Gibanica Awards 2015

One of the aspects that deeply moved me in this work was the way in which Irena Tomazin explores the voice as an experimental choreographic matter, not only making it travel across several parts of the body, but also displacing it to the outside. The voice is thus constantly given back to the multiple spaces and times where it comes from, and taken time and again from different spots to be re-processed in different manners. Most importantly, this use of the body as a medium – or literally, a machine – to process not only one’s own voice but also multiple voices coming from distant places and times, definitely operates a politically relevant displacement of the voice from the production of subjectivity that is usually connected with a supposedly singular and unique body/subject. Last but not least, this work makes us think that if our voices are actually constituted by several voices that come from multiple times and places, i.e. if we don’t really own our own voice, our responsibility in relation to the way we position it, to the way we choreograph, de-choreograph and re-choreograph it according to what makes sense in a specific situation – is even bigger.
Paula Caspão, 21. 02. 2015

Irena Tomazin’s performance The Taste of Silence Always Resonates I understand as a work which choreographs sound – its movements, its potentialities, its availability for deconstruction, reconstruction, and alteration, all of these actions and attempts serving not to erase the body from which they are produced but to allow this same body to become something other. To become a material that is at once possibly both less and more human. The Taste of Silence Always Resonates surfaced in front of me as a kind of obstacle or problem positioned in such a way that it left me no choice but to reconsider how to approach it. Such an encounter doesn’t allow one to be or remain who he or she was a moment ago. It left us not knowing precisely where we were. It displaced the ways in which we produce and admire identity, making it possible to forget ourselves, effectively destabilizing our thinking, thus creating conditions from which a thought, one which is not already confirmed, could arise.
Jana Jevtović

»I am happy that the prize goes to Irena Tomažin. I hope it will help her to continue in that movement and voice research because – as I told publicly – that’s what touched me so strongly – natural connection of body, voice and mind, the way she is able to transform her feelings and emotions through the work with voice and gestures – which is very surprising and original.  She achieved a real complexity of the piece including work with space, lights, sound and costume the right way to underline her own high quality as a performer. And I must add one more admiration – Irena went to a deep research of songs and their roots, not from Slovenia, but Ukraine if I understood it well – and she interprets them openly and revelatory to today’s public«.
Yvona Kreuzmannová, Tanec Praha, Czech Republic

KSENIJA HRIBAR AWARDS 2015

The professional awards named after Ksenija Hribar, an important Slovenian dancer and teacher, will be granted for the second time by the Slovenian Contemporary Dance Association. The committee appointed by the Association and composed of  Blaž Lukan, Pia Brezavšček and Sabina Potočki will select the award-winners among the proposals submitted to the Association. In the categories where no candidates were proposed, the committee itself made the proposals because it believed that the accomplishments of the candidates deserved to be awarded. In granting the awards, the committee will took into consideration the complete range of contemporary dance artists.