“To be a dance artist is to dedicate oneself to infinity.”
Mary Fulkerson

Mary Fulkerson (1940–2020) choreographer, dancer and teacher, is considered one of the most controversial figures in dance. Her work evokes a number of different, though always strong, reactions. She has significantly contributed to the development of new dance in Europe. She created a space for choreographers and dancers to explore them creatively. Fulkerson was interested in the place of ideas in culture – k not merely in dance, but also in literature, aesthetics and philosophy. With her work, she confirmed the intellectual place of dance, looking for a redefinition of dance performance. Her work was remarkably sensual, intuitive, emotional and expressive, what stems from a deeply reflexive starting point – contemplative immobility, in which, however, she did not remain.

Fulkerson tirelessly moves on to new performances with their pitfalls and potential. She presents her landscapes in a deliberately anarchic manner and draws viewers into various directions, confronts and encourages them to encounter the complexities of life today. She developed an approach to movement called Anatomical Release Technique, that significantly influenced postmodern dance. She was a teacher at Dartington College (UK), the School for New Dance Development and the European Dance Development Centre.

Homage to Mary has been made especially for Nu Dance Fest 2021. We thus pay tribute to the choreographer and dancer who influenced Slovak artists. The event comprises of a performance and lecture.

The lecture will introduce Mary Fulkerson based on interviews with her students and friends, and on memories of her brief visit to Bratislava, where she gave the performance The Garden and Nature at the Academy of Performing Arts.

The performance commemorates the staging of The Garden and Nature in Bratislava in 1999.

”What is chosen and assigned to individuals?”

”What happens on the basis of laws of nature?”

The performance consists of:

Constructed / improvised movements
Decisions / coincidences
Order / disorder
Boundaries / open space

Anna Sedlačková (1962) has been working on the Slovak dance scene as a dancer, choreographer and teacher for over 30 years. In 1995, she founded her own group AS Projekt. She is currently working on the functionality and expressiveness of movement, open dance forms and improvisation. She is with the civic group Late collection, where she created, as an author and performer, the works Intentional Waiting (Zámerné čakanie; 2014), Elegance of a Quantum Rabbit (Elegancia kvantového králika; 2015) and Stories of Be-coming (2017).  Since 1997 she is a lecturer at the Dance Department at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. She is also a certified BMC® teacher.

Lucia Holinová is a graduate of the Faculty of Music and Dance at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava in the field of Dance Art – Pedagogy of Modern Dance. As a choreographer, director, dramaturge, she created performances in collaboration with other artists, that were presented in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Germany, Austria, New York, and Cyprus. She started working in choreography during her studies at the Academy of Performing Arts. She has created feature choreographies Škára (Crack; 1999), FUGA (2012), WATCH (2015), as well as renewed première of WATCH NOW (2016), PI STORY (2015), DUNAJ (2016) – work in progress, Niveau stable (2019). As dramaturge, she has worked with the choreographer Šárka Ondrišová on 4 MEN (Slovak National Theatre Ballet;2011), Water on Water (elledanse; 2011) and FROST (Ballet Bratislava; 2012). In 2014, together with Anna Sedlačková, Daniel Raček and Monika Čertezni, she founded the group Late Harvest, that brings together dancers of mature age. In this collaboration, they created the performance Intentional Waiting (Zámerné čakanie; 2014) in a collective choreography. From 2010 to 2013, she was executive director of the elledanse Theatre and Dance School. Since 2014, she is Editor-in-Chief of the magazine TANEC.

Authors: Anka Sedlačková – lecture, Lucia Holinová – performanc
Cast: Monika Čertezni, Radoslava Martinček, Barbora Janáková, Anna Sedláčková, Lukáš Bobalik, Renata Ptačin, Katarína Vlniešková, Magda Takáčová, Barbora Kiczková
Running time: 60 min + 30 min