Marta Navaridas
Once upon a Time in the Flames: Our Firebird Ballet (2024)
Performance
Photo: Elsa Okazaki
Marta Navaridas’s new performance departs from her and her performers’ experience of facing nationalist and patriarchal structures in their dance training. Navaridas grew up in San Sebastián, where she witnessed the escalating militancy and repression of the Basque independence movement while training in ballet four times a week for a remote aesthetic ideal. Punk seemed like a way out, though it too was being appropriated by the independence movement and involved subscribing to its program.
Against this backdrop, Navaridas turns to Igor Stravinsky’s Firebird, which is considered an example of musical rebellion, but is also mixed up with Russian nationalism and packaged as an implicitly anti-Western, anti-classical fantasy. In a way, it could be considered punk before its time, but is heavily implicated in a by-now toxic nationalist tradition. Navaridas and her ensemble question this repertoire and liberate themselves from embodied classical doctrines, resulting in a dance of raw, untamed, and repressed feelings, a display of folk horror and a passionate and joyful critique of patriarchal violence and oppression.
Marta Navaridas (1979, San Sebastián, Spain) is an artist who works across disciplines using the body as the central element to explore ideas connecting the personal with the political. Since 2008, she has been creating text-based performances with Alex Deutinger. Since 2015, she has also been creating her own works, blending texts, live music, and gestures in unpredictable ways, playfully challenging social conventions and perceptual habits. Navaridas’s stage works have been presented at international performance venues and festivals, as well as in galleries and museums. She lives in Graz.
Commissioned by steirischer herbst ’24
Produced by steirischer herbst ’24 and Performanceinitiative 22
Supported by the City of Graz, the Province of Styria, and BMKOES
With the kind support of the Embassy of Spain in Vienna
Courtesy of UNIVERSAL EDITION AG, Vienna, www.universaledition.com, on behalf of Schott Music GmbH & Co KG, Mainz
26.9., 28.9., 19:30
Dom im Berg
Schloßbergplatz
8010 Graz ♿
18/14 euros
For ages 14 and up
Duration: ca. 80 min.
Concept, direction, choreography: Marta Navaridas
Text and performance: Veza Fernández, Stina Fors, Lau Lukkarila, Marta Navaridas, Maja Osojnik, Denise Palmieri
Music: Igor Stravinsky
Live electronics, sound design: Manuel Riegler, Maja Osojnik
Costumes: Annemarie Arzberger
Stage design: Georg Klüver-Pfandtner
Lighting design: Christina Bergner
Dramaturgy: Alex Deutinger
Outside eyes: Nerea González, Sara G. Novi, Jennifer Weiss
Thanks to: Alix Eynaudi
Production management: mollusca productions
Commissioned by steirischer herbst ’24
Produced by steirischer herbst ’24 and Performanceinitiative 22
Supported by the City of Graz, the Province of Styria, and BMKOES
With the kind support of the Embassy of Spain in Vienna
Courtesy of UNIVERSAL EDITION AG, Vienna, www.universaledition.com, on behalf of Schott Music GmbH & Co KG, Mainz