Direcció: 63/65 rue Vandeweyer Bruselas-Bélgica
Telèfon: +32 (0)478/96.89.97
Web: http://lesslovaks.com

---

Detalls

Les SlovaKs is a collective made of five independant, energetic dancers coming from Slovakia : Milan Herich, Peter Jasko, Anton Lachký, Milan Tomásik and Martin Kilvády.

Milan, Peter, Anton and Milan started dancing very early. At the age, of five, before even meeting each other, they shared the stage at the "Vychodna" folk festival. At that time nobody expected, that during the next 20 years they would share the same life, education, room, fun, common games and stage frights.

After knowing each other for many years and having danced and lived together at different periods from childhood to present, when Les SlovaKs officially formed a collective to make dances together in 2006, they started from the point at which they wanted to finish: with vivacious and unbound dancing.

Opening Night. This experience (creative process that lasted one year) laid a ground stone for the collective way of working and decision making. It was a beginning in developing of common skill in composing while performing, finding movement language (later named "New Traditional dance"), accumulating the set of rules in relating to each other and to the public while performing, using of Slovak folk dance, music and singing. The premiere of "Opening Night" was in November 2007.

In the second creation Journey Home, which was premiered in November 2009 in Brussels, Les Slovaks continued working as a collective. The characteristic feature in "Journey Home" was the direct inspiration and the use of Slovak folk dance, traditional polyphonic singing and playing with "Slovak sensitivity" and humor while performing.



Our work
Right from the start Les SlovaKs embarked on a practice of dancing together with no rules. Through the ongoing work of dancing itself, discovered what rules are absolutely necessary to create a space in which each person's dance is supported by the group and supports the group, where the dancing remains a priority and its possibilities remain vast. A very simple directive is the impetus of the practice: the dancer can do everything he wishes within the frame of dance.

Full and Open Dancing: A Practice of Inclusion
Principally not excluding any aesthetic or movement possibilities, this lively practice and the collaborative rules that emerged within it became known as "Open Dancing". Continuing with Open Dancing to create a performative practice, Les SlovaKs fully grasped the necessary difference in performing for each other and performing for a public. From the added ingredient of this self- consciousness to their practice, they developed "Full Dancing" a set of attentive parameters created to maintain a fully committed level of performance within the difficult task of occupying the simultaneous role of observer and participant. With the application of such rules as "always know what the others are doing," Full Dancing is about occupying one's own physical space with totality and precision while occupying a further expanded space in one's awareness that incorporates the other dancers and the public.

From a shared practice of Open Dancing and Full Dancing, Les SlovaKs work with very direct parameters in order to facilitate a context for dancing that encompasses expression, emotion, physical virtuosity, personal history and cultural reference. With all of this information, Les SlovaKs employ a very diverse set of dance and performance skills in their work, enlivened by total personal availability onstage allowing for charm, humour, and joy to colour the fully embodied and personified movement. Free of any kind of categorization, Les SlovaKs embrace style, connotation, drama, and imagination with flexibility and playfulness. This spirited and inclusive approach to performance allows for a magnitude of physical expression long awaited for in the field of dance, as the seemingly limitless field of reference in which they move supports an uninhibited display of their true love for dancing.

Les SlovaKs and New Traditional Dance
In what has been referred to as "New Traditional Dance," Les SlovaKs have developed a way of dancing and performing together from playing with their shared history. The fraternity of dancers has knit a web of reference points together enhanced and complexified by the personal folklore of their friendship. Through an organic process of collective gravitation towards common points of interest and by maintaining their individual specificities, their uniquely personal and intuitive context has generated a way of dancing that functions much like a social dance, yet without the limitations of style or cultural uniformity.

The Collective Onstage: A Human Statement
Working as a true collective from the studio to the stage and continuing their negotiations of time and space within the performance itself, Les SlovaKs share with their public a very generous and earnest way of relating that immediately traverses any objective distances possibly created by the theatre. By doing what they love and investing passion and affinity in their decision making, their process is directed by desires that sometimes converge and sometimes conflict. Regarding each member as an irreplaceable asset to the whole, Les SlovaKs create a polyphonic dance that brings each dancer to the fore as a soloist and an instrumental part of a dynamic and familial collective.

---

Espectacles

Journey Home
Within

---