SINSONTE, A SONG LEFT FORGOTTEN IN THE THROAT

The project is a reminiscence of being a woman, a dancer, a performer — a physical study of (self-)identity. The creation is set within a dystopian world in which the performer searches for animality and confronts multiple layers of her own personality through an allegory of bird behaviours and languages mirrored in human form.

The material unfolds through a constant tension between the attempt to merge with its surroundings and the insistence on remaining fully itself, between control and surrender, between discipline pushed to its limits and the persistent need for lightness. It navigates states of pleasure and fear, exposing the body as a site of contradiction: one that seeks intensity, yet resists its own exhaustion; one that desires flight, yet remains bound to gravity. Imbued with the symbolism of duality, the work reflects the parallel lives of a bird and a woman. A woman is a bird and a bird is a woman — for one night only.

A bird’s life is interlaced with regular behavioural patterns and rituals, where movement and sound occupy a position of interdependence. Bird dance emerges from song. Birds’ vocalisations are not just sound, but a system of rhythm, repetition, and signal — a living structure that shapes movement. This choreographic work is built on that structure, translating sonic patterns into physical action. It explores the body as a resonant, rhythmic entity and approaches flight not as metaphor, but as a concrete physical state.

Dancer and choreographer Urška Centa and a contemporary flamenco avant-garde artist, Marco de Ana, continue their fruitful creative partnership with a sequel to their project Historias de Pájaros (Stories of Birds, premiered in July 2021 at Cankar Centre).

”Sinsonte, a bird of four hundred voices; a mockingbird that forms different layers of sound to mimic its surroundings, to appropriate the calls of other species and speak the same language, to blend in. Its nomadic living environment is a large city; it forms part of the bird’s concealed and transfigured nature, which is reflected in the daily lives of alienated humans. Alienated from nature, life in the urban jungle juggles with the intertwined notions of freedom and captivity. Sinsonte turns night and day upside down and calls out also at nighttime; struggling for survival, it soaks up the noise frequencies and the glare of neon lights that extend the dimensions of its daytime.“