Story-telling does not necessarily imply words. We all know that you can often tell by someone’s expression or gestures much more than words can express. In this sense, the dance goes beyond the spoken word. It explores and cultivates the language of the body, its rhythms, forms and styles, its spatial characteristics and tensions. Choreography provokes narrative through arranging bodies in space and in time. In dance, the story is written on the body.
In her choreography the Slovene choreographer Sinja Ožbolt asks herself why we should speak, or why should we dance, if we assume that everything has already been said. But in one and the same breath she remarks that a lot has been concealed and unspoken, so why should we remain silent?
Oppositions and dichotomies are part of the narrative of the “old world”. Nowadays, paradoxes and hybrids are the only metaphors able to capture some of the complexity of the world we live in. Ožbolt’s story without words questions and deconstructs some of the “traditional pairs”.
