MAGURA / TERRITORY & PEOPLE
This piece is a choreography / performance in a collaboration between Ukrainian artists, alina sokulska and Maria Plotnikova. According to the pagan beliefs of ancient Ukrainians, Magura is a woman with wings, a magic bird, a female deity of war, flying over the battlefield and blessing the brave soldiers for their final journey with a kiss… In their co-creation, sokulska and Plotnikova address the radical corporeality of the wartime with its vulnerability and strength, fragility and power of an act of physical effort and resistance. Magura, a character, once dissolved in the slipping meanings and sensations, approaches this corporeality through the mystical side of Ukrainian culture with its ancient archetypes and beliefs.
The creation of the choreographic material by sokulska is born alongside the performance conceptualized by Plotnikova, where the performer manipulates the body made of clothing and filled with earth, trying to find the decisions of physical effort to desperately give it a vertical position, while the earth is emptied from the body. At the same time, the carnal presence articulated in the performance material resonates with the choreographic interpretation of the myth of Magura. Thus, the very ontology of the body is questioned and seen as something radically material, at the same time – beyond materiality: body is land and soil, flesh in pain as well as the spirit that transcends it, dissolving in the semiosis of what it possibly could transform into.
La Mercè festival MAC 2023, Barcelona, Spain
San Jose Jazz Winter Fest, San Jose, California, USA, 23.02.2023
Internationales Solo Tanz Theater Festival Stuttgart | Stuttgart, Germany | 16.03.2023