THERE, IN THE GARDEN

The performance There, in the garden is an invitation from two people who discover the beauty of the mechanisms of listening. In their act of listening to nature, they uncover worlds of sound and their echoes in the visible. In doing so, they translate these sounds through their own bodies to expand their imaginative potentials and explore their overlap with the world of movement.

Urška Centa, choreographer and dancer, and Domen Novak, actor, lead the sound and movement based performance with a pure instinct of curiosity, which creates connections and weaves relationships between them. The images, drawn from different personal time periods of the two co-creators, dissect their performing identities and reflect a search for mutual contact and an exploration of their coexistence and interdependence.

They understand the garden as a playground, a microcosm of human interactions, a space for building community, exploring different constellations of relationships, and offering invitations. Together, they observe the far-reaching and chain-like nature of reactions within and beyond it, emphasizing the role of the senses in shaping human experience.

In the performance, the human body, as an instrument, is intertwined with various inter- and transdisciplinary structures that perceive the ways in which our lives are interconnected. These structures refer both to the performers and to the broader construction of an internal network shared with those present in the space, invoking a structural logic of nature that emerges from an awareness of the deep interconnectedness of the individual and the environment. The performance also subtly reflects the social value of human dependence on nature. Nurturing the garden becomes a metaphor representing a cultural value for the artists—one that continually connects them, as individuals, to all living things and offers them the opportunity to experience a more acute presence in the world.

There, in the garden is the result of choreographic research into the correlation between movement and sound, carried out with the support of a working grant from the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia in the field of musical art. Urška Centa, in collaboration with Domen Novak, presented this work in October 2023 in the miniature Miniatura no. 9 (part 4 of the miniature, ZRC Atrium, NEST) and in November 2023 in the sound choreography The Garden, which was selected for presentation at the FIAC – International Festival of Contemporary Art in León, Mexico.

The premiere of the performance took place as part of the Noches de Tablao series, which showcases the art of contemporary flamenco. It is shaped by interdisciplinary artistic events primarily based on the live connection between music and dance, as well as an accompanying program of educational and theoretical content. The program builds an intercultural bridge between international and local creators who establish a dialogue between flamenco artistic practice and other musical genres, introducing new creative approaches to musical, dance and performative arts. Since its inception in 2017, it has provided a platform for the latest artistic projects rooted in genre-crossing and offers a wide range of contemporary expressive forms. It features concerts and dance performances in which tradition enters into exciting alliances with innovation.