Last Saturday, on the stage of the Slovenian National Theatre in Nova Gorica, auditions were held for the dance company of the multimedia performance BORDERLESS BODY, choreographed by choreographers and dancers Nastja Bremec Rynia and Michal Rynia. This is the beginning of a major project, certainly one of the flagship projects of the European Capital of Culture 2025 Nova Gorica – Gorizia programme.
More than 800 dancers from all over the world applied for auditions, but only 50 were invited to Nova Gorica. The selected dancers will form a dance company that will be part of the performance Borderless Body 2025. From April 1, Nova Gorica will have a “permanent” dance troupe for the first time in its history. The peak of the dance events will take place in 2025 with a performance in the Solkan quarry, but until then the project will include several smaller performances, training sessions, dance films and other preparatory events.
Borderless Body is a dance and multimedia performance that explores the limits of the body and artificial intelligence. It will be performed in the fascinating setting of the Solkan quarry. The project’s lead artists Nastja Bremec Rynia and Michal Rynia, dancers and choreographers of MN Dance Company who graduated from Codarts Rotterdam, will also invite other artists and researchers to collaborate.
During the process of creation, they will explore and discover the limitations of the body and connect dance with artificial intelligence and robotics. The two-year research will lead the artists and researchers to find answers to a series of questions about the future relationship between the biological and the technological. What happens when human bodies can be “optimised” by technology? What will the “body” be in the future, and will the mind even necessarily need a biological body to function? Can the body be moved by artificial intelligence using algorithms?
The project involves several partners: multimedia artist Valerie Wolfgang, Darrel Toulon – The Alpha Group (Austria), SNG Nova Gorica, Mittelfest (Italy), University of Bologna (Italy), Pro-Progressione (Hungary) and HKD Rijeka (Croatia). It will also involve researchers, artists and scientists from various disciplines, as well as associations for disabled people and others, retirement homes and other institutions, and companies developing innovative tools for overcoming motor difficulties.
The MN Dance Company performs at many international dance festivals, runs master classes all over the world and trains young dancers, but most valuable of all – they create fascinating dance performances for us, in which they weave all their knowledge of body, mind and intelligence so that we can admire them dancing and reflect with them on questions of the origin, rise, fall and the overall structure of the world and the human being in it.
Their international recognition has certainly been boosted by the South Korean k-pop band BTS, for whom MN Dance Company choreographed their art film Black Swan.