Circles in Five, an improvised dance concert

The story of the event Circles in Five is a story about patterns and relationships. About how nothing can remain constant if we want to dance, if we want to play, if we want to truly experience life.

Circles in Five unfolds as a sequence of improvisations based on previously outlined patterns. Each improvisation lasts five minutes. All are grounded in the seguiriya rhythm, originating from flamenco, which is also counted in five.

In circles of dance and music, Anja, Luka and Mario will meet Vid, Andreja and Igor for the first time. Shod dance, synthesizers, guitar, percussion, voice, barefoot dance, light. In the search for a shared language, each brings something and everyone takes something away.

According to the author, dance must have a connection to life if it is to be meaningful. What connects dance with life are patterns, which are also the central focus of the author’s dance research and the main theme of the event. She is particularly interested in the relationship between patterns and relationships themselves: how destructive they can be when we are unaware of them, and how they can protect and support us when we learn to recognize them and work with them consciously.

“If dance has no connection to life, it has no meaning.”

When a living being encounters a pattern and becomes caught in it, it repeats it due to the nature of its functioning… and repetition becomes a constant. Yet repetition itself already creates difference—but only in contact with another. Often it is only in relationship that we realize what is truly essential and what can easily fall away. As the German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm writes: “We cannot fail to react to one another.”

Anja understands her encounters with the musicians and dancer as a form of instant composing in the relationship between pattern and improvisation, where past structures dissolve and reform in the emerging space of transformation. The human compulsion to repeat is unavoidable, while unconscious structures can only change once we become aware of them and understand them.

“I do not dance flamenco, I simply dance,” says Anja. “Flamenco has become my unconscious structure.”

For this reason, she does not wish to foreground technique, but rather illuminate the relationships between the creators, and the repetitions and differences that run through them. The spatial and temporal deconstruction unfolds in the reverse direction of the classical construction of a flamenco composition. Dance technique can be understood as a set of embodied and internalized forms that function as a safety net through which the body tells its story.

Circles in Five opens a space where dance and life are allowed to follow their own flow, trusting that something will ultimately be caught in the widely spread network of choreographic and musical fragments.