Neven Korda Mister Nahtigal three times solo, performance

Photo: Miha Fras

Mister Nahtigal brings an atmosphere of lyricality of the utopian absurdity of pleasure/sacrifice and the tragedy of the utopian absurdity of necessity/sacrifice. It creates a transemotive field of the feeling of life limited by longing and the brutality of being. The beauty of these acts derives directly from the physical situation of theatrical time. Great melancholic widths, short breakthroughs of heroism and pathos. Strong beats – as on dance floors.

Mister Nahtigal is a performance, a staging of a recurrent literary theme of a real victim in an off-beam world, or an off-beam victim in a real world. These are the two possible choices of Mister Nahtigal, who at the turn of the century is looking for the person about whom he sings and narrates to the stars. He is unemployed and in his spare time a volunteer pizza delivery man. His world is a video studio. His audience is mostly cameras and microphones. His environment is made of projected objects, elusive images, commanding sonority. It is to them that he must perform his art, it is to them that his efforts are dedicated. The audience, witness to the event, enjoys his bravura.

A string of everyday dance/performance chores. A string that leads to routine. Routine leads to precision and precision, with time, brings down norms and creates new forms. Slowly, a string of metamorphoses develops which remain in the memory and can be manipulated through media in the same way as the events transmitted in the immediate moment. Constant metamorphosis, growth, sprouting of forms. Buds, buds, buds.

The performance is made in the genre of media theatre, although to Mister Nahtigal the issues of the appearance and place of the body-subject are only a means of expression emptied of scholastic self-reflection and used merely as aesthetic effect.

»In his performances, Neven Korda transfers the notion of choreography from the classical paradigm of space and body to the digital form, transforming simultaneously the modified and manipulated image from the live event into a technological one.« (Rok Vevar)

About the author
For several years, Neven Korda has been making performances that, on a sort of Nothing's way, treat the dancer's body and work as a sonic and pictorial image. In Read Me Prospectively (2002/03), the body and work are in a kind of airless space, in a total non-relation towards the environment and themselves, while being at the same time entirely immersed in that environment and themselves. In Letters from the Present (2004), the body and work are closed in themselves in an obsessive action that is cruelly placed in an otherwise completely emptied space without other image carriers. In TWO (2005), motion is radically stopped, while circulation is possible in the communication with the gaze (the public). YYY (2006) focuses on big themes with uncritical distance. The meaning of being and the awareness of the environment in which we are inevitably set. Motion is concrete. It is an autonomous pleasure as well as an object in the making of the show.


CREDITS

Idea, direction and video manipulation: Neven Korda
Choreography and dance: Igor Sviderski
Music and audio manipulation: Luka Prinčič
Lighting design: Danilo Pečar
Makeup: ajetaMateja
Technician: Jure Sajovic


Produced by: Aksioma - Zavod za sodobne umetnosti, Ljubljana
Executive producer: Marcela Okretič
Co-produced by: Zavod Zank, Zavod K6/4, Zavod SCCA-Ljubljana, KUD Pozitiv - DIC, PTL- Plesni teater Ljubljana

Project supported by: The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, The City of Ljubljana

Thanks to: Borut Kumperščak, Slavko Glamočanin, Janez Štambergerj, MAC&PC

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Contacts:
Marcela Okretič
Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana
Neubergerjeva 25, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenjia
e-pošta: aksioma4[AT]siol[DOT]net
www.aksioma.org