VENUS

a dance film with live music

ELIAS 2069 and Mercedes Klein, 2022

Running time 27 minutes without intermission.

Concept, choreography, text and performance: Mala Kline
Direction: Mala Kline, Hana Vodeb;
Visual dramaturgy: Petra Veber, Hana Vodeb, Mala Kline
Scenography: Petra Veber
Light: Jaka Šimenc
Camera: Hana Vodeb, Darko Herič
Video sinchronisation in original performance: Darko Herič
Montage: Hana Vodeb
Music, performance, production: Kristijan Krajnčar
Music mixing: Dejan Lapanja
Recording mixer: Julij Zornik
Costume: Mala Kline, Petra Veber
Set assistance: Omar Izmail, Špela Škulj
Executive production: Ajda Kline
Production: ELIAS 2069 and Mercedes Klein
Co-production: Zavod En-Knap, Mesto Žensk
Supported by Ministry of Culture of Slovenia, City of Ljubljana, Department for Culture.

Thanks to Domen Hajnšek, Vid Martinčič, Katarina Morano, Blaž Celarec, Tomaž Grom, Gašper Puntar and Matija Zvezdan Puntar Kline.

The film is in English.

The film is made from materials for the dance performance of the same name, based on Botticelli’s painting The Birth of Venus depicting the moment of her emergence from sea foam. The birth of Venus occurs as a cut that distinguishes between heaven and earth, thus creating an in-between, wherein creation occurs continuously. Without a cut, there is no gaze and no creation. Only inertia.

The painting is the starting point for the text and the dance material which, each in their own way, offer the possibility of different readings and meanings. The film juxtaposes the two worlds simultaneously present. The world of dream images constantly interrupts the here and now of the body, inhabiting it, challenging it, and transforming it. The space between is one of boundless creativity, from which a multitude of forms and their variations emerge. They create a visual poem in time, one that poses questions about corporeality, sentience, relationality, the gaze and the fertility and transience of nature. The film’s imagery invites us to contemplate the constant birthing into space and time, creative imagination, and the beauty of creation.

Mala Kline is a performer, choreographer, and writer. Her artistic and theoretical work is embedded in the practice of dreaming. Her extensive oeuvre is based on the Saphire® dreaming techniques, which she uses to open up ingenious spaces of experience and generate semantically fluid contradictory imagery marked by atmospheric intensity. With her works, she creates unique worlds weaved through the language of our dreaming. Mala Kline won a series of major Slovenian awards and nominations for her choreographic works, including the Golden Bird Award (2005), Triton Award (2005, 2013), the Ksenija Hribar Award for choreography (2013) and the Ksenija Hribar Award for theory (2021) among others. In 2018, she founded ELIAS 2069 institute – a school, an art residency space, an ecological farm and an outdoor spa, located in a pristine natural resort deep in the wilderness of the southern Slovenia and dedicated to education and creation through dreaming.