Research evening with Burja Podlesnik and Pia Mačerol

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Slovenian dance artists Pia Mačerol (2000)  and Burja Podlesnik (2001)  have been following each others’ educational steps since they finished their secondary dance education at SVŠGUGL – the Secondary Preschool Education, Grammar and Arts Grammar School Ljubljana, specializing in contemporary dance. They continued their studies at the New Education for Contemporary Dance (NEFCD) program at Härnösands Folkhögskola in Sweden. Currently they are both completing their final year of studies at ArtEZ University of the Arts in Arnhem and will be graduating side by side in July.

Burja Podlesnik was a part of  IlDance’s youth company IlYoung, where she worked as a dancer in a piece titled “Self Contained” choreographed by Israel Aloni. This experience hugely influenced her view on art and dancing, and encouraged her to dive into the world of choreography herself. Throughout her time at ArtEZ Burja self-organized various performance evenings attracting a wide range of audience, where she showcased her group piece “Leftovers” and duets “In My Room” and “Two Men in Underwear”. Her solo “The Snippet of Now” was showcased at the Festival of Young Dance Creators OPUS 1 in Slovenia. Through creating Burja started questioning her role as an artist in today’s society and felt a responsibility to challenge the world we inhabit, through an intervention and transfiguration of the current symbolic frameworks. By critically responding to the current reality, she aims to reconfigure the space given to things that have no space and voice things that otherwise remain silent.

Pia defines herself as a dancer, performer,  maker and norm-breaker. As an author, she created the duet I’m Counting On You, which was performed at Café Theater Festival Arnhem 2024 together with Inês Fertuzinhos. In September 2024, she participated in a Postdramatic theatre residency within the Culture Moves Europe program, held at the Laboratorium cultural centre in Skopje led by theatre director Filip Petkovski. At the beginning of 2025, she began collaborating with Amit Palgi on the duet Attached, which they developed during a residency at ICK Amsterdam. The work premiered at 4bid Gallery (Amsterdam) and was later performed at the Café Theatre Festival Arnhem 2025. In February 2025, she performed a solo Mouthwash at the experimental event The Eve of Imbolc, organized by 187 Nights Rotterdam. She co-organized a performative exchange evening Let’s Get Loud together with Pieter Zomerdijk, where the two also performed an improvised duet Whipped Cream. In April 2025, she  participated in the Artists’ Encounter programme organized by European dance organization Aerowaves.
Pia is particularly interested in developing principles that support the presence and growth of improvisational and experimental practices on stage. Her performances often happen in silence, but include sounds and speech. In her artistic practice she is, with one eye, observing the environment and people around her while the other eye is looking, deeply inwards, into the internal processes of her own body.

ON THE MAT
“On the Mat” presents itself as a wannabe scripted performance, where the amount of agency we have over our lives is questioned through a poetic exploration of dealing with an altered reality. Approached from the lens of literary theory, the duet reimagines the concept of the tragic hero through pre-written conversations, audience interaction and bodies that yield and rebuild, striving to find balance on unstable ground, intertwining themes of morality, mourning and guilt. With a hint of humor and despair the piece nudges the hopeful curiosity of potential ways of navigating our paths in the ever-changing world around us.
“On the Mat” is a product of a yearlong artistic research “Humor as a Choreographic Tool” with a subtitle “Humor as a Critical Outlet and a Gateway to Vulnerability”. Driven by Burja’s curiosity of the mechanics of humor and its potential applications in her artistic practice. Through theoretical investigation, analyzation of stand-up comedy, clowning and contemporary dance performances that entail humor, vulnerability and critique, in addition to partaking in a stand-up comedy course herself, Burja strived to answer the question: “How can humor serve as a critical outlet within my choreographing and as a gateway to vulnerability of the choreographer, performer and an audience member?”.
CREDITS:
Choreographer: Burja Podlesnik
Performers: Lihi Maslo, Ohad Rubin Paz
Composers: Simon Krust, Felix Draisma
Rehearsal Director: Oscar Magnusson
Photo by Burja Podlesnik

BOom BoOm  
Pia begins her research from a point of silence, which she consciously and purposefully interrupts with her body. When she speaks of silence, she refers to the absence of music as a basis or condition for movement. For her, silence is both a prerequisite and an invitation to explore her own loudness—an exploration she hopes will also resonate with the voices of the audience.
She views silence as a challenge that propels her—almost like a throw—into space. There, she engages with the exploration of physically sounding capabilities of her body. She investigates how different physical proposals generate a variety of sounds, spoken and unspoken voices—and vice versa. One of her research approaches involves placing her body—or specific parts of it—in relation to spatial surfaces and everyday objects that she introduces in space.
She develops her performative language through (structured) improvisation, currently focusing on repetition and bypassing, which gradually become perceptible through the persistence of time.

CREDITS:
Performer/maker: Pia Mačerol
Photo: Živa Brglez