Double Program

Celestial Bodies / Audrey

Olga Pona Chelyabinsk Theatre of Contemporary Dance

World Premiere

In her latest piece, Celestial Bodies, Olga Pona expands her idea of complexity. She dares to undertake the experiment of creating a state of being in several dimensions at the same time. To retain a sense of clarity, the dancers are divided into small units: solos, duets, trios. Pona’s dance performance reflects the Russian conflict between tradition and modernity. What the Chelyabinsk company tells us is unspectacular, but still deeply human.

In the Russian province, more than anywhere else, images of the West have long been shaped exclusively by motion pictures. Here, Audrey Hepburn is one of the outstanding Western icons. The solo piece Audrey, which Olga Pona developed together with Maria Greyf is based on two movies: “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “Roman Holiday”. Even though times have changed, dealing with the old topics of these films opens up the chance to reassess one’s own memories and find new aspects that are more personal and real and most of all more revealing than the image of a remote idol.

Maria Greyf presents the Audrey Hepburn, who we believe to know from the silver screen, and tries, at the same time, to draw closer to the real person.

Choreographer Olga Pona comes from a back province south of the Ural Mountains. She and her dance company from Chelyabinsk are seen as a ray of hope in the sparse Russian contemporary dance scene. She creates with her company an atmospherically dense theater of images that doesn’t tire of telling little stories shaped by the personal experience of a simple and hard life. Before taking up dance, Olga Pona worked as a tractor engineer. Pragmatism and art are very closely related in Russia. She is now one of the big stars of the international dance scene.

Maria Greyf was born in Chelyabinsk, Russia. After graduating from the Chelyabinsk Institute of Culture she became a member of the Chelyabinsk Theater of Contemporary Dance in 1997.

Celestial Bodies

Audrey