Make Yourself (Zrob Siebie) by Marta Ziolek
One Hundred Toasts by Via Negativa /Anita Wach and Bojan Jablanovec
How the Hares Are Dying and Private Inventoryby TukaWach

Wednesday, November 15, 2017 – Sunday, November 26, 2017

La MaMA E.T.C.
66 E 4th Street, New York, NY
Tickets: $25 Adult Tickets; $20 Students/Seniors + $1 Facility Fee
 Tel: 212-352-3101
Perforations Festival returns to New York November 17 to 26 with a diverse slate of genre-blurring performances by artists from Central and Eastern Europe. The 2017 festival will feature seven productions over ten days including U.S. premieres by Bruno Isakovic and Mia Zalukar, Via Negativa, Ina Sladic, Magda Stawman-Tuka and Anita Wach, Jasna L. Vinovrski, and Marta Ziolek.The Great Jones Repertory Company’s 2015 work Pylade, directed by Ivica Buljan, will also be presented. Perforations is curated by Zvonimir Dobrovic and presented by La MaMa with an opening performance at Abrons Arts Center.

Taking place annually in Croatia since 2009, Perforacije (Perforations) is the largest initiative focused on artists from Central and Eastern Europe whose work is created within the independent artistic scene. Recipient of an EFFE Award for its innovative programming, Perforations presents artists working in performance art, dance, and theater whose diverse approaches to art-making blur the borders between these genres. While the works touch upon issues of identity, of a collective past, and personal histories, the primary focus is on the present and future. Perforations Festival NY was first presented at La MaMa in 2011.

Artists coming from Poland for this edition will include:

Make Yourself (Zrob Siebie)
by Marta Ziolek
(US Premiere)
Wednesday, November 22, at 7pm,
and Saturday, November 25, at 9pm
@ La MaMa/Ellen Stewart Theatre

Make Yourself, an experience somewhere between gym training, techno party, and corporate
mindfulness church, starts with a set of imperatives and a body sculpture. Five performers assume the names High Speed, Coco, Lordi, Glow and Beauty, with Marta Ziolek (aka Angel Dust) serving as moderator and guide. Described by the artists as “a utopian structure that creates its own style, language, and sexuality–Make Yourself is a kind of ‘trip’ that transmutes the body into a machine.”

Choreographer and performer Marta Ziolek studied humanities at the University of Warsaw before studying choreography at the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam. Her work focuses on expanding the field of practice in choreography and the study of new forms of expression and embodiment. Ziolek has participated in workshops and collaborated with such choreographers and theoreticians as Bojana Cvejic, DD Dorvillier, Deborah Hay, Maria La Ribot, Trajal Harrell, Benoit Lachambre, Ann Liv Young, Xavier Le Roy, and Meg Stuart. Ziolek’s work has been presented in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, and the United States.

Make Yourself is performed by Marta Ziolek, Agnieszka Kryst, Ramona Nagabczynska, Robert Wasiewicz, Pawel Sakowicz, Katarzyna Sikora, Maria Kozlowska, Lubomir Grzelak, and Dominika Olszowy.

One Hundred Toasts
by Via Negativa (Anita Wach and Bojan Jablanovec)
(US Premiere)
Wednesday, November 22, at 8pm
@ La MaMa/Ellen Stewart Theatre

Conceived and devised by Anita Wach and Bojan Jablanovec of Via Negativa,One Hundred Toasts is a celebration–a farewell toast, so to speak, of the romantic idea of the artist-producer and a welcome to the artist-consumer. The work examines how the artist as an embodiment of “true, authentic, genuine human production” no longer exists and how we are faced with the artist as innovator of consumption, and a maker of various artistic forms of consumption.

Performed by Anita Wach, with music by Glenn Miller, Michael Nyman, the Stooges, and Alfred Schnittke.

Via Negativa is a Ljubljana-based international platform for research, development, and production of contemporary performing arts. Founded in 2002, it operates under the artistic direction of theater director Bojan Jablanovec and is focused on devising and exploring different performing strategies, with an emphasis on ethics, performance practices, procedures, and genres. In addition to productions, Via Negativa conducts workshops as the VN Laboratory for Contemporary Performing Arts. Via Negativa has devised numerous projects that have been presented in 24 European countries and in the United States.

How the Hares Are Dying
and
Private Inventory
by TukaWach (Magda Stawman-Tuka and Anita Wach)
(US Premiere)
Friday, November 24, at 8pm
@ La MaMa/Ellen Stewart Theatre

A double bill of ontological insecurity that differs wildly in style, the latest two-hander by Magda Stawman-Tuka and Anita Wach plays with ideas of disappearance in relation to our sense of being. The episodic ritual of Private Inventory, conceived as a choreography of the hidden, is followed by an imaginary Joseph Beuys workshop, the setting for an exploration of self-sacrifice and transformation in How the Hares Are Dying. Together with the audience the performers enter the empty space and will try to fill it with events rooted in very personal sources. The events may seem trivial, frivolous, bizarre, but because they are theirs they are unique.

TukaWach was founded by the core creative team of Magdalena Tuka and Anita Wach, performers from theater and dance, respectively. After working together in previous collaborations, the two were inspired to formally unite as a company. From 2013 to 2016, TukaWach was known as Ja Ja Ja Ne Ne Ne after the Joseph Beuys artwork. Through its various fusions of new dramaturgy and multimedia experimentation, the narrative of a TukaWach show is never a linear cause-and-effect system of Events but one open to fragmentation and deconstruction. Fiction is employed as a device for the performer-devisors to confront personal material through unfixed strategies.

FESTIVAL PROGRAM