“When, as a dancer, I stood alone in the massive crowd of liberation fighters, aware that I shall be able to use my dance gift and weak body to express what had been uniting us, that I shall also be able to master the vast natural space, I felt strength in my feet, tramping the hard soil of the forest ground. ” - Marta Paulin alias Brina
© David Visnjic
GIBANICA 2023
25 February, 19.30 at Cankarjev dom, Ljubljana
Brina – A kinaesthetic monument is a collaborative project of Leja Jurišić, Bara Kolenc, and the NO1 collective (Peter Kutin, Patrik Lechner, Mathias Lenz)
Production: Pekinpah
Co-production: Samosvoj
With support of the Ministry of Culture of Slovenia
A monument: a structure, a tangible structure, a lasting tangible structure as a reminder to a historical phenomenon, a fixation of a specific memory arising from the fear of loss of memory. Now: to make one who is movement itself into a monument.
Brina – a kinaesthetic monument brings to presence the Slovenian contemporary dancer Marta Paulin alias Brina – as she was known among her fellow partisans in the National Liberation Front during the WWII. As an artist, Brina performed improvisational dance acts for the fighters and the locals on various meetings and gatherings. After the war, she was forced to give up active dance creation due to frostbite on her toes. The kinaesthetic monument empowers Brina, as an antifascist and a dancer-choreographer, to rise in a liquid and vocal appearance, as body which is movement itself.
The performance was included in the main program of the ImPulsTanz festival in Vienna in 2021.
Brina was her partisan name: Marta Paulin was among the first modern dancers in Slovenia before the Second World War. Born in Ljubljana in 1911, the student of Mary Wigman’s method worked for the radio before holding her first solo evening at the National Opera House in 1940. In 1941, she actively took part in the national liberation movement. A dancer-fighter who improvised her performances on the front: this is a unique phenomenon in the history of modern dance. Together with Bara Kolenc, Leja Jurišić, Mathias Lenz and Patrik Lechner, Austrian artist Peter Kutin has created a rotating, hologram-like sound object as a kinaesthetic monument to Brina, which re-examines the traditional view of monuments as static and unchangeable. Opening up an evolutionary approach to memorialization, it is itself a proposition of a new format: a kinaesthetic monument.
