Mateja Bučar

On the one hand, the austerity of a clear line, on the other, the complexity, the wildness, the intricacy of the languages of movement and articulation, which will braid themselves into each other, one after the other, into each other, constantly swirling within the internally highly complex and externally utterly simple clarity of a single line. We want to capture the paradoxical moment between total liberation and strict discipline in which living, thinking and dancing are always fatally trapped, and some of this paradoxicality, which extends to contemporary life in a broader sense, is perhaps also suggested by the title: Hurry-Scurry, Stay in Line.

»I was born one mornin', it was drizzlin' rain

Fightin' and trouble are my middle name

I was raised in the canebrake by an ol' mama lion

Can't no high toned woman make me walk the line«

(Tennessee Ernie Ford, Sixteen Tons)

"01 The line functions in Mateja Bučar’s new choreography as the mark of a productive limitation. Not a limit in productivity, on the contrary: a limitation that proves itself to be productive. Movements are thus limited to pertaining to a line. Yet this limitation immediately opens up a space of invention. It brings about all kinds of obvious, fancy, strange or bizarre ways of dealing with one’s attachment to the line. The rule of the line does not just exclude or forbid a number of movements. At the same time it suggests a goal for an abundant number of other movements. It brings about a desire, not to break the rule, but to fulfil it and to reach its goal, maybe by an unexpected move. As soon as the rule of the line is formulated, the spirit of play is provoked – or as it were invoked, engendered. Even the rebellious, outlaw spirit is here not to be understood as the one that violates the rule, but rather as the one that attempts to reach the suggested goal in a strange, funny way, against all possible hindrances.

02 The line brings together a number of movements just like a string unites a number of pearls. 

Connecting movements by the criterion of their pertaining to the line is a way of bringing movements together that is different from uniting them, for example, by the criterion of their similarity, their juxtaposition, their contrast or their narrative sequence. The rule is never only the opposite of no rule, but as well of several other rules that often remain unacknowledged due to their self-evident, customary character. The rule of the line is the breaking with other rules. Only due to this fact – that it breaks with customary, unacknowledged rules – the rule of the line can bring about the unexpected." Robert Pfaller