Slovak choreographer and dancer, based in Slovakia and Germany
Katarína Brestovanská is slovak choreographer and dancer, based in Slovakia and Germany. She grew up with music, studyied piano interpretation and choral singing. Her works intertwine dance with music, musical composition, digital and experimental technologies.
Katarína Brestovanská established EN VORENTOE dance project in 2021, which encompasses her previous achievements in art productions. It grows with the label bearing cooperation, ingenuity, finesse, multidimensionality, sometimes minimalism, another time quantity.
She closely collaborates with theater director and dramaturgist Jana Smokoňová and slovak musicians such as Martin Kosorín (Zoo and Aquarium), Adam Volt Dekan (Gladia Moony), Ján Kružliak jr. (Spectrum Quartett), pianist Kamil Mihalov and musicologist Marek Žoffaj.
Katarína Brestovanská together with companions has created several authorial performances (such as Micro v macro, Indigo, DUAL, In between yearning and death, Shifting systems). The work DUAL (2017) won an award for the Most Innovative Performance of the Fintdaz International Festival in Chile, along with an award for its contribution to the development of artistic and cultural values in the field of contemporary art. As choreographer she collaborates with german dance collective The MichaelDouglas Kollektiv and with dance art innovator and conflict mediator Dana Caspersen (USA). Their collaborations focus leads to choreographical preparation of participatory events with an overlap into social themes as polarization, violence, corruption.
She graduated from the Faculty of Arts, Commenius University in Bratislava, department human resources management, cultural and social science.
Together we create En Vorentoe
Martin Kosorín focus in his artistic work on the creation of music and interactive scenography for contemporary dance performances and perform in musical groups. Hi is interested in using modern technologies in art to expand the possibilities of musical instruments and interactively connect sound with the physical world and movement. He graduated from STU in the field of Robotics.
Martin Kosorín co-founded the Mela Music Festival, focused on contemporary experimental music and sound art.
Jana Smokoňová graduated from Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava, department of Theatre directing and dramaturgy in 2015. Through the Erasmus programme she studied one year at Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, Sidcup, London, where she attended the European Theatre Arts course. Since then her work shifted from traditional theatre towards physical theatre.
Jana has directed several theatre productions and she has also participated on theatre and dance projects in a role of dramaturg. So far she has repeatedly collaborated with independent artists Katarína Brestovanská, Theatre NUDE and Tomáš Procházka. In her work she has focused on topics of isolation, communication problems, inability of lost generation and need for attention. She tries to recontextualize analyzed topics.
In 2019 she finished her first short film. In March 2019 she was one of five finalists of Young Directors in Prague.
Since the beginning of 2020 she is dance and theatre curator in the cultural and creative centre Nová Cvernovka. She used to live in Prague but now she is happily settled in Bratislava, Slovakia.
Ján Kružliak Jr. is a versatile multi-genre violinist actively engaged in various musical styles. Thanks to his flexibility and versatility, he has become a sought-after chamber and solo musician.
He studied violin at the Church Conservatory in Bratislava. In addition to his studies, he pursued music composition, jazz and improvisation. Later he continued his violin studies at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava, and at the Royal Academy of Music in Denmark, where he studied global music in addition to classical music. Later he continued his studies in sound and music direction at the State Conservatory in Bratislava.
He has become visible on the theatre scene as well, either as a musician-actor or as a composer of incidental music. He collaborates with choreographers of contemporary dance and theatre such as Debris Company, ElleDanse and En Vorentoe. He is a co-recipient of the Grand Prix Nová Dráma 2010 – an award for the theatre production Project Wedding, and a co-recipient of the Dosky 2008 award for the best music for the project Canto Hondo, by alternative dance theatre ElleDanse. In collaboration with the renowned dance theatre Debris Company, he participated in the dance-theatre performance The Abduction of Europe, directed by Jozef Vlk.
Ján Kružliak Jr. is currently engaged in historically interpreted early music in the ensembles Solamente Naturali and Musica Aeterna. In 2012 he founded the string quartet Spektrum Quartett, which is dedicated to the performance of works mainly by contemporary composers.
foto: Martina Mlčúchová
foto: Goethe institute
foto: Simona Babjaková
foto: Noro Knap
