One ballad, please!

One ballad, please! is an interdisciplinary project that brings together music, dance, and storytelling, interwoven through the poetic textures of Slavic traditions and flamenco.

At the core of the work is an intimate encounter between vocalist, harpist, and multidisciplinary artist Zvezdana Novaković, and flamenco dancer and performer Urška Centa. Seated at a shared table, the artists unfold a dialogic performance structure rooted in the tradition of ballad storytelling. Their collaboration generates a deeply expressive duet, weaving together songs, spoken exchanges, rhythmic patterns, and melodic lines through which Slavic and Balkan cultural references meet the sensibility of flamenco.

Sound continuously transforms into movement, giving rise to a choreography that unfolds with visceral intensity, resonating physically and emotionally within the spectator. Novaković’s resonant, open-voice singing and her harp create a powerful sonic landscape shaped by reimagined folk heritages. Within this field, Centa engages through percussive presence and the raw physicality of flamenco, exploring the thresholds where dance becomes sound and sound becomes embodied gesture.

“One ballad for you, one for me” becomes both a performative principle and a narrative thread and an attentive exchange between two women deeply rooted in the embodied memory of folk traditions.

Zvezdana Novaković is a Slovenian artist working at the intersection of music and performance. Her practice focuses on the exploration of resonant, open-voice singing, drawing from extensive research into Slavic and Balkan folk traditions. She has studied and collaborated with traditional singers from Bulgaria, Belarus, Serbia, Bosnia, Poland, Croatia, and Slovenia.