From August 27 to 31, four performances of the international contemporary dance festival “Time to Dance” will take place in Riga – both several premieres and the renewal of an important project in the history of Latvian contemporary dance – Olga Žitluhina’s “Dances of Loss”.
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According to the organizers, the festival “Time to Dance”, which traditionally takes place in early June, will offer an artistic program gradually this year due to the restrictions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. In June, the festival program already included works by future dance artists of the Latvian Academy of Culture (LCA), which were created in the conditions of distance learning. In October and November, it is planned to perform performances by Norwegian, Finnish and Icelandic artists, thus allowing to get acquainted with contemporary Nordic dance and revealing the central theme of this year’s festival – the North. It is planned that in the autumn the festival will also host a performance by Slovenian artists, which will mark the transition to the theme of next year’s “Time to Dance” – the Balkans.
Every year, the festival allows to get acquainted with the works of Latvian choreographers, which can be seen at the end of August this year.
Choreographer and performer Alise Putniņa’s performance “Night” will take place on August 27 at 19.00 in the Eduards Smiļģis Theater Museum of the Latvian Academy of Sciences. The solo work is created by moving the perception away from the public perceptions of women. The choreographer of the performance together with the playwright Linda Krūmiņš invites the viewer to discover the essence of a woman sleeping in the deepest cells of the body and can only be guessed by the spinal cord.
On August 29, at 7 pm, Olga Zhitlukhina’s performance “I Was Here”, staged by the founder of Latvian contemporary dance together with one of the most famous dance companies in Estonia – the dance theater “Fine 5”, will be shown at the Riga History and Navigation Museum. The show had its world premiere in September 2019 in Estonia, but this will be the premiere of the work in Latvia. At the heart of the show “I was here” is the theme of physical and mental / mental communication and touch. Olga Zhitlukhina admits that life is moving very fast and the question arises: “Can we feel a real touch, or is the only communication we know is contact with touch screens?”
On August 30, at 16.00 and 20.00, as well as on August 31, at 20.00, the premiere of the joint work “On the Other Side” by scenographer Dmitrijs Gaitjukevičs, choreographer Elīna Gaitjukevičs and composer Anna Ķirze will be shown at the LAC Theater House It was created in cooperation with the students of the dance art course of the Latvian Academy of Arts, and is the master’s thesis of Dmitrijs Gaitjukevičs, graduating from the Scenography Department of the Latvian Academy of Arts. The show tells the story of people stuck in time and space, of the borders that are being built to control the flow of people in the world and to isolate us, the necessary, from the unnecessary, who are forced to flee their homeland, place and affiliation for various political and social reasons.
On August 31, with the entrance from 19.00 to 21.30, “Dances of Loss” will take place at the Digital Art House – in 2008 a project by Olga Zhitlukhina’s Dance Company was created, which has now undergone a renovation. Olga Zhitlukhina’s return to a once created work is intended not as a traditional retrospective of creative activity, but as a kind of living dance archive and audit of artistic ideas. It will be an attempt both to look at the theme of the show – ecology, the relationship between man and nature – from a modern point of view, and to show how the dancers of the original show dance and think today, 12 years later. “Dances of Loss” combines dance, photography and video art, and the form of the performance is similar to the rules of an art gallery. The show lasts 45 minutes, but in three hours it will take place four times in a row without interruptions, giving the audience the opportunity to come and go whenever they want.
Tickets for the shows can be purchased at “Biļešu paradīze” box offices and online. Tickets for the show “On the Other Side” ticketshop.lv
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