International TOURS

The Name of That Steppe During intermission and after the performance, we continued talking with JOLDA’s key creators, Jeanne Tulendy and Nafissat, about the various collaborations between contemporary dance and architecture. Exiting the Macao Cultural Centre, the golden dome of the neon lights was still clamorous. But the steppe inside the black box remained in the body in an invisible way. What JOLDA did was not to bring the steppe into the theatre, but to reinvent the steppe in the theatre—using the dancers’ spines as ridges, their breath as wind, their silence as snow, and the tension between two bodies as the horizon. The essence of architecture is not matter, but relation. The inside-outside relation defined by walls, the gravitational transmission borne by columns, the view framed by windows. JOLDA’s dance architecture goes one step further: it replaces walls with movement, beams and columns with touch, windows with gaze. On the blank paper of the black box theatre, "unpolluted by architecture," they built a steppe invisible to the eye but habitable by the body. In that night’s theatrical nomadism, Kazakh contemporary dance built a steppe with body architecture. The steppe in the black box never closes. Its name is "Root," and its name is "Eternal."

JOLDA contemporary dance theatre represents Kazakhstan at festival in France