your Face! performance directed by Matjaž Pograjc featuring Betontanc, Silence musical duo (Slovenia), Umka.lv theater group and Ugisa Vitinša musicians (Latvia),
at the Under the Radar Festival
Overview of Betontanc's production
Prior to 1999, Betontanc, comprising musicians, dancers, actors, and costume and stage designers, regularly collaborated with the Glej Theatre, which co-produced the group's first 6 performances. The group's unique sensibility for and approach to the performing body, often evoking infantile, ridiculous, brutal, and violent traits of human nature, became soon recognised at home and abroad. The group's third production, Every Word a Gold Coin’s Worth [Za vsako besedo cekin] (1992), co-produced by Glej Theatre won the Grand Prix de Bagnolet of 1992.
Dance or Die (2007), co-produced by Mladinsko Theatre posed the question whether dance might be the greatest revenge for human laziness and mass stupidity evoking the images from well know fairy tales and the story by E. A. Poe.
International coproductions
Betontanc's more recent performances include the politically engaged Everybody for Berlusconi (2004), which premièred in the Netherlands and was co-produced by Jonghollandia. Show Your Face (2006) was created by Betontanc and the Latvian artistic collective Umka.LV and co-produced by New Theatre Institute of Latvia and Bunker Institute. It was performed in Bremen, Palmela and Groningen in 2007/08 and in 4 major US cities – New York (Under the Radar Festival), Chicago, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles in January 2011.
Run for Love (2008) was premièred at the Festival d’Aurillac, France. A theatre performance and installation (artist Matej Andraž Vogrinčič) took as its starting point the reinterpretation of the famous scene on the Odessa steps from Sergei Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin but focused not on the scene of panic itself but on the space of transition between the past and the future, the moment when life is concentrated on one moment, the moment of extreme urgency, of danger and hope for survival, a run toward life and love. The performance was co-produced by Festival Excentrique, Liexpublics, and In Situ, the European platform for the production of street arts, supported by the European Culture 2000 Programme.
Betontanc's latest production Maybe We are Mickey Mouse [Možda smo mi Miki Maus] (2009), based on the play by the Serbian playwright Maja Pelević and produced by National Theatre in Belgrade, Serbia, Bunker Institute, and Sterijino pozorje Novi Sad, Serbia, innovatively contemplates an individual in the world of today, who stands perplexed in the face of absence of morality, love, tolerance, and any standard of value.
International touring
Since its inception, Betontanc has travelled extensively, to 4 continents and over 70 cities, among them appeared at the Festival Small Is Beautiful in Marseilles, at Sterijino Pozorje, Serbia, Dublin Dance Festival, at Bremen's Schwankhalleas, in Schauspielhaus in Vienna, Festival Noorderzon in Groningen, well as appeared at home theatre and performing arts festivals, such as Mladi levi Festival, Borštnik Theatre Festival, and Rdeči revirji! - Red Beats! Festival. Betontanc's productions are regularly presented at the Stara Elektrarna - Old Power Station.