THE ACADEMY OF FIREFLIES

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Dance performance project with site-specific movement researches and theory lectures

Project by artist Neda Kovinic with initial collaboration with Adrien Gaume

Choreography: Adrien Gaume, Syv Bruzeau, Neda Kovinic

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Dancers: Ezgi Durak, Danijela Vuckovic, Marija Maletic, Ayumi Toyabe, Nemanja Boskovic, Olga Uzikaeva, Syv Bruzeau, Neda Kovinic and then others.

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The drummer: Milan Bukejlovic

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Lectures by Jelena Vesic, Ana Vilenica, Dragan Strunjas, Ana Dragic, Neda Kovinic, Adrien Gaume, Syv Bruzeau

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photography by Aleksandra Djordjevic

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Production DKSG New Belgrade and Neda Kovinic 2019/2020

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The Academy of Fireflies gathered an international group of artists of contemporary conceptual dance, with the aim to explore the movement and compositions of dancing bodies in the urban landscape at the Student City Culture Center in Belgrade, Serbia. The research began from the Pasolini’s article "The Disappearance of the fireflies" from 1975, in which the author had given a poetic critique of the political situation in post-war Italy, speaking of the real effects of fascism and capitalism. Pasolini resembled the change in the nature that occurred in Italy in the mid-seventies, which was a complete disappearance of fireflies due to pollution and light pollution, and certainly, as a result of the untouchability of the logic of the white Western colonizer as the central protagonist of such socio-political movements. Pasolini metaphorically divides the period on the political scene to the one before the disappearance of the fireflies and the one after the disappearance. His metaphor can be applied today when we meet with the latest neoliberal stamp and the strengthening of the right, while we live in a world that hits the gong of production and consumption and we cannot resist this rhythm or follow it. Humane values, organic, biological, organic limits are under attack. As Pasolini had spoken of the world after the fireflies, so today we are talking about the world after man. The anthropic-scene is climatic and collapses, the lights turn off...

The Academy of Fireflies was also in dialogue with the spatial-utopian paradigms of socialist modernism embodied in the architecture of the Student City in Belgrade (1960), built at a time when students and education were in the focus of social ideals.

This dance research with a final performance sought to connect the artists between themselves and evoke the dialog with the audience and space itself. Movement researches started from Butoh avant-garde dance and other experimental dance approaches.

“The firefly is a tiny animal, so sensitive, that when the air becomes too heavy, it dies. In some ways, we are these fireflies destroyed by the system. The fireflies are representatives of the way of life that had begun to vanish, because we had become infected by the system, by the air itself, the atmosphere, the consumerism, which all affected us and ruined us ... " Ninetto Davoli about Pasolini's article.

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“Shining by something or burning is something dancers and performers deal with. The essence of a firefly is still in the common memory of people even though it's vanishing. One way, the phenomenological one, to feed the memory is to make imagination wider! Therefore, we plan to suggest some dancing pictures of fireflies' traces referring to our lack of attention toward them. “

Adrien Gaume, choreographer, about the project

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