Events

 

 

MODABORN

MODABORN does not imitate or copy styles to fuse east and west, but is uses these different influences to question the present dance culture. The performance is divided into two sections. The first is an entertaining showcase, the kind that Sri Lankan audience may be more accustomed to. It is colourful and fast, bodies are moving quickly and fluently, and the beauty of this 12 girls and 6 boys shows to its full extent. The 5 to 8 minutes long single, couple or group dance items draw fantastic pictures of love and jealousy, dignity and doubt, conformance and confrontation on the stage. It is what you would call beautiful Sri Lankan dance at its best.

 
In the second section the troupe truly explores, which is what makes nATANDA so different from conventional dance performances. It is dance that is an expression of the self, and its states of being. The overall topic of this part is the cake, as an essence of live and the celebrations of its crucial moments like birth, wedding or death. The diversity of movements and choreographically ideas are much broader now in order to increase the possibility of dance expressions. Routines and mechanized movements are being deconstructed as well as the frozen smile on dancer's face, which is paid to entertain. When nice dance steps suddenly interrupt or some dancers seam to forget they are on stage, and start laughing, crying or fighting, you feel the conjoint aspiration of prettiness between dancers and audience is carried ad absurdum.

 

Instead of this it is going deeper into role behaviours, fears and secret longings, what makes it dangerous but irresistible. The dance does not try to express a feeling, relate a story or give a message. It provokes associations. But no idea remains too long, each interpretation clashes with the next. It leads you in a carrousel of emotions, like a movie in fast motion. And after a while you will realise that the story is only happening in the mind of the observer.