SONG
Premiere: 27/11/2018, Co-Festival, Spanski borci cultural centre, Ljubljana, SI
“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth—“ (Song of Songs, 1:2)
SONG is based on the Song of Songs, one of the greatest mystical texts of Western tradition. Like The Song it is an enduring quest for a relationship with another. SONG is a subtle meditative minimalist piece, which explores, through dance and choreography, the potentialities of language. How language as a medium can bring us into a relationship; with the unnamable, the body, the space, the music, and the audience, and become a song. SONG is a love song we write with every utterance we make. SONG is the first part of a trilogy that seeks to develop language(s), through the body, that need to be felt to be understood.
language is one
body is one
life is one
one touch
one kiss
one breath
just one
just you
just me
just him
just my love
just my dove
just one left
just
SONG is a love song we sing with every utterance we make.
Concept and choreography: Mala Kline
Creation and performance: Eftychia Stefanou
Space, costume design and photography: Petra Veber
Music and sound: Nenad Sinkauz
Light design and technical direction: Jaka Šimenc
Executive production: Ajda Kline
Production: ELIAS 2069 and Mercedes Klein
Co-production: Pekinpah, Center kulture Španski borci/Zavod EN-KNAP, Platform 0090 Antwerpen, Kino Šiska in Nomad Dance Academy in the frame of CoFestival.
Supported by Ministry of Culture of Slovenia, City of Ljubljana, Department of Culture.
Thanks to Urša Sivič, Hana Vodeb, Aleš Zorec, Gašper Puntar, Mesut Arslan.
‘The real singular moment of this year's selection (and - I would say - contemporary dance practices in our country at the moment) seems to me to be the solo Song, created by Mala Kline and performed by the excellent dancer Eftychia Stefanou. ... Song is in fact an example of an extremely complex, you could say classical (modern) dance choreographic composition, which we are not (anymore) used to seeing. Especially not so filigree. With this kind of density and fundamentality of choreographic texture, the domestic public is in fact very rarely confronted. However, such works are rarely created in our country. When confronted with works like this, they rarely act as vividly and truthfully as Song of Male Kline. ...
The dance body that unfolds before us in one hour is not an identity (a particular dance style; it does not tell us what dance is), but a difference (a transition between modalities as well as spaces between them; it tells us what happens to it in time).
It is also interesting that the choreography abandons the negotiating and advocacy elements, as it does not want to convince us of anything other than the intensification of spectator’s attention, from which neither our sensorium nor the reading act is excluded. If we are willing to dive into the work. Her discretion and delicacy are framed at the front by a translucent and at the back by a projection screen, two screens between which the structure stands before us as a choreographic object or choreographic text from which Mala Kline has extracted most of the working processes that make up her opus. The degree of choreographic reduction, distillation or abstraction seems to me loud and astonishing in the case of a choreographer’s work. ...
The art of forgetting is in individual cases at least as important as the art of remembering, but the former is only revealed to us when we are able to decipher its traces. And this is not always an easy task. ... The moment one deviates from the desire, SONG can really reveal herself to her.' (Rok Vevar_NEKAJ O GIBANICI in SOLU SONG MALE KLINE IN EFTITHYE STEPHANOU)
‘The dance segments meander and repeat as refrains of the Song in different positions of the stage, and if the dancer would leave behind her visible traces, they would plot the path of the perfect spiral. The dancer’s hands are playful, sparkling in fluid minimalism and restlessness of a heart beat to expand into a cosmic embrace, while across the dance floor blows as the summer breeze a song of love… Showing a new artistic direction taken up in all maturity of the choreographer… [SONG] … also heralds [Mala Kline’s] new, second creative ascent.’ (D. Podboj_SONG)
‘The choreography of Mala Kline is reminiscent of the existence of an intimate space within ourselves and the harmony of silent mystical songs we sing with our body, breath and our existence. The Sounded Bodies Festival thus ended with a voiceless connection of physicality and music presented through movement.’ (J. Čižmek Tarbuk_The Voiceless Song of the Body)
‘The series of movement repetitions and permutations, in which instantaneous pauses are drawn according to the natural flow of movement, culminates in the moment when the dancer no longer acts as a human body, but only as a silhouette that turns long arms and head up into the sky and places the audience into the background ... before returning to constant movement in the form of dance loops. We viewers are thus immersed in an endless canon, co-created by music, light, space and the body as an image before the viewer's eye.’ (Katarina Bogataj_PODOBE ZA ODRSKO TANČICO | Radio Študent)
The choreography, which is now ethereally and dreamily, now roughly and dynamically rocks the excellent dancer Eftychia Steffanou, does not focus on a specific sub-theme, but rather in an hour captures the mood of love and wraps it in (typical for Kline) virtuoso movements, which through an almost dramaturgical montage, are constantly confronting the last corners of human attention and playing with it. Koridor, 14. december 2018
Through the development and refinement of the methodology, Song hints at a shift towards more intense contemplative depth… The stage images here are already completely dissolved into a perfectionist and flowing movement composition. Nika Arhar, CoFestival: Razprtost uprizoritvenih situacij | MMC RTV SLO 4. december 2018
We construct language to speak through the body (performed by the dancer Eftychia Stefanou) in a non-mental sensory way again about being, the body, meeting, time and space. Petra Zemljič, Preko telesa nazaj k besedi | Večer, 25.oktober 2019
Those who know the past works of Mala Klina would be surprised by the performance. If we did not know, we would not even say it is hers… The course and the executions of this performance with its harmonious, indisputable correctness, in which nothing is twisted, whistled, hangs on a string, interrupts, subverts or moves itself, doubts or does not know… longs for the concept of love in its extreme purity. And as the language of the the Song of Songs sings, the mobility of the Song also embodies the classic concept of beauty. Planned or not, Mala Kline thus manages to authentically pour into the performance the perfection of the song. Radharani Pernarčič, Ne moremo se kar prepričati, naj ne beremo, ne (pre)poznamo | Neodvisni, november 2019